Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale (7 page)

In return for yard work, the
old salt had permitted several generations of neighborhood boys to
construct and maintain elaborate electric-train sets out in the
redwood-shingled garage by the creek (the old salt had ridden a
bike everywhere he went, or a bus, and never owned a car), where
around walls shaped into miniature mountains wove at least a dozen
tracks, circling through forests of tiny trees, through dozens of
tunnels, along a running stream with a working waterfall and a
little lake, and through two tiny towns with working lights. In
return for secret places in the garage where Jim could hide his
drugs where Judy would never think to search, he bought the current
generation of neighborhood boys beer and slipped them
joints.

Early on the night Jim’s
first wife forsook him, he had gone out to the garage and pulled
the switch that set the tiny towns ablaze. He took a fat joint
hidden in a bright red caboose and fired it up. He put a couple of
the electric trains in motion, aimed in opposite directions on
different tracks, and he sat there in the dim light smoking and
watching the little trains as they rolled around and around as
though they were going someplace in particular. From the open
garage doors Jim could see Judy through a kitchen window at her
ironing board. As Judy leaned slightly forward, her soft brown
hair fell over her face and Jim could see the lovely curve of her
neck. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse, and

Jim watched the firm muscle
in her brown upper arm flex as she ironed. Once when Judy had
raised her arm as she brushed back her hair, Jim could glimpse the
delicate whiter flesh of a shaved underarm. When the phone in the
kitchen rang, Judy rushed to it. Judging from the brightness of her
smile, it was the call she had been waiting for. Judy sat down at
the kitchen table to talk. At one point Judy threw her head back
laughing, and Jim could see her teeth shine.

The air was sweet that
evening with the aromas of the flowering bushes along the creek
bank and of bread baking somewhere and of both clean and old oil on
the cement garage floor. The lights of the tiny towns had looked
somehow so sad to Jim, and fragile and beautiful, and the tiny
trains made him remember lying in bed as a boy and being rocked
gendy by the faint rumble of an endless freight or coal train
passing through the little coal town at night, headed someplace
special and new and infinitely distant in the mysterious, adult
dark. Jim could hear the flow of the shallow water in Matadero
Creek, and the croaks of frogs, and crickets, and from beyond the
trees the faint sounds of El Camino Real traffic, and he knew that
his life there in that beloved little bungalow with that beautiful
woman talking on the phone to her new loverboy was lost to him.
Even distant sirens sounded like sad echoes from a whole life Jim
could imagine someday only faintly remembering.

Jim had watched his first
wife talk on the phone and laugh as he hadn’t seen her laugh in
ages. Judy looked so happy Jim couldn’t help but be happy for her.
From inside the mouth of one of the tunnels through the miniature
mountains, stuck back deep enough so that the trains wouldn’t bump
against it as they rolled by, Jim fished out the sample jar with
its tiny tear of sperm. He tossed it from hand to hand, as he might
have a baseball, and then held it up in the dim light, tilting it
this way and that, watching the tiny tear glisten as it slid
about. Jim let himself imagine tiny eyes, a tiny mouth, teeth like
tiny tombstones.

The next time one of the
little electric trains swung out of a tunnel onto the straight
stretch of track near him, Jim placed the jar in an empty boxcar
and watched it ride around. Presently Jim heard the screen door
bang and Judy’s footsteps come across the brick driveway. Then she
was a shadow in the doorway of the garage. Jim could smell her
perfume. I’ll be back in a little bit, honey, Judy said quietly,
and Jim said okeydokey. Jim watched his wife walk to her vehicle in
the soft glow from the kitchen lights through the windows. Judy had
combed her hair and pulled it back behind her ears with little
silver barrettes. She had changed into a short
red-and-white-checked sundress. Jim noticed that Judy had a litde
lift to her step. Jim watched as Judy studied her face in the
rearview mirror for a moment, before she pulled her station wagon
on out across the narrow wooden bridge to go do it with her new
boyfriend, Melvin.

In the hot darkness of the
garage Jim had bawled for a while. Then he had plucked the plastic
jar from the boxcar when it swung near him. He closed his runny
eyes, and with a startling vividness he pictured his pretty first
wife naked in her new boyfriend’s arms. Whereupon Jim had started
bawling again. He started jerking off, too. And this time Jim had
no trouble filling that sperm sample jar halfway to its brim in
about a half-dozen furious whacks.

Holding to the shadows, Jim
had walked out onto the little bridge over Matadero Creek. Years
later, when he would attempt to resurrect those moments in his
memory, Jim would recall thinking, Is this my real life? Is this
it? Jim had stood in the shadows in the center of the bridge
blubbering some more and hating himself for it, and finally he quit
it. He listened to the shallow water flowing below. He listened to
the frogs and the faint sounds of £1 Camino Real traffic and
laughter from a yard up the street. He watched as street light
coming through the leaves of the trees along the creek bank was
gathered and released on the shining, tremulous current.

In the darkness two hundred
yards ahead, Matadero Creek disappeared into the entrance of a
tunnel that ran under El Camino Real and most of Palo Alto, to
empty finally into the waters of the East Bay, a perilous passage,
full of rats starved insane, rabid fish, snakes glowing in the
dark, crawdads that dined on the living and the dead: a passage
full of danger at every turn, spiritual fatigue, failures of will,
a daily ton of turds floating to the Bay, along with Jim’s jar of
secret sons.

Even in the enveloping
darkness Jim could see the tiny sparkle of the splash when he had
tossed it, that plastic jar with his name on its label containing
his so-called seed, and he had watched that tiny arc of lost,
secret sons float in the creek’s shallow, shimmering current out
of his life for good.

The Wife in the
Story

1

Although it was against the
terms of the fellowship, Ralph Crawford had retained his part-time
teaching position at Berkeley while he was a Stegner Writing Fellow
at Stanford (and this on top of illegally collecting unemployment).
On one occasion when Lindsay had flown down from Montana for a
romantic rendezvous with Ralph at his Berkeley apartment, she had
gone along with him to the Tuesday-afternoon writing workshop at
Stanford, where Ralph was scheduled to read a story that
day.

Lindsay was thrilled with
the lovely, sunny day and the silly ride down the East Bay,
laughing their heads off, singing along with golden oldies on the
radio, windows wide open, the hillside houses and downtown
buildings of San Francisco shining white as bones in the distance
against a glorious blue cloudless sky, sailboats blowing about the
green water of the bay. In the intense clarity of the light that
day shapes were luminous, surfaces seemed to swell. Then they
strolled across a campus of stone colonnades like caves full of
Spanish sunlight and shadow, sprinklers lifting blue bells of light
above fiercely green lawns, dogs romping in fountains, woodpeckers
pounding high in palms, hordes of absolutely beautiful, blond,
sun-browned people pedaling bikes everywhere, pictures of such
perfect health and happiness and confident hope they made Lindsay
want to barf. Lindsay and Ralph stopped at a plaza display table
loaded with turquoise and silver jewelry, where Ralph helped
Lindsay select a tiny ring of silver fish, which Ralph pledged he
would return to purchase as soon as his next ship came
in.

In the second-floor library
rooms where the writing workshop met, Ralph had introduced Lindsay
around to a blur of faces. She was his fiancee flown down from
Montana, where she worked as a cowgirl, to witness his literary
lionization is what Ralph told everybody. (Then it must be true,
Lindsay had thought, her heart soaring. Ralph really had separated
from Alice Ann.) Lindsay had loved the two high-ceilinged rooms the
writing class met in, with their book-lined walls and comfortably
shabby couches and stuffed chairs, and the huge, oblong table in
one room the writers sat around as they listened intently to Ralph
read in his soft, almost whispery voice between long drags on a
cigarette. Lindsay loved Ralph’s looks, a large, shambling man with
dark, woolly hair and dark eyes, who had such a sensitive, shy,
gentle nature, yet radiated an inner strength she found comforting,
compelling. Ralph smoked continuously as he read the story, and he
often laughed out loud at lines that cracked everybody else up,
too, and Lindsay felt like his wife.

The story Ralph read that
day was the one that became so famous in years to come, about a
couple on the verge of bankruptcy who had to unload their Cadillac
convertible before some creditor could slap a lien on it. The wife
in the story, who was smart and had personality and business sense,
would have to do it. The wife in the story was gone for hours
before the half-drunk, stir-crazy husband got call one. The wife
was making the deal over dinner, she said. Returning home finally
near dawn, drunk and disheveled, the wife called her husband a
worthless bankrupt and dared him to do anything about her being out
all night doing God-knows-what with some greasy used-car salesman,
and then she had stumbled on off to bed and collapsed. After one
sad thing and another, the story ended with the husband tracing his
fingertips over the stretch marks on the backs of his naked wife’s
legs and hips while thinking about how those blue lines looked like
dozens, perhaps hundreds, coundess really, roads running through
the flesh of the wife in the story. The story was a great hit with
the other writers that day.

Lindsay had listened to
Ralph read his story that day and she had thought about how Ralph’s
hands had felt on her own flesh the night before while they had
made love, how warm they had been, and gentle. Could Lindsay go out
and unload a Cadillac convertible in a hurry like the wife in the
story? If Lindsay had been the wife in the story, what would have
had to have happened to drive her to such desperation and
betrayal? The backs of Ralph’s huge hands were so hairy, those
huge, gentle hands.

When Ralph finished reading
his story, the other writers in the class applauded, which Ralph
told Lindsay later had never happened before, at least not since
he had been there. Ralph’s best friend, Jim Stark, had not been in
the workshop that day, and this had disappointed Ralph. Wonder
where that old dog Jim is, Ralph had speculated. Old Jim never
misses workshops. Well, Ralph concluded, Jim had probably been
afraid Ralph’s story would be the hit it was and Jim just couldn’t
handle the envy.

(Actually, Jim hadn’t been
there that day because he was staking out the entrance to where
his first wife worked, sitting across the street in his vehicle
with his old film-noir fedora pulled low over his steely eyes,
while he sipped from a pint of whiskey and waited, hoping to catch
his first wife and her loverboy leaving together, arm in arm, or
holding hands, whereupon Jim planned on displaying his displeasure
by pounding his first wife’s boyfriend to a pulp.)

Lindsay and Ralph had driven
up in the hills west of Palo Alto with several writers from the
workshop to a roadhouse called the Alpine Inn, where they had all
downed pitchers of beer until dark, and then later, when the other
writers had one after another drunkenly departed, Lindsay and Ralph
had pigged out on greasy cheeseburgers whose juice made their
fingers shine. Ralph had licked Lindsay’s fingers clean, as they
sat off alone at a picnic table under the trees by the creek bank.
Looking deeply into his eyes, Lindsay had taken Ralph’s huge, hairy
fingers into her mouth, one at a time, and Ralph had suggested in a
quiet but urgent voice that they employ Lindsay’s plastic and grab
a motel room down there for the night instead of driving all the
way back to Berkeley.

2

In the motel room that
night, after Ralph had fallen asleep, Lindsay had tilted the
dresser’s lampshade and in the slant of light looked in the mirror
at her hips. She jiggled her fleshy hips. The wife in Ralph’s story
had given birth to two children, and yet, except for those blue
highways in her flesh, she had been slim and firm. Lindsay had
found a copy of the story in Ralph’s briefcase. She had noticed
Ralph’s wallet on the dresser.

Lindsay locked the bathroom
door. She lit a cigarette and sat on the toilet seat, flipping her
ashes now and then into the sink. Lindsay flipped back through the
story Ralph had read that day. In the story the wife had had a boy
and a girl barely a year apart before she was nineteen. In the
story the wife had been tall and slim, with blond hair that she
wore very long and straight. Except for a couple of Ralph and Alice
Ann, and one of Alice Ann and their two kids when they were very
young, the pictures in Ralph’s wallet were mosdy of Alice Ann.
Alice Ann had a long, thin, beautiful face, and in some of the
pictures her long blond hair was almost white. Ralph looked so
large and dark beside Alice Ann, a dark, hairy hand clasping a thin
waist, a heavy arm hugging her slender shoulders. The picture of
Alice Ann and the kids was taken on some beach, some ocean in the
background. The kids were building a sand castle whose wet wall
stretched to the ocean’s edge. The boy was as blond as Alice Ann,
but his face was Ralph’s; the girl had dark brown eyes like
Ralph’s, but the nose, mouth, and long, thin face of Alice Ann. Had
Ralph snapped that picture of his little happy family at the
seaside? Adults had obviously helped those kids build their
elaborate sand castle with its many towers. Alice Ann was wearing a
red bikini in that picture. She was smiling and shading her eyes
with her hands, and she had her left hip stuck out so sassy and
sexy.