My girlfriend was there in bed with me.
“I’ll be right there,” I said. “She lies to you,” the Polack said. “You do not leave me in bed to go to her house in the middle of the night.” “She doesn’t lie,” I said. “Say what you like about Wendy but she doesn’t lie.” “Maybe she does not know it. That she is lying. But, you trust me, she lies,” she said. “And one more thing. Do not say her name like that when you are lying in bed with me. I do not want to hear that name,” she said. “I told her I would go,” I said. “I have to go. What if there is a burglar there? It’s not just her. It’s Claire, too. It’s my daughter, too. My daughter, Polack.”
Then I thought, Bobby, this woman is in bed with you, with her arms around you, and now you are going to drive across town on the cold road in the middle of the night to your wife. She may be the Polack, but she’s a woman, too. Can you not have a little patience and sympathy? I reached to touch her cheek in the dark with my fingertips. But she turned her head away. “You do not bother coming back, then,” she said. “You do not return here.” “It’s my apartment, Polack,” I said. “Tonight, I am saying. Spend the night there. In your old bed with your old wife. You do not drive back here to hope to fuck me.” “I’m not going to spend the night there,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” “No, you will not,” she said. Another night on the way back from Dallas the beeper went off and the Polack took it from the coin well and threw it out of the car. That’s what you get for driving a convertible, I thought.
Wendy and I stood outside the store and I handed her our daughter. Claire did not want to go to her mother. She grabbed at my neck and my arms. She wrapped her little legs against my diaphragm and rib bones.
“No, you put her in her car seat,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. I did not know what else to say. There was nothing else to do except to put Claire in the car seat. I wondered if the Polack was watching us from inside the store. I wondered if it might be practical to kidnap Claire, drive to Lisa’s, and then the three of us could drive to Mexico. My new, improved family. We would have to wait until night so I could rifle the store’s safes before we left.
“I want you to do it,” Wendy said. “I want her to see who’s doing it.”
Because Jim wasn’t taking his calls, Dad kept phoning me for money. I had relented and started up with the cocaine again. It was the buildup to the season and Jim and I were working fifteen-and sixteen-hour days. Black Friday was only a week away. I used one of those little brown bottles that Jim used to carry. I always offered it to Lisa. Out of politeness. Not because I thought she should have some. She said no for months and then she said, “Fine.”
We were back at the Mansion on Turtle Creek. But not in the big suite I had moved us to for our last couple of visits. “I want to stay in our old room,” Lisa said when we checked in. “Our regular room.” It was one of the smaller rooms, on the third floor.
“Don’t do it if you don’t want it,” I said. “But it is very good cocaine. I get it from the biggest importer in San Antonio. She is a little Mexican woman who weighs about three hundred pounds. Maria Garza is her name. She is the cocaine queen of Texas.”
“I bet she has nice jewelry,” Lisa said. She was being sarcastic but she knew it was true. It was sarcasm directed at me, not at the cocaine dealer.
I did not want to talk about that. You hated to think about putting your own diamonds and Rolexes up your nose.
“I don’t know, Bobby,” she said. “I like to feel clean when I take a bath.”
“I’m used to doing it without you,” I said. “But it is an awfully nice thing to do together.”
Then, unexpectedly, and gracefully, not violently like I would have expected, she sniffed several small lines.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ve done it now. We may as well go ahead and do it. Let’s smoke some,” she said after we had sex. There was something different about her. I did not like it, whatever it was, but it was spiritually stimulating. Suddenly she reminded me of Jim. Her face looked so independent. Like she had made a decision, and she was not going to tell me what it was. For my protection, maybe, or just because she didn’t need to tell me, and I didn’t need to know.
I wondered about that. Where precisely that change in her originated, I mean.
“Do you know how to do that?” Then I thought that was the wrong thing to say. “Can we even do that in here?”
“It’s really easy. We’ll smoke it in the bathroom. You know how it is, you don’t let the smoke out of your lungs anyway. It tastes too good. We’ll smoke a few grams and then go to the pool. It’s dark, I bet we’ll have it all to ourselves.”
“It’s ice-cold out there,” I said.
“We’ll have sex in the hot tub. We’ll wear robes. It will be fun.”
In the bathroom I sat on the edge of the tub and she sat on the floor with her back against my legs.
“I honestly can’t sniff cocaine anymore, Bobby,” Lisa added, as she started her cooking. “I quit sniffing it years ago. Sniffing it is too fake.”
Jim was on the phone. I kept the pocket door between our offices open so that I could watch him when he grabbed the phone. This was not easy because we were very busy and the phones rang constantly. I always answered the phone now. With customers at my desk, too. I would smile and apologize and roll my eyes at the sales floor to express my frustration with my lazy salespeople and then get it on the second ring. “Clark’s Precious Jewels.” If it wasn’t her I stuck them on hold. Even the Polack told me, “You are the boss. Let those salespeople answer your phone.” But she didn’t answer it any faster herself. It was never Lisa when I answered. But I knew that sometimes when Jim picked up it was her. I could see it on his face. He would stand, sometimes, too, and slide the door closed. He might do that just because the customer in his office wanted privacy. But he would do it when he was on the phone, too. I knew he could call out if he wanted. But when you called her she never answered, you always had to leave a message, and then she would call back. So I watched for that behavior especially closely. Call, leave a short message, watch the phones. When I could see him doing that I grabbed every call. I thought about cutting the line to his phone. If it was practical I would have done it. It would give me a few easy days. A few days before we got it fixed. He shouldn’t be answering the phone anyway. The Polack was right about that. We were too busy to be answering the phone.
My boyfriend doesn’t like you anymore,” Lisa said.
“I don’t blame him,” I said.
It was late Saturday night and we were driving across I-10 to spend the night in a cabin on Caddo Lake in East Texas, in the Piney Woods. It was too far a drive for just one night and the next day. There was an oversized limestone fireplace in the cabin and I would make a real fire. In the morning there was a place on the lake we could have pancakes. This was our first trip there but I had read about it in a guidebook. I hoped the pancake place would be open with the cold snap. Maybe there will be ice on the edges of the lake, I thought. That will look nice against the dark water. In the guidebook it said it was the only natural lake in the state of Texas. And Texas was covered with lakes. All of those other lakes were made by human hands. That was upsetting to think about. Or bulldozers, more likely.
“He always liked you before. He always said you were a good one.”
She tapped out two little polka dots of crank onto the plastic makeup mirror she carried with her. Then she sniffed them quickly up. She blinked.