feelings. But, boy, this is a good story.'
Ellspeth tugged my sleeve. As I followed him into the kitchen, Eleanor said, 'Do you see how black my hair is, Ansel? In China everybody's hair is black, just like mine. But this story is about a very special little boy, a little boy with bright gold hair, exactly like yours, but not so pretty.'
Ellspeth went to a roll of paper towels hanging on the kitchen wall, tore one off, and blew his nose on it. 'The kid needs a woman,' he said fiercely.
'How much does he understand?'
'The words? Not much. But he can feel her. He can tell a good person better than I can.'
'She's a pretty good person,' I said.
'Marry her,' he said, 'if you're in a position to do it. You're a dope if you don't.'
'Well,' I said lamely, 'we were talking about you.'
'Right.' He opened a cabinet under the sink and tossed the towel into it. 'The big marriage expert. Let's go back into the living room.'
In the living room he reseated himself and looked down into his coffee cup. 'The Ballad of Caleb and Mary Claire. Like I told you, I was in the Navy,' he said after a gulp of cold coffee. 'This is about four or five years after we got to L.A., and Mary Claire and I were getting along pretty good, I thought, I mean we were both in the Church and she wasn't picking at me about Ansel anymore. She seemed better, you know? Anyway, when they wanted me to travel I said okay and relinquished my hardship deferment. They sent me to the Philippines, Subic Bay. All these randy, cute little girls, all these guys going ashore, coming back with drip, syph, God knows what. I was the only guy didn't invest that ten bucks in cab fare, the only guy came home with a dry wick. I'd been writing her regular, getting not as many answers back as I wrote letters, but I figure, she's got the kids to worry about all day, and the Church, and what am I doing? Lying around reading Playboy and keeping the machine clean, so I plan this big surprise. I get home three days early, right off the boat I buy a dozen roses, a bottle of champagne, make reservations at Perino's, where I've never even been before-I mean I am ready to party Mary Claire out of her skin. Rent a limousine, get home about eight p.m., choke off the impulse to call out 'Surprise,' and stand in the front door listening to her moving furniture around upstairs. She was like that, you know? Ever since Ansel was born, too much nervous energy. Wake up at four a.m., start shoving the couch around. So I go up the stairs wondering where the bed's going to be this time, and open the door, and the bed's right where I left it, only it's fuller. She's on it with two guys. Two guys from the Church. I mean one of them was my Listener. I told everything to this guy, and here he is trying it all out on my wife with one of his buddies.
'Well, where I come from, Michigan, you don't hit women. So I took it out on the guys. I threw one of them through the window without bothering to open it, we were in a two-story apartment at the time, and the second guy, the Listener, had it easier because, first, the window was already busted, and second, he had the other guy to land on. Then I turn around to her and she's yelling, 'Don't hit me, don't hit me! I just changed the sheets.'
' 'Mary Claire,' I say, 'I wouldn't hit you with somebody else's fist.' And I shake up the bottle of champagne and pop the cork in her direction, and she's sitting there all wet, holding the sheet up above her tits, and I say, 'Welcome home,' and throw the flowers at her. 'Yeek,' she says, like I hit her with a baseball bat, and then I'm out of there. I don't even stop to see Angel or Ansel, not even Ansel. It's like I'm mad at them too, for some reason. The car's still waiting outside, although the driver's pretty gaga at these two naked guys who just sailed out the window and are now crawling for the shrubbery, and it's time for Perino's. So I go. But first I go back onto the lawn and give my Listener a good kick or two. Then I go to Perino's and drink my dinner to the point where it takes three waiters to get me back into the car, and I tell the driver to take me back to the ship. Two days later I sail for Christ knows where, and I still haven't talked to my kids.'
Behind him, Eleanor came into the room. 'Asleep,' she said, seating herself next to me.
Ellspeth nodded to her, tilted his head back for a second in the listening position, and continued. 'I have talked to my lawyer, though, some jerk from the Church-I didn't know who else to ask, I'd spent all my time in L.A. with my kids and my wife and the people in the Church-and the lawyer tells me not to worry.
'So, like the world's ultimate end-of-the-line asshole, pardon me, miss-I don't worry. And then, I think I'm in Tokyo at the time, I learn that she's run up my credit cards to nine thousand bucks, which is as high as they'll go without dissolving in the hand, and she's got the apartment and four-fifty a month for her plus another five each for Angel and Ansel, and my pay is attached because I owe on the credit cards. So the light dawns in the east that maybe she's been porking my lawyer too.'
'Sounds like a logical assumption,' I said.
'Yeah, and so forth and so on. Except it turns out that maybe it's wrong, because a couple of months later, who's the Church's new Speaker? My little girl, Angel, who's never said anything more complicated than she wants a glass of water. I mean this was a kid who didn't learn to read until everybody else in the class was doing square roots or something. Slow, Mary Claire used to say, the kid's slow. She's going to wind up scouring some clown's pots and pans, Mary Claire used to say, like there was something wrong with that, like Angel was supposed to be a nuclear physicist or translate the Bible into Farsi. And all of a sudden she's the Speaker, spouting stuff… Well, you've heard it-sounds like the Gettysburg Address in drag.'
'What did you do?'
'Went down there, naturally. What would you have done?'
'And what happened?'
'They wouldn't let me see her. Like she's the Queen of England. First I get these two weight lifters at the door, guys that look like they bench-press the Arco Tower on Saturday morning, and they ripple their muscles at me like their tailors got nothing to do but fix the tears in their cute little uniforms. So I make some noise and they take me inside after they figure I'm not going to shut up, and they put me in a room. And who comes in? My shithead lawyer.'
'Meredith Brooks,' I said.
'Meredith Fucking Brooks. Only guy in the world who polishes his face. Eight million bucks' worth of clothes and he still looks like twenty pounds of cat shit. So what's the first thing he says to me?'
'I give up.'
'He says, 'Jesus, I wish you'd been here. The judge figured you'd run off, that's why he gave her everything.'
' 'I had a lawyer,' I said. 'I thought maybe a lawyer, all that college, could manage to explain that I was in the Navy. I thought maybe 'He's on a boat' was something a well-trained lawyer could manage to say. And by the way,' I said, 'she fucks pretty good, huh?' Sorry again, miss.
'Well, he got all grave-looking. You know how he rubs his chin?'
I said I knew.
'Guy loves to rub his chin. I figure when work is over he goes home, fixes dinner for his chin, and then the two of them sit around and watch TV. After Johnny Carson they go to bed and he rubs it different. Well, he rubs his chin and says I shouldn't talk that way about Mary Claire. She's the Speaker's mother, you know? So I get up to murder him and the two weight lifters pick me up and smear me across a wall and hold me there with my feet off the ground. And I'm kicking and swearing a blue streak and Meredith Brooks gives me the world's oiliest smile and tells me that I'd better be careful because all my Listenings are on tape.'
'What had you told them?' Eleanor asked unwillingly.
He leveled his brown eyes at her and blinked twice. 'I might as well say it right out,' he said. 'At least then I won't have to worry about it anymore.'
'What was it?'
'That once, right after he was born, I'd tried to kill Ansel.'
Chapter 19
I had about four hours to kill before I was due to turn up at Bernie's, bottle in hand, so I killed them by driving Eleanor back downtown. She was silent for the first twenty minutes or so, and when she spoke, all she said was, 'That woman should be in jail.'
'When she goes,' I said, 'she's going to have a lot of company.'
