Further Joy (13 page)

“How old do you think I am?” Pauline asked.

“By your voice, I'd say you're around my age. You're thirty years old, give or take.” Then he added, “We're in our primes, you and me.”

“I'm not in my prime yet. And I don't have a lot of money, so I wouldn't be a very good customer for you.”

Justin laughed. He said he wasn't laughing at her, that he was watching a movie on his phone. His personal phone. He could do a lot of things at once. The movie was a parody where a guy keeps killing people with poisoned apple turnovers and the cops hire a master baker to catch him.

“You're allowed to watch movies while you work?”

“No,” he said. “The rules are getting kind of lax around here. The company's about to go under. I'm just riding it out for a little extra cash.” Justin told Pauline he had his own ventures he was working on, his own start-ups. They mostly centered on golf.

“Can't you get in trouble for saying that to me?”

“They're not listening. I can tell when they tap in, there's a little click. It's just you and me on this call.”

There was a pause then. Pauline didn't want to get off the phone. She'd never spoken to a telemarketer for this long. She went and sat down on the couch, blowing into her steaming cup of tea. There was a belt and a headband on the other cushion, and a sock, and she collected them up and tossed them into a decorative basket she kept against the wall. Someone had to
say something, and Pauline knew what she wanted to say.

“What do you look like?” she asked Justin.

“Look like?”

“Yeah, look like. Describe yourself.”

“Oh, wow,” said Justin. “Okay.” His voice was quieter. Pauline could picture him sitting up straight in his office chair, checking over his shoulder. “Is this happening? My friend who got me this job said this might happen.”

“It's happening,” Pauline assured him.

“Well, okay, so I have long sideburns, but not too long. No mustache or goatee or anything. And my hair's kind of wavy but I keep it short. And I have broad shoulders. Like a swimmer's shoulders.”

“Uh-huh.” Pauline raised the dripping teabag out of her cup and sucked on it.

“I have piercing eyes. People have told me that. Man, this isn't easy. Let's see. My hands are big, and they're tan from playing golf. Is that a thing girls like? Tan hands? I wear a sport coat a lot, but I'm not wearing one now. Um…”

Pauline couldn't think of anything better, so she asked if he was wearing boxers or briefs. She rested her tea on the floor and stretched out on the couch.

“Boxer briefs, actually. They're tight like briefs, but they go down your legs a little.”

“What color are they?”

“Just gray. Like sweatshirt gray.” Justin cleared his throat. When he started talking again, it was in a whisper. He told Pauline he did a hundred pushups every morning, that he was kind of obsessive about it, so his chest was pretty good, and his triceps. He said he was six feet tall, or just a shade under. Pauline could feel it all happening inside her. She wasn't trying to picture Justin; she was just listening to his hushed voice, relishing this wayward mischief. He said when he was a kid he used to hide in the hedge and spy on the neighbor lady getting dressed. He said one time he'd gotten a handjob in the back pew during church.

Justin asked Pauline to talk for a while, asserting that it was her turn, and she told him she had thick chestnut hair and nerdy glasses. She ran her hands down her legs, bragging on them, telling Justin they were shapely and smooth and supple. She said her toenails were painted red, which wasn't true.

Justin said he was going to put his hand under his desk now, but he couldn't unzip his pants because there were too many people around.

“When I saw Palatka next to the number, I thought this would be a dud. I drove through there one time. Most calls are duds, but when I saw Palatka I thought either I'll get hung up on right away or else some old lady will try to talk to me for an hour about her nephew.”

Pauline said her tummy was flat and her lips were plump. “What all's on your screen there?” she asked. “Do you have my address?”

“No, we don't have that. But you could give it to me. Actually, you don't need to. I know sort of what you look like and I know you're about thirty. I could just come down and look around for you.”

Pauline was thinking of asking him what he would do if he drove down to Florida and found her, but then she heard him curse, sounding defeated.

“My manager's telling me he wants to talk to me. He doesn't look super pleased. He's doing that thing with his finger like get over here. Maybe they were listening in after all. Maybe I didn't hear the click.”

Pauline waited.

“I really have to go. Shit, he's coming over here.”

Justin hung up, and Pauline looked at her phone a moment and then set it down on the floor next to her tea. She gazed up at the ceiling of her apartment, marked up here and there where previous tenants had hung plants or killed insects. She moved her hand to her hip, dug her fingers in and kneaded her flesh, but the excitement was already dissipating. Her heart was slowing back down. Her breath was evening out again.

She'd been given an extension on her work projects, but could still find no motivation. She got everything out and tried to concentrate, but after
twenty minutes she closed her computer and pushed the files aside and drove over to the Mexican restaurant.

At the restaurant she ate a couple bites of an enchilada and then went to the bar and started on a beer, feeling the first sips trickle down inside her. It was afternoon, still early afternoon, but the place was busy. A guy with buzzed hair and glasses sat on the stool next to Pauline and told the bartender to pick a beer out for him, something seasonal and with some bite. It wasn't the lady bartender Pauline had talked to a few times, just a nondescript Mexican kid. The TV that had been hanging in the bar was gone, along with its hanging stand. There was a vacant spot where it had been. When he was ready, the guy with the buzzed hair looked squarely at Pauline and introduced himself as Herbie. He was already sitting where he was sitting and had already ordered something, but he went ahead and asked if the seat was taken. Pauline told him she couldn't care less where he sat, and he looked at her with amusement. He told her he was writing a feature for a magazine based in Mississippi, and made a surprised face when she hadn't heard of it. He had a pronounced Southern accent but he didn't speak slowly. Pauline watched him take down half his beer in one greedy pull.

“You mind if I talk to you for a spell?” Herbie said. “So I can see if you'd be a good character for me to use.”

“I wouldn't be,” Pauline said. “I'm the boring friend.”

He grinned, then he knocked on the bar like it was a door. “Nobody who calls herself boring is boring. And in my experience boring folks don't go out drinking alone. That ain't foolproof, but it's a general rule.” Herbie held his beer at an angle in front of him, like he was examining the color. “I won't grill you with questions. We'll just shoot the breeze and see where it goes.”

Pauline wondered how she looked. Her hair was pulled straight back and she didn't have any makeup on except some eye shadow. She was wearing cute shoes, at least. She had no idea why she'd worn cute shoes, but she had. No one had hit on her in the year she'd been in Palatka. She asked Herbie what his story was about, exactly.

“It's a series of stories, interrelated I'm hoping. I start them out sounding like corny Southern tales, and then I stick in profiles of real people. Then
what I do is imagine meetings between the real people, if that makes sense. Fiction and nonfiction have a lot of gray area now. As does the South.”

“I don't want to be in a gray area. I feel like I've been in a gray area for too long.”

“Whoa, see, that's a line. I could use that. That's sharp dialogue.”

Pauline took a hard gulp of her beer. It was still ice cold. She didn't look over at Herbie but instead kept her gaze vaguely ahead—on the bottles, on the string of plastic peppers hanging from the shelves, on the blue and gold macaw perched up among the tequilas.

“Why do you get to judge who's boring or interesting?” she said. “I think you're kind of boring. I think writing magazine articles is boring. I wish you'd just come out and ask for what you want. I've already decided the answer, so you might as well ask.”

Herbie laughed through his nose, his straight white teeth lined up in a showy smile, but Pauline had cracked his cool veneer. He tried to think of what to say, fooling with a stack of coasters on the bar. “Hey, take it easy with the insults,” he told her. “Maybe I'm just in need of a pal. I been on the road a long time. It gets lonesome. I need characters, but I need a pal too.”

The lights in the restaurant dimmed a little and Herbie traded out his glasses for a pair he pulled from a pocket in his shorts. The new ones had less tint in the lenses. Pauline's heart was beating fast and she could feel that she was holding her shoulders tense.

“We don't even got to talk if you don't want,” Herbie said. “I can learn plenty about a person without talking to her. Just by observing with the five senses.”

Pauline kept looking ahead into the bottles, thankful there wasn't a mirror behind them. She liked being able to look away from Herbie and know he was looking at her. Men were certainly cunning. He had smelled the recklessness on Pauline. They did have their senses, men, and not just the five. Now he was doing something with his hands, sign language or something. He kept tapping the side of his head, then tracing his jawline with his finger. Pauline didn't believe he was really a writer. She didn't
believe a word he said. She felt disoriented by him—his accent seemed to thicken and thin, and his grin had something sinister in it.

“What's the first line of the story you're writing? What's the first sentence?”

“I've done South Carolina and Georgia. Now I'm on Florida, obviously. The Georgia part's about this guy from Australia who opened a Civil War restaurant. It's called The Hardtack. They serve legal moonshine. Let's see, the first line. It's something about how in the South fun and trouble have something in common: you can't plan when you're going to have either. I can't remember exactly how I put it.”

Pauline adjusted her sleeve and her bra strap. “So basically you're getting paid to mess around in bars for weeks on end? They pay people to do that? In this economy?”

“They do if your grandfather founded the magazine. He passed last year and I inherited his big old Cadillac. I was his favorite. Everybody wanted somebody from the Crontcow family to be associated with the magazine, so I quit science and became a writer.”

“Science?”

“Herpetology, to be precise. I studied enzymes in snake venom. I always had a thing for snakes. That's a misunderstood, maligned creature right there. You work up compassion for snakes, you really did something. That compassion's hard-earned.”

They were looking at each other and Herbie reached over very calmly and touched Pauline's wrist. His fingers were callused, but his touch was gentle. She waited a moment before she took his hand and moved it back to his beer.

“Your name isn't Herbie Crontcow. There's just no way that's somebody's name.”

“What difference is it what my name is? A lot of people have a few separate names. In Georgia I was Sonny Martin. If anybody goes looking for me they'll be looking for Sonny Martin. I have a pen name too.”

The bartender had brought Herbie another beer without his asking for it, and he was already more than half done with it. He raised it to Pauline,
like he was happy she was coming around to his viewpoints, whatever those viewpoints were.

“What's the worst thing you've ever done?” Pauline asked him. “What's the worst single act in your history?”

He looked at her deliberately, not ready for the question, filling his chest with a breath. He finished the rest of his beer with an easy swallow and then held his hand up to stop the bartender, who was getting ready to get him another. He rested his hands on the black wood of the bar. There was a ring on his left hand featuring a silver scorpion. His arms were wiry. The sleeves of his T-shirt were short enough that Pauline could see his hard, oval-shaped biceps.

Looking at Pauline with an overly mild expression, he said, “Oh, I've always been pretty sweet.” His eyes behind his glasses were meek. “I wouldn't have much to report in the way of evil acts. I never been too wieldy in a fight. And I don't believe in revenge. Somebody gets the best of me, I tip my hat to them. I have my interests and I pretty much just stick to those.” He stroked his cheek, which hadn't been shaved in a few days. “Not that I'm self-righteous. I know people got their problems. Sometimes things get out of hand. I'm fully aware about that phenomenon. Sometimes you think you're heading for a good time and then you realize you got on some other road, and it's too late.”

Pauline wondered where this guy was from. He could be from Virginia or Texas or from a mile down the road. She felt the familiar alarm she'd always depended on droning in the back of her mind, but it wasn't difficult to ignore.