This One Time With Julia (14 page)

This conversation was starting to put me on tilt, and I wanted to get out of there. I didn’t want to hear any more of her stories. It was starting to seem difficult to breathe again, and my eyes were starting to itch.

“What about him?”

“Houston practically ran him out of town. I heard that right after he fired him, he threw all his clothes out into the street.”

“Houston thought he was a bad influence on her,” I said. “He was probably right.”

“And you’re a good influence?”

“He thinks I am.”

“Are you on drugs, Joe?”

“No.”

“I hope I didn’t offend you by asking. It’s just that sometimes I wonder if you’re stoned. Am I really going to say this? Here I go.” She took a deep breath. “Houston has always been in love with Julia.”

It took a minute for me to make sure that I understood what she was saying. “He’s her brother.”

“I didn’t realize until he was fifteen or so, when I found some of his notebooks hidden in his bedroom wall. Poor thing. I watched him try to fall for other women. He could make it last a month, sometimes a year, before he found some reason to be unsatisfied with them. A woman can live up to a man’s ideal, but not if that ideal is another woman. Now he pretends to have a girlfriend in Chicago, just to keep things simple.”

She stood up and went back over to the loom and started working the pedals. She gave me this little smile, like she was proud that she’d made me too confused to speak.

“It was always interesting to see how he’d react to Julia’s boyfriends. If he felt threatened he would plot against them, find some way to poison her interest. It was never very difficult, because Julia always looked up to Houston. But if he saw that her new boyfriend was just a stupid crush and wouldn’t last, then he’d stoke the fire, tell Julia that he approved, and try to make it last as long as possible. His favorite was a Swedish exchange student she went out with. Houston would drive them to the movies and take them out on dates, because everybody knew they couldn’t last. But Alvin was a different story. Alvin scared him.”

I knew I wasn’t supposed to be listening to her. Julia had warned me that her mother would try to give me a lot of strange and terrible ideas, and I could tell that’s what was happening right then. But it was impossible not to hear her voice.

“Alvin was a legitimate threat to take Julia away. He was making Julia question her own father. She was talking about leaving Tennessee.”

“Julia said I shouldn’t listen to you.”

“You don’t have to believe me.”

“You’re saying he wants to marry her?”

“No, not yet. He probably doesn’t want to make a move while Bill is still around, but I’m not sure how long he can afford to wait. He’s risking a lot even letting her go to college. Plenty of girls still find their husbands in college.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “Just ask yourself sometime why Houston is so nice to you. Personally I’ve never trusted anything about him. When a boy keeps a secret his whole life, the secret eventually covers him completely, until nothing about the boy is true. Don’t you wonder why he’s putting on these absurd formal airs all the time? Why he talks like a middle-aged man? He found a way to act where he could be around Julia without exploding. The real Houston we never got to see.”

Sometimes everything is so complicated that you just want to cover your eyes and pretend it’s not there. I felt exhausted and confused, like I was trying to solve one of Alvin’s damn puzzles. Julia’s mother had put me on this very bad and worried tilt, and suddenly I badly needed to go outside.

“Thanks for showing me the house,” I said.

She nodded and stood up from the loom. Then she came over to the couch, leaned down, and kissed me on the forehead.

“You’re not listening. It’s fine. It’s better for you. I probably wouldn’t tell you if I thought you could understand me. But now that the tour is finished, there’s one more thing I’ve been dying to ask you. Did you even notice this whole house is burnt to a crisp?”

“Of course.”

“Of course you did.” She winked, like she knew I was lying. “For some reason I didn’t think you had.”

I don’t know how I didn’t notice, because looking around now it was totally obvious. Some of the walls were basically just big lumps of charcoal, and there were little piles of black soot in all the corners. I saw that the loom was all charred, and noticed our footprints in the black dust on the floor. I understood why I’d been having so much trouble breathing. I realized it had been a cloud of soot that rose up from the couch. Ms. Delancey was sort of smirking as she watched me figure all this out. “It was something in the wiring. I don’t really understand these things. But nobody was here, and the fire trucks didn’t arrive for hours, and everything was destroyed. Did Julia really tell you none of this?”

“Of course she did.”

“You’re fibbing. And that’s fine. But don’t you ever wonder why she doesn’t tell you anything?”

On our way out of the room she stopped in the doorway to flip a light switch on the wall, but nothing happened because there was no bulb in the ceiling and all the wiring in the house had melted. “Oh, Joe, this is my dressing room,” she said. “This is where I used to get dressed.”

Ms. Delancey drove twice as fast on the way back from Golden Oaks, weaving in and out of traffic, singing along to her CD—and she seemed to have basically forgotten I was there, because she didn’t try to talk to me again until she dropped me off at the hotel.

“I’d keep this to yourself if I were you,” she said as I was getting out of the car. “You’ll be tempted to talk about it, but it won’t work out well for you.”

“Okay, I promise.” I already knew I wouldn’t keep that promise. I would look for Julia as soon as her mother drove away, that very instant, and I would tell her everything. “Thanks for lunch, and I’ll be seeing you around, I guess.”

“Probably not for long. Good-bye, though. And good luck.”

Julia wasn’t home. I found out she had already finished lunch with Granddad, and now she was at a training session in the city, and she might stay for dinner. I found Cecily out by the pool, lying on her back next to the water.

“Cecily,” I said. “Can I ask you a couple of things?”

“Wait.”

She sat up quickly, grunting. I realized she was doing sit-ups, and I tried to stay calm while she finished them off. Then she rolled slowly over the edge of the pool and splashed into the water. She stayed under a long time and finally came up shaking her hair like a sprinkler.

“Okay, now you can speak.”

“I talked to your mom.”

“Hold on, I think I lost my hair band.” She disappeared underwater for another minute, and then came up. “Maybe I never had it on. What were you saying?”

“Your mom took me out to lunch. Then she showed me your old house. Then she started talking about Houston.”

“Wait, she asked you out to lunch?”

“Just the two of us.”

“Did she pay?”

“Yes.”

Cecily started to climb out of the pool excitedly. “That means she’s in a good mood. If I get over there right now, maybe she’ll pay for my trip to Montreal.”

Now she was all in a rush, pulling on her shoes and wrapping a towel around herself. As she sprinted out the gate, she yelled over her shoulder at me, “Don’t worry, Joe! Whatever the problem is, I’m sure there’s nothing you can do!”

When Cecily was gone I put her towel in the laundry bin and reorganized the equipment shed about fifteen times. Then I watched TV in Julia’s room while I waited for her to come home. By the time she finally walked in, it was pretty late and I’d forgotten half the things I wanted to ask her—and also how I’d planned to bring them up. She went straight to the bathroom and took this incredibly long shower. Afterward she was too tired to play poker or ask me about my day. We were lying around watching this bank-robber movie when I finally mentioned that I’d seen the house she grew up in.

“My mom took you to Golden Oaks?”

“She gave me the whole tour.”

“Why?”

“She thought I might like to see it.”

“So, what’d you think?”

“I never knew your house burned down.”

“I guess it’s not my favorite subject. Did you notice all her plastic surgery?”

“No.”

“Look a little closer next time, and you’ll see.”

“We talked about your family too.”

“Well, whatever she said, I’m sure it isn’t true.”

“She told me about Houston.”

“What about him?”

“She told me Houston is in love with you.”

“No. Don’t say that.”

“But that’s what she said.”

Julia jumped up and snapped on the light. It was too bright to open my eyes all the way. “I told you not to listen to her,” she said. “She’s so horrible. All she ever wants to do is stir up trouble.”

“Is it true?”

“It’s totally ridiculous.”

“That’s what I said.”

“So why are you upset? What is this? Why are you confronting me like this?”

“I’m just telling you what she said.”

“Well, it doesn’t feel that way.”

“That’s not all she told me.”

“I don’t care what else she said. I don’t have the energy for this right now. If she upset you then it’s your fault for listening to her. It’s hard enough for me, having a mother who hates me.”

Julia jumped up and stomped off to the bathroom. Life is so full of impossible things that I can’t understand. Sometimes being in love means that a girl is furious with you and you have no idea why. When she came back she was calm again but acting very young. She got herself under the covers with her arms full of stuffed animals.

“Cuddle with me,” she said.

“No, I don’t feel like cuddling.”

“Come on. Don’t make me cuddle with myself.”

She opened up the covers to make room and tried to pull me in, but I wriggled away from her and rolled off the bed onto the floor. I guess I was just going to sleep there all night. I really have no idea what my plan was. After a few minutes I thought maybe Julia had gone to sleep, but then she started talking.

“Okay, fine. Let’s talk about my mom,” she said. “If she told you so much, did she tell you how our house burned down?”

“Something about the wires.”

“Funny she didn’t get more into it.” Julia’s voice was very calm and quiet. “Go ahead, Joe. Ask me how our house burned down.”

“No. I don’t feel like asking.”

“We were all in the dining room, eating dinner. Did she show you the dining room?”

“I saw it.”

“We heard a knock on the door, and it was the police coming to arrest my dad. It was obviously serious this time, but my mom tried to keep on eating like everything was normal, asking for the spinach, making Houston finish this really boring story. But I could see it gradually sink in that the ride was over. He’d given her this exciting life, but now her reputation would be ruined, and every party would be different and there was nothing she could do. And she wouldn’t be able to pretend that he was someone else anymore because everybody could see him.”

I pushed myself onto my knees and then slowly stood up. Julia was curled up on her side holding her knees and staring at the wall on the other end of the room. I couldn’t see her face.

“She always acts like he betrayed us. Like she didn’t know he was a crook when she married him. She sent us all off on vacation in Los Angeles, where her sister lived, and that’s where I met Alvin, on my last day there. While we were gone, Golden Oaks burned down one night. My mom was out to dinner in the city when the fire started. The insurance covered it as an electrical fire—and some days I want to believe it, because I think that house probably wanted to burn down. But most days I know I’m kidding myself. That house meant a lot to Dad’s family, so I guess she figured that was the cruelest way to hurt him.”

I got up off the floor and lay down carefully next to Julia. She rolled over and put her hand on my chest.

“I just want you to think about what kind of woman you’re dealing with. She turned on all of us. Especially Houston. She’s just looking to make trouble for everyone.”

“I didn’t know all that.”

“Besides, the whole thing is ridiculous. Houston likes you.”

“She thinks he’s only nice to me because everyone knows we won’t last.”

“Amazing,” said Julia. “She really is uncanny. She can always find the nastiest and cruelest thing to say.”

“So it’s not true?”

“Is what not true?”

“What everybody thinks.”

“Oh, please. Don’t ask me that.”

“Why not?”

“Honestly? Because it makes you seem a little insecure. She’s like a wrecking ball. What else did she say?”

“I can’t remember.”

“And you really didn’t notice her plastic surgery?”

“I guess I’ll try to look next time.”

“I’m so tired, Joe. Can we talk about this tomorrow and just be flop-heads for a minute please?”