“You think we should be worried about him?”
The music played on… I don’t like riding on the passenger side…
“I am a little curious, though,” Hickory said. “Why’d you leave him?”
“You ever meet someone who’ll never say what it is they want? I mean, even when they know it?”
“He says you left him drunk in a fireworks shop. Down in some dirty town in Baja.”
“He says that about every woman he’s ever had. But really Dinky left himself.”
“You and Basil are… Well. You guys can be pretty harsh.”
“Buddy Time,” Lucille said. “I know, I know. It’s hard to understand, especially if you haven’t been in it long.”
The gnome at my feet was irking me to hell. Everywhere I turned found me challenged by some scrap of carnival, mannequins and clowns and gnomes. You had to wonder what the Wainwrights were about, this family full of tightlipped babbitts who thought they were cool every time they stuck some doll with a boner on their mantle.
“It’s funny, you know,” Lucille said, “how sometimes things just happen.”
“I’m tired of things just happening,” Hickory said.
“How things can happen and you don’t understand them till after it’s too late?”
“And that’s if you’re lucky.”
“It’s like when I had that shitty temp job out in Walnut Creek that time,” Lucille said. “Ten or so years back, I guess, the summer before I got out of State. I’d taken on this temp job down at Blue Boss Insurance, to make up for what my parents wouldn’t cover. Opening mail and photocopying and stuff. There were four of us there, me and this girl named Chiffon-Latrese, and two other bimbos from Antioch. About every three or four days, this guy’d call on the phone. He was a quiet kind of guy. He didn’t have any business with the company, that’s not why he was calling. He just wanted to hear a woman’s voice, he said. It didn’t take long to figure out he wanted more than that. Really he was calling to hear our voices while he beat off. He never said that’s what he was doing. I just knew it. You could hear him over the line doing his thing, it was kind of loud, and he’d breathe real hard, you know. The thing is, he never said anything nasty to me or anyone else. Two of the girls, the bimbos, they wouldn’t talk to him. He’d call and they’d hang up. Only Chiffon-Latrese would talk to him. And me. We felt sorry for him, I guess. Every time I answered it seems like I’d end up talking to him until he was through. You get tired of reading magazines, you know? Chiffon-Latrese, though, she was like me. A temp. Which means after about a month or so she got shipped off to some other shitty hole. Some days the guy would call up and ask me to tell him about my sisters. Some days it was the other women in the office he wanted to know about, what they were doing, that sort of thing. I could always hear him, too, going at it, I mean. But after a couple of weeks he started getting weirder. He asked me to call him names. ‘What kind of names,’ I said. ‘Dirty names,’ he said. ‘Insult me.’ So first I told him he’s a good-for-nothing jerk and an asswipe besides, and what did he do but groan and ask for more. I called him a dirty bastard prick and he groans again and starts in with the heavy breathing. I called him a fucking douchebag fuck. I called him a cocksucking piece of dickweed. I called him everything he’d ever read in the Penthouse forum, and then some. I was probably getting off on it all more than he was. It was sort of out of hand, I guess, when I really think about it. It had got to the point where I was practically screaming at the top of my lungs when his voice kind of shuddered, and he hung up. The two bimbos were staring at me. It made me think how creepy I must’ve been. I mean, I was enjoying all of that, you know? It wasn’t for about a week or so that the guy called me back. But you know what he does? The first thing he does is ask how big my feet are. I told him I was a tall girl. My feet are bigger than most girls’ feet, I said, but they fit my body. He said what size. Ten, I told him, they’re size ten. But they fit my body. And then he hung up. Three days later he calls again to say he’s been dreaming about me every night, says he’s dreaming about my feet. He’s been having sex with my feet, he says. I ask what he means by with my feet and he says he’s been sticking his dick between my toes after I go to sleep, but that’s okay, because that was how we’d planned it. Meaning, in his dream I’d told him the whole thing was cool with me but just to wait till I’d passed out. He asked me if that’s okay, that he’s been dreaming about me, and I tell him sure, that’s okay, why should I care what you do at night. The next time he called, another two or three days’d gone by. He asks if I think he’s a pervert. Well look what you’ve been doing, I say. So I am a pervert, he says. Sure, I say, yeah. But that’s okay. It’s not like you’re stalking me or anything. But I’m a pervert, he says. Everybody’s got their thing, I say. And he says, Yes, but I’m a pervert. Then he hung up, and I never heard from him again.”
“People do things,” Hickory said.
“But you know what?” Lucille said. “I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. I mean, if you really want to know, I thought there was something wrong with me. I kept taking his calls. It’s like I actually enjoyed talking to him. And when he stopped calling, I missed him. I even got depressed, you know? Every day I’m answering the phone hoping it’s my quiet little pervert. One day, after a couple of weeks, I pick up and there’s a guy on the end who sounds exactly like my man. I was so obsessed with the whole thing, I’d brainwashed myself into thinking it had to be him. And so in this disgustingly breathy voice I said, I’ve missed you, baby, and the guy says, Who is this? Turns out it was just some schmuck calling about his reimbursement. That’s when it hit me. You’re the one who’s pathetic, Lucille. You. Fucking pathetic.”
The girls were quiet then. I went back to Dinky. His breathing was still bad, and he was sweating and gibbering again, this freaky thing after that. The wreck must’ve busted him up inside, the way he carried on. Sure, he was sick before we’d got here, but not like that. Or maybe he’d always been sick but just never said. Or maybe he’d never said because he wanted us to see for ourselves, to say something, maybe, as if we cared, to console or advise him — it was there before our eyes, wasn’t it, plain as a bomb going off? — or maybe just to ignore it altogether, anything so long as it wasn’t this elephant-in-the-living-room type scene we all made light of in that lily-livered way of ours, when things got too heavy for anything else. He wanted something pure, I imagine, something he could count on.
I sat down beside him, wondering what I could do to make it go away. Spittle had pooled at the corners of his mouth. I wrung out the cloth from the basin and placed it on his brow. Once again he began to weep. I looked away, out toward the advancing dawn, and watched a list of stillicides trickle from the eaves…
A sphere of glass filled with plastic snow. A withered hand clutching the sphere until it slipped and shattered on the marble floor. Rosebuds across a carpet, yellow, white, and red…
Downstairs I paused in the landing this side of the door, and peered around the corner. Hickory lay on the couch, fooling with a Rubik’s Cube. Lucille had propped herself up by a bourbon at the table to doodle on a napkin.
“It’s pretty bad, huh?” Lucille said.
“You saw him yourself,” Hickory said.
“But you don’t know him like I do. I’ve seen him this way a hundred times.”
“Still.”
Lucille slapped the pen down and gulped at her drink. “Maybe the phone’ll start working.”