Some Can Whistle (3 page)

“You two aren’t taking this very seriously,” I said. “My daughter’s called twice. What do you think I ought to do?”

Before they could answer, two training jets from the air force base in nearby Wichita Falls roared overhead—“roared” was not too strong a word, either. They crossed the hill where my house sat at an altitude of about fifty feet, followed by a tidal wave of sound. When the trainer jets came over, there was no point in even trying to talk. The sound they brought with them had an almost paralyzing force; one just endured it, thoughtless, blank, and a little resentful at having the peace of the morning shattered.

The dark green fighter jets sped like darts toward the western horizon; the waves of sound that swept over us began to recede, and as it did we all heard another sound, a minute tinkle that had been completely smothered by the surf of jet noise: the phone was ringing. I grabbed for it instantly, but just as I did the ringing stopped.

“Oh, shit!” I said. “Oh, no!”

To their credit Godwin and Gladys were as horrified as I was.

“Sue the air force!” Godwin said, shaking his fist at the departing planes. “Get the Secretary of Defense on the phone. This outrage has gone on long enough!”

“That was probably just one of your girlfriends anyway,” Gladys said soothingly. “That Italian girl usually calls about this time of day.”

She was referring to Marella Miracola—the Miracle, to her worshiping public. Marella was a great star and a good friend, but it was no longer exactly accurate to call her a girl, and in any case she had fallen in love with a man half her age and hadn’t called for months.

“Now what’ll she think?” I said, fearing it had been my daughter. “She’ll think I don’t want to have anything to do with her. I’ll never meet my grandkids.”

“Might be a blessing,” Gladys said, reverting to form. “I’ve met mine, and it’s my guess we’ll be lucky if half of ’em even manage to stay out of jail.

“The person who said children are a curse wasn’t far wrong,” she added. “Look at how cute puppies are when they’re young, but then they grow up to be dogs.”

“Well put,” Godwin said. “My own children seldom offer me the slightest assistance.”

I was well aware that I was not taking breakfast with two of life’s great successes in the parenthood stakes. Godwin’s attitude was frankly Casanovian: for him conception meant goodbye. In his wanderings as a young classicist he had fathered children in most of the places where the British flag had once flown: Cairo, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Cyprus, Kenya, all turned up regularly on my long-distance bill, but it was not clear to me that Godwin had ever actually
seen
any of his children. The only language he shared with them all was French.

Gladys had five girls, all clustered in a tight, bleak corner of the oil patch near Abilene, Texas. Their lives were a constant shuffle of divorcings, remarryings, new loves that soon seemed indistinguishable from old loves. The only thing more constant than this shuffle was the production of offspring; Gladys already had twenty grandchildren, and none of her daughters had yet reached her thirtieth year.

“Haven’t any of your girls heard of contraception?” I asked once.

“It don’t work in our family because of metabolism,” Gladys informed me with a straight face.

Godwin heard her say it and bounced around in his chair for five minutes, making the strange gargling sounds that passed for laughter with him.

“Perhaps you and I have more in common than I supposed,” he said to Gladys, when the gargling stopped. “Metabolism has always been my problem too. I expect it explains why Daniel—who doesn’t seem to
have
a metabolism—will never understand the common lot.

“Not a bad title for a book,” he added, smiling brightly at me. “Why don’t you call your new opus ‘The Common Lot’?”

“Thanks, I have an excellent title already,” I reminded him. “I have a metabolism too, for your information.”

“What are you calling that book?” Gladys asked. “I know you told me, but my memory leaks.”

“‘My Girlfriends’ Boyfriends,’” I told her. “I think it’s a brilliant title.”

“It might appeal to the French,” Godwin sniffed. “Hearty folk, of which Gladys and I are two, won’t go for it, though.”

“Too subtle for you?” I suggested.

“Too corrupt,” Godwin replied. “The suggestion implicit in your title, that you permit your girlfriends to have as many boyfriends as they want, bespeaks an unhealthy complaisance.”

“That’s what I think too, and I come down with complaisance once and know exactly what I’m talking about,” Gladys informed me.

“You came down with
complaisance?”
I asked, twirling my finger around my ear in the universally accepted sign of insanity.

“Yeah, it was right after I had that bad bladder infection,” Gladys said. “Antibiotics didn’t do no good because it’s a virus.”

Shortly after that the conversation stalled. There were mornings when Godwin and I could team-tackle Gladys and force her back a few yards, and then there were mornings when it seemed pointless to try. If she wanted to believe she had once suffered from viral complaisance, why not let her?

I was more irritated with Godwin, anyway. In the twenty and more years I’d known him, his own girlfriends
and
boyfriends must have accumulated thousands of lovers—a Breughelian triptych would hardly have been sufficient to catalogue the writhings and squirmings he had been witness to. How dare he sit there and accuse me of complaisance!

Meanwhile the sun was well up, the day’s heat was coming, and I had missed my daughter’s call.

“There’s nothin’ I hate worse than waiting for the phone to ring,” Gladys said. She stood up as if to clear the table, and then sat back down and stared into space.

“How old would she be?” Godwin asked.

“Who?”

“Your daughter,” he said. “The young nymph with the two cherubs.”

“She’s twenty-two,” I said. “Twenty-three her next birthday. I just hope my agent doesn’t call. It won’t matter to him if I have fifty daughters—I’ll never be able to get him off the phone.”

The phone rang. I grabbed it so quickly it squirted out of my hand and popped up in the air, like a frog. Godwin began to gargle. I caught the receiver on its descent; to my immense relief it was the operator, asking if I would accept another collect call from T.R.

“Certainly, of course,” I said.

“Howdy,” my daughter said. She sounded slightly amused.

“Hi,” I said.

“I’m gettin’ the hang of this collect calling,” she said. “Shoot, if I’d known it was this easy I’d have been calling people all over the place and making them pay for it.”

“I’m sorry if that was you who called a minute ago,” I said. “Two jet fighters were going over and I didn’t hear the phone until it was too late.”

She didn’t reply. A pause lengthened, during which I became nervous. She might be getting ready to hang up on me again.

“Is something wrong?” I asked. “Did I offend you?”

“Un-uh,” she said. “I was just watching Bo.”

“What’s he doing?”

“He’s trying to pee on a cat,” she said. “He’s at that tender age where he tries to pee on things. I feel a little sorry for the cat, but then a cat that can’t outrun Bo don’t stand much of a chance, in this part of town anyway. Bo ain’t quite three.”

Then her mood darkened.

“If them fighter planes you mentioned ain’t got nothing else to do they could come down here and bomb this part of town, for all I care,” she said. “I hate it.”

“Can I just make one request?” I asked.

“I guess, it’s your nickel,” she said.

I was beginning to love her voice. If I’m a connoisseur of anything, it’s the female voice. Through the years—fifty-one of
them now—the voices of women have been my wine: my claret, my Chardonnay, my Chablis. And now I had found a new wine, one with depth and color, bite, clarity, body. I was lapping it up, ready to get drunk on it.

“Just tell me your name and what town you’re in,” I asked.

“My name’s T.R.,” she said.

“Which stands for what?”

“It stands for Tyler Rose,” she said. “What else would it stand for?”

“Well, it could stand for Teddy Roosevelt,” I said.

There was another pause. I had the sense that I didn’t quite have her attention.

“Oops, now he’s trying to hit the kitty with a brick,” T.R. said. “I’m gonna have to let this phone dangle for a minute, we don’t want no squashed kitties today.”

Godwin and Gladys were staring at me. They loved watching me talk on the phone. The concept of privacy held little meaning for either of them. Sometimes I got the sense that the romantic peregrinations of my far-flung lady friends were the only thing keeping them alive.

“My grandson’s trying to hit a cat with a brick,” I informed them. “He
was
merely trying to pee on it, but he seems to have become homicidal.”

“All kids are murderers,” Gladys remarked.

“All kids are murderers,” Godwin repeated. “Write that down. It’s another good title—rather Euripidean, wouldn’t you agree?”

Wails began to come through the phone. More than one voice could be heard wailing.

“What are you crying about?” T.R. said. “Your brother’s the one who got the spanking.

“Now both these babies are crying,” she said to me. “Jesse don’t like me to spank her brother, even when he’s being a dick.”

The wails of my grandchildren grew louder.

“I hate trying to talk on the phone with them squalling,” T.R.
said. “That dope dealer’s still around, too. He’s standing across the street trying to get his pit bull to bite a turtle.”

“You didn’t tell me what town you’re in,” I reminded her.

“I sure didn’t,” she said crisply. “Why would you even want to know, after all these years?”

“So I can come and see you,” I said.

The wails seemed to be diminishing, but T.R. was silent.

“It wouldn’t be Houston, would it?” I asked, making a wild guess.

“Mister, I don’t know a thing about you,” she said, her voice suddenly blistering again. “You could be an old scumbag, for all I know. You could have AIDS and give it to my babies.”

“I don’t have AIDS, are you in Houston?” I asked. “I wish you’d just tell me that much.”

“Wish all you want to,” she said more quietly. “Wish for me like I used to wish for you. I ain’t tellin’ you nothing. If you’re such a smart old fart, maybe you can figure it out. There’s two people waiting to use this phone, and anyway I got to get these kids out of this sun or they’ll be red as lobsters.”

She hung up with some force.

“I think she’s in Houston,” I said to Godwin and Gladys.

“So are you gonna pull yourself together and put some clothes on and go get her, or what?” Gladys wanted to know.

“Gladys, I’ve got clothes on,” I said. “A caftan is clothes. Millions of people in Africa wear them every day of their lives.”

“Maybe so, but this ain’t Africa,” Gladys said. “If you show up at some Dairy Queen in Houston looking like you look now, your daughter’s gonna take one look and run the other direction, that’s my frank opinion.”

I had picked up some caftans in Tunis several years ago, meaning to use them as crew presents for people who worked on my television show. But it was hot when I got back to Texas, so one day I tried one on, to see if what worked for North
African heat worked for Texas heat, too. Pretty soon I was wearing caftans day and night, week in and week out. I don’t know that they made me cooler, particularly—what they did was eliminate the problem of thinking about clothes at all. I just wore my caftans; they were perfect for the reclusive life I started leading right after I sold my production company and departed Culver City forever.

Gladys undoubtedly had a point, though. Caftans would not be ideal garb for my first visit to my daughter. Unfortunately I’d become neurotically attached to them; the thought of having to change to normal American clothes produced a certain dissonance in my thoughts. The dissonance made me grumpy.

“She doesn’t work in a Dairy Queen, she works in a Mr. Burger,” I pointed out, well aware that I was making a picayune objection.

“She’ll still freak out if you show up in a caftan,” Gladys insisted.

“I’m afraid this means you’re finally going to have to get dressed,” Godwin said in a gloating tone.

I gave them both a defiant glare.

The once-respected classicist sitting opposite me had just unscrewed the top from a bottle of suntan lotion and was casually pouring the liquid over his chest and shoulders. His clothes at the moment consisted of a towel across his lap, put there in deference to Gladys’s sensibilities.

“If you think she’ll run for the hills when she sees me, think what she’ll do when she sees you,” I said. “You’re sitting there naked and you look at least a hundred years old.”

“Two hundred,” Gladys said. “He’s the oldest-looking thing I ever laid eyes on, and both my grandpas lived to be over ninety.”

“Sour grapes from two sourpusses,” Godwin said. “I’m frequently complimented for my youthful deportment.”

The top of Godwin’s head was completely bald; a few tufts of long, wispy white hair clung to the underside of his skull. In the summertime he rarely wore anything more formal than a swimsuit;
with Godwin nudism was not so much a philosophy as a convenience. Three of his front teeth were missing, courtesy of a love affair with a biker of unstable temperament. Efforts to get him to replace them had so far been greeted with toothless sneers.

For a year or two, when he first conceived of the book about Euripides and the Rolling Stones, Godwin had staggered around my hill, doped to the gills with acid and other controlled substances, earphones clamped to his head, the Stones’ music pouring into his ears for as much as eighteen hours at a stretch.

Gladys and I both felt that he had not really come back from that experience, though what “back” meant when you were talking about Godwin Lloyd-Jons was not easy to say.

“Anyway, why pick on me?” Godwin asked, pointing his bottle of suntan lotion at Gladys. “Gladys doesn’t exactly dress her age, you know.”