I got it out and showed it to him. "Fourteen thousand to you," I said.
"Why not?" Boog said. "Come to the Little Bomber's and I'll give you a check."
He walked up the driveway with the rifle in his hand, looking utterly sad.
Chapter XII
Twenty minutes later I was in Wheaton. When Jean Arber, in her blue bathrobe, stepped out on her porch to get her morning paper I was sitting in the car in front of her house. The fifty pairs of Twine boots were lined up along her curb, waiting.
Jean saw me just as she picked up the paper. Then she saw the boots. After a moment, she went back inside. I waited. Almost immediately she came back out, a little girl on each hand. They were in bathrobes and slippers, their hair seemingly curlier than ever. They all looked at me, the car, and the fifty pairs of boots.
Belinda immediately broke ranks and came out to look the boots over. She squatted down in front of them.
"Where's any for me?" she asked. "Don't ya got little boots?"
"This man wasn't put on earth to bring you things," Jean remarked.
Belinda shrugged. "He could, though," she said.
"Where did you spend the night?" Jean asked.
"Baltimore," I said. "You'll never guess what I bought."
"You probably bought some stupid trunk, thinking you could bribe your way back into my good graces," Jean said, finishing her inspection of the boots.
"It's in the back seat."
Belinda began to hop up and down, trying to see. Jean went over and looked, but didn't pick her up.
"Fm the trunk person," she said. "You don't need to see."
She didn't change her expression, when she saw the trunk. She was not wearing a particularly friendly expression, either. Still, she looked at the trunk for quite a while.
"You can get in the car and look," I said.
Jean reached down and picked up Belinda. "Nope," she said. "I'm not amenable to bribes. Belinda is but Beverly and I aren't. Beverly and I have better values."
"Yeah, Belinda's greedy," Beverly agreed.
Jean gave me a cool, critical look. If she liked the trunk, she wasn't going to say so. If she liked me, she wasn't going to say so, either. She kissed Belinda's neck a few times, savoring the smell of her daughter.
"Do you think we ought to cook him breakfast?" she asked, looking at Beverly.
"Sure," Beverly said.
"You're a pushover, Beverly," Jean said. "I'm surprised at you."
"We could go out for breakfast," I said. "There's a Waffle House up the road."
"Yeah, Waffle House," both girls said, in unison.
"No," Jean said.
"Why not?" Beverly asked. "We never go out for breakfast."
"Forget it," Jean said. "I'm not ready for society and I don't want to get ready for a while yet."
"I think you're being selfish," Beverly said, taking her mother's free hand. "Everybody wants to go out to breakfast but you. We have to put on our clothes anyway, don't we?"
"Yeah, but we don't have to get syrup all over us," Jean said. "That's what happens at the Waffle House. Belinda gets syrup all over us."
"Not over me," Beverly said. "I keep away from her."
"Somebody has to sit next to her," Jean said.
"Jack could," Beverly pointed out. "He likes her."
"Hey, you're right," Jean said. "He goes for the selfish ones, doesn't he. Let's give her away while we have the chance."
She handed me her daughter, who immediately began to feel around in my pockets.
"But you're selfish, too," Beverly said. "You won't let us do what we wanta do. You almost never do, you know."
"All right, all right, Beverly," Jean said. "I can't bear your accusations. We'll go to the Waffle House and Belinda can get syrup all over Jack."
We went, and Belinda did display an amazing talent for recklessness with syrup. She insisted on a full waffle all her own and then did everything to it but eat it. Jean and Beverly watched from the safety of the other side of the booth. Belinda strolled around between bites, sampled my French toast, and generally indulged herself.
"Eat your waffle," I said several times, to Jean's amusement. Each time I said it Belinda poured more syrup on the waffle.
"Too dry," she said. She filled each of the little squares on the waffle with syrup. When the plate ran over she stuck her elbow in the puddle. On the way home she insisted on helping me drive, which resulted in a very sticky steering wheel.
Jean didn't say much, the whole time. Her attitude was rather spectatorial. When we got back to her house we dawdled in my car for a while, the girls trying out different tapes in my tape deck. Belinda discovered a pen in my pocket and badgered Jean until she produced a small pad from her purse. Then the girls drew pictures. Beverly drew neat representational pictures of animals, chiefly pigs and cows, while Belinda drew swirls that bore a vague resemblance to people.
After a while I borrowed the pen and wrote Jean a note asking her if I could take her out that night. I folded the note into a little square and handed it to her.
"What does it say?" Belinda asked.
"I can't tell you," Jean said. "It's top secret information."
"It is not," Belinda said, trying to snatch it.
To thwart her, Jean ate the note.
"Did you eat it?" Belinda asked, rather impressed.
Jean chewed it up and when it was hopelessly chewed she took it out of her mouth and handed it to Belinda.
"Have some chewing gum," she said.
"I bet he asked you for a date," Beverly said.
"There's such a thing as being too smart for your own good, Beverly," Jean said. "Try and remember that."
"Are you going to go?" Beverly asked.
Both girls seemed to think the question of some importance. They looked studiously at Jean.
"Don't look at me that way," Jean said. "It's none of your business, at I do. Besides, it's no big deal. Lots of men ask me for dates."
"Who else?" Beverly asked.
"What's a date?" Belinda inquired.
"You know, like going to a movie," Beverly said.
"Oh, Star Wars," Belinda said.
"Beverly's right, I'm out of practice," Jean said. "The truth is nobody asks me for dates."
"Who's the babysitter?" Belinda asked. "Not Linda?"
"Why not Linda?"
"Not Linda," Belinda repeated.
"Okay," Jean said, opening the door. "You can take me out, but only because I need the practice. Get out, girls."
Belinda gave me a sticky kiss before departing.
They ran up the steps to their house, eager to get on with other things.
Jean walked around to my side of the car.
"Out where?" she asked.
"I haven't decided," I said.
"Since it's a practice date, take me to a fancy restaurant," Jean said. "Then I can spend the whole day deciding what to wear."
"Okay," 1 said.
"I don't think Belinda's ever seen me dressed up," she said. "I don't even know if I'm still capable of it I'll probably go buy a new dress."
She was silent for a moment.
"You're causing me a lot of trouble," she said. "It's nerve-racking, knowing I have a date. I'll probably worry about it all day. Who knows what you might try?"
"It's a first date, sort of," I said. "I might not try too much."
"Anything’s too much if it makes me nervous," Jean said.
"My gosh, relax," I said. "We are not quite total strangers, you know."
"Yes we are," Jean said. "I'm not counting that time you're counting. I was just holding my own with Belinda, that time. Besides, you lied to me since. This is a new ball game, understand?"
"Okay," I said.
"I don't even know why I consented," Jean said, and went in her house.
Chapter XIII
I drove around Wheaton until I found a decent street with big trees, parked at the curb in the shade of the big trees, and made my car seat
recline so I could take a nap. My car seats are more comfortable than most beds. It was not a pleasant sleep, though, because I had a vivid dream of Coffee, sitting on the steps of our house in Houston and sobbing because she couldn't get her hippopotamus chair in her car. It was practically the one time she had cried, during our marriage, and I dreamed about it often. It seemed to symbolize all failure, but particularly mine. If only I had behaved better and been less obsessed with antiques and nK)re tolerant of Coffee's bad taste in modem furniture I might never have brought her to that pass.
It hadn't been, in the end, such an awful pass. I borrowed a pickup from a junk dealer I knew and hauled the chair to Austin for her. Even that hadn't cheered Coffee up: She had wanted to make a clean break, and what was clean about my hauling her chair to Austin? She may have been right, too. If I hadn't done that maybe we would have made a clean break. Instead we had spent several years talking on the phone twenty hours a week.
The dream was so vivid that it woke me up. Naturally I called Coffee.
"Hello," she said, not very happily. She had a little gulp in her voice when she said it, as if she had not really wanted to speak but was compelled to by politeness.
"Are you okay?” I asked. "I just dreamed about you and the chair."
"Well," Coffee said, "it's awfully early for you to call. I just got to the office."
"I keep forgetting there's a time difference," I said.
"I wish you'd stop dreaming about me," Coffee said. "It's not very nice of you."
"What do you mean?" I said. "I can't help what I dream about. Nobody can. Don't you ever dream about me?"
"I don't have dreams," Coffee said. "I just sleep."
'That's nonsense. Everybody dreams. You have to. You'd get sick if you didn't."
"Well, I'm not sick and I don't!” Coffee said. She was as dogmatic as Belinda.
"I guess you just don't remember them," I said, which was a mistake. Coffee's terrible memory had been a source of trouble ever since I'd known her. She really had almost no memory at all. Once she forgot what butter was, for example. Naturally she was extremely sensitive about her memory, and denied that it was bad.
"I want you to stop dreaming about me," she said
"But Coffee," I said. "You can't control dreams. They just happen."
"Am I naked or what?" she asked, surprising me.
"No," I said. "You were just trying to get the hippo chair in the car."
"Well, am I ever naked?" she asked. "That's what worries me.
"Worries you how? It's my dream, not yours."
"Yeah, but I'm involved with Emilio now," she said. "If he knew you were dreaming about me naked, he'd have a fit I told you how jealous he is."
"Coffee, would you be sensible?" I said. "Emilio can't possibly know what I dream unless you tell him, and there's no reason why you should tell him."
"He knows we talk," Coffee said. "He's always asking what we talk about"
That was interesting.
"What do you tell him?"
"Well, I sure don't tell him you dream about me naked," Coffee said.
"I don't dream about you naked," I said.
"You used to," she said. "You mentioned it once."
"When?"
"Once," she said.
It had begun to seem that if any woman made two remarks to me the second remark would be a complete non sequitur, bearing no relation to what we had been talking about, or to whatever might be happening in their lives. Often enough, nothing was happening in our lives anyway.
"Why did you gulp when you said hello?" I asked.
"Don't change the subject," Coffee said. "Just cut out dreaming about me naked. That way I won't have to tell Emilio."
"Fine," I said. "Why did you gulp?"
"I don't know," she said. "Where are you?"
"Maryland," I said, secure in the knowledge that her grasp of geography was so bad that she would take that to mean I was still in her part of the world. Coffee clung to the strange theory that the states were somehow arranged alphabetically. In her mind Maryland lay next to Louisiana, which was not too far from Austin.
"If you'll come we could eat some Mexican food," she said. "That's one of my problems with Emilio. He hates Mexican food."
"I'll come, and we'll eat some," I said.
There was a pause.
"Do you think we'll ever get married again?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said. "You didn't like it much the first time, remember."
"Yeah, but maybe I was too young," Coffee said. "That's what Momma thinks."
She was silent for a moment.
"If you keep dreaming about me you must want something," she said. "Anyway, I don't want to talk anymore. Now every time I talk to you I want to cry."
"I don't see why," I said.
"You don*t want me enough, that's why," Coffee said wanly. "I always thought you'd be the one person who always did want me enough. Only now you don't."
It was sort of a terrible accusation. One reason it was terrible was because it was unanswerable. I was very fond of her, but I probably didn't want her enough—particulariy since I was not the one who got to measure enough-ness, the most elusive of all qualities. If one's wanting fell one degree short of enoughness the whole tenor of the relationship was spoiled, it seemed. Enoughness admits of no subtraction: Either one's desire is enough, or it's a failure.
At that point. Coffee hung up. Though it was 1,700 miles to Austin I could feel her crying as I started the car and drove out of Wheaton.
I drove to Georgetown, where, as if by a miracle, the parking place in front of Cindy's shop that I had got the day I met her was empty again. I parked and went up to the gallery, to see if anyone there knew anything about the boot exhibit. The only person there was a thin young woman dressed in black. She was beautiful but quite severe-looking. My mere presence in the gallery seemed to affront her slightly. When I stopped in front of her she glanced at me over her glasses, but didn't speak.
"I'm Jack," I said "Were you expecting some boots?"
"We were expecting them yesterday," she said, rather cuttingly.
"I don't know why," I said, stung by her tone.
“You did agree to bring them yesterday, didn't you?" she said.
"Look, I didn't agree to bring them at all," I said. "Nothing was said about yesterday, or about any particular day."
"That's not the impression I was left with," she said, with a trace of uncertainty in her voice.
"Listen," I said. "The boots are mine. I haven't spoken to Cindy in three days. She never said for sure that she wanted them, much less what day she wanted them. There are plenty of other places I can sell them if she doesn't want them."
She was surprised, but not yet in a yielding mood.
"Couldn't you just tell me your name?" I asked.
"Amanda Harisse." she said. She seemed a little grateful that I had changed the subject.
"Hams' sister?" I asked.
"Oh no," she said. ''Just a cousin."
"Is Cindy really going to have this exhibit?" I asked.
"The invitations went out yesterday." .Amanda said. "That's why I had hoped to have the boots. It's dangerous to invite important people to an opening until you're sure you have something to show them."
"I'm surprised you work here," I said, smiling at her.
Amanda sighed. "That was Harris’ idea," she said. "The only one he's had in ten years."
"Is Harris pretty broken up about being jilted?" I asked.
Amanda sighed again. I think she found talking to me a little trying.
"It takes Harris some time to realize things," she said "Fm not sure he's figured it out yet"
"Does Cindy ever show up around here?" I asked.
"Could you just bring in the boots?" Amanda said.
I decided to be cooperative. I brought in the boots. Lined up against the bare white walls of the gallery, so far from cowboys, ranches, Texas, they looked pretty silly. Amanda obviously though
t so, too.
"Well, they're no worse than bread sculpture." I said.
Amanda sighed again. I was beginning to like her a little. She looked tired, probably from the exercise of so much severity.
"I bet you think this exhibit is a terrible idea." I said,
"What I think has no bearing on the question," Amanda said.
"Does it have any bearing on any question?"
Amanda looked disgusted. "Don't ask me questions like that," she said. "I don't even know you."
"It's because you're not trying." I said. "I'm very easy to know."
"I don't think I want to know you," she said, "You're making my morning a lot more difficult."
"Well, I still own the boots." I said. "If you don't want to be bothered with the exhibition I could help out by just taking them away."
"I have instructions to buy them," she said, "Firm instructions."
"Then I could set a ridiculous price," I said.
Amanda shrugged. "We pay ridiculous prices for everything we buy," she said.
"Well, I want twenty thousand," I said. Actually it wasn't a ridiculous price, considering that there were fifty pair of vintage boots.
"Twenty thousand dollars?" Amanda said. "For these?*'
"That's only four hundred dollars a pair," I said. "Some of these boots are worth four times that.
"I wish you'd smile," I added.
"Offer me a reason," Amanda said, looking at me gravely. She picked up the phone and dialed. Cindy must have been sleeping with her head on it, she answered so quickly.
"The gentleman is here with the boots," Amanda said, in a voice considerably more nervous than the one she had been using with me. "However, he wants quite a lot of money for them."
There was a pause.
"Twenty thousand," Amanda said.
I was expecting to be handed the phone, to explain myself to an irate Cindy. Of course, I might change my mind and just give them to her, for old times' sake—although there hadn't been that much in the way of old times.
Just as I started to reach out for the phone, Amanda said, "All right," and hung up.