Round Rock (32 page)

He missed the spur on the first pass and had to turn back. Up the narrow dirt road, he parked next to Libby’s Mercedes. The sun was strong, the air smelled of hot sage and warm, standing water. Parallel jet trails had blown into broad horizontal stripes, like an overarching rib cage. The lake water was dark green, shiny and wrinkled. Orange barrels bobbled by the dam. A steady, persistent northerly breeze made Lewis’s clothes flap and flutter against his body.

The air was calmer down in Libby’s spot. She had only one line in the water, the pole propped against her folding lawn chair. Her hands rested over her rounded belly. She gazed out at the lake from under a black mesh bill hat. Afraid to startle her, Lewis rolled small rocks past her chair until she glanced around. Immediately, she turned back to the lake.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he said.

She pursed her lips. One eyebrow lifted as if on a string. Her hat read
RITO, CALIFORNIA
in red stitching.

“I’ll leave if you prefer.”

She whisked an iridescent green fly off her shoulder and maybe,
maybe,
gave the slightest shrug.

Lewis hunkered down beside her. A swarm of the shiny green flies buzzed over the ground. The sun was hot, and he wished he’d brought a hat. Libby slapped at another fly.

Lewis looked down at the familiar crackled mud. “You know, Libby, I was pretty messed up when I met you.” He peeled a corner off one mud tile and tossed it into the water. “You were so kind and generous. I have nothing but good thoughts about our time together.” He took a steadying breath, pushed on. “I never meant to run out on you, but I short-circuited. It’s pretty unforgivable, I know.” She was staring straight ahead. “Just the same, I wish you’d forgive me. And I think you can, because given the same circumstances, I know I wouldn’t do the same thing again.”

Just when he decided she’d taken a vow of silence, Libby began to speak. “In a way, Lewis, I do forgive you: I wish you well. I want you to teach, publish, stay sober—whatever you want most for yourself. But the damage is done. I don’t say that to be vengeful. But something happened with us—to me, at least. On a physical level. Maybe being pregnant exaggerates it.” She caught a loose strand of hair and mashed it back under her hat. “I have this reaction now: you come into a room and I want to leave it. I see you, I reflexively look the other way. It’s nothing I
decide
to do. It just
is.
You did what you did, and this is the result. It’s like aversion therapy that worked.”

Lewis thought of saying, Well, I didn’t want it to work that well, but something told him not to joke—at least not about this, not yet. “Do you have an aversion to brownies?” He held up his knapsack.

She didn’t smile, though her shoulders registered another minuscule shrug.

He poured coffee into styrofoam cups and unwrapped the brownies.

She took a bite and frowned.

“That bad?” he asked.

“Raisins? In a brownie, Lewis?”

“No good, huh?”

“Not really.” She kept chewing, took another bite. “I’m hungry, though.”

His legs grew tired, so he sat down on the mud flat, hugging his knees. The sun baked his head. Libby, he could tell, was barely tolerating his presence. Last night, a man at the AA meeting said that to feel good about himself, he would line up all the women he ever slept with in his mind. Just seeing them and remembering their sweetness calmed him down, comforted him. This technique, thought Lewis,
would never work for him. Sitting next to just one ex-lover made him want to explode.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “And I’ve been wracking my brains about how to make amends to you.” This was not true. He’d assumed a simple apology would dissolve her hostility. “I had this idea,” he said, talking off the top of his head, “maybe I could help with the new house. I could work, oh, three hours every Sunday. I’ll stain like I did last week, or pound nails. I don’t really care. Whatever needs to be done.”

“We have contractors,” Libby said. “Anything we do up there is because we want to have some hand in it.”

“I can do stuff contractors don’t want to, like dig a garden or wash windows. You won’t ever have to see me. I’ll work Sunday mornings. You’ll be here fishing.”

Libby popped the last of her brownie into her mouth and spoke with her mouth full. “You get used to them, the raisins.”

“Leave me a note saying what needs to be done. ‘Stain woodwork.’ ‘Spade garden.’ Or leave the punch list. I’ll go up to the house every week until …” He tried to think of a reasonable length of time. “Until it’s done.”

Libby brushed off her hands, flicked chocolate crumbs from her sweatshirt, and hazarded a look his way. It was true: her eyes couldn’t rest on him. “It’s hard to say if that would change anything,” she said.

“I’d like to try, anyhow,” Lewis said. “A shot in the dark.”

Back at his car, the right front tire was so low, it was almost flat. When he opened the trunk, he remembered he had no spare. In town, he filled the low tire, but couldn’t get it fixed because Fritz’s Texaco, the only gas station, was closed. He could risk the drive and make the last half of the Nightcrawler meeting, but a flat on the freeway would be expensive. He went instead to Round Rock and lay down in his bungalow until the phone rang. “You
are
home,” said David Ibañez. “Come play softball. The Doodads are low on men.”

“I’m not up to it,” Lewis said, “and I’m a Shithead anyway.” He spent the rest of the day in bed.

L
ETTUCE
, David explained, contains a faint opiate; his mother and aunts used to make a tea from the leaves to soothe their restive
babies. If Libby was having trouble sleeping, she might try some. If she needed something stronger, he told her, throw in two tablespoons of poppy seeds.

Libby obeyed this advice and had her first good night’s sleep in weeks. Try as she might to see things from Billie’s point of view, David did not seem, finally, a con artist. He was too soft-spoken, thoughtful.

She had conducted her own investigation. “So, you worked with cancer patients in Tijuana?” she asked when he came to the office to read client files.

“Not specifically,” he said. “Only those with chronic pain. I worked with one woman who had terrible joint pain after chemotherapy, and a man who had a tumor in his neck—benign, actually—that caused obliterating headaches. So, I haven’t had much experience with cancer, no.”

“If you have any bright ideas to see me through this thing I’ve gotten myself into, please”—Libby drummed fingers on her belly—“let me know. It seems like everybody I meet has a new horror story of an eighty-hour labor.”

“I’m no expert on childbirth,” David said. “I’ve only attended one birth, in New Mexico, and the only thing I remember is that the father cooked the placenta and gave a tidbit to everyone present. It was no worse than other organ meats. A bit chewier, maybe.”

Libby clapped her hand over her mouth, spoke through her fingers. “We won’t be having my placenta for lunch.”

“No?” He smiled. “I do know, though, that the general principles for pain management apply to labor. So much of pain is resistance to pain—you know, what they teach you at Lamaze.”

“When in doubt, hyperventilate?”

Red came in as David left, and Libby made the big concession: “He’s pretty nice.”

“David? Yeah, he’s working out really well.”

How had she ever found, much less married, a man who didn’t gloat?

T
HE NEW
house was locked up tight. No note. No punch list. The roof had gone on, so Lewis walked around the site picking up scraps of roofing felt and broken cedar shingles. Also, the drywallers
had evidently made great sport sailing odd pieces of sheetrock out of windows. He picked up these scraps, too, and kicked at the chalky stains in the pink dirt, a precise expression of the dejection he felt for this lonely, thankless task he’d assigned himself.

Red, arriving around nine, was surprised to find him there. No, Libby hadn’t mentioned anything about Lewis working at the house. “But this is great,” Red said. “I wasn’t looking forward to being by myself.” They stained window and door casings and applied coats of urethane. Red grew talkative and reminisced, describing Round Rock in its first years, when only six or eight guys rattled around in the mansion. “Doc Perrin or somebody from Social Model Detox was over almost every night to baby-sit, make sure we weren’t having keggers.” Then he told Lewis how the large Victorian came to be its unusual shade of blue: “The same day I headed out to buy a hundred gallons of white exterior latex, an itinerant band of housepainters rolled into town. I ran into them at Victor’s. Their estimate, paint and labor, was substantially lower than my paint cost alone. Seemed like a miracle at the time. Of course, the color choice was limited. ‘Seafoam,’ I think it was called. At any rate, they primed nothing, masked nothing, just fired up a wheezing air compressor and shot paint in the general direction of the house until everything—windows, limestone, all the shrubbery—was covered.” Red paused for a moment, then frowned. “Forgive me, Lewis,” he said. “Maybe the prospect of being a father again has made me introspective. I’ve been thinking and thinking about my life, like it’s some long, complicated dream.”

“That’s
très
Buddhist,” said Lewis.

“Hey, you should come over for dinner soon. I’m a barbecuing fool these days.”

“Sounds good.”

“I’ll see when she’s up to company.”

At noon, Libby herself came in, carrying a box of antique door knobs and window hardware. Her cheeks were flushed from lakeside sun and wind. “Hello, Lewis,” she said with a trace increase of warmth, then disappeared into the back bedrooms. Red kept poking his head into the hall, clearly torn between keeping Lewis company and seeking her out.

Lewis stuck his brush in thinner. “I’d better be moseying along.” For the rest of the day, he stayed close to home in case Red came
through with a dinner invitation. He held out until eight-thirty, then drove into Buchanan for a spinach omelette at Denny’s.

N
APPING
one afternoon between lunch and dinner prep, Lewis was awakened by Gustave’s furious barking. A gray Saab had pulled up in front of Red’s office, and Gustave was at the driver’s door, feinting and baying like a hyperactive hellhound. Lewis came out to his porch and called, but the dog was too crazed to notice, so Lewis had to walk over, grab hold of his collar, and pull him back.

The woman who stepped out of the car was older, maybe fifty, with short graying hair in a mannish cut. Putty-colored linen pants. Crisp white shirt. Heavy gold at neck, wrist, ears. Lewis pegged her as a state inspector, or one of many fund administrators who came out for a look before awarding Round Rock a grant.

“Sorry,” he said, pulling Gustave into the house and slamming the door. When he turned back, the woman was gazing about, shading her eyes with her hand. She appeared confused.

“Looking for Red Ray?” he asked, walking toward her.

“No, but this
is
his bungalow, right?”

“The very one.”

“I’m supposed to meet David Ibañez here at two.” She dropped her hand from her brow and offered it to Lewis. “I’m Pauline,” she said, and they shook.

It was David’s birthday, she told him, and Red was lending them his bungalow for the night. Lewis was incredulous. Women swooned over David, and somehow he’d chosen this refined, older matron, as formal and self-possessed as an elk.

“Uh-oh,” Pauline said, as Gustave burst through a window screen. Lewis caught him at the foot of the steps and was again dragging him toward the house when David appeared, on foot, in the roadway. “Sorry I’m late,” he said as he walked up. “The Land Cruiser has a flat.”

While David and Pauline embraced, Lewis got Gustave back into the bungalow. He closed all the windows and left him locked inside when he went to cook dinner. When he came home and let him out around nine, the hot and airless house stank of dog, and Gustave had chewed up a library book and a sofa cushion. The dog had another barking fit at midnight, and Lewis looked outside just as David and
Pauline climbed out of the Saab. Under the mercury-vapor light, David looked soft in the face, thick in the middle, the gray streaks in his hair conspicuous. He, too, looked unequivocally middle-aged.

Lewis caught Gustave’s collar. “Good birthday dinner?” he asked.

“Quite good. Red grilled swordfish,” Pauline said. “Libby baked an orange cake.”

Back in his bungalow, Lewis called Barbara. “Sorry to wake you,” he said, “but I’m desperate to talk to somebody. I am so far off the social registry up here, I feel like a goddamn leper.”

Barbara yawned. “So what are you going to do about it?”

“Quit?”

“I don’t think so,” she said languidly. “Sounds to me like the perfect place to finish your dissertation.”

L
ITTLE
Bill Fitzgerald took a summer job in his uncle John’s West Hollywood law firm. Billie and Old Bill drove him down, helped him get settled in John’s house in Bel Air, and stayed on for a month themselves. The moment Billie came home, she phoned Libby. “Come over right now,” she said.

When Libby arrived, she encountered what must have been the entire Neiman Marcus baby department. Dresses, jumper suits, T-shirts in deep, beautiful, saturated colors, all so much nicer than the river of cheap pastel-pink polyester items arriving from Libby’s mother and aunts. Even the diaper covers were beautiful—deep purple, teal, royal blue, and, as Libby couldn’t help noticing, twenty-six dollars a pop.

“There’s so much great baby stuff these days,” Billie said. “It’s enough to make me think about having another kid.”

“God, wouldn’t that be something,” said Libby.

“On second thought, you have the baby and I’ll just buy the clothes.”

“This baby’s already better dressed than her mother ever was.”

“So why don’t you let Red finance a new wardrobe?”

“I don’t believe in spending a fortune on maternity clothes,” Libby said. “You only wear them for a few weeks.”

“Good God, girl, live it up for a change! You have a rich husband now.”