Cadillac Jack

  "Okay," I said. "What I've got is the opportunity to drive about one hundred thousand miles a year in order to buy forty or fifty really nice things. Who are you to tell me that should be my life?"

  "The woman who's not going to marry you," she said. "You really find wonderful things. It's a kind of art. You shouldn't give that up just because you've met a woman with a couple of cute kids."

  "That's exactly what Beulah told me I ought to do," I said.

  I told Jean about Beulah and the Valentino hubcaps, about her increasingly miserable yard sales, about the vodka and Kool-Aid, about the phone-book table. The story about the phone-book table touched Jean so that she couldn't speak. Tears came into her eyes, she fell into my arms, and we made love again.

  "That's a terrible story," she said later, rubbing my shoulder. "That's probably how I'll end up."

  "No it isn't," I said. "You'll end up with lots of nice grandkids."

  Jean sighed. "Well, it's how I would have ended up if I had been true to my vision of my calling. You better see it's how you end up. I should really admire you if you ended up that way."

  "Why are we talking about ending up?"

  She shrugged. "We're not kids," she said. "The years will pass, and both of us will end up. I think it's an important thing to think about."

  I thought of Goat Goslin, a man who had certainly been true to his vision of his calling to the end.

  Jean suddenly looked decisive. She got up and began to dress. I sat up, too, but I had no sense of what to do next.

  "Get out of here," Jean said. "Hit the road. Find me something wonderful. You can't come back till you do."

  I couldn't think of anything to say. It seemed like a pointless order. Jean was standing by her dresser, sort of listlessly brushing her hair. She didn't have a great deal to brush. As I was putting my boots on she burst into tears. She didn't come over to me. She just stood there, crying.

  "It's hard not to hope for things that can't really be," she said. "I wouldn't mind marrying you, to tell the truth."

  "It could really be," I pointed out.

  "Sure, and you'd end up a fat antique dealer with five or six fags working for you," she said. Then she went downstairs, leaving me to dress alone.

  When I got downstairs she was standing in her kitchen, wiping her eyes and making tea.

  "It seems a stem fate you've assigned me," I remarked.

  "I didn't assign it," she said, with a flash of anger. "You chose it. Only now you want to wiggle out of it, when in fact the thought that it's fate is what tempts me about you."

  "I wonder why Belinda didn't get a stomachache," she said a little later. "We better go pick them up."

  When the girls came out of their nursery school and climbed in the car Belinda looked anything but sick.

  "I hit a boy," she remarked.

  "Why?" Jean asked.

  "Didn't like him," Belinda said.

  "I wish you'd make her behave," Beverly said. "Nobody in her class likes her."

  "Un-uh, some do," Belinda said.

  "I can't make her behave," Jean said, sniffing. She seemed to want to cry some more.

  "I can't stop thinking about the woman with the phone books," she admitted.

  On the way back we passed a yard sale, or the tag end of one. The sale had been going on all day and only dregs were left. Nonetheless we stopped and looked. The girls contemplated a broken doll and Jean and I poked through a couple of cardboard boxes filled with battered kitchen utensils.

  "I could use a new blender," Jean said, though there were no blenders in the boxes. However, I did find a nice rolling pin, twenties vintage, for 75 cents. There was a woman in Vashti, Texas, who collected them. 1 could probably get twenty bucks for it if she didn't have one like it.

  "You see," Jean said. "You can't help yourself. I didn't find anything and you found an appealing rolling pin."

  "We found a doll," Belinda pointed out.

  "Forget it," Jean said. "Let's go to Baskin-Robbins."

  "What?" Beverly said. "Before supper?"

  "I know, Beverly," Jean said. "It's a complete breakdown of discipline. However, it's what I feel like."

  We ate ice cream cones, all except Belinda, who insisted on what she called a banana splut.

  "Split, split, split," Beverly said. "You always use the wrong vowel." Belinda ignored her.

  When we got back to the house the girls spotted a couple of chums sitting on the sidewalk a few houses away. They immediately ran off to join them, leaving Jean and me in the car. We sat and looked at one another.

  "I think you're being too rigid," I said. "We might get along fine. There's nothing so great about driving around finding things."

  "Listen, we're not talking about it," she said. "I don't think I'm planning to marry anyway. I'll just stay the way I am, only I'll receive occasional visitors."

  "Jimmy's detective is probably taking pictures of us right now," I said.

  Jean made a face. "Who cares?" she said. "Jimmy's a jerk."

  "I don't know what my role is supposed, to be now," I said. "Can I at least bring you good antiques to sell?"

  "Yeah, you can do that," Jean said. "Would you like to take the three of us to Disney World?"

  "Of course I would. When?"

  "Maybe in about a month," Jean said. "I’ve been promising them for about a year, but I don't ever seem to get the energy. I hear it's awfully crowded. I'd probably just lose one of them. Belinda runs on her own track, as you know."

  "Sure," I said. "About a month would be fine."

  "That would be nice, if we did that," Jean said. "Then I could stop feeling guilty for not taking them."

  She opened the door and got out. I felt that things were not happening right but I also felt sort of paralyzed. I couldn't think of how to make them happen any other way.

  Jean walked around the car and stood on the curb, looking worried, or maybe just perplexed. Down the sidewalk the four children were conferring. Belinda was looking out our way, watching her mother. Jean came over to my window, her hands in the pockets of her bulgy blue coat.

  "I still think that coat's too big for you," I said.

  She leaned in the window and gave me a quick kiss. For all her defiance I think mention of the detective made her nervous. After all, it was something she had to deal with.

  "Go away and stop tempting me," she said. "This really isn't your life. But you better be back here in a month. I don't want to let these girls down."

  She turned and went in the house. I thought of following and trying to make one more attempt to sweep her off her feet, but I knew it wasn't the kind of gesture she would appreciate. As I was easing away from the curb Belinda came skipping down the sidewalk. The wind, blowing from behind her, blew her curls into a kind of golden hood around her face.

  "Where you going?" she asked cheerfully.

  "I don't know, Belinda," I said.

  "I don't either," she said. "Jist bring some presents when you come back."

  Chapter XVII

  I drove out of Wheaton and got on the Washington Beltway, headed more or less toward Texas. I had been given a sort of mandate, but the mandate had not contained any directions as to where I should go.

  Clouds were gathering—it was the time of early darkness, gloomy dusks that would have been midafternoon had it been July. I didn't really want to go to Texas, where I had just been. I decided I might just as well aim for the far comer of the country—Seattle, maybe. There were some interesting junk shops in Seattle and several more in Portland and Spokane. I could angle up to Minneapolis and shoot right across the top of the great plains.

  Nonetheless, I didn't really want to start. I kept thinking the car phone would ring. It would be Jean, changing her mind in the nick of time.

  In order to give her a little more time I slipped off the Beltway and drove down to Cleveland Park, for a last check on the Millers.

  When I came in Boss was sitting alone in the kitchen, drying her long raven ha
ir with a blow-dryer and drinking coffee. She glanced at me but she did not look welcoming. She looked as if she preferred to sit and dry her hair and think her own thoughts. When I asked where everyone was she merely nodded toward the den.

  I went in and found Micah, Josie, and Eviste sitting on the floor in front of the big TV set, like three small children. Dusk had fallen—it was almost dark in the room. Micah's little TV set sat on top of the Miller's big TV set. The little one was tuned to a Mary Tyler Moore rerun, so that Micah and Josie could play electronic basketball on the big TV set. It took only a glance to determine that Josie was winning.

  "Howdy, wanta play a game?" she asked. "I got Micah whipped and Eviste can't understand the rules."

  She was wearing a yellow T-shirt, yellow silk running pants, and yellow Adidas. All in all she was easily the most cheerful person in the house.

  "This game has serious flaws," Micah said. "The refereeing sucks. I should have had about a hundred free throws by now."

  Eviste was smoking pot and following the basketball in a rather dreamy way.

  "Anyone want to go to Seattle?" I asked, not sure that I felt like taking such a long trip alone.

  "Shoot, Fm staying right here," Josie said. "Boss is paying me twice as much as I could get in Henrietta and Fm learning the real estate business besides. If she opens up an office in Midland I might even get to run it."

  "Theodore Roethke lived in Seattle," Micah observed.

  "Hey if you see Little Joe will you explain the situation to him?" Josie asked. "He don't seem to be getting it too well, over the phone."

  "Sometimes I feel like Ted," Micah said. At first I thought he meant Theodore Roethke, but then I realized he meant Ted on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Josie, not steeped in Roethke, realized this right away.

  "Sometimes you act like him, too," Josie said. "You spend too much time making up poems. Why don't you ask Boss for a job?"

  "But she's mad at me now," Micah said. "She hates me now."

  The Miller household had always been strange, but somehow there had always been intimations of normalcy underneath the craziness. These seemed to have died or disappeared, gone wherever intimations go. The craziness had won.

  The Mary Tyler Moore Show was approaching its climax and everyone turned to watch it, as if responding to subtle cues that I had missed.

  "Merde!" Eviste said, evidently annoyed by some twist the plot had taken.

  "I know," Micah said. "I hate it that Ted's always the scapegoat. I don't see what's so great about Georgette, personally."

  In the kitchen Boss was still sitting. I stood beside her for a moment, and rested a hand on her shoulder.

  "Want to go to Seattle with me?*' I asked.

  Boss shrugged my hand away.

  “No," she said.

  I didn't say anything. Boss looked up at me.

  "I'm tired of men standing in my kitchen looking helpless," she said. "What do you want?"

  I was immediately tongue-tied. I hardly knew what I wanted. Certainly a coherent summary would have been beyond me. I didn't even know how to ask what had happened within the Miller household. From what I could see the collective momentum had been lost. Boss still had her individual momentum, and Boog might recover his, but the momentum that had once attracted everyone in Washington to them had simply disappeared.

  I decided I might as well just leave.

  "Check on Coffee, this time," she said, as I was at the door. She went to the sink, rinsed out her coffee cup, and left the room without looking at me again.

  Still, I had trouble turning toward Seattle. I hit the Beltway, but just before I got to 1-66, the real start of the journey, I pulled over, stopped, and called Jean. I got Belinda.

  "Where's your mother?"

  "Upstairs," Belinda said.

  A moment later Jean picked up the other phone.

  "Hi," I said.

  Jean was silent a moment.

  "Get off, Belinda," she said. "The call's for me."

  "And me, maybe," Belinda said.

  "Hang up!" Jean shouted.

  Belinda slammed down her receiver.

  "Why are you calling?" Jean asked. "I just washed my hair.'*

  "Oh, sorry," I said.

  "What, precisely, are you apologizing for?" she asked. "There's nothing to apologize for. You've got to stop that."

  I tried to think of a justification for the call—something I had forgotten, maybe—but I hadn't forgotten a thing and nothing came to mind.

  "Listen," Jean said. "Fm not going to save you. Men always want women to save them from being what they really and truly want to be. I've been suckered that way before and I may be suckered that way again, but not right now, okay? I know you think you can wear me down, but you're wrong."

  "Well, okay," I said. "I guess I'll probably go to Seattle, then."

  Jean was silent a moment. "Drive carefully," she said as she hung up.

  I drove carefully back down to Wytheville, passing within two miles of Mead manor, where, for all I knew. Mead Mead IV was dining by the pure light of a nineteenth-century lightbulb.

  As usual, once definitely on the road, I felt a little better.

  I soon went back in my mind to a conversation I had had with Jean, in bed in Wheaton that morning. She had made a lighthearted attempt to get to the bottom of me.

  "What are you really looking for, in all this looking?" she asked. "The perfect cunt? The perfect fried egg? The perfect little girl?"

  "I don't think I expect perfection in any of those spheres," I said.

  "Then how come everything you buy has to be beautiful and perfect?"

  "It's just practical," I said. "It's easy to sell fine objects if they're perfect. You don't have to apologize for them."

  Jean had been rubbing my stomach. She looked out the window and didn't say anything.

  "It's hard to sell something if you have to start off listing its defects," I said. "That's all."

  "Make a list of my defects," she said, looking me in the eye.

  "No," I said.

  "I dare you," she said. "I want to know how you’ll go about disposing of me, when the time comes, defective as I am.

  "I don't even know if you have defects," I said.

  She chuckled. "You have a tendency to dishonesty," she said. "My defects are obvious. Skinny. No tits to speak of. Picky. Quarrelsome. I have a bossy daughter. No skills to speak of, except a few modest ones in the domestic areas. Plus I tend to get crazy unless someone loves me a lot."

  "None of those would keep me from loving you a lot," I said.

  Jean looked reflective.

  "What might keep you from loving me a lot is that you don't want to love anyone a lot, I don't think," she said. "It's tiresome work. Means holding still and being bored half the time. I think you'd just rather move around collecting little loves. Affections. Little light ones that you can put in your car for a while and then get rid of."

  "I don't think that's fair," I said.

  "I didn't say it was bad," Jean said. "It's okay. You're not ungenerous. In fact you're rather giving."

  Then she dropped the conversation, lay down with me again, and we cuddled for a while before making love again.

  It had just been a little bit of bed talk, but it came back to me and stayed in my mind all the way across West Virginia, Indiana, and Illinois. I should have been more conclusive, then, it seemed to me. If I had just said the right words, or if Jean had, we might have dispelled all the vagueness that afflicted our relationship—vagueness about what we both wanted, apart or with one another.

  But we had started to touch one another again and had failed to reach any conclusion, leaving me to finish the conversation in my head as I glided across th^ Midwest.

  For a while I felt as if I were actually about to reach a conclusion, after which I would understand everything I needed to know about myself, about my experience, and about my relations with beautiful objects and beautiful women. I felt heavy, and waited for the conc
lusion as one waits for a belch. Any moment, the belch in my head would come, and the first thing I would do was call Jean, wake her up, and explain to her that I finally knew exactly what was going on.

  But if the conclusion was to come like a belch, driving proved to be my Alka-Seltzer. I slowly fizzed back into a blank, relaxed state, and instead of waiting for the conclusion I began to wait for St. Louis. The sun was well up before I crossed the river and passed beside the Gateway Arch. By the time I got tired enough to sleep I was in Nebraska.

  Chapter XVIII

  In the Northwest I had an extraordinary run of luck. For three weeks, every time I turned around I found something unusual, and unusually splendid.

  The run started modestly at a garage sale in Vancouver, where I bought a New Guinea dagger made of cassowary leg bone. A spry, elderly, blue-eyed Britisher was holding the garage sale. When I bought the dagger he asked if I had an interest in a really unusual weapon.

  "Sure," I said.

  "What would you give for the club that killed Captain Cook?" he asked.

  "I didn't even know a club killed him," I said, feeling that I was probably dealing with a nut, albeit a sprightly nut.

  "Oh yes," he said. "It's a Tongan club. I have the full provenance, if you're doubtful. I am descended on my mother's side from Admiral Sir John Hunter, who was a very competent artist, if I do say so. He made excellent drawings of Hawaiian fauna. I've got the club just in here."

  It was a wonderful club, whether or not it had killed Captain Cook. It was made of ironwood, had a little wrist loop, and was incised with genealogical ornaments of some kind, showing a bird, the sun, and the moon.

  Amazingly, the old gentleman, whose name was Legh, did have a more or less believable provenance for it. Though it had once been in his family, it had somehow slipped out and had had to be bought back at auction, in the early seventies. I read the catalog description, which did make it seem likely that the club had been used to give Captain Cook a whack or two, although not until he had already been stabbed.

  Mr. Legh's house was full of interesting weapons. He loved scimitars and had two hundred or so, some of them in splendid jeweled scabbards.