Inner Tube: A Novel (18 page)

“Normalcy,” she finally said, drawing back.

“What?”

“I don’t think I can afford you anymore.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” My jaws were painfully clenched. “I’d ruin you.”

“Normalcy,” she repeated.

I had no idea what she meant.

Irv was highly excited when I called that night looking for sympathy. He’d torn up the linoleum in his back room and was testing the stress tolerances of the framing timbers.

“I’m going to have an orange grove,” he explained. “PVC pipe irrigation with a controlled drip, Gro-Lux fixtures with…”

“Irv, Irv. I’m at the bottom of the shaft and no way up.”

“Skip the melodrama,” he said irritably. “Swing by here in your tank and let’s see what we can do about soil medium at this hour.”

“Okay, okay.”

Irv always was a good influence. We drove out to the Lincoln Park golf course and filled the trunk of the Olds with sod from the sixteenth green.

“Lotsa worms,” Irv said.

We laughed like boys in the pitch dark.

On the way back, he told me of an upcoming houseparty across the Bay. There I met the wise man who cut holes in his shoes.

And it was not long after that I fled the city that has always wanted to be somewhere else.

A
T FOUR THIS MORNING,
a Violet intrusion. The receiver nestled conveniently into the pillow, and for the first minute or two her voice blended into my dream: On the
He and She
set, measuring Paula Prentiss for a flight harness, and Violet’s the script girl calling out sandwich orders. Some catch or quaver pulled me the rest of the way Out of sleep with the knowledge that my ex-wife was at the edge. Wouldn’t I come to her?

The immediate instinct was evasion. I was a wily lunker bass sheltered in thick weeds. The shiny lure ran past me again and again, and up from the darkness of my fish memory came Sunday afternoons fuzzed with Librium when Violet would invite me into her deepest bowels and I would feel the length of her spine under me like water-polished stones. But I stayed in the weeds.

“I’m here now. Can’t go back.”

It was a city of ten thousand gas stations, of countless possibilities, and I had been happy there. Why not go back?

Because one of us would in some way have to die, give up our ghost.

Violet always said: “I’m not ready to be casual about you.”

If only she were.

There could be no sleep after that call. I smoked and drank root beers and read the last book my anthropologist had sent, a mystery novel by an Indonesian diplomat. I thought about the banana tree under her bathroom window and the senescent cafeteria across the street.

By seven-thirty there was nothing left to do but head for the job. Out by the flagpole I saw Heidi and her mate, he, I supposed, on his way to dispense bed baths and muscle relaxants at Cherry Ames. They jostled and teased like a couple of study hall sweethearts and I watched from the car as long as I could stand. He knew the touch of her mouse teeth, the press of her bones, as well as I did; and the things that kept her up at night far better. If there was no going back for me, there was no going forward, either. I kept my eyes on the gas gauge as I drove past them.

So now I’m pumping up and down in the tube, looking to relax. It’s a voice-activated elevator and by calling out numbers like an auctioneer, you can paralyze its soldered brain so it wont go anywhere. The stainless-steel wall is cool against my back, the softly buzzing alarm quite pleasant.

An overriding mechanical voice on the intercom: “Clearing command block. Clearing command block.”

So much for relaxation. I step off at
LIB CNTRL
equipped with a requisition bearing the supervisory signature (forged) which the new procedure guidelines call for. What I’m looking for is the
G.E. College Bowl
segment on which U.C., Santa Clara—and Violet—appeared. The clerk is a pouty little gum-cracker I’ve never seen before; and if she’s going to wear sunglasses and wing-nut earrings, I probably won’t see again. She sighs heavily and the characters crawling across the display terminal reverse themselves in her green lenses.

Behind her, the stacks curve massively like ranked waves. One of the top-tier caliphs was touring through here a few years ago and noted brown patches marring the symmetry, even a stripe of white here and there. His decree appeared the following day: All cassette casings, without exception, shall be black.

This great accumulation has a majesty that never fades for me. I’m as engorged as a miser in a room full of gold, with a sense of completion, of value captured. And always I am wrapped in images of the monastery. There is no self-denial in this life. I am a voluptuary overflowing with time, a lotus-eater in my vault of books. In gold leaf and lapis blue, I illuminate the work of Dalmatian poets. I annotate to exhaustion the long-suppressed memoirs of Scrooge McDuck. And in the mornings, after porridge, I walk windy parapets overlooking a landscape empty of men.

Here it is then: Program #121, 4/17/65, B/W, Synchro-track. I am anxious to see Violet at twenty, deadly serious, as she claims to have been, and still unplucked—though I can’t imagine her innocence being any more than a technicality. I would have been just fifteen in April of ’65, a weedy snot caught in the embracing tentacles of bogus sophistication and no doubt as unattractive to an ambitious fruit heiress like Violet (her self-portrait) as I was to everyone else. We might have done well to have gotten it over with right then and there.

I’m secured in my cell and about to begin the investigation when quashed. Delvino invades my ear with his hearty hellos. Yeah, he takes a personal interest. In espionage cant, he would be called my “operator.” No way to pull a cordless phone out of the wall. Clever, clever.

“We always have something to discuss, am I right?”

There are the usual ambiguities to comb through, certain code phrases to exchange. We’re attuned, like an old married couple, so it’s no strain to pick out the undertones of threat he’s feeling. There might even be someone standing over him and making notes.

I improvise. “We should have dinner sometime soon. There’s a good Greek place in town. You know, a neutral site.”

He reacts as if I’ve asked him to spend the night.

“No, no…I don’t think, well…Really, uh, not wise.”

And to think I’m here because I wanted to escape California by winning fifty thousand dollars on a quiz show.

“I’m sorry. Five-point penalty, and I’ll repeat the entire question for Ohio Wesleyan. British novelist Thomas Hardy was the author of a series of novels set in the mythical county of Wessex….”

Violet’s round, cream-puff face has tightened with—what is it? Fear? Shame? This is her third incorrect, and premature, answer in a row. Her “team” is falling far behind.

“Santa Clara, Feilinghaus.”

“Would that be Henry the Fourth?” Her voice sails into a harsh upper register.

“No, I’m sorry…”

It could be my imagination, but Violet’s prim sweater seems to have darkened with flop sweat. Her hair, though heavily sprayed, has begun to undo itself in response to some magnetic field of humiliation.

Consider the divergences possible inside the same family. A week or so after our return from Las Vegas, Violet’s mother and young sisters came from Redlands for a celebratory weekend of shopping and dining out. A surprise weekend. I’d spent most of that Friday pollinating orchids with my friend Marsh, returned, and found strangers at home. They introduced themselves: Rose and Jonquil. I received new-brother-in-law kisses from two girls who were totally, and quite casually, naked.

“We’re cleaning your apartment as a wedding present and we don’t want to get our clothes dirty,” Rose said, brushing cigarette ash off her breasts.

Smiling, Jonquil returned to her vacuuming. Had to get the job done before Sis and Mom got back from Magnin’s.

Compare this nonchalance with the urgent insecurities of Violet, a woman who could negotiate Santa Monica Boulevard at 50 mph, but needed half a bottle of Chablis to nerve herself for a freshman lecture and bowed to the opinions of boutique salesgirls.

I freeze the image. Her circled lips nearly touching the microphone, Violet bends far forward, as though shrinking from a whip. The eyes of the bow-tied classmate on her left are caught in mid-roll; he anticipates another blunder. Had they warned her during the brownie mix commercial to keep her mouth shut?

“Mr. Earl, the work is
Growing Up in Samoa
and the author is Margaret Mead.”

“That is correct. All right, once again, Santa Clara, the subject is astronomy and your question is in three parts….”

Consider the artificial logic of one thing we name “destiny.” My ex-wife recalls her fascination with the migrants who came to harvest the family orchards and supposes it led her to her current work. My friend and coworker has told me of the secret attentions paid her by a favorite aunt and how they were crucial to her emergence as a lover of women. But I doubt they believe in this sort of continuity any more than I do.

Consider the pure illogic of the realities that pen us in. For Violet, no medication can shorten the hours of insomniac despair which have dogged her all her life. For Ellen, there is no escaping her Seattle cat disease, tiny parasitic bundles that lie in dormant wait on the surface of her kidneys. For both, sharp intelligence is a frequently unwanted gift, a precision tool for the measurement of pain. But I doubt either one of them would trade places with the other.

It’s Ohio Wesleyan in a romp, but Violet has regained her poise. Of the four Santa Clarans, she is the only one to rise above defeat, a flat smile hinting at scorn for the whole exercise. So, with some physical discrepancies (vestiges of baby fat, nails long and painted instead of chewed away), I recognize my wife at thirty-five in this girl of twenty. Switching faces, evading judgment: that mercurial essence is here.

Violet made a joke of subtlety. We were together quite a while before I learned not to anticipate. The fretful neurotic would suddenly take on the hauteur of her noble Bavarian forebears. It was best not to grow comfortable with one’s conclusions. Violet could be at her most tyrannical while pleading for support. Similarly, when arranging some form of subjugation for herself, she was always in command, the author of the playlet. But don’t let such dualities lead you to suspect a simple scheme. Because Violet made all the stops. Her feelings were irresistibly lush and came in tropical profusion.

I’ve found all I’m going to in this tape; no point sitting through it a second time. Ah, swollen youth, how quickly it deflates. And anyway, who was it filed for the divorce? Shit. Can’t go forward, can’t go back. Nobody’s fault, no one to prosecute on this one. We can’t overcome time, separately or together, or clear away the residue it leaves in passing. Still, it should be possible to replicate small pieces of the past. I know how that would be….

Bit by bit, my sleepless fruit heiress cradles into me. Her skin is hot and smooth, like her breath. I decree the smell of orange blossoms. The trees are reaching in the window, I say. And into fine, Aryan hair, I sing the soft, slow tunes that please her. “Mood Indigo” and “Buttermilk Sky” and so on.

Violet, my fragrant bloom, if only you could learn to be casual about things like that.

T
HE SUNSET, LACED WITH
hydrocarbons, was deep purple. Unseen mechanisms turned on lights that beamed cheerlessly on antique shops and design studios along Wilshire Boulevard. Knees against the dashboard, I filled my nose with the smell of good green government ink. I was with my friend Marsh; we had just delivered three crates of psilocybin mushrooms grown from mycelia sent by his stepmother in Olympia, and the money was spilled between us on the seat—fresh, clean bills like chard right out of the garden.

“I’ve been curious about the Solomon Islands,” Marsh said.

I said that was fine, but neither one of us had a passport

“They grow a variety of banana that can weigh up to—”

He was interrupted by an oncoming skateboarder with phosphorescent tape strips hanging from his chin and a bubble pipe clenched in his teeth.

“Youth,” he said, as the kid swerved around our fenders and jumped the curb. “What a dismal job.”

We were passing a carton of orange drink back and forth, working away at a sack of jelly doughnuts. Spotted with confectioners’ sugar, the steering wheel looked as if it had been incompetently dusted for prints. What a pair of night crawlers we made. I craved a leather banquette in some maudlin piano bar, but Marsh, whose enthusiasms were unpredictable, wanted to play miniature golf.

“Precision, precision,” he said. “Like the blossoming of a…”

Who cares! Enough of this aimless remembering. One damn thing I don’t need is to develop a new bad habit. Stick to the tense present and thrive.

Good advice. Except the immediate issue is a thing thirty years old. Double takes and padded shoulders.
My Little Margie.

I could be pulling the lobster shift in a machine shop, crumbs of steel flying off my lathe. I could be sitting on a tractor, discing fragrant black ground for sugar beets. But this is my hazardous profession; it turns me backward, pushes me into not just my own past, but everyone else’s. It propels me without pause from one memory bit to another, feeding on parallels and associations.

I see the cardboard skyline through the window of Vern Albright’s office at Honeywell and Todd, Investment Bankers. I see the spires of the Woolworth Tower and the Chrysler Building paralleled in the fountain pen set on Vern’s desk. I remember staying home from a fourth-grade geography test, the images of a marvelously complete Margie world, city styles distant as Rangoon viewed from a terrace of indulgent pillows.

Enhancement mechanism: I close in and in on the trompe l’oeil skyline until the benday dots of the composite photograph are like a galactic cloud of dust and gas within which time stands still, all motion is perpetual. Negro elevator boys flinch and roll their eyes, powerful men spray frustration through thatchlike mustaches, taxicabs lurch and revolving doors revolve.