Funny Once (18 page)

“You need to move on,” Caroline said. She wouldn’t have offered such pedestrian advice sober.

“Easy for you to say,” said Crystal. She was supposed to be waiting tables; her boss, Steve-o, kept shouting out at her to look lively. It was off-season again; only locals. “I’m thinking of having a baby.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes, that’s actually possible, you know. Spendy, but possible.”

“Why expensive?”

“Sperm donor. I’ve been online, you should see the sites. Fucking hell, it’s something. Very different from dating sites, I might add. Night and day.”

“I wish you could get Drew to make you pregnant,” said Caroline, because she was tipsy, and because it was true. She wanted another chance at loving somebody. She wanted to be someone’s beloved.
Nana
, she practiced.

“Really?” Crystal reached across the table and took Caroline’s hand, because she was tipsy, too, and as in her relations with men other than Drew, this was when she could be tender with this woman, this difficult woman who’d known her for so long and in so many different ways: neighbor, teacher, nagger, savior. And Crystal’s history with Drew made their sleeping together again something so habitual and native to them that it might as well be named another thing. It wouldn’t be like the typical infidelity, would it? Not like cheating, exactly. When Caroline considered it, there seemed nothing more pure, yet also nothing more vaguely incestuous, these people who’d grown up together, sharing bath time, punching and screaming and spending the night, exhausted children sweating and sprawled at day’s end, heads on one another’s chest, sex not unlike any other game they’d played together as competitors, opponents. Or? As allies, teammates. “Make him come home,” Crystal pleaded. “Let’s make him come back here and knock me up!”

“It’s so highly unethical,” Caroline said, beginning to laugh, liking the idea precisely because her ex-husband would have been appalled. Utterly appalled. From the back came Steve-o’s imploring bored voice reminding Crystal that, hello, she was at work, earning a paycheck, fucking up her tips. “I have to admit that I really like the idea.”

“Make him come home,” Crystal pleaded, this time with her wild eyes, with her scrawny starved body. She had not been well, since the wedding. She had what anyone in Telluride had as the weather closed in, as the social season faded, as the mountains’ majesty occasionally appeared more menacing than beautiful, cruelly indifferent. It was a kind of personal off-season.

Sober, the women never mentioned their notion again.

Not long after, on a frozen January morning, a highway patrolman’s car showed up in Crystal’s gravel drive. Had the girl done what she’d always threatened to do? And how had Caroline not been roused, through her thin walls, her light sleep, her long-standing nearness to Crystal’s life? She didn’t bother to dress, found herself down the block and at the Hurd front door minus even socks or slippers, banging with her fist to accompany the banging of her heart.

Crystal answered, in her hastily drawn bathrobe, and Caroline saw her mistake. The highway patrolman was simply another in that line of men brought home on a drunken Friday night. “Are you OK?” Crystal asked, scowling, yawning widely. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Caroline said, turning angrily and taking herself home, one of her feet bleeding from a piece of broken glass in the street.

Thereafter, whenever Caroline saw the new man himself, a thick-necked figure bursting from his uniform, he never failed to touch his hat, a gesture of respect; or it was supposed to be, but Caroline was skeptical. She thought perhaps she was a fond mean joke between Crystal and the cop, the crazy neighbor who ran around in her pajamas. He wasn’t from Telluride, he commuted from Montrose, he’d never been her student or a friend of her sons. Soon, she imagined, Crystal would be pregnant. The child would sleep in the room Crystal had grown up occupying. From some sentimental urge would come the idea of another pet skunk, that odd scurrying figure from the past. Caroline could not forget Crystal’s confessing that she’d never had a first kiss with anybody except Drew when she was sober. “Not sex, either, except Drew. That’s why I can’t get anywhere,” she’d said angrily, “that’s how fucked up I am. If you want to know.” She and the highway patrolman got drunk together, now. On occasion, Caroline could hear them. Their music. Sometimes something that rattled the house, its walls as thin as her own, its mining-times origins clearer with the overlarge presence of the patrolman contained therein. He roared up at odd hours; he slammed his official car door and puffed out his chest. He was coarse, crude, loud, proud; he was as different from her son Drew as a man could be. How had Crystal fallen for him?

When Drew phoned her for her birthday, Caroline mentioned Crystal’s new beau. “That’s good,” he said. “She really,
really
needed somebody. I wondered why the drunk dialing went away.”

“He’s awful! He seems smug,” Caroline told him. “And maybe not that bright?”

“Mom, you know sometimes you’re a little hard on people.”

“He’s no you,” she said. “That’s all. I’d rather be alone than be with someone so inferior.”

“Well, Dad always says you’re the only person he knows who doesn’t actually need other people.” Drew was laughing, as if this were good news. Was it good news? It was news, anyway, news to Caroline.

“I wish I could clone you,” she said to him, a compliment she’d paid him since he was young.

At the Mexican restaurant on a night when ski season was at full throttle—spring break, fresh powder, at capacity—Caroline found herself at the bar with the highway patrolman eating chips and sharing a pitcher of margaritas. On the house, Crystal’s insistence. Crystal had put on some weight in recent months, was vaguely radiant, bustling among the tourists being sexy, stopping to check in on her new boyfriend and old neighbor now and then. “Hey, I have a question for you,” Caroline said over the happy public ruckus to the cop. She was brave and buffered by the alcohol and high spirits.

“Shoot,” he yelled back.

“What’s your opinion on the subject of the perfect crime? I mean, how would somebody get away with murder? In your opinion?”

He looked at her glassy-eyed, the man who’d taken her son’s place in Crystal’s life. How she longed for Drew, looking into those impassive eyes, and how she missed Crystal’s longing for him. This man was no replacement, not even close. “I tell you what,” he said, leaning in, speaking into her ear so as to be heard. “I know for a fact you don’t like me and think I’m a dumbass. I could care less, I don’t give a shit. But what you’re asking? Well, here’s what I think: I think the way to get away with murder is to make them do it to themself.” He leaned back and nodded at her. “If you see what I mean.”

“I do,” Caroline said. “I get it. Tell me your first name.”

“I’m Johnny,” he said, and held out his large rough hand to shake hers.

Chapter Two

Tired of telling her own story at AA, Hil was trying to tell the one of her neighbor. It had been a peculiar week. “So she comes to my house a few nights ago,” Hil began, “like around nine,
bing-bong
, drunk as a skunk, as usual, right in the middle of this show my roommate and I are watching. I go to the door and there she is, fifty-something, a totally naked lady standing under the porch light.” Even at the time, it had seemed designed to charm, her coy drunken neighbor sporting a plaid porkpie hat and holding a toothbrush like a flag or flower or torch. Choreographed, at least, and embarrassing to behold. Bergeron Love, grande dame in her own mind and all around the block.

“Looks like somebody’s not getting enough attention,” Hil had murmured as she unlocked the door. The night was soggy, Houston autumn, frogs like squeezeboxes wheezing in and out. Her neighbor’s nakedness seemed sad and enervated, breasts flat on her chest, a kind of melted look to the rest of her flesh, ankles thick on splayed feet. Southern belle in decline, a dismal “after” picture.

What had “before” looked like?

“You gonna invite me in?” Bergeron Love demanded, raising her eyebrows flirtily in an attempt to rally her own outlandishness. She was known in the neighborhood for being a character—some composite of Miss Havisham, Norma Desmond, and Scarlett O’Hara—her ancient family manse with its aspect of ruined wedding cake, fenced as if to contain inmates, its fetid kidney-shaped pool where her multiple orange cats congregated. Sometimes Bergeron’s antics were whimsical, like crashing a dinner or cocktail party, for example, or commissioning someone in a gorilla suit to deliver balloons, and sometimes they were a serious pain in the ass—reporting overgrown lawns or loose dogs or long-term parked cars, more than once phoning child protective services.

“You can’t exactly say no to a naked lady on your doorstep, can you?” Hil asked rhetorically at the meeting. She made eye contact with the smiling older man holding the leash of his helper animal. There ought always to be a blind man grinning encouragingly, receptively, in the audience, wavy white hair like meringue. The dog lay panting at his feet, head grasped a little unnaturally high by the leash, by the man’s inability to see. The man’s genial countenance was generic—through every story, no matter how unpleasant, he smiled benignly beneath his lovely hair. He had, Hil thought, become like a dog himself, unable to judge.

“My roommate never met my neighbor before, so I introduce them.” How strange to see a clothed person shake hands with a naked one, like the meeting of two utterly different tribes.
Bergeron Love, this is Janine.

“Nice to meet you,” said Janine, averting her eyes.

“Janine is getting her degree at the U,” Hil offered. “In social work,” she added, since Janine was shy.

“Ha!” said Bergeron Love, raising her toothbrush. “You can consider this visit a piece of immersion homework! What in the hell is that?” she asked, aiming the brush at the paused image on the television.

“A bullet puncturing somebody’s heart in slow motion,” Janine said. On the screen, a few perfect circles: bullet, organ, splatter. “Not
actually
,” she added.

“Well obviously not actually,” Bergeron said. “One of those true-crime shows? I love those, but my boyfriend Boyd can’t take it. He literally can’t watch gore. Isn’t that just typical?” Boyfriend Boyd was a mousy man who donned an orange vest every school-day morning and stood blowing into a whistle on the corner of Westheimer and Taft, waving his arms to help the children across. He hid behind a pair of giant square glasses and a push-broom mustache. Only with his vivid vest and shrill whistle did he seem to have much confidence. Then, or after a few stiff drinks.

“You want a robe, Bergeron?” Hil asked. The woman was going to either sit or fall down, and the chair nearest was the one Hil’s teenage son preferred.

“Why would I want a robe?” demanded Bergeron Love. “You got a problem with the human body? You’re watching that shit on TV, and you can’t look at
me
?”

“I just didn’t want her naked butt on the chair where my son likes to sit,” Hil explained to the AA meeting. “But she kind of collapses in his chair anyway, and starts to ramble about her fucked-up life. Sorry, Jim.” The blind man had flinched; his single admission, in all the time he’d come and taken up his role as accepting group focal point, was that the word
fuck
still hurt his feelings. He nodded now, recovered, absolving.

“Friday night,” Bergeron Love was saying, “I’m walking up and down the street, and I can’t even get arrested!”

“That’s partly your fault, you know, Berge,” Hil said, explaining to Janine that it had been Bergeron Love, years earlier, who had been mostly responsible for rousting the homeless and the homeless shelter from the neighborhood. Civic duty was a Love family hallmark; there were bridges and schools and state parks commemorating the name. “Remember all those drunk bums?” Hil said.

“Pissing in our yards,” Bergeron recalled, “leaving all their Sudafed trash in the park. You don’t know the half of what I kept off this street. Next they wanted to turn that flophouse into an AIDS clinic. No, ma’am, said I.”

“But Berge, if those guys were still around, there’d have been more action out there tonight. You’d have had company. They would have been ecstatic to see you coming.” And Bergeron Love laughed appreciatively, conceding, still savvy in her deceptive absurdity, then wondered aloud what a person had to do to get a drink around here. “I had an open container until just a little bit ago,” she explained. “There might be some broken glass out on your walkway, sorry about that.”

Janine jumped at the chance to leave the room.

“
That
is a
big
old gal,” Bergeron Love whispered.

Hil couldn’t disagree; Janine was three times her own size, a woman who must have been eating most of the day to maintain her weight, and yet Hil had never seen her do it. Janine had her own shelves in the fridge and cupboards; plastic grocery bags came and went; and still Hil had never shared a meal with the woman.

“You’re lucky
she’s
not the nudie here,” Bergeron said, then added, in her normal voice, “Where’s your son? Out on a date? Raising some high school hell?”

“He’s here,” Hil said. Had he heard, from his bedroom? Declined to enter the fray? No doubt he was listening to music on headphones, reading a philosophy book, texting with his school-hours-only girlfriend. He led a quiet, self-contained life; his peers maybe frightened him; he wasn’t ready, quite yet, to go unguarded into the night. It was he who every evening checked the locks and switched off the lights. After Hil went to bed, he and Janine would play complex and violent video games into the wee hours, keeping score, speaking a fascinating coded language with one another while adroitly operating their control devices, never taking their eyes from the divided screen. For this, and other, reasons, she was an excellent roommate to both Hil and Jeremy, her own social life nearly nonexistent. Like Hil, she went to meetings to discuss her defining, overwhelming weakness; in the kitchen now, she would no doubt be devouring a frozen candy bar in addition to mixing fresh gin and tonics. She insisted on keeping the chocolate frozen hard, despite the broken crown she’d incurred just last week. Addicts, Hil marveled: so dedicated!