She had a demon husband if demon means a force of some kind, an attendant spirit of discipline and self- command, the little flick of distance he'd perfected, like turning off a radio. She knew about his father's disappearance but there was something else, hard and apart. This is what had drawn her in the first place, the risky and erotic proposition.
Brian was looking at the photographs on the wall by the door.
'Which one is her?'
'Get out,' she said.
She made the bed and bagged the dope and put the robe back in the closet. She washed the glass Brian had used, standing naked in the kitchenette, and it seemed completely reasonable and natural, all of it, earned, needed, naked, and she took a shower and got dressed.
She was feeling pretty good. She felt lazy-daisy, you know. You know the way something's been nagging and dragging and then it gets unexpectedly sort of settled.
She felt all the good things would find her, which they usually don't. She would know them when she saw them with her L.A.-type eyes.
She stood before the mirror adjusting her sunglasses. Because if she didn't have this thing to do, to plan and maneuver and look forward to, this far-too-infrequent Brian, and this is what she'd almost told him earlier, she would become lonely and shaky, driving along the decorated highway under the burning sky, and maybe a little indistinct.
She felt well liked. She liked who she was today. She felt a little lazy-souled. She thought anything L.A. seemed right today. She'd even say she was more or less euphoric, although she wasn't ready to commit to that completely.
Before she left she inspected the room one last time. These were the things that opened the world to secret arrangements, the borrowed flat and memorized phone number and coded notation on the calendar. Childish spy games really that made her feel guiltier than the sex did, a sheepish kind of self-reproach. She patted down a pillow to remove the indentation. She wanted things to have an untouched look so Mary Catherine would not mind when she asked to use the place again.
10
He spread the mayonnaise. He spread mayonnaise on the bread. Then he slapped the lunch meat down. He never spread the mayonnaise on the meat. He spread it on the bread. Then he slapped down the meat and watched the mayo seep around the edges.
He took the sandwich into the next room. His dad was watching TV, sitting in that periscope stoop of his, crookback, like he might tumble into the rug. His dad had infirmities still waiting for a name. Things you had to play one against another. If one thing required a certain medication, it made another thing worse. There were setbacks and side effects, there was a schedule of medications that Richard and his mother tried to keep track of through the daily twists of half doses and warning labels and depending on this and don't forget that.
Richard ate about half the sandwich and left the rest on the arm of the chair. In the kitchen he called his friend Bud Walling, who lived forty miles into nowhere and wasn't really his friend.
He drove out to Bud's place through old fields marked off for development, with skivvy strips on narrow posts running stiff in the wind. Out here the wind was a force that seized the mind.
Bud's place could have been something blown in from the hills. It had a look of being deposited in a natural spree, with lumber warping in the yard and sprung-open doors and an unfinished porch on cinder blocks, one of those so-low porches the house looks sunk in sand. Bud had a coydog that lived in chains in a ramshackle hut out back, part coyote, part alley mutt. Richard thought this dog was less dangerous than legend would have it. Richard thought Bud kept this dog basically for the juvenile thrill of having a chained beast that he could feed or starve according to his whim.
He realized he'd forgotten to give his dad two glasses of water to take with the blue and yellow capsule despite the bold-faced reminder on the prescription bottle. These little failures ate away at his confidence even when he knew it was his father's fault for not managing his own intake or his mother's for not being around when she was needed. There were constant little wars of whose fault is it and okay I'm sorry and I wish he'd die and get it over with, all taking place in Richard's inner mind.
He did the dumb-joke thing of knocking on Bud's door and saying, 'Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.'
Nothing happened. He went in and saw Bud in a large open room sawing a two-by-four that he'd set between benches of unmatching height. The house was still mainly framework although Bud had been working for many months in a conscientious struggle that Richard thought had less to do with gutting and reshaping a house than destroying some dread specter, maybe Bud's old drug habit, once and for all.
'Your phone's out of order,' Richard said. 'I thought I'd drive on out, see if everything, you know's, okay.'
'Why wouldn't it be okay?'
'I reported it to the phone company.'
'My only feeling about the phone.'
'Sometimes they correct the problem from the office.'
'It brings more grief than joy.'
Bud finally looked up and noted his visual presence.
'It brings personal voices into your life that you're not prepared to deal with.'
Richard kept to the edges of the room, running his palms over the planed sills, examining the staples that kept plastic sheeting fastened to the window frames. It was empty distraction of the type that forestalls the pain of ordinary talk.
'I'm putting in parquet,' Bud said. 'Herringbone maybe.'
'Should be good.'
'Better be good. But I probably won't ever do it.'
The sound of the wind in the plastic sheeting was hard on the nerves. Richard wondered how an ex-addict could work all day in this scratching and popping. The sheeting popped out, it whipped and scratched. Crack cocaine fools the brain into thinking dope is good for it.
He thought of something he could say
'Tell you, Bud. I'm forty-two years old next week. Week from Thursday.'
'It happens.'
'And I still feel like I'm half that, pretty much.'
'That's because it's obvious why, you living as you do.'
'What do you mean?'
'With your folks,' Bud said.
'They can't manage alone.'
'Who can? My question to you is.'
Bud tossed half the length of sawed wood into a corner. He studied the other half as if someone had just handed it to him on a crowded street.
'What?' Richard said.
'Don't they smell?'
'What?'
'Old people. Like bad milk.'
Richard heard the plastic windows pop.
'Not so I notice.'
'Not so you notice. Okay. You want to feel your correct age. Get yourself a wife. That'll do it for you. It's horrible but true. A wife is the only thing that can save guys like us. But they don't make you feel any
