Last Bender

11.3

Lydia, out of nowhere, called to say she was in Chicago and would be arriving late the next night or early the morning after. She still had her key. We looked at her bed. It was the same bedding that had been there when she left. With no real enthusiasm we stripped it, flipped the futon and put on clean sheets and clean blankets. I liked making a bed with Sally. I liked smoothing out the sheets, lifting the futon to tuck them in, then opening the blankets, and slipping the pillows into cases. I watched her as she worked, as she clamped the pillow beneath her chin, and bent over and stretched her arms across the surface of the bed, stood up and fluffed the pillows.  

Lydia arrived the following night in good health, boisterous. Her face was a little lined but her dark brown eyes were bright. She was in jeans and a jean jacket, her hair cut into a bleach blond crew cut and she wore a white t-shirt. She put down two duffle bags and her bracelets slid into her wrist. Maureen in a brown bomber jacket followed her in with backpacks and shopping bags.

“There’s more in the lobby,” Maureen said. Her round glasses were fogged-up white and her cheeks were red from the cold.

“Where’d you get a car?” Sally asked. “What is it?”

“A Hawnder of course, what else. I got the car in Phoenix for 600 bucks. So Mo and me met up in San Francisco and I worked at the halfway house and we crashed at this girl’s place in the Mission. But I stayed clean. I went to meetings every fucking day. All day long was a meeting.”

“Are you parked?” I asked.

“Yeah yeah, just up the street. I’ll ditch the car I guess at some point. But I mean, six hundred bucks.” She took off her coat and tossed it across the piano bench. Her arms were strong from working out and she had flames tattooed on both biceps

“But you didn’t know how to drive.”

“I learned that. That was one of the things I had to do in Phoenix. Driving up to San Francisco was a little scary at first. I’ve never done things like that sober. You don’t think about it much, till you try it and everything is different in the way you feel. But who cares about that, listen to me.” She looked around, turned to face each wall, looked at the big painting in the living room, checking for changes. The figures then were quite large; what had started out as embryonic forms emerged as these enormous, multilayered Olmec-like faces, and it looked like they were all paddling a canoe made up of discreet layers of color. When she got to her part of the room she said, clasping her hands to her cheeks and making a face, “Oh you made my bed! Thank you. That’s something else I have to do every day. Where’s Roy? How is he?”

“He’s fine, as always,” I said.

“Well let’s call him up and go out for dinner.”

We made a plan for dinner the following night at a Japanese place in the East Village on First Avenue. We got there first, Sally, Lydia, Mo and me. “So what’s he like?” Lydia asked.

“Everyone sits waiting for him to blow up and abuse them,” Sally said.

I said, “He has ok days. He’s like a nut about me going to school. I’d like to stay off it.”

“He’s a fucking asshole. He’s trying to talk Alex out of leaving town. He’s basically using everything to badger him into staying.”

“Here he comes,” Lydia said.

Roy entered briefcase in hand, dressed in a black suit with a tie, sporting a mustache of sorts. He scanned the room for us, lockjawed, till he caught my eye and nodded, then turned around and opened the door to the vestibule, where, evidently, Dawn had been waiting.

She came in looking a foul mood and shook her face a little as she followed him past the host and to our table.

Lydia stood and got out from behind the table and hugged him. “Oh Roy, hi.”

He kissed her cheek and head and smiled. “They let you out finally?”

“Eh, they ain’t let me outta nuttin’.”

We sat down and looked through the menu.

“I don’t know why we come here,” he said.

“Cause it’s close by and it’s cheap and it’s good,” I said.

“Whatever, fuck it, I’m spoiled. I go out to these places with these people, man.”

“Sounds very uh, specific, man” Lydia said, flipping the menu over.

“So what, are we getting any appetizers? Dumplings?” he asked.

“Hijiki,” I muttered, “and that eggplant thing–”

“With the miso paste,” Sally said.

“Yeah, how about the calamari?” Lydia asked

“Oh, I love that,” said Dawn. “Let’s get a whole tempura appetizer.”

“You can’t order hot food first,” Roy said.

“Says who,” Dawn asked.

“Go ahead, it’s like asking for cheese with fish in an Italian restaurant. But go ahead. These people are just freaks, whatever. Spoiled little fuckers from the suburbs. Let’s just get a giant platter full of sushi and sashimi and eat it all. It’s on me. And sake all around?”

No one said a word.

Roy called the waiter over, a bored, 25 year-old Japanese guy with a rockabilly hairdo. “I’m ordering. Four sakes with cups for everyone. Hijiki, two orders of eggplant appetizer, the fried squid, one mixed tempura appetizer and 3 shumai. Then I want a sushi and sashimi platter for the whole table, maybe three, four deluxes? With seaweed? Just tell the chef to make one up for us.”

The waiter scribbled down the order looking world weary and left.

“So where were you living? I heard San Francisco,” he said to Lydia.

“For six months. I may go back. I got into this whole performance poetry thing there. It’s funny, all you gotta do is start talking about shit you did and they laugh. That’s really all I do. War stories. With hallucinations. Sometimes, I make ‘em feel reeeeaallly baaaaaaaad.”

“It’s like these apartments I’m trying to buy to rent to out of towners. I can make thousands a day on that alone if I can talk my way into it. You know I know these people,” he rubbed his face, “ha ha.”

“Whatever that means,” Lydia said.

“Did you ever hear the story of Mr. Ha Ha the baboon?” Sally asked.

Roy looked at her strangely. “No.”

“That is what you were quoting, is it not?”

“Not. I don’t know.”

“Oh, never mind then.”

“I know that story of Mr. Ha Ha the baboon from somewhere,” Dawn said. It was the first sign of interest she had shown.

“Bosse-de-Nage, ole bottom face, the baboon who accompanies Dr. Faustroll on his exploits,” Sally said.

“Dr. Faustroll!” she said. “You know about him?”

“The Eminent ‘Pataphysician.”

Dawn looked at her oddly and then smiled. “I read that at UGA. I lived in this house and that book was in the bathroom. Alfred Jarry. The Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. I must have read it twenty times. That’s why I read Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and The Flowers of Evil, and Huysmans! How could I forget that?”

“I was just reading Frost at Midnight.”

“If that’s Coleridge I didn’t read it. Nope,” Dawn said, “I only read the Rime.”

“The Rind of the Ancient Marinara,” I said.

“Whatever,” Roy said. He pounded the sake and put his face close to Lydia’s. “I haven’t been to San Francisco in a while. It’s a hippy town. The girls there still don’t shave. I hope you stay home. That’s what I’m trying to talk these two into doing. Maybe you could give it a whack.”

“Why would I do that?” she asked. They put down the dumplings and the other appetizers and we dug in.

“Am I the only one?” he asked, his nostrils and neck throbbing iambically.

I found myself saying, “It is scary giving up an apartment in NY.” It felt like a slightly lose tooth that has just enough wiggle to cause you to check and loosen it, day by day, till it breaks free.

Lydia and Sally both burst into anapests at once, “Do you have to bring up that apartment again?” Roy’s beeper went off. He checked it and put it back.

The waiter cleared the plates and lowered this monstrous collection of raw fish and seaweed to the table. We surrounded it and began to reach our chopsticks in and pluck forth the fish, the red bricks of yellow fin tuna, and my favorite, wedges of Spanish mackerel. I stirred a dab of wasabi into the soy sauce and dipped a piece in. It has a dark, oily taste, but milder than sardine.

“I want some more shumai,” Lydia said. “Getting out of this place for a while’s the best thing that ever happened to me. You get some perspective. Shit you thought you never could do is easy. Like learning to drive. I thought it was some big deal but you get out west and it’s like taking the subway. And in Phoenix they take more antibiotics than anywhere else. And Phoenix is America’s fattest city. California’s not like that. In California, they hate you if you’re fat. I had to lose twenty pounds just so they wouldn’t hate me. Didn’t mean they started to like me. Only the dikes. The guys are like ‘Look at the fat chick.’ Ha ha. Now who’s the baboon. But you can’t even walk there. In San Francisco, you walk.”

“I don’t think anyone in Dallas doesn’t drive,” Dawn said.

Mo asked, “Why would anyone ever want to live in such a place?”

“I mean–” she looked confused. “What can I say? I left. There ain’t nothing to love there, not even my parents. But I want to defend it for some reason. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

“Sure,” Sally said, eating a dumpling and washing it down with Sake. “When I was overseas and people would talk about America as if we had all voted for that asshole. I felt defensive and foolish both.”

“That’s just it.”

“Only you can make a joke about your mother,” Mo said.

“No mother jokes,” Roy said. And then, “Your mother’s so fat that when I fucked her ass my dick never went inside her asshole. She’s so fat my father and I both fucked her and we couldn’t tell her tits from her ass.” 

I savoured the shoyu and wasabi on a piece of tuna. Roy picked at his mustache. It was a ratty, cheap mustache. All his life he went in for skeevy facial hair. He hadn’t eaten much at dinner, but he was going to pay for it. No one could pay for a thing when they were with Roy now. His eyes worked us over robotically. He jerked them back and forth between Sally, me, and the briefcase on the floor by his foot. His beeper went off. He stood, grabbed the briefcase and marched to the pay phone.

“Hoo,” Lydia said. “Is that relaxed for him? Cause he’s wound very tight.”

Dawn looked to make sure he was on the phone and said, “He’ll pretend to go do something and just listen to what you’re saying. Once, he took me to Vegas and spent the whole night playing cards and fighting with anyone he could find. I won’t touch that shit anymore. It makes you crazy. My husband’s gonna kill someone some day.”

Lydia was about to say something but Roy returned and snarled at his sake cup. “Don’t worry about money. No one here worries about money again. There are three things fueling this economy,” he said, counting off with his fingers, “Real Estate, Money Market Funds, and you know what the other is. I’m heavily invested in all three. We don’t worry. We take charge. All those assholes, who think they’re so goddamned cool, are putting me on top. And that will send us all to college.”

Sally touched my shoulder and said into my ear, “What is he talking about?”

“I don’t know.”

Lydia tried to order more shumai, but the waiter wouldn’t stop. “I just can’t stop eating them. The rawr fish isn’t floating my boat tonight.”

“We need more sake, where is that guy?” Roy craned his neck around and his face turned bright red. “Look,” he said, turning towards me, his eyes hardening in their sockets and jabbing his two fingers, “look. You at least apply here in the city and that way if she gets into Yale or Penn you can live here and commute. Not those other ones, the one in Provincetown.”

“Providence,” Sally said. “Brown.”

“Oh yeah, the color. They aren’t right for him and not you either. I know. I’ve been to those other places, those little cities, and there is nothing but murder and abuse in them. You can see them on the street, the survivors.”

A harried waiter in red sneakers ran past and Sally literally grabbed him. He wheeled around, his face a portraict of wrath. Roy bared his fangs. The tension circulated between them in little packets of energy ready to explode. Hair by hair, a chill creeped up my neck. For a moment the waiter and Roy were paralyzed by each other’s eyes. They were two ludicrous space creatures forged in the depths of galactic anger. And they were both so stylized–the bad mustache and acid burned skin of a cocaine addict versus the wild albino fury of the East Village waiter, overworked and overpaid, constant victim of the snide, unruly impulses of people who were in the habit of behaving as if they were always on vacation. Sally asked for two orders of shumai. The waiter let down, his face relaxed. Roy disengaged and said, “Four more Sakes.” The waiter nodded and took off and Roy said, “What the fuck was that all about? Did he hurt you?”

I touched his shoulder. He flinched and his eyelashes did battle. I said, “She touched him. He was in a hurry. It freaked him out. There was nothing personal.”

Sally said, “It was nothing. I’m fine,” and for the first time ever she smiled at Roy. I felt again the prick of jealousie, just like that day in Flint Park when Roy caught Tammy Markham’s eye.

“That wasn’t nothing. That was something. Did you see his face?” He made a guttural sound. Then he shook his head and laughed. “Did you see his face? Something or nothing? Is everybody done?” The beeper went off.

Lydia said, “No. We just ordered more shumai.”

“Right.” He marched off on his steel rods to the phone.