“A couple of cars passed and I stuck out my thumb and the old man tried to flag them down with his stick, but we must have looked too peculiar—a dirty kid in dungarees and a blind fat man dressed in his city best. I guess we’d still be out there if it hadn’t been for this truck driver. A Mexican. He was parked by the road fixing a flat. He could speak about five words of Tex-Mex, all of them four-letter, but I still remembered a lot of Spanish from the summer with Uncle Alvin in Cuba. So the Mexican told me he was on his way to El Paso, and if that was our direction, we were welcome aboard.
“But Mr. Schmidt wasn’t too keen. I had practically to drag him into the caboose. ‘I hate Mexicans. Never met a Mexican I liked. If it wasn’t for a Mexican … Him only nineteen and her I’d say from the touch of her skin, I’d say Ivory was a woman way past sixty. When I married her a couple of years ago, she said she was fifty-two. See, I was living in this trailer camp out on Route 111. One of those trailer camps halfway between Palm Springs and Cathedral City. Cathedral City! Some name for a dump that’s nothing but honky-tonks and pool halls and fag bars. The only thing you can say about it is Bing Crosby lives there. If that’s saying something. Anyway, living next to me in this other trailer is my friend Hulga. Ever since my wife died—she died the same day Hitler died—Hulga had been driving me to work; she works as a waitress at this Jew club where I’m the masseur. All the waiters and waitresses at the club are big blond Germans. The Jews like that; they really keep them stepping. So one day Hulga tells me she has a cousin coming to visit. Ivory Hunter. I forget her legal name, it was on the marriage certificate, but I forget. She had about three husbands before; she probably didn’t remember the name she was born with. Anyway, Hulga tells me that this cousin of hers, Ivory, used to be a famous dancer, but now she’s just come out of the hospital and she’s lost her last husband on account of she’s spent a year in the hospital with TB. That’s why Hulga asked her out to Palm Springs. Because of the air. Also, she didn’t have any place else to go. The first night she was there, Hulga invited me over, and I liked her cousin right away; we didn’t talk much, we listened to the radio mostly, but I liked Ivory. She had a real nice voice, real slow and gentle, she sounded like nurses ought to sound; she said she didn’t smoke or drink and she was a member of the Church of God, same as me. After that, I was over at Hulga’s almost every night.’ ”
George lit a cigarette, and his wife tilted out a jigger more of the pepper vodka for him. To her surprise, she poured one for herself. A number of things about her husband’s narrative had accelerated her ever-present but usually Librium-subdued anxiety; she couldn’t imagine where his memoir was leading, but she knew there was some destination, for George seldom rambled. He had graduated third in his class at Yale Law School, never practiced law but had gone on to top his class at Harvard Business School; within the past decade he had been offered a presidential Cabinet post, and an ambassadorship to England or France or wherever he wanted. However, what had made her feel the need for red vodka, a ruby bauble burning in the firelight, was the disquieting manner in which George Whitelaw had become Mr. Schmidt; her husband was an exceptional mimic. He could imitate certain of their friends with infuriating accuracy. But this was not casual mimicry; he seemed entranced, a man fixed in another man’s mind.
“ ‘I had an old Chevy nobody had driven since my wife died. But Ivory got it tuned up, and pretty soon it wasn’t Hulga driving me to work and bringing me home, but Ivory. Looking back, I can see it was all a plot between Hulga and Ivory, but I didn’t put it together then. Everybody around the trailer park, and everybody that met her, all they said was what a lovely woman she was, big blue eyes and pretty legs. I figured it was just good-heartedness, the Church of God—I figured that was why she was spending her evenings cooking dinner and keeping house for an old blind man. One night we were listening to the Hit Parade on the radio, and she kissed me and rubbed her hand along my leg. Pretty soon we were doing it twice a day—once before breakfast and once after dinner, and me a man of sixty-nine. But it seemed like she was as crazy about my cock as I was about her cunt—’ ”
She tossed her vodka into the fireplace, a splash that made the flames hiss and flourish; but it was an idle protest: Mr. Schmidt would not be reproached.
“ ‘Yes, sir, Ivory was all cunt. Whatever way you want to use the word. It was exactly one month from the day I met her to the day I married her. She didn’t change much, she fed me good, she was always interested to hear about the Jews at the club, and it was me that cut down on the sex—way down, what with my blood pressure and all. But she never complained. We read the Bible together, and night after night she would read aloud from magazines, good magazines like Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post, until I fell asleep. She was always saying she hoped she died before I did because she would be heartbroken and destitute. It was true I didn’t have much to leave. No insurance, just some bank-savings that I turned into a joint account, and I had the trailer put in her name. No, I can’t say there was a harsh word between us until she had the big fight with Hulga.
“ ‘For a long time I didn’t know what the fight was about. All I knew was that they didn’t speak to each other anymore, and when I asked Ivory what was going on, she said: “Nothing.” As far as she was concerned, she hadn’t had any falling-out with Hulga: “But you know how much she drinks.” That was true. Well, like I told you, Hulga was a waitress at the club, and one day she comes barging into the massage room. I had a customer on the table, had him there spread out buck-naked, but a lot she cared—she smelled like a Four Roses factory. She could hardly stand up. She told me she had just got fired, and suddenly she started swearing and pissing. She was hollering at me and pissing all over the floor. She said everybody at the trailer park was laughing at me. She said Ivory was an old whore who had latched on to me because she was down and out and couldn’t do any better. And she said what kind of a chowderhead was I? Didn’t I know my wife was fucking the balls off Freddy Feo since God knows when?
“ ‘Now, see, Freddy Feo was an itinerant Tex-Mex kid—he was just out of jail somewhere, and the manager of the trailer park had picked him up in one of those fag bars in Cat City and put him to work as a handyman. I don’t guess he could have been one-hundred-percent fag because he was giving plenty of the old girls around there a tickle for their money. One of them was Hulga. She was loop-de-do over him. On hot nights him and Hulga used to sit outside her trailer on her swing-seat drinking straight tequila, forget the lime, and he’d play the guitar and sing spic songs. Ivory described it to me as a green guitar with his name spelled out in rhinestone letters. I’ll say this, the spic could sing. But Ivory always claimed she couldn’t stand him; she said he was a cheap little greaser out to take Hulga for every nickel she had. Myself, I don’t remember exchanging ten words with him, but I didn’t like him because of the way he smelled. I have a nose like a bloodhound and I could smell him a hundred yards off, he wore so much brilliantine in his hair, and something else that Ivory said was called Evening in Paris.