None of this Ever Really Happened (18 page)

The Billy Goat is underneath Michigan Avenue and the
Tribune Tower surrounded by loading docks. It claims to
have once been the hangout of writers and reporters from the
city's newspapers, and their autographed photos are all over
the walls, but these are old and faded now, and its customers
are mostly tourists who know the place from John Belushi's
"cheeseborger, cheeseborger" skit. Charlie had a shot and a
beer; I was able to negotiate my way down to a beer alone.
When I kidded him about "riding the dog," he said it was
better than Flecha Roja.

"Flecha Roja?" I said. "Don't tell me you took buses all
the way from Mexico City."

"From Cuernavaca. Actually from Tepoztlán. Father Dick
was at a retreat, and Mr. John Handy (Charlie's name for his
twenty-year-old Ford) needs a new clutch at the moment,
so I even rode the local into town." Twice during his years in
Mexico, Charlie had used hard work and good investment
to accumulate some modest wealth, but each time he had
awakened one morning to discover that the peso had been
devalued while he slept, and his money was worth a fraction
of what it had been worth the day before. It is the plight
of the Mexican middle class which always seems to pay the
price for the greed, corruption, and mismanagement of those
in power. The very wealthy aren't much bothered, and the
very poor haven't much to lose (staples such as beans, rice,
corn, and the diesel fuel that powers the old school buses
poor people ride everywhere have traditionally been subsidized),
but the always-fledgling middle class takes it on the
chin every time.

Charlie and I met Lydia at our old place. He put his arms
around her and held her to him for several moments; she
smiled at me beneath his arm. The apartment seemed bare to
me, although I couldn't identify a single thing that was missing
or changed. It smelled a little different. We had a drink,
and Lydia and Charlie talked. I watched Lydia. She had a new
haircut that was stylish and looked expensive. She was tan.
Odd. I had always owned the sun and Lydia the shade. She
had lost a little weight.

Charlie insisted on treating us to dinner, so we went to
La Choza because it was nearby, inexpensive, Mexican, BYO,
and the BYO was just beer and wine. By dinnertime Charlie
was half in the bag, and I was confused about how that
was happening in front of me; he must have been sneaking
drinks when he went to the bathroom. We sat in the garden
of the restaurant beneath the El tracks and the twinkling,
year-round Christmas lights, drank cold Tecates against the
heat, and ate enchiladas and arroz con pollo. Charlie told
funny stories about the local men he had hired to dig a small
swimming pool in his garden. After three years of frustration,
he gave up and converted it into a septic tank. He told
a troubling story about how he had discovered a method
for converting grain alcohol into vodka, and another about
two village boys named Pedro and Pablito who had taken to
hanging out at the ranch, doing Charlie's chores and running
his errands. He spoke of them several times and quite fondly,
so that a suspicion hatched in my mind that they might be
doing other things for him, or at least stealing from him.
And, of course, he told his usual quotient of improbable tales
about unlikely characters doing barely believable things. In
one of these an over-the-hill Mexican soap-opera star had
lost her luxury villa in a backgammon game but not its detached
garage, which had a separate deed. All she had left was
her '68 Mercedes convertible, so she married her chauffeur
and they were living in the car in the garage. To the chagrin
of the municipal government, no one could find anything illegal
with the arrangement.

Then there was "Arturo, the lout, a BMW Bolshevik if
there ever was one. Everyone knew his father bought him
the position at UNAM to begin with, and of course Sylvia
left him years ago, sick to death of his philandering. So, after
all those years of ranting and raving about the revolution
ad nauseam, guess what? They threw him out of the university,
and guess why? Not lefty enough. Now, isn't that just
a hoot?"

"Charlie," I said, "I don't have any idea who you are talking
about and never have. I just don't know any of these people."

"I don't know half of them myself," he said. "It doesn't
really matter. It's just talk." If you sifted through Charlie's palaver
and listened carefully enough, you could almost always
find some small truth, and this was one of them: "It's just
talk." I laughed aloud.

We had emptied our cooler of beer, and I asked for the
check and went to the bathroom, but when I got back, Charlie
had somehow produced a bottle of red wine and was in the
process of opening it. It occurred to me as he madly popped
the cork that he had built the evening to this pinnacle of artificial
gaiety primarily so he could drink some more. Walking
back to Lydia's car a bit later, Charlie was unsteady on his
legs and went on and on about "what a marvelous evening"
it had been.

As soon as we stumbled into the apartment, Charlie put
on blue cotton pajamas with navy piping and went to sleep
on the couch. Lydia and I had a discussion about whether
or not I should drive, although we both knew we were really
talking about something else. I think we were feeling the
closeness that divorced parents feel when they have to deal
with a wayward or ill child, and we were hoping that it was
something a little more.

"Stay," she said. "Don't take the chance."

"I would, but for the dogs."

"When did you walk them?"

"Just before we came over."

"They should be fine until morning. And if they aren't,
so what?" We went to bed, but it didn't work. Lydia did all the
things I had always wanted her to do, but it still didn't work.
It was too hot, we were too sticky, and Charlie began to snore.
I said I was self-conscious. Lydia said she was, too. I made
the
Macbeth
joke about drink: "It provokes the desire, but it
takes away the performance." Lydia was defiantly cheerful.
We tried to just hold each other. We were all wrong-handed.

Finally I said, "Listen, I'm feeling guilty about those dogs.
I don't think I can sleep. I think I'd better go."

"Well, sure, I mean, if you can't sleep." I went down the
stairs as fast as I could. I was still a little drunk and already a
little hung over. I sat in the car trying to think of a moment in
my life when I had felt worse. I wondered if Lydia was feeling
this awful. God, I'd never wanted to want someone so much
in my life. "Christ," I said out loud, "Jesus Christ. What have
I done? Can this possibly be about Lisa Kim?" I had stepped
outside for just a moment just to look around, and it seemed
that the door had closed and locked behind me. I had an uneasy
feeling, which I wanted very much to deny, that I had
entered a new part of life, one in which everything was not
a beginning; there were now some endings. Everything was
not falling in love, there was now falling
out
of love. I had
never really known that was possible.

When I picked Charlie up the next day to take him back
to the bus station, he was rooting around in the kitchen cabinets.
"Any idea where Lydia keeps the hooch?" he asked. "I
need a tiny bracer, hair of the dog."

I showed him the hutch in the living room where the liquor
was, and he had a large, quick drink.

"There. Much better."

At the bus he held me as long and as hard as he had held
Lydia the night before. I could feel his heart beating, or mine;
I knew that I'd probably never see him again. It wasn't a premonition
or anything like that; it was just a bit of knowledge:
Our time had passed. Our stars had crossed—his and Lydia's
and mine—and I was very happy that they had, but that was
all over. Our vectors were speeding away from each other. As
had happened so often lately, I had a sense of transition and
inevitability. There is so much that is beyond our control, all
you can really do is deal with that which isn't. That which
wasn't seemed to be Lisa Kim.

"Were you in love with her?" asks the girl, whose hair is now
pink. "That is, if she ever really existed which, of course, she
didn't, blah blah blah."

"I guess I was, in some way," I answer.

"That's pretty weird," she says.

"Why?"

"She doesn't exist, and then she died, so she doesn't exist
squared."

"But she
did
exist," I say.

"Not for you. Might as well be fiction," says Nick.

"People fall in love with fictional characters all the time."

"Fourteen-year-old girls with rock singers," says Nick.

"No, everyone. All of us. I'll give you an example. When I
was your age, a little older, I was in college, I fell in love with
a beautiful tomboy named Elena, and she fell in love with
me, or so I thought, and it all happened one spring day in the
backyard of one of my professor's houses on a hilltop overlooking
the university. White clouds were moving fast across
a blue sky, our bare feet touched in the new grass, and it was
thrilling, truly thrilling."

"Oh boy, Mr. Ferry got lucky."

"Spare us the details, please," said the girl with pink hair.

"No," I go on, "this wasn't about sex. This was about love.
I told her everything that was in my heart, and she listened
to me intently; I knew she did, and I fell in love. A year later,
I bought a ring, and the night I was going to give it to her and
ask her to marry me and spend the rest of her life with me,
I evoked the memory of that spring afternoon that for me
was the very foundation stone of our relationship. And you
know what she remembered of it?"

"What?"

"She remembered being chilly. She remembered that the
grass was damp and she got cold. That was it. I probed and
probed, but that was it. I never gave her the ring. I kept it in
my pocket."

"What's your point?" asks the dog-faced boy.

"My point is that I'd fallen in love with a fictional character.
I'd made her up."

"I think that your love was fictional," says the pink-haired
girl. "I think that had you really loved her, you would have
forgiven her. I think that what you felt was infatuation, rather
than love."

"Maybe. Probably," I say, "but didn't someone in here
once say that infatuation is a form of love?"

"I think it's a stage of love," says the pink-haired girl. "An
early stage."

"My point is that love is like sex; some big part of it is in
your mind."

"I refuse to believe that," says someone.

"He might be right," says the dog-faced boy. "I read an
article on a survey someone did that said for some high percentage
of people—most of us, if I recall correctly—no actual
sexual experience has ever lived up to what you thought it
would be before you ever had sex at all."

"That's pretty scary," says the pink-haired girl.

"But isn't that true of anything?" says Nick. "Wouldn't it
be true of anything, I mean, like cheeseburgers or whatever?
You never think of a cheeseburger that's dry and cold, do
you? Just hot and juicy. I think you're really talking about the
real versus the ideal."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, love or sex or whatever, if you imagine it, you're
going to imagine it in its most perfect form. I mean, if I say
'summer day,' you think of the perfect summer day, not a
chilly, rainy one."

"Okay. What is ideal love, then?" I ask.

"The love of a dog," says the pink-haired girl without
hesitation.

"Oh Christ," says someone.

"No, I'm serious. You can laugh at old ladies with cats, but
think about it."

"Think about what?"

"Think about the love a pet gives you," says the pink-haired
girl.

"Okay, I'll think about it. It's submissive and extremely
limited," says Nick.

"Of course it's limited. I'm not being sappy here—"

"Okay, it's unconditional—"

"It's unconditional, and it doesn't change," says the pink-haired
girl. "It's static. It doesn't evolve. A pet and its master
don't grow apart and don't go their separate ways. A pet
doesn't have a friggin' midlife crisis and run off with his friggin'
sales assistant . . ."

"Oh Christ," says someone. "I
thought
this is where we
were headed."

"Well, I can't help it. The only time a pet hurts you is when
it dies."

"Which it will do about seven times in your lifetime," says
the dog-faced boy.

"Also, a pet doesn't grow up and need to reject you like a
kid," says the pink-haired girl.

"You're going to be one of those people with a home full
of dogs they call the health department on," says Nick.

"I know I am."

"But what about real love?" asks someone.

"What's that?" asks the pink-haired girl.

"Romantic love. Love between a man and a woman."

"Or a man and a man or a woman and a woman," says
someone.

"Case in point," I say. "Now we make sure to include and
honor homosexuals. A hundred years ago we chased them
out of town or killed them. Fifty years ago we put them in
hospitals, and sometimes they killed themselves. Now we
have parades for them. What's changed besides perception?"

"Yeah," says Nick cautiously, "but there's a difference between
perception and fantasy. I mean, this Lisa Kim is pure
fantasy."

"I put it to you that many of the most celebrated loves in
literature were at least partly fantasy. Romeo and Juliet.
How many days did they know each other? How many total
minutes were they together? 'I was a child and she was a
child,/In this kingdom by the sea,/But we loved with a love
that was more than love—I and my Annabel Lee.'"

"Who's that?" asks Nick.

"Poe. Take Lenore, for that matter," I say.

"But those are lost loves," says Nick. "They at least existed.
There's a difference between the remembered and the
imaginary."