Ahad, 31 Oktober 2010
Waiting on the Thunder
by W. E. Turner
The first house I almost bought was in the part of Wichita known as "Hoover's Orchard." It was called Hoover's Orchard for the very logical reason that a family named Hoover once owned and operated an apple orchard or a peach orchard on the land. Or, then, maybe it was a cherry orchard they owned. There's now a furniture store called "Cherry Orchard Furniture" in that vicinity. It doesn't matter, really, but I do hope it wasn't really a cherry orchard because I hate the Cherry Orchard Furniture commercials that run on the local radio and TV stations. For the orchard to have been an actual cherry orchard lends legitimacy to the store's name and, through the magic of the reasoning of an illogical mind such as mine, also lends legitimacy to those obnoxious commercials and the thoroughly irritating jingle that accompanies them.
It's different in Real Estate sales. They don't have jingles and "Red Tag Sales" in that business. The agent that showed us the house said there are three things that determine the price of a house and its salability: location, location and location. And location is exactly the reason I didn't buy that house in Hoover's Orchard.
It's not that I dislike the neighborhood and its reputation like some other long-time residents of Wichita do. It was a lower-middle class neighborhood for a lot of years, and still is in many areas, and was generally known (at least when I was growing up) as a "tough" neighborhood. My wife grew up in that area, for instance, and you can't get much tougher than my little redheaded "Billy Bad-Ass." She hates that nickname. Her sister's husband, whom she can't stand, gave it to her and as a result, I never call her that except inside my head. Sometimes I think she's secretly proud of the nickname, but I know it would hurt her feelings for me to call her that.
But really, Hoover's Orchard was no tougher than the streets of Planeview, where I grew up. Both neighborhoods were havens for "tough guys" and crooks but there was a basic difference between the two, and that was a matter of attitude. They were both slums, if you get right down to it; Planeview on the east side of Wichita and Hoover's Orchard on the west. But at least Hoover's Orchard was an "upwardly mobile" slum.
For instance, the crooks who lived in Planeview were mostly petty thieves and dope dealers while those of Hoover's Orchard were Bank Robbers and Drug Kingpins. The "tough guys" from Hoover's Orchard, if they went straight, usually made something of their lives. They became Engineers and Chiropractors and Police Detectives and Fire Inspectors. They all live in Westlink, now, and on weekends they and their wives get together at some place like Rolling Hills Country Club to play golf and drink Martinis. The "tough guys" from Planeview, if they went straight, became auto mechanics and machinists that work for Boeing or Cessna Aircraft. Most of them either still live in Planeview or somewhere near there, like South City or Derby or maybe one of the mobile home parks down south of town. On weekday nights, they all go over to some place like Thunderbird Lanes to bowl in leagues, harass the cocktail waitresses and drink beer.
Just down Gilda Street (where the house I almost bought, but didn't, was located) is the intersection of Gilda and St. Louis, just before Gilda turns into a dead end. On one corner of that intersection is the real reason I didn't buy the house in Hoover's Orchard.
At that location sits a totally nondescript clapboard house. I couldn't even begin to tell anyone what color the exterior of the house is, the layout of the rooms, how it's decorated or anything else about it. All I really remember about that house is a wall filled with electronic gear: reel-to-reel tape machines, AM/FM receivers, cassette players, two turntables and maybe four or five amplifiers, equalizers, pre-amps and other electronic do-dads. Everything was flanked on each side by a stack of speakers--four or five in all. On the floor immediately in front of this electrical amplification and playback extravaganza that would have caused most of the flower-child, hippie-freak, drugged-out acquaintances I had back in Los Angeles to immediately cream their applique-embroidered jeans, though, is the thing I remember most about that house. It was a waterbed. No pedestal, no headboard, no footboard, no padded rails along the side,... Nothing. Just a waterbed mattress with a heater underneath laid out directly on top of the carpet that covered the creaking floors of that old house.
The house, at the time I remember it, was rented by a woman named Pam Carstairs. Evidently, Pam spent most of every paycheck from Boeing Aircraft (where we both worked) on acquiring and/or paying for more electronic equipment for her sound system. At one time, Pam's landlord locked her out of her house, saying he was going to confiscate the electronics inside to compensate for back rent. Charita (Rita) Rosario, who worked in Personnel, and I helped organize a fund-raising drive among Pam's friends and acquaintances there at Boeing to help bail her out. I met Pam again at a bowling alley here in Wichita a couple of years ago; she's all married and respectable now, with two kids. She told me she eventually got a conventional waterbed after that one sprang a leak and she sold all her electronic gear at a fraction of it's original cost after it became obsolete with the advent of the digital and laser-track stuff sold these days. Ah, but back then in the mid-70s, that was one hot set-up.
Rita Rosario borrowed Pam's house one night and Rita and I spent the evening fucking on that waterbed and listening to soft, romantic music on Pam's sound system. Seems a waste, doesn't it, to fail to utilize all that capability and use a sound setup like that just to listen to a little mood music? I say Rita and I spent the night fucking instead using some more delicate form of expression like making love or having sex or copulating or whatever, because that's just what we did. We fucked. Every chance we had, we'd get together and, after a drink or dinner somewhere or maybe a movie if I thought we had the time, we'd go somewhere and just fuck our brains out. I was a lot skinnier in those days and sometimes my skinny belly would come in contact with Rita's petal-soft, smooth-skinned, perfectly-formed one and our bodies would make obscene noises: little smacking, popping sounds as our sweaty bellies came together, came apart, then came back together again. If we had stopped to listen, I suppose the noises we made during the sex act would have made us both laugh, but at the time we were too passionate, too busy just experiencing the sensations and the ecstasy of the moment to care. After I reached my climax (Rita never did), we would roll apart and lie there, cradling and cuddling one another, enjoying the closeness our bonding brought us.
I think that night in Pam's house was the first time I told Rita I loved her. She said she loved me, too, but we both knew neither one of us meant it. That was also the first time Rita told me goodbye. Later, there would be other goodbyes between us as we got back together to test the validity of the lie we told each other that night. Finally, though, the extreme unction we performed so many times on our relationship finally took hold and we parted for good.
You see, Rita was going to get married the next weekend to Robert Penwood, her long-time boyfriend, who was the Club Pro over at Rolling Hills. I suppose I was meant to be her last fling as a single woman before she tied the knot and settled down; one last night of debauchery and licentiousness before marriage and respectability set in and she lost that care-free, wild abandon she tried to keep so secret behind her dark eyes. She called me "Tommy" after my last name of "Thomas" instead of my first name, "Gary," like everybody else did. She made me feel special that way. I couldn't believe it was happening, the first time she asked me out.
My God, she was beautiful. She had a hooked nose like that on the Indian head of a Buffalo Nickel and she had slightly bucked teeth that made her upper lip protrude a little bit above the lower one; the upper lip forming a slight chevron peak that allowed her strong white teeth to show. I know all that really doesn't sound especially alluring, but I never saw those things as imperfections. Like any man, what I saw at first was her nearly-perfect figure; her large, firm breasts and exquisite long legs. Later, after I got to know her, what I saw when I looked at her was a shy, teasing smile that always said she was glad to see me and her large, luminous dark eyes that were always wide with wonder. Her eyes were so large she couldn't even close the lids completely unless she squinted and scrunched up her lovely face. I remember keeping my eyes slightly open a few times while kissing her and noticing tiny slivers of white under the lower edge of her closed eyelids. Other times, just on the verge of the orgasm she never quite reached, the eyes were closed but not quite shut.
Watching Rita sleep after our first tiring sexual bout that evening in Pam's house, again I noticed the incomplete eye closure, as if she was trying to see something extra; something that didn't exist. Maybe it was my ego or whatever, but my illogical mind decided it was love she was looking for; my love for her. That's what women want, isn't it? To be loved?
I kissed her then, lightly, tasting the sweat we'd worked up that had beaded onto her upper lip. She woke up at the touch of my lips on hers and rolled toward me, snuggling deeper into my arms.
"I love you," I said then, struggling to get the words out and to make them sound true.
Rita pulled her head up from my chest, where she had laid it as she snuggled. It wasn't an abrupt movement, it was more feline and curious. Her big eyes bored into mine, flitting their gaze from the left one to the right, looking for sincerity or its absence, then examining the rest my face under the green glow from the stereo dial, searching each crevice, crease and imminent wrinkle for the laugh lines that would prove I was just kidding. She laid her head back down. "I love you, too," she said.
The words echoed down through my chest, penetrating deep into the hollow air chambers of my lungs, rebounding off my spine to return to the surface where our sweat mingled, where her lips brushed lightly against my chest as she spoke the words, where the hairs around my left nipple moved with her breath. I didn't believe her for an instant but, God, it was good to hear.
As we lay there, I could feel her fingers moving across my chest, separating the hairs with her long fingernails. At first, I thought she might stick her finger in the old bullet-hole scar or else was tracing out the letters of the "Semper Fi" tattoo like she'd done other times when we were together, but a glance at her showed me she was lying with her cheek against my chest.
"What are you thinking about?" I asked her.
She waited a long time before answering. "Us," she whispered.
Again, I wasn't sure I believed her, but I didn't pursue it.
A long time passed before anyone said anything else.
"Why did you marry your wife?" Rita asked me, suddenly, raising up her head and peering at me through the gloom.
I sighed, coming back to that old question I'd already asked myself a million times. I didn't have an answer to give her, so I decided to tell the truth, instead.
"Because Kansas is a common law state," I said. "Sarah and I used the name Mr. and Mrs. Gary Thomas to buy some furniture when we first started living together. That's all it takes in this state. She could have sued me for divorce if she wanted to. Gotten alimony and everything else I had."
I saw her eyes narrow to slits as she digested this information. "But I thought.... You told me she was a good Catholic girl. What makes you think she'd sue you for divorce?" she asked, her eyes wide again.
"Bein' Catholic don't mean dick, honey," I said with a snort. "Not when there's money involved." I looked at the clock on Pam's stereo, calculating how much time we had, then remembered I hadn't really answered Rita's question.
"So, then, when I took a few classes up at WSU, I found out I could get more money on the GI Bill if I was married. So we got married."
Rita laid her head back down. "How romantic," she murmured.
Another long, drawn-out time passed before anyone said anything else.
"If I divorced my wife," I asked her, "would you marry me?"
"No," she said, not even raising her head or hesitating for an instant. The word reverberated down through my chest like a thunderclap.
"You couldn't afford me, Tommy," she explained. "Not on a supervisor's salary. You forget, I know how much money you make. Not even if you made Foreman." She raised up her head and peered at me from under lowered eyelids. "I'm awfully expensive to maintain. Even Robert and I argue about money. All the time. And he makes a hell of a lot more than you do."
She laid her head back down again and I lay there on the bed, quietly, accepting the hollowness of the comparison between "She's the wife of the machine shop supervisor" and "She's the wife of the Golf Pro at Rolling Hills."
Then, the next thing I knew, I was mentally going over the real reason I married Sarah, alias Billy Bad-Ass. We just kind of drifted together, the way people do, sometimes. Drifting along in the stream until we both got tired of swimming against the current and found another person to hold on to, just so neither one of us would feel so alone. I never really admitted it, I guess, but I think the only reason I married Sarah is the fact that she loved me. Now, I've had a lot of women tell me they loved me, but most of the time I knew they really didn't mean it. Like Rita. They just said it. They didn't believe it themselves and, even though I heard the words, I knew there was no truth in them. It was different with Sarah. I think it was different, anyway. She really did love me. I suppose she still does, even though I know I make it hard for her to, sometimes.
God, that's a pussy thing to admit, isn't it, that a man's so damned vulnerable that he'll marry someone just because she needs him? It just shoots the macho image he's built up for himself all those years right to hell, doesn't it?
I often wonder what Rita was getting at when she asked me why I married my wife, but she never said. I also wonder why it couldn't have been Rita and I who drifted together, instead of Sarah and I. But, what the hell.... If wishes were horses....
"So, why are you marrying Robert if he's such a lousy lover, like you say he is?" I asked Rita a little while later.
Rita waited what seemed like a long time before she answered. "Because he wants to get married," she said. "He insists." There was another long pause. "He knows about you," she told me.
"I know he does," I said. I told Rita about the time Robert confronted me in the Boeing parking lot one night after work; about how he threatened to tell my wife if I didn't stop seeing Rita and how I told him I really didn't give a shit if he did or not.
Rita raised her head and looked at me as I told her the tale. "Did he?" she asked.
I shook my head. "If he had of, I probably wouldn't be here, now. You either. We'd both be dead. Hell hath no fury like a pissed-off redhead, you know."
"Do you really think she'd kill us?"
"No," I said with a little half-laugh. "She talks tough, but most of the time that's all it is. Talk. She'd just be hurt.... And cry. Then she'd divorce me. Take everything. And then, after it was all over.... Then she'd learn to hate me. And you. What would Robert do?"
"Nothing. It would just hurt his ego to think I might prefer somebody else over him as a lover. I think he believes that if I'm married to him, that'll end it between us."
"Will it?" I asked.
She never did answer me.
Later, several more gasping, groping struggles beneath the sheets of that waterbed took place as Rita and I made love again. You can't call it just 'fucking' anymore, after you've told someone you love them, can you? Doesn't matter if you really meant it or not.
Sometime long after midnight, we rose, showered together quickly and quietly got dressed. Outside, in front of Pam's house, Rita told me goodbye over the occasional sound of the early morning I-235 traffic rushing by only a few feet away.
"Breakfast?" she asked, almost jovially.
But she knew I had to be getting back home so there wasn't too much disappointment on her face as I silently shook my head.
"You know I can't see you any more, don't you, Tommy?" she said, pulling on her expensive calfskin driving gloves.
I nodded dumbly, unable to look at her for a time, then lifted my gaze to meet hers, unwilling for her to think me weak. For what I thought was the last time, I drank in the beauty of her dark eyes, the perfection of her smooth, dusky complexion, the shine of her black hair.
"Will it be a big wedding?" It was a dumb thing to ask, but it was out before I knew it.
She nodded, then turned away to watch the early morning traffic go by on the freeway. "Oh, yeah," she said, then heaved a long sigh. "My mother invited all the relatives. And you know how Mexicans are. I've got a million of them."
The silence stretched on until the next car came whirring past.
"Well," I said at last. "I hope you're happy."
"Me, too," she said. "I hope you're happy, too."
We kissed again because, I think, we didn't know what else to do. It wasn't the most satisfying kiss I ever had, and it didn't last very long. We didn't want to spoil her lipstick. She laid her head on my shoulder and I knew the scent of her perfume would linger there, but for once I didn't care. Finally, she pulled away.
She climbed into her Mercury Cougar as I walked over and got into my pickup. I sat there as she started the engine of her car and let it warm up enough to allow the light hoods to flip up and let the Cougar see out through its headlamps. She drove away, up Gilda toward Central, heading back to the north end of town, toward the barrio and her own collection of cultural and ethnic baggage. I got the pickup going and headed out onto the freeway, heading back toward Planeview.
And that's why I couldn't buy that house in Hoover's Orchard. I knew I'd spend too much time looking south, down Gilda Street toward the dead end. And even today, when I go down Gilda to get on I-235, I have this unconscious desire to keep driving past the entrance ramp, to go on down to St. Louis. And whenever I'm driving past the Rolling Hills Country Club, I always glance over at the few fairways and greens you can see from Maize Road. Maybe. Maybe one of these days I'll get lucky and see her again. But maybe not. I don't usually go to Country Clubs and she probably doesn't go bowling very often. That ain't her style.
Maybe one of these days the phone will ring like it used to, though, and one more time I'll hear her say, "I miss you, Tommy." I miss her, too. But I suppose she's found someone else to devour, by this time.
These days, my kids think I'm crazy when Bob Seger's "Night Moves" comes along on the car radio and I scream at them to shut up. And I always get pissed off if it's just the short version and they leave out that last, slow, nearly-spoken verse. If they do play it, I always sing along.
"Woke last night to the sound of thunder.
How far off? I sat and wondered.
Started hummin' a song from 1962.
Funny how the night moves.
When you just don't seem to have as much to lose.
Strange how the night moves.
Autumn closin' in."
Ah, nostalgia. Yeah, it's like I keep telling my kids: "Nostalgia," I tell them, "it just ain't what it used to be."
They aren't sure what I mean by that. But I'm not so sure I do, either.
The first house I almost bought was in the part of Wichita known as "Hoover's Orchard." It was called Hoover's Orchard for the very logical reason that a family named Hoover once owned and operated an apple orchard or a peach orchard on the land. Or, then, maybe it was a cherry orchard they owned. There's now a furniture store called "Cherry Orchard Furniture" in that vicinity. It doesn't matter, really, but I do hope it wasn't really a cherry orchard because I hate the Cherry Orchard Furniture commercials that run on the local radio and TV stations. For the orchard to have been an actual cherry orchard lends legitimacy to the store's name and, through the magic of the reasoning of an illogical mind such as mine, also lends legitimacy to those obnoxious commercials and the thoroughly irritating jingle that accompanies them.
It's different in Real Estate sales. They don't have jingles and "Red Tag Sales" in that business. The agent that showed us the house said there are three things that determine the price of a house and its salability: location, location and location. And location is exactly the reason I didn't buy that house in Hoover's Orchard.
It's not that I dislike the neighborhood and its reputation like some other long-time residents of Wichita do. It was a lower-middle class neighborhood for a lot of years, and still is in many areas, and was generally known (at least when I was growing up) as a "tough" neighborhood. My wife grew up in that area, for instance, and you can't get much tougher than my little redheaded "Billy Bad-Ass." She hates that nickname. Her sister's husband, whom she can't stand, gave it to her and as a result, I never call her that except inside my head. Sometimes I think she's secretly proud of the nickname, but I know it would hurt her feelings for me to call her that.
But really, Hoover's Orchard was no tougher than the streets of Planeview, where I grew up. Both neighborhoods were havens for "tough guys" and crooks but there was a basic difference between the two, and that was a matter of attitude. They were both slums, if you get right down to it; Planeview on the east side of Wichita and Hoover's Orchard on the west. But at least Hoover's Orchard was an "upwardly mobile" slum.
For instance, the crooks who lived in Planeview were mostly petty thieves and dope dealers while those of Hoover's Orchard were Bank Robbers and Drug Kingpins. The "tough guys" from Hoover's Orchard, if they went straight, usually made something of their lives. They became Engineers and Chiropractors and Police Detectives and Fire Inspectors. They all live in Westlink, now, and on weekends they and their wives get together at some place like Rolling Hills Country Club to play golf and drink Martinis. The "tough guys" from Planeview, if they went straight, became auto mechanics and machinists that work for Boeing or Cessna Aircraft. Most of them either still live in Planeview or somewhere near there, like South City or Derby or maybe one of the mobile home parks down south of town. On weekday nights, they all go over to some place like Thunderbird Lanes to bowl in leagues, harass the cocktail waitresses and drink beer.
Just down Gilda Street (where the house I almost bought, but didn't, was located) is the intersection of Gilda and St. Louis, just before Gilda turns into a dead end. On one corner of that intersection is the real reason I didn't buy the house in Hoover's Orchard.
At that location sits a totally nondescript clapboard house. I couldn't even begin to tell anyone what color the exterior of the house is, the layout of the rooms, how it's decorated or anything else about it. All I really remember about that house is a wall filled with electronic gear: reel-to-reel tape machines, AM/FM receivers, cassette players, two turntables and maybe four or five amplifiers, equalizers, pre-amps and other electronic do-dads. Everything was flanked on each side by a stack of speakers--four or five in all. On the floor immediately in front of this electrical amplification and playback extravaganza that would have caused most of the flower-child, hippie-freak, drugged-out acquaintances I had back in Los Angeles to immediately cream their applique-embroidered jeans, though, is the thing I remember most about that house. It was a waterbed. No pedestal, no headboard, no footboard, no padded rails along the side,... Nothing. Just a waterbed mattress with a heater underneath laid out directly on top of the carpet that covered the creaking floors of that old house.
The house, at the time I remember it, was rented by a woman named Pam Carstairs. Evidently, Pam spent most of every paycheck from Boeing Aircraft (where we both worked) on acquiring and/or paying for more electronic equipment for her sound system. At one time, Pam's landlord locked her out of her house, saying he was going to confiscate the electronics inside to compensate for back rent. Charita (Rita) Rosario, who worked in Personnel, and I helped organize a fund-raising drive among Pam's friends and acquaintances there at Boeing to help bail her out. I met Pam again at a bowling alley here in Wichita a couple of years ago; she's all married and respectable now, with two kids. She told me she eventually got a conventional waterbed after that one sprang a leak and she sold all her electronic gear at a fraction of it's original cost after it became obsolete with the advent of the digital and laser-track stuff sold these days. Ah, but back then in the mid-70s, that was one hot set-up.
Rita Rosario borrowed Pam's house one night and Rita and I spent the evening fucking on that waterbed and listening to soft, romantic music on Pam's sound system. Seems a waste, doesn't it, to fail to utilize all that capability and use a sound setup like that just to listen to a little mood music? I say Rita and I spent the night fucking instead using some more delicate form of expression like making love or having sex or copulating or whatever, because that's just what we did. We fucked. Every chance we had, we'd get together and, after a drink or dinner somewhere or maybe a movie if I thought we had the time, we'd go somewhere and just fuck our brains out. I was a lot skinnier in those days and sometimes my skinny belly would come in contact with Rita's petal-soft, smooth-skinned, perfectly-formed one and our bodies would make obscene noises: little smacking, popping sounds as our sweaty bellies came together, came apart, then came back together again. If we had stopped to listen, I suppose the noises we made during the sex act would have made us both laugh, but at the time we were too passionate, too busy just experiencing the sensations and the ecstasy of the moment to care. After I reached my climax (Rita never did), we would roll apart and lie there, cradling and cuddling one another, enjoying the closeness our bonding brought us.
I think that night in Pam's house was the first time I told Rita I loved her. She said she loved me, too, but we both knew neither one of us meant it. That was also the first time Rita told me goodbye. Later, there would be other goodbyes between us as we got back together to test the validity of the lie we told each other that night. Finally, though, the extreme unction we performed so many times on our relationship finally took hold and we parted for good.
You see, Rita was going to get married the next weekend to Robert Penwood, her long-time boyfriend, who was the Club Pro over at Rolling Hills. I suppose I was meant to be her last fling as a single woman before she tied the knot and settled down; one last night of debauchery and licentiousness before marriage and respectability set in and she lost that care-free, wild abandon she tried to keep so secret behind her dark eyes. She called me "Tommy" after my last name of "Thomas" instead of my first name, "Gary," like everybody else did. She made me feel special that way. I couldn't believe it was happening, the first time she asked me out.
My God, she was beautiful. She had a hooked nose like that on the Indian head of a Buffalo Nickel and she had slightly bucked teeth that made her upper lip protrude a little bit above the lower one; the upper lip forming a slight chevron peak that allowed her strong white teeth to show. I know all that really doesn't sound especially alluring, but I never saw those things as imperfections. Like any man, what I saw at first was her nearly-perfect figure; her large, firm breasts and exquisite long legs. Later, after I got to know her, what I saw when I looked at her was a shy, teasing smile that always said she was glad to see me and her large, luminous dark eyes that were always wide with wonder. Her eyes were so large she couldn't even close the lids completely unless she squinted and scrunched up her lovely face. I remember keeping my eyes slightly open a few times while kissing her and noticing tiny slivers of white under the lower edge of her closed eyelids. Other times, just on the verge of the orgasm she never quite reached, the eyes were closed but not quite shut.
Watching Rita sleep after our first tiring sexual bout that evening in Pam's house, again I noticed the incomplete eye closure, as if she was trying to see something extra; something that didn't exist. Maybe it was my ego or whatever, but my illogical mind decided it was love she was looking for; my love for her. That's what women want, isn't it? To be loved?
I kissed her then, lightly, tasting the sweat we'd worked up that had beaded onto her upper lip. She woke up at the touch of my lips on hers and rolled toward me, snuggling deeper into my arms.
"I love you," I said then, struggling to get the words out and to make them sound true.
Rita pulled her head up from my chest, where she had laid it as she snuggled. It wasn't an abrupt movement, it was more feline and curious. Her big eyes bored into mine, flitting their gaze from the left one to the right, looking for sincerity or its absence, then examining the rest my face under the green glow from the stereo dial, searching each crevice, crease and imminent wrinkle for the laugh lines that would prove I was just kidding. She laid her head back down. "I love you, too," she said.
The words echoed down through my chest, penetrating deep into the hollow air chambers of my lungs, rebounding off my spine to return to the surface where our sweat mingled, where her lips brushed lightly against my chest as she spoke the words, where the hairs around my left nipple moved with her breath. I didn't believe her for an instant but, God, it was good to hear.
As we lay there, I could feel her fingers moving across my chest, separating the hairs with her long fingernails. At first, I thought she might stick her finger in the old bullet-hole scar or else was tracing out the letters of the "Semper Fi" tattoo like she'd done other times when we were together, but a glance at her showed me she was lying with her cheek against my chest.
"What are you thinking about?" I asked her.
She waited a long time before answering. "Us," she whispered.
Again, I wasn't sure I believed her, but I didn't pursue it.
A long time passed before anyone said anything else.
"Why did you marry your wife?" Rita asked me, suddenly, raising up her head and peering at me through the gloom.
I sighed, coming back to that old question I'd already asked myself a million times. I didn't have an answer to give her, so I decided to tell the truth, instead.
"Because Kansas is a common law state," I said. "Sarah and I used the name Mr. and Mrs. Gary Thomas to buy some furniture when we first started living together. That's all it takes in this state. She could have sued me for divorce if she wanted to. Gotten alimony and everything else I had."
I saw her eyes narrow to slits as she digested this information. "But I thought.... You told me she was a good Catholic girl. What makes you think she'd sue you for divorce?" she asked, her eyes wide again.
"Bein' Catholic don't mean dick, honey," I said with a snort. "Not when there's money involved." I looked at the clock on Pam's stereo, calculating how much time we had, then remembered I hadn't really answered Rita's question.
"So, then, when I took a few classes up at WSU, I found out I could get more money on the GI Bill if I was married. So we got married."
Rita laid her head back down. "How romantic," she murmured.
Another long, drawn-out time passed before anyone said anything else.
"If I divorced my wife," I asked her, "would you marry me?"
"No," she said, not even raising her head or hesitating for an instant. The word reverberated down through my chest like a thunderclap.
"You couldn't afford me, Tommy," she explained. "Not on a supervisor's salary. You forget, I know how much money you make. Not even if you made Foreman." She raised up her head and peered at me from under lowered eyelids. "I'm awfully expensive to maintain. Even Robert and I argue about money. All the time. And he makes a hell of a lot more than you do."
She laid her head back down again and I lay there on the bed, quietly, accepting the hollowness of the comparison between "She's the wife of the machine shop supervisor" and "She's the wife of the Golf Pro at Rolling Hills."
Then, the next thing I knew, I was mentally going over the real reason I married Sarah, alias Billy Bad-Ass. We just kind of drifted together, the way people do, sometimes. Drifting along in the stream until we both got tired of swimming against the current and found another person to hold on to, just so neither one of us would feel so alone. I never really admitted it, I guess, but I think the only reason I married Sarah is the fact that she loved me. Now, I've had a lot of women tell me they loved me, but most of the time I knew they really didn't mean it. Like Rita. They just said it. They didn't believe it themselves and, even though I heard the words, I knew there was no truth in them. It was different with Sarah. I think it was different, anyway. She really did love me. I suppose she still does, even though I know I make it hard for her to, sometimes.
God, that's a pussy thing to admit, isn't it, that a man's so damned vulnerable that he'll marry someone just because she needs him? It just shoots the macho image he's built up for himself all those years right to hell, doesn't it?
I often wonder what Rita was getting at when she asked me why I married my wife, but she never said. I also wonder why it couldn't have been Rita and I who drifted together, instead of Sarah and I. But, what the hell.... If wishes were horses....
"So, why are you marrying Robert if he's such a lousy lover, like you say he is?" I asked Rita a little while later.
Rita waited what seemed like a long time before she answered. "Because he wants to get married," she said. "He insists." There was another long pause. "He knows about you," she told me.
"I know he does," I said. I told Rita about the time Robert confronted me in the Boeing parking lot one night after work; about how he threatened to tell my wife if I didn't stop seeing Rita and how I told him I really didn't give a shit if he did or not.
Rita raised her head and looked at me as I told her the tale. "Did he?" she asked.
I shook my head. "If he had of, I probably wouldn't be here, now. You either. We'd both be dead. Hell hath no fury like a pissed-off redhead, you know."
"Do you really think she'd kill us?"
"No," I said with a little half-laugh. "She talks tough, but most of the time that's all it is. Talk. She'd just be hurt.... And cry. Then she'd divorce me. Take everything. And then, after it was all over.... Then she'd learn to hate me. And you. What would Robert do?"
"Nothing. It would just hurt his ego to think I might prefer somebody else over him as a lover. I think he believes that if I'm married to him, that'll end it between us."
"Will it?" I asked.
She never did answer me.
Later, several more gasping, groping struggles beneath the sheets of that waterbed took place as Rita and I made love again. You can't call it just 'fucking' anymore, after you've told someone you love them, can you? Doesn't matter if you really meant it or not.
Sometime long after midnight, we rose, showered together quickly and quietly got dressed. Outside, in front of Pam's house, Rita told me goodbye over the occasional sound of the early morning I-235 traffic rushing by only a few feet away.
"Breakfast?" she asked, almost jovially.
But she knew I had to be getting back home so there wasn't too much disappointment on her face as I silently shook my head.
"You know I can't see you any more, don't you, Tommy?" she said, pulling on her expensive calfskin driving gloves.
I nodded dumbly, unable to look at her for a time, then lifted my gaze to meet hers, unwilling for her to think me weak. For what I thought was the last time, I drank in the beauty of her dark eyes, the perfection of her smooth, dusky complexion, the shine of her black hair.
"Will it be a big wedding?" It was a dumb thing to ask, but it was out before I knew it.
She nodded, then turned away to watch the early morning traffic go by on the freeway. "Oh, yeah," she said, then heaved a long sigh. "My mother invited all the relatives. And you know how Mexicans are. I've got a million of them."
The silence stretched on until the next car came whirring past.
"Well," I said at last. "I hope you're happy."
"Me, too," she said. "I hope you're happy, too."
We kissed again because, I think, we didn't know what else to do. It wasn't the most satisfying kiss I ever had, and it didn't last very long. We didn't want to spoil her lipstick. She laid her head on my shoulder and I knew the scent of her perfume would linger there, but for once I didn't care. Finally, she pulled away.
She climbed into her Mercury Cougar as I walked over and got into my pickup. I sat there as she started the engine of her car and let it warm up enough to allow the light hoods to flip up and let the Cougar see out through its headlamps. She drove away, up Gilda toward Central, heading back to the north end of town, toward the barrio and her own collection of cultural and ethnic baggage. I got the pickup going and headed out onto the freeway, heading back toward Planeview.
And that's why I couldn't buy that house in Hoover's Orchard. I knew I'd spend too much time looking south, down Gilda Street toward the dead end. And even today, when I go down Gilda to get on I-235, I have this unconscious desire to keep driving past the entrance ramp, to go on down to St. Louis. And whenever I'm driving past the Rolling Hills Country Club, I always glance over at the few fairways and greens you can see from Maize Road. Maybe. Maybe one of these days I'll get lucky and see her again. But maybe not. I don't usually go to Country Clubs and she probably doesn't go bowling very often. That ain't her style.
Maybe one of these days the phone will ring like it used to, though, and one more time I'll hear her say, "I miss you, Tommy." I miss her, too. But I suppose she's found someone else to devour, by this time.
These days, my kids think I'm crazy when Bob Seger's "Night Moves" comes along on the car radio and I scream at them to shut up. And I always get pissed off if it's just the short version and they leave out that last, slow, nearly-spoken verse. If they do play it, I always sing along.
"Woke last night to the sound of thunder.
How far off? I sat and wondered.
Started hummin' a song from 1962.
Funny how the night moves.
When you just don't seem to have as much to lose.
Strange how the night moves.
Autumn closin' in."
Ah, nostalgia. Yeah, it's like I keep telling my kids: "Nostalgia," I tell them, "it just ain't what it used to be."
They aren't sure what I mean by that. But I'm not so sure I do, either.
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