Keep the Change (15 page)

He was so happy! He loved her with his whole heart. And then tears came into his eyes.

“Met anyone nice out here?” Astrid asked.

“One. But I already knew her, really.”

“Get anywhere?”

“I would.”

“Only what?”

“I keep laughing at the wrong time.”

“I
see
.”

He couldn’t fathom her. It was like Jackie O at the funeral
of Onassis. One suspected the sunglasses concealed twinkling eyes. When Astrid wished to tell him something important, she would grab his forearm the way children do to each other in the scary parts of movies. She did that now. “Do try to remember the week we had,” she said. “All those funny things that weren’t funny.”

“Like what wasn’t funny?”

“Farting in time to music.”

“What else?”

“Calling me drunk at three a.m. and shouting, ‘Don’t pay the ransom, I’ve escaped!’ Joe, you were a hoot!”

A certain formality was agreed upon without discussion: Astrid would have her own room. As it happened, the two bedrooms were on opposite sides of the kitchen and so the sense of division was fairly complete. It was Joe’s plan to make this arrangement clear to Ellen as soon as he could. He didn’t think that that was absolutely required; and in fact he meant to be sure his explanation did not imply a deeper responsibility to Ellen than necessary. He just wanted it clear. Astrid settled right into the arrangement without particularly indicating whether she was there for a day or a year. Joe didn’t plan to ask. He didn’t mention his daughter because he wanted to make certain a reasonable plan for visiting was in place before he got down to the specifics of an arrangement.

He was immediately fascinated by Astrid’s city ways, which he hadn’t even noticed before. She folded her things in her dresser and hung her blouses carefully in the closet. She got a glass from the kitchen to put in the bathroom cabinet and set a bottle of French perfume on the dresser where the brassieres were folded one cup inside the other. She tied the curtains in their middles to let in light, stretched the bedspread taut and placed a travel-battered paperback next to the bed.
Joe noticed all this as breezily as he could, but since he had no real routines in this house, no routines anywhere really, it was hard to make a single natural movement at the same time he was observing Astrid. He simply felt her presence swelling and seeping throughout the house and found himself less and less able to even act as if he was ignoring it.

As they passed in the short corridor, he reached his hand out to her arm. She stopped at exactly that distance and said, “Yes?”

“Hi,” he said, smiling, and feeling shockingly stupid.

She said, “Hi.”

They passed going in opposite directions. Joe thought that to keep this business from degenerating at a very rapid rate, he was going to have to have something to do other than absorb the impact of Astrid.

He turned back from the living room and stretching his arms across the doorway, spoke down the corridor toward Astrid’s room. “I’m going to run in and get a few supplies before things close.”

“Bye,” she called, “use your seat belt.”

He sped to Ellen’s bearing some peculiar force because she simply let him rush into her house and make love to her, bracing her pelvis while she scrutinized this demented, ejaculating person. Joe felt withered by her quizzical stare. He dressed so quickly afterward he had to pry himself back into his shorts. “I have to talk to you,” he said, underlining this vagary with a powerful, fixed look. “You know what it’s about. I feel I’m being strung along.”

Ellen said, “You’ve got a lot of nerve after what we’ve just done.”

“I mean, is this it? We’re just going to sneak around like this?”

“It depends,” Ellen said.

“Depends? On what?”

“On how I feel. God, Joe, you never changed! Can’t you take one day at a time?”

“No,” Joe said so loud it was almost a shout. “
I want to see my daughter!
”

He went to the IGA store and threw things arbitrarily into the shopping cart. He got stuck in the only check-out line that was open. A small, heavy woman in front of him, with a dirty-faced infant riding the cart, unloaded small items piled as high as her head. He stared at the front page of the
Star
, at the headline
RABBIT FACE BABY HAS TEN INCH EARS
, and read as much as he could of the text before he had to check out with his items: the dieting mother had binged on carrots during her final trimester.

As he unloaded his groceries in the kitchen, Astrid glided past him and said, “I smell what you’ve been doing.”

He slowly turned in her direction, the burn of deep conviction; he was a bit too slow: she was already back in her room.

“When are you turning in that rental car?” he asked loudly.

“As soon as I can get to the airport,” she said. “You can follow me.”

“Why would I follow you?”

“So you can fucking well give me back my car.”

Joe had once gone out with a girl who was just breaking up with her live-in boyfriend. He had quite fallen for this girl and had already begun worrying about the depth of his involvement. The boyfriend had recently moved out but he stopped back from time to time to bicker with the girl about the ownership of the stereo and the health of the bamboo plant
he claimed to have nurtured to its current size, and to laugh sarcastically at the clean house she was currently keeping. As Joe watched the progress of these small nagging encounters, he began to suspect he was witnessing a preview of his own life. Detachment set in. Now, years later, he placed similar hopes on the pink car. Some nagging, the exchange of a few receipts, some appropriate body language, whirling departures or loud footsteps on the wooden floors of the ranch, and the slave chains could be gently lifted.

A few days later, he set up his drawing equipment in the kitchen, where the light was good and the coffee was close. But he knew it was a lie and he put it all away again. It was as if he was posing these materials. Astrid came in wearing her wrapper drawn close around her with one hand and carrying a cup and saucer in the other. She went to the sink and looked out the window. Joe felt that there was something brewing: the set of her mouth, her silence, something. He managed to watch her without being intrusive. As she looked through the kitchen window, her expression began to fill, to bloom, and he knew an emotion was cresting, an exclamation was at hand.

“Get a load of that ghastly dog!” she screeched. Joe jumped.

“Is he out there?” Joe got up and went to the window. The dog, lightly blurred with new fur, sidled over the lawn, glancing at the house, his corkscrew tail shifting metronomically over his back.

“I never saw one quite like that,” said Astrid.

“I can’t believe he’s just out walking around.”

“He’s like something from outer space,” she said. “I want to go see him.”

“He’ll be back under the house the second he sees you.”

Joe watched from the kitchen window. He saw the dog react to the motion of the inside kitchen door. His tail sagged to the horizontal. His lower jaw dropped slightly and his ears clenched into a suspicious knot on top of his head. Then Astrid appeared in the picture. She said something to the dog. She patted the tops of her knees. The crown of the dog’s head smoothed as his ears dropped adorably. He bounced back and forth, then bounded to Astrid and licked her face. She found a stick for him to fetch; but when she reared back to throw it, he yelped and ran under the house. Astrid went over and lay on her stomach to plead with the dog. Joe wound open the kitchen window and hauling himself forward over the sink and faucets was able to look straight down on the lower half of Astrid’s torso; the rest of her was under the house. She had let the wrapper slip up so that the hard shape of her buttocks was visible up to where they were sliced from view by the clapboard siding. “Aw, come on,” she was saying, “whaddya say?” Joe’s face was only a matter of feet from her bare loins and he could feel himself swelling abruptly against the sink. Astrid began to back out from under the house. He was terrified that she would discover him hanging out of the kitchen window, and he grappled his way inside, managing to hit one of the faucets in his rush, and soaking the front of his pants. By the time he was standing flatfooted on the kitchen floor once more, Astrid walked back in, stared at his wet bulging crotch, and said, “What have you been doing” in an uninflected voice. It was not a question. She sighed deeply and went into her room.

“Let me see if we can’t just drop the rental car right in town,” he said into the bedroom doorway.

“Give her my regards,” said Astrid, in a kind of trill.

“You can reach me at my aunt and uncle’s,” he called back. “The number’s by the phone.” He paused in the doorway, soundless, in case anything could be heard from her direction, any little thing. But it was quiet.

He shot into Smitty and Lureen’s. He didn’t really want to stop, hadn’t intended to. As soon as he got there, he called the ranch. “It occurred to me,” he said to Astrid, “that the number might actually
not
be there—”

“It is.”

“Okay,” he sang, “that’s all I had in mind.”

“Bye.”

Smitty was alone. Lureen had gone to do something at the rectory. Smitty sat at the kitchen table, his hands clasped on its top. He wore the familiar suit pants and his shirt was buttoned right up to his throat. He seemed to stand before some final and invisible inquisition as he wailed, “Here I am living on leftover chicken salad and baked beans! While Lureen dusts for that double-chinned preacher!”

It might have been his present mood or his recollection of his gingerly first night here, but Joe said, “Then why don’t you get up off your ass and cook something?”

After a long moment, Smitty said, “I have decided that I didn’t hear you. You have still got, by special dispensation, an unblemished record in this house.”

“I just wanted to check in and see if you and Lureen are getting along okay.”

“We are, if you think so. We’re not complaining. The Overstreets are not happy about you running those cattle. I don’t know what we, or at least Lureen, are going to live on.”

“I think you’re going to be fine,” said Joe and went out.

“You forgot your thesaurus!” Smitty called from the stoop.

“I’ll be back!” Standing in front of the two-story blue expanse of clapboard in the perfectly centered doorway, Smitty reminded Joe of a cuckoo clock. Smitty used to be a man about town, but there were only one or two apertures in the building in which he appeared now: the front door and his bedroom window.

Joe drove down Benteen Street and turned on Fifth, went a couple of blocks in an old neighborhood whose telephone wires came through heavy foliage and slumped low over the street. Plastic three-wheelers were parked on the sidewalk. A woman smoked and seriously watched her dachshund move along the band of grass between the sidewalk and the street. Another woman stood in the street and waved her husband on as he backed his Buick slowly from an old garage. At a certain point, she flattened her palms in his direction, the car stopped, she got in, and they drove off. There was a five-cent lemonade sign but no stand. Finally, with a flourish, Joe arced Astrid’s rental car into Ellen’s driveway. As soon as he had stopped, the engine still running, the passenger door opened and Billy Kelton climbed in.

“Hi, Billy.”

“Let’s take a ride,” he said.

Joe put the car in reverse. “Any spot in particular?”

“You pick.”

Joe crossed the neighborhood the way he had come. He made a point of greeting people with a small neighborly wave. Most responded as from long acquaintanceship except the lady with the dachshund, who was sufficiently possessed to remove her cigarette and squint after him with irritation. Billy exhibited a lazy athletic grace. He was dressed more conventionally now in a pair of Wranglers and a blue work shirt. He had a
hardbitten, thin-lipped, fairly handsome face, and a husky voice.

“I don’t know what to do about the fact you’ve been seeing Ellen …”

Joe looked out to the oncoming street. He set his head to one side as though about to speak. Then nothing came.

“I fought for a country I’m not sure I care to live in. But while I’m here I can find a few ways to make it my own. If you follow me.”

“Not completely. And I thought your marriage was on the rocks. Weren’t you seeing someone just the other day? But yes, Billy, I missed the war in Vietnam.”

“Well, there you go. That’s about it, isn’t it.”

Joe could nearly feel the heat of his stare. They drove on down past the wool docks alongside the railroad tracks and then curved on up toward the courthouse.

“I don’t want to just go to spelling things out here, pardner, but there’s this little country of my own where I make all the laws. Do you believe me?”

Joe pulled up in front of the glass doors of the sheriff’s office. They could look through the windshield, through the door, and see law officers. It would be an easy thing to honk on the horn. Joe tapped it lightly; two officers glanced out and he waved them off as though he had bumped the horn accidentally.

“Why wouldn’t I believe you?” Joe said bitterly. “If you’ll admit being in that war you’ve got nothing to hide. Now, do you want to walk, or shall I? I don’t care, this is a rental car anyway.”

“I’ll walk, thanks. But just take me pretty serious here. It’s important. Ellen and I haven’t given up. And we have a sweet little girl that’s worth any sacrifice we might make.”

“And B,” said Astrid, “it’s time you potty-trained your mind. Especially as relates to me and my activities.”

He didn’t dare ask what A was. She was drinking and had
been
drinking. Nevertheless, she looked quite attractive with her dark hair still wet from the shower, its ends soaking the light blue dress at its shoulders. It was very rare for Astrid to drink too much. This was just fascinating. Everything she did fascinated Joe.

“I don’t know much about your activities,” said Joe coldly.