One Day the Wind Changed (10 page)

Two weeks earlier, as I peeled away Suzi's bikini bottom in the swimming pool at her apartment complex, I told myself not to feel guilty. At first, I was Suzi and Billy's bashful friend. The geek who spent all his time in the library. They'd invite me for pizza and beer. Then Billy started to disappear in the middle of dinner. He'd swallow a slice of garlic and pineapple, three or four Lone Stars, then … gone. Later on, he got to where he'd call Suzi early—from the pub, he said—and tell her to go ahead and order the food, don't wait for me, you and Tim get started. New equipment. Sound check. Sorry.

And then one evening: “I can't believe it,” Suzi said to me. “I'm your first, aren't I?”

Even now (and admitting her strife with Billy), I can only explain Suzi's behavior by imagining myself as a challenge to her vanity, and this seems a partial truth, at best.

Two nights after my “awakening,” as she put it, as we drifted together in the deep end of the pool (it was ten o'clock and no one was around), it occurred to me that Billy already knew I was fucking his fiancée—he'd have to be a dead man not to know—and I must have his blessing, otherwise where the hell was he?

Suzi's suit bottom floated near an intake valve. From a radio near an open window in an upper-story bedroom, Dylan sang “All along the Watchtower.” The song sounded slower than I remembered it. Then faster. Was something wrong with the radio? As I gazed at Suzi's face, wondering what we'd set in motion, the song seemed to rush, drag, rush: mental distortions, tied to my fluid moods. Intake. Outflow. Panic. Joy.

As we drove from the priest's office, I said to Suzi, “Probably only about three people in the country have actually read Moby Dick.” I wasn't one of them, but I resolved to know it intimately, so I could lord it over the theory bastards at liberal arts mixers. Those squirrels hadn't read a lick.

Tears dampened Suzi's silence.

“It's okay,” I said. “We can read it
together
. Aloud. In bed.”

Billy didn't show and she didn't want to go hear him at the pub. I don't remember ordering pizza. What I remember is Suzi crying again when she discovered Billy's blond hairs in her bathroom sink. “He
never
cleans up after he trims his beard,” she said. “And he trims it
every day!
” She sobbed. I yanked some toilet paper off the roller and handed it to her. “You're very kind,” she said. “And patient. Will you do something for me, Tim?”

“Sure,” I said.

She told me to sit on the edge of the tub.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Just sit.”

She unbuttoned her blouse and dropped it on the black-and-white tile floor. Then she slipped out of her jeans. In her bra and panties, she lathered her legs with shaving cream and, leaning over in front of me, warned me with a mock-stern look not to touch her. She moved a plastic razor up and down her calves, rinsing the instrument beneath the faucet after each stroke. Then she washed her legs in the tub and toweled herself dry. “Fetch me my boots,” she said. I'd seen them in her closet—knee-length black velvet numbers—but she'd never worn them for me. She liked to tease me that some enchanted evening she'd drive me wild with them.

I brought them to her. “Sit,” she said. I went to my knees by her bed. She stripped and pulled the boots up her legs then she settled back on the sheets. “Where are you?” she whispered. I leaped up, shucked my clothes, and crawled on top of her. She gazed at the ceiling. I murmured into her cheek, licked her tears. “Shh,” she said. “Shh, shh.” Her sainthood had begun.

I only saw Billy three times after that. Suzi rarely mentioned him. She said the two of them met the priest twice a week for lessons in “holy marriage.”

“My Catholicism has been dormant these last few years,” she told me one morning over coffee. “I'd forgotten how much I love the ritual of the Mass. I mean, it's kind of corny, but it's beautiful too. Comforting. The patience behind it. The precision and grace. There's not much grace in life, is there?”

“Ah! Hemingway's credo,” I said. ‘“Grace under pressure.' That's us, eh?”

Her face stiffened, as though she endured some inner distress.

She hadn't set a date, but she busied herself with wedding plans. We didn't tryst as often as we used to. I spent my days in the school library writing research papers or reading Melville. His biographers said he died penniless. At first, America's greatest sea epic was a failure. The critics missed the boat.

At grad school parties, I could never wield
Moby Dick
skillfully enough to KO the theorists, so I stood in a corner by the food, gobbling raw cauliflower.

I lived in an efficiency apartment just off a freeway near campus. My window overlooked an oak tree in a courtyard. That spring, it rained almost every evening, cold sheets of water pasting glossy leaves to the ground, a
shushing
rush as runoff from the downpours seeped into the soil beneath the tree.

I ate off a hot plate on my floor: canned soup, pork and beans. From my turntable, Linda Ronstadt moaned, “Ooh baby baby.” A woman lived next door, a beauty about my age. She never smiled at me or spoke. Past midnight, every night, I'd hear her scream at her boyfriend while he paced beneath the tree, drunk on MD 20/20, pleading to come up. I'd peek through my window and see her pressed to the balcony rail, shouting down below—“You're drunk and disgusting! Leave me alone!”—the hem of her nightie riding up her thighs. In the rainy moonlight, the backs of her knees were as white as the coils of my cooker.

One night I dreamed of tossing her over the railing, only to run down and catch her in my arms, the boyfriend just a mulch-pile at this point, a wet mess to be raked away someday. The woman cooed “Baby baby!” as I carried her back upstairs.

On Friday nights, when I'd finished studying, I'd head over to Finches, a beer and burger joint on Mockingbird Lane near the university football stadium. The smell of fresh bread from a bakery up the street made me feel full whether I ordered dinner or not. A friend of mine managed Finches. His name was Gary. He had a ginger beard, a sly smile, and a limp. He'd shovel fries until two. Then he'd close the place, send the help home. He'd sit with me by the bar's stone hearth reading aloud chapters from a novel he'd hacked at for years. It wasn't very good but I enjoyed the ritual. He'd grab us a couple of lagers—ignoring the sticky plates in the kitchen—and remind me where we'd left off in the story. His stubborn pluck and glee, his devotion to his awful characters, warmed me more than the fire.

On a typical Friday night, a student poets' club gathered at a corner table, got snockered, bold, and loud, and yelled at the late-shift girls streaming in from the Dr Pepper bottling plant across the street. The girls shed their shoes, rubbed their pinched red feet, and told the poets to shove it. This just stirred them up. “Hey baby, let's couplet!” one of the geniuses would shout. They tipped poorly, left a salty, burbling mess on the table, and mocked Gary's gait. The Dr Pepper divas were every bit as smarmy, setting their shoes on tabletops, griping about their feet.

Gary could have told them all a thing or two (though he never did): a jungle in southern Laos, a land mine sunk in mud; it was pure dumb luck the thing malfunctioned just as Gary stepped on it.

“
This
is what you should write about,” I told him whenever he talked about the army. Instead, his novel concerned a black girl in a Houston ghetto: a subject he knew nothing about, but the material was “sociologically significant,” he insisted. I'd know the importance of this, he said, if I ever got out of the library and took a look around.

So we'd sit after closing, two literary types flummoxed by the world: he by what he'd seen, me by all I'd missed. “10, 2 & 4” flashed the Dr Pepper sign in front of the plant. What did these numbers mean? I imagined them as the key to a combination safe. Inside, Linda Ronstadt. Judy Collins. Or my neighbor in her nightie. Never Suzi. Never the treasure I expected. Already, my imagination had accepted Suzi as a creature apart.

One Friday evening, the yelling started early in the courtyard. “I'm coming up there, bitch!” “I'll call the cops!” the woman said.

I switched off my hot plate and looked out the window. She wore only a white dress shirt, a man's. It barely covered her butt. The backs of her knees seemed to glow. Rain lashed the tree. The boyfriend staggered and weaved. I hadn't eaten all day, and my stomach hurt. The discomfort convinced me that no matter what the future held, I would never feel nostalgic about my college days. I wouldn't miss the rain. The tree. Or the lonely boy I'd been.

But oh baby baby, the backs of her knees.

I was surprised to see Billy that night at Finches. He didn't see me, or pretended not to. He had his arms around a woman I didn't know. Tall, loud: Suzi's opposite.

Thin crowd. Late spring. Some seniors—those headed for the service or their fathers' corporate boardrooms—had graduated early; others stayed home prepping for exams. Gary always worried about summer. Without students around, Finches didn't do enough business to justify staying open, and he felt unsafe with so few people in the bar.

Tonight, a local high school was holding a track meet in the university stadium. The big lights came on at 7:30, and a powdery glare bore through Finches' windows. “10, 2 & 4” flashed the soft drink sign. Maybe it was my year-end mood, maybe I missed Suzi, but as I watched my fellow revelers, I assigned the sign's numbers to the faces all around me. This boy's got ten more years to live, I thought. That one, two. In four months, disease will waste this gorgeous girl leaning against the phone booth. Eventually, that loving couple will scratch each other's eyes out. In the glary light, we all (I pictured myself among the crowd, as though my consciousness hovered above the room) resembled comic actors in a silent film. Performing gaily. Long dead.

Well. Way too morose. I signaled Gary for another brew.

I looked around for Billy. A pasty-faced young man—he appeared to be about twenty—moved among tables, setting palm-sized New Testaments next to people's condiments. “What the hell is this?” a big guy yelled at him. He wore a T-shirt that said, “My Alcohol Team Has a Soccer Problem.” “What are you, boy? Some kind of preacher?”

“God loves you,” the young man said.

“Ooh, and I wuvey-dovey
Him,
” the big guy boomed. He pinched the young man's cheek. People roared. The Pepper girls arrived to a ragged, standing salute by the poets. Billy had vanished.

The following Monday, when I got home from the library, Suzi was standing in the courtyard, her back against the oak tree. She wore jeans and a blue halter top. Her hair was limp.

“I've been waiting,” she said.

“I'm sorry, I didn't know … had we planned…?”

“No.”

“It's been a while. I've missed you.”

“Billy left.”

I tried to look surprised.

“I want to move in with you,” Suzi said.

I touched her arm. Her skin felt cold, though the day was humid and warm. “Come on up, Suze. Tell me—”

“I don't want to talk about it. I want to fuck. I want to eat and go to a movie. Then I want to move in with you.”

We stared at each other, hard—as if we'd fought. “Okay,” I said.

Her hair tasted of cigarette smoke (she never smoked). Crazy. My Suzi-inspired distortions. She clung to me on the carpet, in the bathtub, on the bed. We were self-conscious, awkward. Still, in my eagerness, my head rang like a roomful of phones.
Pledge break. Won't you help? Call now. Give this couple a future
. I was perfect for her, I thought. “Let's track down the priest,” I said. “Let's get married.” I loved her, I loved her. Shit, I loved her.

Afterward, we walked up the street for cheap Chinese. Then we went to see
Return of the Dead
at a second-run movie theater. Suzi laughed and laughed. I wouldn't let go of her hand. She got quiet about halfway through the film. The corpses kept coming.

Take her home, put on Linda Ronstadt, kiss her where her hips begin to flare, the soft, subtle flare of her hips.

When we got to the courtyard Suzi wouldn't come up. She paced around the tree. “I can't,” she said.

“I thought you wanted to move in with me.”

“It's wrong.”

“Wrong, like …
wrong?
Or wrong for you and me?”

She glared at me. “Don't you understand? Don't you understand anything?”

“Suze—”

Her feet were muddy. “Don't touch me! Don't you fucking touch me!”

I spread my arms. She turned and smacked her head against the tree. “Oh my god!” she said. She screamed and sank to the ground.

“Suze …”

“No, no! Get away from me!”

“Suze, is Billy … where is Billy?” I hovered around her, stupid as a moth.

“He's left!” she said.

“I know, but …”

A white flutter. I looked up. There, above us, leaning against the balcony railing, wearing the man's white shirt, was my neighbor. The beauty. She didn't acknowledge me in any way. She began to unbutton the shirt. Then she turned and slipped inside her apartment.

“I think. … I'm beyond it all,” Suzi whispered.

“No,” I said. What did she mean? I helped her up. The gash on her forehead seemed minor. It stopped bleeding. We walked the six or seven blocks to the Greenfield Pub. On the way, Suzi let me hold her. Then she shook off my arm. The cut opened again. By the time we reached the pub, blood smeared her left cheek. We stood in the doorway. The room went quiet. Billy was singing “Diamonds and Rust.” He faltered, quit. A lifetime's worth of expressions crossed his face; I saw him as an old man. Finally, all his emotions—panic, fear, exhaustion?—merged into a slow, sad smile. “Darlin',” he said into the mike. Suzi ran to the stage. I felt naked and dumb. I couldn't blend into the crowd. As I turned to go, I caught a glance from Billy: a generous smirk?
Is
there such a look? How had the evening gone so wrong? I walked away wondering what I'd missed that could have forced a different ending.