Pat Boone Fan Club (10 page)

Beside you on the library table is today’s
Houston Chronicle
. Flip through it. See the ad for a temporary employment agency in Houston. They claim they’ll find you jobs by the day, the week, the month. On a whim, drop coins into the library’s pay phone. Set up an appointment. Write down directions to San Jacinto Street. Wonder whether a temp job is better than suicide or arson.

At the Olga Employment Agency, pass the typing test. With flying colors. Although you’ve had responsible jobs, this feels like a stunning achievement. You are told to report to Schroeder Oil Company the next day. They anticipate the assignment will last a week.

You are on the lam without a thing to wear, however. For the interview you dressed in your best floral bell-bottoms, but you need a few additional outfits.

Drive around the Loop to the Galleria. Park your rusty, dented Volkswagen beside Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals. Since you’ve lived almost in isolation the past few months, now, inside
the mall, feel overwhelmed. But persevere. Check price tags on dresses. Technically, you could charge clothes. Technically, you’re still married. Nevertheless, technically, the credit card belongs to your husband so, up until now, you’ve used it sparingly.

Decide—although you more or less knew it all along—to shoplift.

Perhaps this is due to
Crime and Punishment
. Perhaps this is your sorry attempt at a grand gesture. Perhaps if caught and arrested, sent to jail, you won’t have to return to your apartment. Your life.

In the dressing room slip on a red-and-pink polyester dress, flimsy enough to fit beneath your clothes. The clinging material is the kind worn in
Saturday Night Fever
. That won’t wrinkle. Ever. That you can rinse in your bathtub. That will air dry, even on the damp Gulf Coast, immediately.

Glance in the mirror. Wonder if you’re sexy. Pretty? On your honeymoon night, in a suite in the Plaza Hotel, your husband fell asleep without so much as kissing you goodnight. Right now, this one fact—that you married someone who doesn’t love you—scares you. Slide onto the floor in the dressing room. Hug your knees to your chest. The song “People” plays on the Muzak. This version—thin, pathetic, yet trying so very hard to please—causes despair to cascade through your heart.

Stop! Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Continue with your plan.

Pull on your own clothes over the polyester. It bunches across the thighs. Smooth it out. Better. If caught, don’t make excuses. Admit guilt. Accept responsibility. Demand a prison sentence. But only if caught, of course.

Back in your car, feel drunk with success. Not altogether unlike how you felt when you ran away with blue-convertible man.

Shoplifting: A Cautionary Tale

When your Volkswagen drops a rod on
I
-45 outside Texas City on the way home, consider crime
and
punishment. You are now
hunkered on the shoulder. Semis and Texas-sized Caddies whiz by, your car shimmying in the gusts. The wind, however, is more like an equatorial nightmare than a fresh breeze off the gulf. Especially wearing two layers of clothes. The polyester feels like a hair shirt against your skin (which of course you deserve). The stuffing, leaking out of the split in the upholstery, pokes your left thigh. Smoke billows in the distance, tarnishing the sky, oil refineries processing crude. Take a deep breath. Think about sitting in your car until your skin grays with soot. Think about penance.

A police cruiser pulls onto the shoulder behind you. Glance in the rearview mirror to make sure no price tags stick out from under your arms or the back of your neck. Notice that, having driven with the windows open, your ponytail looks like a bristle brush.

“Trouble?” he asks.

Explain.

When he offers to call the nearest service station, accept.

Think about confessing. After all, he is cute, with blue eyes and black hair.
He
, in fact, looks more like John Travolta than the blue-convertible man. If he forgives you, you will be saved.
He
, in fact, will save you. Don’t heroes love to save sinners? Consider what it’s like to be married to a cop. Wisely decide not to ask.

Two hours later your car is in the shop. Lacking options, call your husband for a ride home. By now, you’ve sweated through both layers of clothes so that, if you look closely, the red-and-pink polyester is visible beneath the bell-bottom outfit. If your husband notices, he says nothing. At this point, however, you no longer care.

His Ford Mustang is air conditioned. Cold slices you like a blade of ice. Sweat freezes your skin. Develop a headache behind your right eye. Press a palm against your throbbing lid.

He stops the car outside the quadriplegic’s house, the engine idling.

“Oh, we sold the Tremont Building,” your husband says. “With façade easements.”

The Tremont Building is part of his restoration development project. Façade easements protect, architecturally, the exterior of the buildings, requiring owners to give the fronts facelifts. “Super.”

He explains how the developer plans shops on the ground floor, apartments upstairs.

You sit beside him in the car feeling cold and frail, but he doesn’t ask how you’ve been, if you’ve been eating, if you’re lonely.

Never mind.

By dusk, as sweat evaporates, your skin feels gritty, sandy. The polyester outfit, which you are now regretting on every level, hangs in the bathroom, drying. Lie on your bed in your underclothes, a washcloth on your forehead, your body settling into the familiar hollow in the mattress. Your palms are up, forming shallow, empty cups. Feel like a Victorian girl with ague. The vapors.

Notes from High above Ground

In December, begin your thirty-fourth temp job in Houston, each in a different downtown high-rise. Every morning cross the causeway over Galveston Bay to the mainland, returning every afternoon, back and forth, north and south on
I
-45, now in your Volkswagen with a rebuilt engine. Which cost $750 to fix. Which your husband loaned you. Which you are now repaying from weekly paychecks, depleting the four to five dollars an hour you earn.

At each job sit at a desk that is yours for the day or the week. Liken it to renting a motel room for an hour. Aspire to nothing else. Instead, on an
IBM
Selectric, type reports for oil companies. You are a good typist. You proofread. No one complains. Typing is clear-cut, keeps you focused on punctuation, on minutiae. Little time or energy to consider a failed marriage, neon penises at the Kon Tiki, shoplifting, spying on blue-convertible man . . . or the distant, unseeable future.

Pass entire days barely speaking. You aren’t allowed to make personal phone calls. There is no one to call. During lunch sit at your desk reading. Or, through lowered lashes, watch coworkers, women efficiently dressed in pantyhose and business suits—women with real jobs, families, homes. Photographs of children adorn their desks. Their closets do not contain shoplifted clothes. They do not live across the street from rooming houses.

These women seem unknowable. Different.
Adult
. You fear you are not. You
know
you are not, you, with your Monday-Wednesday-Friday peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. On Tuesdays and Thursdays you bring strawberry yogurt and an apple for lunch. Pack a dented spoon from your furnished apartment in your brown-paper sack. To save money, drink a glass of tap water. Use a paper towel from the bathroom for a napkin.

Feel as if you are sliding far away from normal behavior. Hope, at least, you are more interesting than your coworkers—like a starving artist. Or begin to feel almost
Russian
, that
you
are living underground. Take a revolutionary stand against capitalism, civilization.

Perhaps you are having an existential crisis.

Also suspect, however, you are simply unoriginal, lost, confused.

Don’t think about the permanence of a temporary life.

You are asked, at one oil company, only to answer the telephone, no typing. Buy Rilke’s
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
and read it, day after day, nine to five. Remove a piece of stationery from the desk drawer and print out the following line from the book: “There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, it gets dirty, it splits at the folds, it stretches, like gloves one has worn on a journey.” Finish the book while sitting at your neat desk under fluorescent lights on the fifteenth floor. Wonder whether human faces, like buildings, can have façade easements.

Attend a Christmas buffet lunch at one of the offices. Fill a paper plate with ham, sweet potatoes, a gingerbread man. Employees gather in small groups, talking and eating. Return alone to your desk, carefully setting down your plate. With your plastic knife, cut a wedge of ham. Put it in your mouth. Focus on food: cutting, chewing, swallowing. Wipe your mouth with a napkin decorated with Santa. Feel invisible.

Out the window, a forest of high-rises stretches to the Loop. The pocked roof of the Astrodome, resembling the moon, darkens in the gray afternoon. Grackles swarm in the distance, though you can’t hear their raucous cries. Sounds in the office fade as well. Feel as if you occupy a monastic cell—all the windows in the buildings, all the office workers, all these sequestered faces suspended behind glass—hovering high above the earth.

The Shrouds of the Kon Tiki

Late one night awake to the clang of fire engines. Leap from bed and look out the window. Flames, from the direction of The Strand, stain the black sky. The arsonist is burning another building. Slip on flip-flops, cutoffs, hurry outside. Your lungs are heavy with humidity, your mouth smoky. Run as if you can save the building, worrying it might be your old apartment.

It is the Kon Tiki.

Pause in the alley across the street. If a building must burn, at least this one is no longer adorned with its original iron-front façade, isn’t worth much architecturally. Over the years the structure’s been decimated, reduced to stucco slabs.

But where are the patrons?
Upstairs from the dance club are steam baths for the gay clientele. Probably the baths operate all night. Probably men are still up there, though hopefully, at this hour, not many remain.

Flames spire from the roof. Red paint peels off the front door. Behind windows, fire shimmers and roils. Your husband, in robe and pajamas, whom you just noticed, grabs a fireman. He points
to the surrounding buildings. Probably he worries the fire will spread, will leap the alley to buildings waiting to be restored. The fireman nods before rushing off. Your husband backs away but continues to watch.

Slide down, your back against your old apartment building. The brick-lined alley is warm beneath your legs. The air pings as windows crack before shattering. Imagine water pipes bursting, nails bending. The notes on all the vinyl records warp. The Lucite dance floor blisters before it melts—red, green, blue neon puddling to black, to a char, to soot, to dust. The air smells dark, a whoosh of exhaled ether.

As if in a mirage, they emerge from cataracts of spraying water, walking single file. An orderly line of men wrapped in white sheets follow a fireman from a side door. They look like a procession of shrouds. Dazed, they pass an ambulance, trickling down the alley one by one, their forms watery, as if leaving the Kon Tiki not having found what they sought. They reach the end of the block. You can no longer see heads or outlines of bodies. Wispy sheets seem to drift on air currents, though the men’s soles leave moist footprints on hot asphalt, as they stumble toward what will be the worst decade of their lives. Perhaps their last.

Across the street, your husband’s shoulders tremble as if he is crying. Even though this building isn’t on the list to be restored, still, it’s in The Strand district, which he loves.
This
is his love.

Walk over to him. Hug him. Your voice would never be heard above the fiery night, but you hope he understands you are sorry. About the fire. About the blue convertible. About everything.

Imagine relationships ending like drops of water sizzling in flame.

Worn-Through Faces

One Saturday morning toward the end of March, see the entire man who lives in the rooming house across the street, not just his forearm in the window. He’s opened the door and stepped
outside. How do you know it’s him? You just do. Imagine he’s a sailor, unemployed for a while, fallen on hard times. Now you’re sure he’s found a new job on a freighter bound for Venezuela. He pauses on the front stoop, a cardboard valise in one hand, a cigarette in the other, as if he’s stepping off a 1940s movie set. Crewcut hair. The leather of his western boots is cracked, but polished. He’s younger than you imagined. But perhaps an old, previous, down-and-out face has worn off, as Rilke suggests, to reveal another face, one that’s pale, yes, from his long captivity, yet now setting sail into the future. As he walks down the sidewalk watch his footsteps as if you could follow them, each step a point on a map. Direction. A destination.

The thing of it is, the moment is banal. Watching this man is the opposite of the melodrama of running away in a blue convertible. Today it is just solitary footsteps moving in one direction . . . and a new face. Today it is only the air that’s spring yellow, oleanders falling all over themselves to bloom.

The man disappears at the end of the block. Rather than feel abandoned, imagine the tether that’s lightly bound you and him together, now pulling you forward, too.

A few weeks later, almost a year after you ran away from home with the blue-convertible man, you are financially solvent. Pay off the rebuilt Volkswagen engine. Purchase new clothes. Pack them in the canvas suitcase and throw it in the backseat of your car. One of your temporary jobs has become permanent. You plan to move. You want to feel the throb of Houston, a city that grew in proportion to Galveston’s demise. Although Galveston was once the largest port on the gulf, after the Houston Ship Channel was constructed, the island slumbered, leaving blocks of Victoriana to decay.

Until your husband was hired to restore it.