Who is Charlie Conti? (18 page)

‘I guess not. But I think it’s better to try and make yourself find someone attractive because you like them, instead of making yourself like someone because you find them attractive. Otherwise you end up with an asshole.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘If you’ve got to force yourself then I guess it’s best to force yourself that way. But even if you meet someone on the net, and you like them because of the things they write, I mean, they might just be playing a game, you know, inventing a character that they think you’ll like.’

‘Maybe. But people can do that when you meet them in real life too. I mean, that’s always a danger.’

‘Tell me about it.’

Stella put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. You don’t expect girls to do that. Maybe football coaches and teachers and so on, not girls. But I liked it.

We walked back to the motel to get the Buick, then we drove around all the second hand car dealerships to see if anyone wanted to buy it. Most of them weren’t interested. They said that buyers didn’t want that sort of car anymore. But the salesman at O’Rorke’s Cars, he seemed interested. Or at least, he was interested in Stella and pretended that he gave a shit about the car but I could see he didn’t. He had a big handlebar moustache and he was almost handsome in a 70s porno way. But I didn’t like him at all. You could see straight away he thought he was a real hotshot, the kind of guy that thought he was doing a girl a favor if he let her blow him.

He was corny as hell too. He walked around the car and stroked the wheel arches and looked at Stella and said, ‘Believe me when I say I appreciate great bodywork.’

Stella played along. While the cheeseball was stroking the wheel arch she leaned across the hood from the other side so he got a good view of her breasts, then she said, ‘Of course Mister, you’re more than welcome to a test drive.’

He smoothed down his moustache and asked, ‘You know, you
look mighty familiar. Ain’t I seen you before someplace?’

‘Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t.’

‘I could swear I know your face. Are you from around here?’

‘That depends…’ Stella stood up and turned around and leaned back with her ass against the wheel arch and her eyes closed and her face lifted towards the sun, like she was sunning herself.

‘Depends on what?’

‘Depends on whether you gonna make my friend here a nice offer for this here vehicle.’ She adjusted the cowboy hat and looked archly over her shoulder at the salesman. Boy she was good.

‘Lemme go make a coupla calls.’ He disappeared inside. I thought he’d probably gone to jack off.

When he came back he said, ‘I’ll take it for a thousand.’

That was five times less than I paid for it, but I didn’t have an alternative. I figured that a thousand was about enough to get me to Maryland, to stay there a few days, and then to go on to the coast to write my story. If I ran out of money I could get a job on the coast and write at night. That was my plan.

‘Ok, I’ll sell it for a thousand,’ I said.

The cheeseball looked at Stella again. ‘And I still want my test drive,’ he said.

She replied, ‘Come to the Palace of Pleasure tonight. I’ll get you free entry and a free dance.’

‘And when do we go for a proper drive?’

‘Buddy, this vehicle’s stick shift, we go one gear at a time.’

So, I left O’Rorke’s with a thousand bucks in hundreds in my
pocket. I offered to give some of it to Stella but she refused pointblank. Then we walked to the bus stop by the motel and sat in the dust waiting for the bus into Vegas. The shadows were long and the light was fading from the sky and I thought that in a novel or a film or whatever I’d go back to Stella’s room and we’d make love while the sun set and then I’d whisper something mysterious and meaningful into her ear which would solve all our problems and that would be the end. But life isn’t like that, or at least mine isn’t.

Then the bus came and I kissed her goodbye on the cheek and thanked her for the stitches, but I forgot to say anything that mattered, like how I felt about her or how I wanted to see her again.

S
ITTING ON THAT
bus I started to feel pretty depressed. I wished I’d kissed Stella while we were waiting at the bus stop, or at least told her how much I liked her. Boy, I hate regret. It makes me feel sick. I swear, it really gets to me. I still feel terrible when I think back to this one time in New York a couple of years ago. I saw a girl on the subway who was so sweet looking it pretty much killed me. She was about my age, sixteen or seventeen I guess. She was reading a magazine and laughing to herself and she had striped mittens dangling down from the sleeves of her duffle coat. I guess the mittens were tied together with string, the way little kids have them. She even looked over her magazine at me a couple of times, kind of inviting me to go talk to her. Thing was, there were other people standing around and I chickened out; I couldn’t do it. I
got to my stop and all the time I was thinking that if I didn’t talk to her I’d regret it for the rest of my life, and I guess that’s what happened.

I think regret kills me so much because I kind of invent these great stories of what could’ve been. Like with the girl on the subway, I remember walking home – it was just starting to snow – and imagining how differently things might have turned out. I mean, I could’ve waited until she got off the train and then spoken to her on the platform and she might have smiled at me and we’d have gone for coffee and then maybe walked to the park and suddenly we’d be holding hands and it would have happened just like that, without thinking. And all the time we’d be telling each other everything and understanding everything and there’d be no confusions or misinterpretations or whatever. Maybe we’d go to a movie and when we came out the snow would be thick and fresh on the ground and we’d have kissed out there on the street, our cold noses touching like Eskimos. We’d have become lovers and spent the rest of the vacation together and done all the things that lovers do that are beautiful at the time but kind of corny when you try to describe them later.

To tell the truth, I’m always regretting stuff. I guess it’s also because I’m not very good at seizing the moment. In fact, I almost always miss the moment and then I have to make up for it afterwards. It’s ok if I’ve got the time to think about what I should do and if I imagine the regret I’ll feel if I don’t do it, that helps me to work up my courage. But when something happens suddenly and you’ve got to seize the moment and be decisive and all, like with Stella when the bus came into view, that’s when I screw up.

I guess the real irony is that I worry about all these possible stories that never get played out, and the few that have been played out have never in my experience lived up to the promise of the first opening sentence. I don’t just mean Jeanine; I’m thinking generally about the girls I’ve hooked up with, which really isn’t that many. I mean, before hooking up with them I’ve always imagined that things would turn out to be, I don’t know, more exciting than they were. It’s a bit like when I lost my virginity. Before I ever slept with a girl I spent hours and hours thinking about what it would feel like and what that dark triangle would be like and so on. That was back at Belmont and I guess we were all like that, being schoolboys and all. It was so mysterious. Then I did sleep with a girl and it really wasn’t that great, just a lot of squelching in the dark. It made me think of getting rubber boots stuck in mud. Sure, it got better after that, and like I said it was pretty good with Jeanine which is mostly why I was with her. But what I want to say is just that things are often better in my imagination than they turn out to be in real life. At least, when I’m feeling down it often seems that way.

That’s when I like to watch nature documentaries. Thing is, depression makes you think that the world is a boring place. But when you watch nature documentaries it makes you realize how much there is out there, and how unbelievably varied it all is, and how minutely sophisticated. I like amazing facts too, like that there are 240 million insects for every human on the planet, or that the blue whale’s tongue is the size and weight of an African elephant, or that cockroaches can survive for nine days without their heads. I mean, when you hear stuff like that you realize how amazing
the world really is, and that’s before you even start thinking about magic and the human spirit and so on.

I woke up just as we were pulling into the Greyhound bus terminal in Vegas. I went to the ticket office to buy a ticket east to Frederick in Maryland; from there I’d have to hitch to Paradise, just across the river from the Susquehanna State Park. The bus journey was going to take two days. I had to change in Denver, St Louis and Pittsburgh. It was cheap though, and I didn’t want to risk travelling by air because of the security checks and all.

Most of the journey I slept. In St Louis I started to get a headache so I went to the drugstore next to the bus station to buy some painkillers. The guy behind me in the line was enormous; not just tall, he had massive shoulders too, like a football player. His face was memorable – everything about it was very straight, like geometry. Almost scary. I paid for the painkillers and left the drugstore and right away got on my connecting bus. I was about to sit down when I saw that the guy from the drugstore was already in the seat next to mine. I guess I did a big double take because he said to me, ‘Don’t worry, you probably just saw my brother Hal. We’re identical twins.’

‘I thought I was going crazy,’ I said.

‘Yeah, people can get freaked out. Hey, I’m Jud.’ He stuck out his massive hand and I shook it. Then I sat down.

‘I don’t want to be rude,’ I said, ‘but what’s it like being a twin?’

Jud brushed his hair out of his eyes. It was an oddly feminine gesture for such a big man. Then he said, ‘It’s not so different. I mean, sometimes people that don’t know us can get freaked out, like I said. And of course you get mix-ups and all – people think I’m Hal and ask me something about the dairy and I gotta tell them I’m Jud. See, I do the agriculture and Hal does the dairy, that’s why I gotta go up to Indianapolis and source me some parts.’

‘But do you know what your brother’s thinking? Do you have the same dreams, stuff like that?’ I asked.

‘No, not anymore. I got a fair idea what he’s thinking, but we don’t have the same thoughts. I guess when we were kids and we were always together, I mean, we were more similar then. We played college football together too, at Texas A&M. It woulda been pretty useful to think the same thoughts on the football field, but that’s not the way it works. It’s more like having a best friend who also looks like you.’

‘But isn’t it strange to be able to watch yourself, to see a copy of yourself walking around?’ I asked.

‘Thing is,
we
don’t think that we look the same. It’s only people that don’t know us that get confused. People got more confused when we were kids, that’s true, but we were more similar generally back then. And at college it was kinda fun. We used to swap girls in a bar and most times they didn’t notice. But now people don’t get confused so much, and like I say, it’s never been weird for us. I guess you get to know your own face pretty well. It’s like when you look in a mirror and you think your appearance changes from day to day but most people never notice a difference.’

I nodded.

‘Unless your face gets beat up,’ Jud smiled at me. ‘What happened to you?’ he asked.

I thought about lying; I didn’t want to go into Kramer and all. But in the end I just said, ‘I got hit,’ which was true but kind of evasive, not that Jud seemed to mind.

‘Huh. Yeah,’ he said, looking sympathetic, ‘I used to get in fights all the time, but I got off the wagon a while back. Drink used to make me real aggressive. I’d be brawlin’ most Saturdays, except I’d never remember what happened come Sunday. Hal never had that problem. He’d just get real affectionate, tell everyone they were his best friend, that kinda thing.’

‘Really? I mean, that’s strange isn’t it? If you’re identical twins aren’t you supposed to have exactly the same genetic information?’ I remembered Martin once teaching me about identical twins – they are two halves of the same zygote.

‘That’s true,’ said Jud. ‘And I guess it is weird that we’re so different when we’re drunk. I mean, it’s weird because we’ve had the same parents and schools and upbringing and all.’

Jud smiled and I sat back in my seat thinking to myself that that was surely the real mystery: what makes people different if everything about them – their genetic information, their background and upbringing – is the same?

When I next woke we were past Indianapolis and Jud had already gotten off the bus. I was sorry about that; I’d liked him. So I dozed for a few more hours, then I watched the enormous freshly planted
wheatfields rolling by outside. We were driving through Indiana now and it’s true what they say, the skies are really big. They made me think that, whatever happens, there really ought to be enough of everything to go around. Then I tried to think about the way I wanted to write my story but I couldn’t concentrate so well and thoughts of Stella kept coming into my head. She’d really been good to me. She was a bit crazy too, I mean that stuff with the Dictaphone and getting so pissed at me because I’d been at the strip club and that. But I liked her craziness. I still didn’t really understand it, but I liked it. Most of the time I think it’s important to understand, but if you find something you really like maybe it’s best just to leave it the way it is. And maybe, if you really like something, it’s better not to want to own it or possess it or make it yours; maybe it’s better just to try to be happy that it’s out there, that it exists at all. I guess if I thought that way a bit more then I wouldn’t have to regret stuff all the time.

I
ARRIVED IN
Frederick in the early afternoon. It was still wintry and I realized how slowly spring moves north. Then I hitched a ride to Paradise with a young family who were going camping in the Susquehanna State Park. They had tents and cookers and fishing rods all jumbled together in the back. I sat next to the two young boys while their mother held the baby girl in the front. It was kind of them to take me, I have to say. They were pretty religious – Seventh Day Adventists they said. But I guess a religion’s got to pretty admirable if it means you’ll take a hitchhiker into your crowded car when you’re going on a camping trip. The only problem was that the baby made a terrible smell. I guess she just shat in her diaper or whatever, but it damn near made me heave, even with the windows down. It was unbelievable, it really was,
but even more unbelievable was that the parents hardly seemed to notice. I don’t know if that was their Seventh Day Adventism or whether parents just get immune to the smell of baby shit but I ended up wishing I’d walked, even if it would have taken all night.

I jumped out of the car outside the Paradise Tavern that had given the town its name. I remembered parking there the very first time I’d gone to visit Izzy, not long after my mother died. It seemed like another lifetime. Things looked different now, though I guess that was because of the weather. The trees were bare and the sunshine was pale and washed-out. That first visit to Paradise had been at the height of summer when the days were long and tiny bugs bounced up and down in the warm sunlight as if attached to invisible elastic threads. And I guess I was pretty different back then too.

It was the summer before I started my freshman year at Belmont – I had just turned fourteen. I know there are smart people who worry about what it is that makes them the same person they were at birth, I mean, given how your cells are renewed at least every ten years so no part of you is ever more than ten years old and how your character changes and all. But when I arrived outside the Paradise Tavern I was
really
struggling to connect myself to the person I had been back when I first visited. I guess we shared a few memories from childhood, but I was beginning to forget a lot of those too. Maybe it’s just that I had more in common with that fourteen year old than anyone else did, even if we weren’t identical; maybe that’s all there is to it.

That’s what I was thinking as I walked up the hill to Happy
Lives. Either side of me were neat lawns and white fences and well-kept homes, some with flagpoles from which the occasional star-spangled banner flapped in the breeze. Rusty BMXs and choppers were leaning against the sides of houses, waiting for warmer weather. I could see the roof of Happy Lives behind the bare branches of a big old chestnut tree that pretty much obscured the building in summer. Happy Lives was an elegant old stone building; it had been a school back when Paradise was only a small settlement. There was a narrow driveway leading to a parking lot for three or four cars, then you had to walk along a little path to the front door. The last time I visited, Martin and I had walked straight through to the garden at the back where the barbecue was, but now everything was silent and the doors were locked and it was not very welcoming. I rang the doorbell and waited.

Eventually I saw a shadow moving behind the frosted glass. The door opened and a large lady with scraped-back hair and narrow horn-rimmed reading glasses eyed me suspiciously. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

‘Hello, my name is Charlie Conti. We haven’t met. I’m Izzy’s brother,’ I said. The lady looked at me pretty quizzically and I remembered that I still had the black eye and my nose was still a bit swollen.

‘I see,’ she said. ‘Nice to meet you. I’m the afternoon supervisor, Judy McGrabe.’

We shook hands. ‘Is Ma Petri still here?’ I asked. ‘She knows me.’

‘I’m sorry to say that Ma Petri is no longer with us. But if you’re Izzy’s brother we can sign you in. It’s strange that Izzy’s never
mentioned you.’

‘Hasn’t she? She used to talk about me a lot. That’s what Ma Petri said.’

‘Well, there’ve been a few changes here since she left.’ Judy McGrabe gave me a significant look before leading me into the hallway where there was an open visitors’ book.

‘Why did she leave?’ I asked, signing my name.

Judy McGrabe looked embarrassed. ‘We had a bit of trouble here,’ she said, ‘but at least it can’t happen again. We now require all our visitors to identify themselves.’ Then she turned round and lead me down the corridor to her office.

Judy McGrabe indicated a chair to me, then she sat down on the other side of the desk. ‘I just need to photocopy your passport or your drivers license for our files, then I’ll show you up to Izzy’s room,’ she said.

Again I felt a sinking feeling. In fact it was a feeling I was getting pretty used to, though that didn’t make it any less unpleasant.

‘I’m afraid I don’t have them with me,’ I said. ‘I’ve never had to show them here before. But you can ask Izzy, she’ll tell you that I’m her brother.’

‘Well I’m sorry but we have to be rather more strict these days. That’s what led to the trouble last year. If you can’t identify yourself you can still see Izzy, but you’ll have to be supervised in the visitors’ room.’

‘But that’s ridiculous, she’s my sister and I’m her legal guardian,’ I said.

Judy McGrabe pushed her glasses further up her nose. ‘Do you have the guardianship papers with you?’ she asked.

‘No, they were stolen from my house,’ I said.

‘Well, I’m really sorry Mr Conti, without identification of any sort and without the guardianship papers I’m afraid I cannot leave you alone with Izzy. But, as I said, I can arrange for you to see her for half an hour now.’

It really seemed pretty ridiculous that I wasn’t allowed to be alone with Izzy despite the fact that I was her brother and her guardian and that of course she’d recognize me. I followed Mrs McGrabe down the corridor to the visitors’ room and watched her big ass swinging self-importantly in front of me. I was pretty pissed. I mean, there were a lot of things I was confused about, but one thing I did know was that I was Izzy’s brother and guardian, and just because I couldn’t prove it didn’t make it untrue.

‘I’m sure you understand the precautions we have to take,’ she said, turning around suddenly and eyeing me meaningfully.

I was starting to feel like I wanted to break something. It was a bit like the feeling I get when I lose something although I’m sure I know where I left it but I just can’t find it anywhere, except a million times worse. It makes you hot and knots your stomach and you can’t shake it off.

Mrs McGrabe showed me into the visitors’ room. It was very brown: brown wallpaper, brown carpet and brown armchairs. Even the once-white paint of the door had faded to brown. She closed the door and I sat down and took a few deep breaths which seemed to work because I started to feel less angry. Then I picked
up a well-thumbed copy of GQ magazine from the brown coffee table and began to read. Or rather, I looked at pictures of bronzed models and advertisements for aftershaves for the first ten or fifteen pages. I’m kind of fascinated by aftershave and perfume and all. I mean, the advertisements are pretty cool-looking, you have to admit. There was one in this magazine for an aftershave called
Savannah
and it really looked great. In the photo there was a bronzed, tough-looking guy in some dusty yellow place holding a tawny lion cub under one arm; a girl with tousled sun-bleached hair was whispering into his ear. She was very hot. I mean, the photo just made you want to be that guy. In the foreground there was a picture of a
Savannah
aftershave bottle; I recognized it immediately because old Hartfelder had once given me one, back when I was way too young to need it. The bottle looked pretty cool though. It looked like cut glass with a thick band of crocodile skin around the middle and a burnished aluminum screw cap, very manly. But if you picked it up it was surprisingly light and you realized that in fact it was just made of different types of plastic, cheap as hell. And I guess scent itself is kind of like that too. I mean, you have all these poetic sounding names –
Romance
and
Pure
and stuff like that – but in fact they’re just a few chemicals in alcohol. I once saw a film about perfume production; some of the stuff they put in is really shocking. Like musk, for example. There’s one kind of musk that comes from the Abbysininan civet, which is a type of mongoose. The musk gets scraped from the civet’s anal sacs every few days, then dissolved in alcohol and used as a fixer in perfumes. I know it sounds crazy but it’s true. And Russian and Chinese musk deer get killed for their musk glands, which are internal. And
then all this musk is used to make scents like
Romance
and
Pure
. The world’s crazy, I swear.

I skipped the next few pages about perfect abs, then I read an article saying that most men are bad at
cunnilingus
. There were a lot of stats, stuff like – ‘eighty percent of women have never reached orgasm through oral caress’, ‘forty-five percent of men don’t know where the clitoris is’, that kind of thing. I leafed through the rest of that month’s magazine then started looking at the next one, which was for the month after. Ten pages of aftershave ads, then the first article:
How to give Great Head
. Second article:
The Vagina: a user’s guide
. I have to hand it to them, it’s pretty clever. One month you freak guys out that they’re bad lovers, next month you pretend to provide the solutions. Neat. And kind of fucked up.

I put down the magazine and leafed through a couple of the pamphlets on the coffee table. They were the kind that you get in doctors’ surgeries, about STDs and contraception and drugs and solvent abuse and so on. By now the light was seeping out of the room; the sun’s last rays were concentrated in the far corner where they reflected off the glass front of a framed poem that hung on the back of the door. The poem was printed in a precious italicized font, the kind they use for the covers of slushy romances. Illustrations of pink flowers were all intertwined around the outside of the poem, occasionally nuzzling against the generous arcs and swirls of the writing. Tired of the pamphlets, I got up to have a closer look.

Corny as hell, I thought. Corny, and simplistic, and pious. All that Christian stuff about ‘meek and mild’; I mean, meek? Come on, give me a break. But as I was thinking this I had to
blink a couple of times, despite myself. Sometimes that corny stuff just gets me, I swear. It may not be sophisticated or original or clever, but it can still come from the heart. I mean, whoever wrote that poem, they didn’t do it to sell anal mongoose gland perfume, and they didn’t do it to make people feel insecure about their ability to pleasure the opposite sex, and they didn’t do it to make money or manipulate people. Stuff like that gets written because people need to believe that the world is a good place and that things happen for a reason. And that comes from the heart. Like I say, it’s not sophisticated or original or clever, but I’m not sure how much that really matters. In fact, sometimes I think sophistication might be the problem. If people were a little less sophisticated, and a little more honest, then maybe the world really would be a better place. Amen.

As I was thinking this, the door opened and Izzy came in, accompanied by Mrs McGrabe. If Izzy was happy to see me she didn’t show it. Maybe she didn’t like Mrs McGrabe being there; Izzy can be kind of self-conscious like that. I certainly didn’t like Mrs McGrabe being there, although she was doing her best to make herself inconspicuous by taking a seat in the corner of the room. Or maybe Izzy was scared by my black eye and the little twists of thread that were still in my chin. Anyway, I kissed her on the cheek and that seemed to relax her some, then we sat down facing each other on either side of a small desk.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t visited for so long,’ I said. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Fine.’

‘Are you happy?’

Izzy didn’t reply but nodded and pulled a face which meant
what a dumb question
.

‘Well, that’s good,’ I said. ‘Are you doing any classes? Cooking? I know you like cooking.’

‘Yes.’

‘How’s that going?’

‘Fine.’

I cast around for something else to say. ‘And what about your room here, where is your room?’ I asked.

‘By the big tree.’

‘That’s nice. Do you like your room?’

No reply. Like I said, Izzy’s not always so communicative, especially in situations which are awkward. I mean, if we’d been strolling by the river like I’d intended, then I’m sure she’d have talked a lot more, but the way we were sat opposite each other with Mrs McGrabe in the corner, well, it felt pretty awkward.