Secrets and Surprises Part 15

"I wanted you to praise my paintings." Banks plays church and steeple with his hands. "But also, I just wanted to talk."

"Was there anything particularly-"

"I thought you might want to talk to me."

"Why don't you talk to me, instead?"

"I've got to be a great painter," Banks says. "I paint and then at night I smoke up or go out to some bar, and in the morning I paint ... All night I pray until I fall asleep that I will become great. You must think I'm crazy. What do you think of me?"

"You make me feel old," I say.

The gin bottle is in Banks' crotch, the gla.s.s resting on the top of the bottle.

"I sensed that," Banks says, "before I got too wasted to sense anything."

"You want to hear a story?" I say.

"Sure."

"The woman who was driving the car I was in-the Princess ..." I laugh, but Banks only nods, trying hard to follow. "I think the woman must have been out to commit suicide. We had been out buying things. The back seat was loaded with nice antiques, things like that, and we had had a nice afternoon, eaten ice cream, talked about how she would be starting school again in the fall-"

"Artist?" Banks asks.

"A linguistics major."

"Okay. Go on."

"What I'm saying is that all was well in the kingdom. Not exactly, because she wasn't my wife, but she should have been. But for the purpose of the story, what I'm saying is that we were in fine shape, it was a fine day-"

"Month?" Banks says.

"March," I say.

"That's right," Banks says.

"I was going to drop her off at the shopping center, where she'd left her car, and she was going to continue on to her castle and I'd go to mine ..."

"Continue," Banks says.

"And then she tried to kill us. She did kill herself."

"I read it in the papers," Banks says.

"What do you think?" I ask.

"Banks's lesson," Banks says. "Never look back. Don't try to count your tail rings."

Danielle walks into the room. "I have come for the gin," she says. "The cook said you had it."

"Danielle, this is Banks."

"How do you do," Banks says.

Danielle reaches down and takes the bottle from Banks. "You're missing a swell old time," she says.

"Maybe a big wind will come along and blow them all away," Banks says.

Danielle is silent a moment, then laughs-a laugh that cuts through the darkness. She ducks her head down by my face and kisses my cheek, and turns in a wobbly way and walks out of the room.

"Jesus," Banks says. "Here we are sitting here and then this weird thing happens."

"Her?" I say.

"Yeah."

Lorna comes, very sleepy, carrying a napkin with cookies on it. She obviously wants to give them to Banks, but Banks has pa.s.sed out, upright, in the chair next to mine. "Climb aboard," I say, offering my lap. Lorna hesitates, but then does, putting the cookies down on the floor without offering me any. She tells me that her mother has a boyfriend.

"What's his name?" I ask.

"Stanley," Lorna says.

"Maybe a big wind will come and blow Stanley away," I say.

"What's wrong with him?" she says, looking at Banks.

"Drunk," I say. "Who's drunk downstairs?"

"Rosie," she says. "And William, and, uh, Danielle."

"Don't drink," I say.

"I won't," she says. "Will he still be here in the morning?"

"I expect so," I say.

Banks has fallen asleep in an odd posture. His feet are clamped together, his arms are limp at his sides, and his chin is jutting forward. The melting ice cubes from the overturned gla.s.s have encroached on the cookies.

At the lawn party, they've found a station on the radio that plays only songs from other years. Danielle begins a slow, drunken dance. Her red shawl has fallen to the gra.s.s. I stare at her and imagine her dress disappearing, her shoes kicked off, beautiful Danielle dancing naked in the dusk. The music turns to static, but Danielle is still dancing.

Friends.

P.

erry had just walked into Francie's living room, headed toward the table for the bowl of anchovy-stuffed olives. d.i.c.kie, who had called earlier to say he was too stoned to come, looked up and raised two fingers to his sweaty forehead in salute. Before Perry could say anything but h.e.l.lo, the phone rang, and he answered. The woman Perry used to live with, Beth Ann, used to complain that Perry should have been a robot-he was programmed to answer the phone and would talk politely to whatever wasted friend it might be, at whatever ridiculous hour.

"Delores?" he said.

"I'm in Miami," she said over the static in the line, "but I'm coming your way. I came to round up Meagan from my parents' place." Static cut off her next sentence. "I haven't talked to you for so long. How are you, Perry? I heard you were winterizing your place in Vermont."

"Yeah, I am. I can live in half the house now. I came down to Francie's this weekend for a party. It gets lonesome up there. I broke my G.o.dd.a.m.n foot. I had on sneaks, and I turned my ankle jumping off a wall."

"Your hand was broken the last time I saw you."

"Only two broken bones I've ever had in my life," he said.

d.i.c.kie had picked up the bowl of olives and was having one. He held the bowl out to Perry. Perry took two, and with his tongue rolled one to either side of his mouth.

"I'd love to come up there."

"There's plenty now that's livable. Come on up. Bring Meagan."

"Thanks, Perry. I think I really might. Is Francie there?"

"This may sound crazy, but Francie is pa.s.sed out with her head under the bed."

"Everybody's drunk?"

"I'm not drunk, Delores. Is there anything I can tell Francie tomorrow?"

"Maybe you'd know." (He waves away the olives.) "I wanted to know if my oak table is still there. The one with the wide-board top."

"I don't think so."

"Would you look in the kitchen for me? I think she piles cookbooks on it."

"Sure."

He walked down the hallway to the kitchen. T.W. and Katie were putting the make on each other in a corner of the kitchen. The Scandinavian rock-'n'-roll record Daryl Freed had brought to the party was playing for the fifth or sixth time. He looked for the table and it wasn't there. He remembered the table now. He was sure it wasn't in the house.

"Hey, Delores? It's not there."

"No?" she said. "Thanks for looking."

In the other room the needle scratched across the record, somebody cursed loudly, and Chuck Berry started singing.

"Jump a wave for me," he said.

"Sure," she said. "Stick your finger in some maple syrup."

He put the phone down in time to face his fate: d.i.c.kie coming at him, ski mask pulled over his head, fireplace poker extended. He laughed a little more than he felt like laughing and stepped aside so that when d.i.c.kie stumbled and tripped, the poker jabbed the wall.

"It's all s.e.xual," d.i.c.kie said. He pulled off the ski mask and smiled widely. "I put a hole in her wall," he said. "Hey, I saw you had two poems published. Congratulations."

Perry tilted his head like an obsequious maitre d'.

"They were good, too," d.i.c.kie said. "I read them in one of those free magazines on the airplane."

Perry frowned, confused.

"No I didn't. I read them in the magazine. Francie gave it to me. Where is our hostess, anyway? Did I hear you say she was about, but indisposed?"

"Why don't you go check on her?" Perry said.

This time d.i.c.kie did the courtly bow. He turned with a military pivot-long ago he and d.i.c.kie had gone to the same boys' school-and headed out the door just as the needle was scratched across another record and Daryl Freed cursed. After a long silence the London Bach Choir began to sing. "Cut that s.h.i.t!" somebody hollered. "I mean it-cut the s.h.i.t." The London Bach Choir was silent. T.W. and Katie, arms around each other's waists, walked down the hallway, past the door. He knew they were going to bed. He looked down at his foot. The cast looked larger than he remembered. He had not put on his sock, and his toes were lavender from the cold. Francie never heated the house well enough in the winter. When he was partying he didn't notice it, but when he stood still, he noticed both the cold and the slight pain across his instep. He looked at the gla.s.s of Scotch he had left on the table and decided to leave it there. He took an olive, picked up the Scotch only for a second, to wash away the salty taste, and left-right-left-right, without his crutch went into the living room. Nick and Anita were dancing. Roger Dewey and Daryl Freed were sitting on the floor in earnest conversation, bobbing heads at each other like plastic birds dipping for water. Somebody Perry had never met before-a man (a teen-ager?) with white streaks fanning out from his temples whom Freed had brought to the party-sat next to Roger Dewey. It looked as if he was mocking Roger's gestures.

"Hi," Anita said.

"Hi," he said. He hobbled out of the room. He went down the hall to Francie's room and found her conscious, flat on her back, d.i.c.kie seated behind her, brushing her hair.

"Good night," he said to both of them. "I'm going up to the attic to go to sleep."

d.i.c.kie raised the brush to his forehead in salute. Perry took the afghan draped over Francie's mattress and headed for the attic stairs.

"He drilled a hole in your wall, Francie," d.i.c.kie said, making his words come slowly, in time with the brush strokes. "In the other room, he crouched down and concentrated all his energy, and his right eye bored a hole about half an inch deep in the wall."

He climbed the stairs to the attic slowly and carefully, wishing there were a handrail. The afghan was draped around his neck like a towel.

Francie painted, and the attic was where she usually went to do it, although it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. He groped for the light bulb at the top of the stairs and fumbled for the switch on the side of it. The attic lit up. To his left was the mattress, under the window, flecked with oil paint. It was the mattress the cat had had a litter on when he and Beth Ann and Francie, d.i.c.kie and Gus lived together in Connecticut. He sat down awkwardly because of the cast, sighing as he sank down because he would just have to get up in another minute to turn off the light. In front of him was a stool with a piece of material draped over it. On top of the fabric was a conch sh.e.l.l. Little tubes of paint were scattered on the floor like cigarette b.u.t.ts. He always liked to sleep in Francie's attic, and went there by choice instead of to the spare bedroom. In the morning the light came through the four-over-four windows and made a Crosshatch pattern on the floor.

He lay back on the mattress, pulling the afghan over him, and tried to block out the noise from the party. He heard rock-'n'-roll, pretty clearly. Then he opened his eyes and concentrated on the music; it was rock-'n'-roll, and he could hear it clearly.

He took off his belt and watch and unb.u.t.toned his jeans. There was a slight odor of cat about the mattress. He got up and put off the light and went back to bed. The ba.s.s downstairs was turned up so high that he could feel the reverberation through the mattress, and it made him think of one of those motel beds that vibrate when you deposit a quarter. The last time he had been in one of those beds it was in a room he shared with Francie, after he drove to Francie's sister's house to pick her up and bring her back to this house. Francie had been married to a lawyer for a year, and when the marriage broke up, she flew to her sister's. She missed the house and wanted to come back to it, but she was afraid that she might cry in public. She called him because she said that she did not want to cry on an airplane or train. They could have made the ride from her sister's to Francie's house in New Hampshire without spending the night in a motel. Stopping had been Francie's idea. She wanted to spend the night in a motel and go back in the morning, when the house wouldn't look as nice, when the sunlight would make all the dust visible, when she wouldn't be sentimental for the good times she and her husband had had in the house. They sat in the motel on their twin beds and each drank a c.o.ke from the machine outside their door. Francie had been going to pay for the motel with her American Express Card, but then she realized that the bill would go to her husband. She didn't have any money, so he paid for the room. They had each put quarters in the boxes attached to the headboards and been shaken off to sleep. At least they had pretended that, because it wasn't the right night to sleep together. The next morning when they woke up it was raining, and when they got to her house it looked even more depressing than she had hoped it would. He was never clear on why Francie and her husband divorced, except that Francie did not want children and wanted to be a painter.

Before he fell asleep he heard the silence. He was conscious of it not because he heard the music die out or voices get quiet, but because he heard a car starting outside. It sounded as if everybody downstairs had gone home. Waiting to fall asleep, he thought about what Francie had told him recently: that he was her best friend. "A woman should have another woman for her best friend," Francie said and shrugged, "but you're it." "Why would you have to have a woman for a best friend?" he said. She shrugged again. "It's hard for men and women to be best friends," she said. He nodded and she thought he understood, but all he meant to acknowledge was that they were close, but there was also something hard about that. What it was, was that it had never been the right time to go to bed with her, and if he did it after all this time, he would have been self-conscious.

Beth Ann was in Albuquerque.

Delores-s.p.a.cy Delores-had traveled from Palo Alto to Miami and was headed north.

Drifting off to sleep, he thought about being on the subway in Boston, where he had stopped on the way to Francie's earlier in the day to pick up some things for her at Charrette. An old lady had struck up a conversation with him, saying that she was a rarity, a native Bostonian. She asked him where he was from. "Michigan," he said, although he was not from there. He hated talking to strangers, and he felt that there must be something wrong with him because so many old ladies thought he was a nice young man; they talked to him in spite of his long hair and leather jacket, with the leather so old it was flaking off like scabs. But she had a friend in Michigan, so she went on and on about it. "Then I moved with my family to Fort Worth," he said, "and then we lived in Germany until I was a teen-ager, and then we moved to New Jersey, and Iowa, and Los Angeles." She nodded, greatly interested. "How long have you been in Boston?" she asked. "Six days," he told her. Then she caught on-something told her he was putting her on, or crazy. He could see her narrowing her focus on the rotting leather, raise her head a bit to look at where his hair edged over the shoulder of the jacket. "Tomorrow I'm going to Mexico," he said. She didn't speak the rest of the ride, from Charles Street to Harvard Square.

In the morning he went downstairs, looking for coffee. The door to Francie's room was closed. In place of a DO NOT DISTURB sign was a sign that Delores had taken from the pool at the condominium where her parents lived: POR FAVOR PONGA LES TOALLAS EN EL CESTO. He thought that he could use a shower, and wondered if there would be towels. His friends' bathrooms never had towels, and he could not imagine how they dried off. He got distracted by the odor of bacon, walked into the kitchen to find a plate of half-eaten eggs and bacon, and Daryl Freed slumped over it.

"f.u.c.king creep stole my car," Freed said.

"What are you talking about?"

Freed had pulled his cardigan sweater over the top of his head. He looked like a mad nun. He looked as if he had been awake all night.

"What are you talking about, Freed? Who stole your car?"

"He f.u.c.king ate breakfast, and then he stole my car."