Read Big Bad Love Online

Authors: Larry Brown

Tags: #General Fiction

Big Bad Love (2 page)

I turned on the radio and tried to find a little music. I put my sunglasses on. I felt like I was making some real progress.

The last time I'd been in Sheena Baby's car there'd been two or three joints in an empty Marlboro pack in the glove box. I flipped it open and the Marlboro pack was still there. I elbowed the wheel and peeked inside the pack and, sure enough, there were still two whole joints in there. I got one out and put the other one back up. Things were getting pretty groovy. It was a Sunday evening and Army Archard was counting down all the top 100 hits of 1967. I lit that joint and bumped down the road drinking my beer and keeping time on the steering wheel, holding the smoke in deep. After a while I was just shaking my head over how good it all was. I listened to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Elvis Presley and The Doors and Cream and Grand Funk Railroad and CCR and Percy Sledge, wawa wawa wa. I got to singing out loud and moving my shoulders around and when that joint got short I took little tokes and got all I could out of it. Army was breaking in once in a while, commenting on how fine it all was and talking about how lucky we'd all been to be alive in that era. I agreed with him 100 percent. I wished I'd gone out to San Francisco and worn flowers in my hair. I wished I'd been hip instead of picking cotton. All of a sudden it didn't bother me any more that Sheena Baby was leaving me, and I saw that it had been inevitable. We were two different people. We came from different backgrounds, and our interests were not similar. It was a wonder that we'd stayed together as long as we had. Love took a lot of different forms and sometimes what appeared to be love wasn't really love at all, was
just infatuation in disguise. It hurt when that happened, and it messed you up for a while, but sooner or later you got back on your feet and faced the world and saw that love was hard to find and sometimes it took some looking. Love wasn't going to just walk up and slap you in the face. It wasn't going to tackle you around the knees out on the sidewalk. Love wasn't going to leap out of a second story window on top of you.

I rode along there, slightly bumping, the needle wobbling between 7 and 10 mph. The tires went whop whop whop, and the rubber squirmed under the iron rims, and it made the car rock gently. I knew I was going to make it. I knew all this was just a temporary setback.

Army Archard kept playing those great hits from 1967. I kept drinking that beer. There was plenty more in the cooler. I had plenty of cigarettes. I saw a figure walking along the road, growing larger as I got closer, and I beat time with my hand on the steering wheel and slapped the floormat with my tennis shoe. I knew she'd feel funny when I bumped by in her car. It hit me too that I'd go home and sleep alone, that I wouldn't have her arms around me to hold me in the night, not have her arms any more forever.

Her arms, any more, forever.

I slammed on the brakes right beside her. She stopped walking and turned and looked at me. We looked at each other for about a minute. There were a lot of things I could have told her, a lot of promises I could have made and broken later, just anything to get her back in the car. But all I said was, “You want a ride?”

She didn't say anything when she got in. She shut the door
and knelt on the seat across from me, with her fine thick legs folded up under her, deeply tanned, muscled as hell, a bodybuilder with fourteen trophies. I was skinny, coughed in the mornings, had a lot of gas most days. Her eyes were close to me, staring into mine, deep blue and beautiful. She came to me. She came to me and she wrapped her arms around me and squeezed me (she could bench two hundred) tight. She mashed her lips down over mine and crushed my mouth tight against hers and pushed me back against the door and I could hear her breathing hard through her nose. She was sucking all the air she could and kissing me as hard as she could. My side of the car was low and she was on top of me, trying to climb up into my lap, pawing at me and hugging me alternately, pushing me hard against the door. The door opened and I fell backwards out into the road and Sheena Baby crawled down from the car on top of me except for my feet, which were still in the car, and she laid down on top of me, kissing me, pushing the back of my head down hard on the asphalt, mashing my ears between her two hands, panting, forgiving all, covering me completely with love, blocking out the sun with it, there beside a flat tire and the rusty underside of the car on the open road where anybody driving by wanting a testament to love could ride by and see it, naked, exposed for the whole world to view.

That was when the cops pulled up, two of them, with hard faces and shiny sunglasses, and I saw with a sick feeling in my heart that our happy ending was about to take a turn for the worse.

The Apprentice

This can't be living. I drink too much Old Milwaukee and wake up in the morning and it tastes like old bread crusts in my mouth. All my underwear's dirty, I can't find my insurance policy.

Here I was thinking we had a good normal marriage. She dirtied up my car and changed the TV channels for me, and I'd bring her Butter Pecan Crunch home from Kroger's. I'd tell her to just leave the dishes until tomorrow, things like that. I didn't even say anything when her dog pissed in my chair. For better and for worse and all that. I even nursed her in sickness once.

Judy wanted to be a writer. Writewritewritewritewrite. That's all she studied. She was always writing something, and always wanting me to read it. Hell, I'd read it. Some of it. I'd
tell her it was pretty good if it was. Only most of the time it wasn't. I'd try to be honest. She wrote this story one time about a man whose wife was always speeding and getting tickets. This woman would get three or four tickets a week. She'd come home and tell her husband about the tickets, and he'd raise hell with her. This went on for a while. The tickets were piling up. They owed something like sixteen hundred dollars to City Hall. So finally the guy decided he'd do something about it. He killed his wife. Blew her head off with a shotgun, and then confessed to the whole thing. When the cops found him he was wiping up her blood with the old traffic tickets. Terrific story, right? I told her I didn't think much of it, and she got pissed off. That was the thing of it. If I told her I liked one of her stories, she'd pin me down on the couch with the story in her hand and try to get me to point out every paragraph, every sentence, hell, every
word
I liked. And if I didn't like it, she'd sulk around the house for three or four days. There just wasn't any pleasing her.

She didn't want to have children yet. There was plenty of time, she said. Wait till I sell my novel, she said. I even took this high-paying job, working inside a nuclear reactor, so she could quit the post office and write full-time. I didn't mind. I didn't even mind having to eat TV dinners by myself sometimes. I mean, if you love somebody, you put up with them. Hell, I told her to go for it, grab all the gusto she could. But even that wasn't enough. When we first got married, we'd go to a movie every Friday night. Then on Saturday night, we'd go out somewhere with some of our friends and listen to a band, have a few drinks, do some dancing and just kick up our heels.

And then she started writing. She wrote a novel first. Blasted straight through, seven months, night and day. I'd be in there on the couch watching old Hopalong Cassidy or somebody and hear that typewriter going like an M-60 machine gun in the bedroom. That's where she writes. I'd stay in there by myself until the movie or Johnny Carson or whatever I was watching went off, and then I'd get up and open the door and ask her if she was ready to go to bed. And most of the time, she'd say she was right in the middle of a scene and had to finish it. She'd give me this sort of pained but patient expression that said clear as glass, Shut the door and leave me alone.

What the hell. We had some fights about it. Anybody would. We had some knock-down-drag-outs. I busted a picture that her mother gave us over the goldfish bowl one night, and another time I kicked a hole in the bedroom door after she locked me out.

And that wasn't the worst of it. All our friends started wanting to know why we never went out with them any more. The only thing I could tell them was that she was working on her writing. I hated doing that. You tell people something like that and they look at you like you're crazy. I mean, who sits around writing fiction besides Edgar Rice Burroughs or Stephen King, or in other words, somebody who knows what the hell he's doing? I used to tell her that shit. Especially if she'd just written something I didn't particularly like. Like this one time, she wrote a short story about a woman who was a hunchback. She called it “The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati.”
It wasn't worth a shit!
I didn't want to hurt her feelings, but it was boring as hell. And the whole time I was
reading it, she was sitting right beside me on the couch, sipping a glass of wine, smoking one cigarette after another. She was looking over my shoulder, trying to see where I was on the page. This damn woman who was a hunchback had a son who was a cripple. The only thing he was good for, apparently, was shoveling out horse stalls. But every night he'd bring his little twopence or whatever home. I think it was supposed to be set back in olden times or something. They were trying to save up enough money for an operation. But she didn't say
who
was going to get the operation, the woman or the kid. That was the big suspense of the whole crappy story. It turned out they had this damn
dog
you didn't even know about until the last page, and the dog had some rare disease that only this veterinarian in Cincinnati could cure, for—you guessed it—the exact same amount this kid made after working for a year shoveling all this horseshit. I damn near puked when I got through reading it.

But I didn't say anything when I finished it, not right away. I got up and went into the kitchen and got a beer. I still had on my radioactive work clothes. She hadn't even given me time to eat my supper. I was trying to think of some nice way to bring her down, but hell, I didn't know what to say. She was sitting on the couch with her legs tucked underneath her, grinning. Sipping that wine, smiling like the cat that ate your sardines.

“Well?” she said. “What did you think of it?”

She leaned forward a little on the couch and held her wineglass between her hands. I told her I didn't know. I told her I thought I ought to read it again to sift out the ambiguities and
decide which mode of symbolism the denouement pertained to. I took some English Lit classes in college and that was the only thing that saved my ass that night. It was like old times when we went to bed. She came twice. She said I was the greatest husband and the most understanding human on earth. I felt like a real bastard.

The next morning was Saturday, and I didn't have to go to work. I remember waking up and thinking about a little early morning love, but then I heard the typewriter pecking. I dozed off for a while because I didn't want to be by myself all day. Saturdays she wrote all day. When I got up and went into the kitchen to make coffee, it was already made. There was bacon laid out on a paper towel just as pretty as you please, hash browns and scrambled eggs on the warmer on the stove, and my plate was set with the morning paper folded right beside my cup. She had butter and biscuits and molasses on the table, just like in a restaurant. I really felt like a bastard then.

I didn't know what to do. If I said it was bad, she'd sull up or maybe cry. She cried a lot when I didn't like her stuff. And if I said it was good when it really wasn't, she'd get very encouraged and sit right down and type it up all nice and neat and send it off to
Playboy
or somewhere, and then get all broke down when it came back rejected. I used to hate mail-time on Saturdays, when I was home. About eleven o'clock, if she had a story out, she'd sit down on the couch and open the drapes on the front window, watching for the mailman. She'd sit there with a cup of coffee in her hands. She'd start doing that about three days after she'd sent a story off, I
think. I guess she did it every day while it was out. I don't know. But I'm sure she did. She wouldn't even write while she was waiting for the mailman. When she was waiting for the mailman, she wouldn't do anything but look out the window. Every once in a while, she'd get up and go to the front door and open it, and look up the street to see if she could see him coming. And finally, there he'd be. She'd get up and get over to one side of the curtains, and peek out to see what he was pulling out of his bag. If it was just some small stuff, some white envelopes, or circulars from TG&Y or somewhere, she'd rush out as soon as he put the stuff in the box. But if she saw him pull a long brown manila envelope out of his bag, she'd jerk the curtains back together and sit down fast on the couch and put her face in her hands.

She'd say: “It came
back”
like she was talking about a positive test for cancer of the womb. She'd sit right there and shake her head and never lift her face from her hands.

“I don't want to go out and get it,” she'd say. “Lonnie, you go out and get it.”

So I'd go out and get it. What the hell, it was no big emotional experience to me. Just a piece of mail. That didn't mean I didn't know what it meant to her. I knew it hurt her to have her stuff come back. But
Playboy
is never going to publish something like “The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati.” Never. Ever. Not in a million years. I'd bring it in, and she'd be sitting there. She wouldn't look at me. She would have turned on the TV by then. She'd be looking at it like she was really interested in it. We had this routine we'd go through. It was always the same thing.

“You want to open it?” I'd say.

She'd shake her head quickly, violently almost.


No!
You open it.”

I'd always tear the damned thing opening it, and she'd scream, “Be
careful!
There might be a
note
in it!” She meant like a note from an editor.

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