9

My romances tend to move with speed. Ann and I met on a Friday afternoon, by Saturday night we were “going steady” as she put it, Sunday I moved my toothbrush and hookah downstairs, and on Monday morning Ann poured cream in my coffee without being asked and told me to pick up formula on my way home from school. One moment we were blitzed by that first rush of new love, and the next time I looked around, we were sunk belly deep in a comfortable rut. Or stability, depending on how you look at it.

The new life felt considerably better than the old one had, so I stayed with it, never stopping long enough to wonder if there might be more than just this way or that way. Throughout the years, both before and after Ann, I’ve never been able to see more than two choices at a time. This simplifies decision making, but Lana Sue says my narrowness of options causes me to make mistakes. I think I would make mistakes no matter how many choices I was given.

I know exactly why I felt better with the new life than I had with the old one. We’re coming up on an important point here: Pre-Ann and Buggie, I had a poor outlook. I thought people are born, we hang around a few years pretending it will last forever, either we breed or we don’t, we consume more than we create or we don’t. Mostly we’re miserable and every once in a while we aren’t, but whether it’s a tenth-week termination or 106 years down the line, sooner or later we all disappear. So what?

With that attitude it’s no wonder I watched I Love Lucy and smoked dope all day. The little I managed to pull off was motivated by the unpleasantness of the alternatives. School beat work, so I stayed in school. Being alive put off the disappearance, so I did what had to be done to stay alive.

And then—drum roll—Buggie swallowed a tube of Krazy Glue. Suddenly something mattered. Something has to matter. Otherwise, a person’s life will be miserable and empty. Am I the last one to figure that out? The what that matters is unimportant—God, Coke-bottle collecting, track and field—all are equally useful in staving off the uselessness. For my stepfather, Don, bowling matters. Napoleon wanted to conquer Russia. Lana Sue’s mom thinks the quality of her life is directly dependent on the meat prices at Kroger’s. Career and love life may be a little trite, but they seem to work as well as anything.

To someone on the outside, your basis may look like a joke, but if you know it’s important, really know and go on knowing, you’ll never fall into despair.

After all those years of neoexistential pouting, I awoke Monday morning caring about something. Driving in to class on the I-45 loop, I seriously worried about Buggie’s diet, Ann’s reproductive organs, my future. Within a week, I started writing a book. No matter what Sartre, Camus, or Vonnegut says, a man with no future does not write a book.

I enjoyed making love in the glow of TV light and the wave that swept over me when I awoke early and watched Ann’s face asleep on the pillow next to me. Those first few weeks were an orgy of touching, meaningful moments that made me sick with love. However, it was the smaller rushes, the day-to-day routines, that gave me the powerful something-matters feeling I had always wanted—pushing Buggie in a grocery cart down the aisles in Food Lion, sorting socks next to Ann at the Laundromat, holding Buggie while she swabbed his ear with a warmed Bermuda onion when he had an infection—that’s when I felt life was worth the trouble even if it has to end.

Another rule: A woman who makes laundry day fun is a woman to keep.

The semester ended in a flurry of B minuses and C pluses. Summer loomed as a long, easy three months of warmth, family, and regular sex—or the summer would have loomed if I’d had any money. The only job I could find was breakfast-lunch dishwasher at the Hard Wok Cafe on East Colfax. I like Chinese people. Remember that. My body does not contain a single ethnically prejudiced bone, but Jesus Christ, it’s unnatural to expect someone to eat rice and bok choy before 8:00 a.m. Our breakfast special was jellied lamb loaf. Try jellied lamb loaf with your first cup of coffee some morning and see if you don’t resent our little Oriental brothers.

And all the cooks, waiters, and busboys spoke nothing to each other but Chinese. Fast Chinese, like they’d gone to the Ho Chi School of Speed Speaking. They had so much energy and, at that time of day, I had so little, I felt like a 33 1/3 man in a 78 world.

I wrote my first Western in the Hard Wok kitchen. Professional dishwashing is a great job for mental retards or soaring philosophers because you must be either so far below the work that it constitutes a challenge, or so far above it that the drama is all in your brain and your bodily actions can be ignored. To those hyper cooks banging wok tools and singing “At the Copa” in Chinese unison, I may have appeared to be scraping, spraying, shoving, sorting, and stacking, but in actuality my Jackson Sterilizer dishmachine and I were in 1882 Bitter Creek, Wyoming, defending goodness and fistfighting bad men with livid facial scars.

Except that they drank, fought, and chased women endlessly, all my characters were stolen directly from Andy Griffith TV show reruns. Usually I played Andy’s parts and the Jackson Sterilizer was Barney, but sometimes we’d switch and he’d be Gomer while I played Opie. The garbage disposal played the role of Ernest T. Bass. We blocked out every scene, experimenting with dialogue, going over the fights and shootouts one instant at a time.

At 2:30, I sped home, took the stairs to my apartment two steps at a bound, and typed furiously for an hour before my mind wandered and I lost the lines that sounded so bright and clear in the steam of my Sterilizer. The book was about a sheriff with bad manners and good intentions and a woman the other way around. The sympathetic whore with the heart of gold acted suspiciously like Aunt Bee, and Floyd shot himself every time he picked up a gun, but, as a cheap Western, I thought the book worked, sort of.

Typing done, I reread the previous day’s work, fixing blatant inconsistencies, like the heroine’s eyes that kept changing color and the bad guys whose names were never the same two chapters in a row. After that, I watched a real Andy Griffith rerun, taking notes of course, and waited for the moms in their Volkswagen bugs and buses to carry away all the little Jesses and Heathers downstairs. Around 5:30, Ann knocked on the ceiling twice with a mop handle and I answered with a hiking boot. Then I trotted downstairs for an evening of quiet domesticity.

• • •

I decided it would be fun if Buggie’s first words were multi-syllabled and significant. His biographer would love me for it. For two weeks, I debated between “environmental action” and “Spare change, mister,” finally opting for “transcendental.”

“Transcendental,” I said seven thousand times.

“Agwahk,” Buggie answered.

My job was to sit Buggie in his high chair and feed him supper while Ann worked on our own dinner, which by then had become the big event of the day.

“Open up,” I quacked in my duck voice, shoveling in what I could from a Flintstones bowl of lentil-barley soup. I cleanly shaved the spit-out off his chin with the spoon. In two months, I’d become a whiz at the father skills. I cleaned, fed, entertained, and when I wanted, ignored the baby as well as any sperm daddy around. Didn’t even retch at peeling off a diarrhea-filled diaper. I call that commitment.

“Transcendental,” I said.

Buggie reached for the soup bowl, but I saved it. “Transcendental,” I said again.

“He’s not a parrot,” Ann said.

“Transcendental.”

Ann moved around the stove, throwing vegetables and spices into a Dutch oven on one of the burners. “I wish you wouldn’t treat him like a pet.”

“He’s a genius. Did you see him playing baby in a coma the other night?” Buggie shook his head from side to side, daring me to stick soup in his mouth.

“I saw you feeding him chocolate kisses when he got it right. The sugar kept him up all night.”

“Transcendental,” I said. I reached over and pinched Buggie’s little nostrils together. After a moment’s resistance, his mouth opened and I popped in a spoonful of soup.

Ann stirred whatever it was with a ladle. I loved suppertime best of all—the three of us together, doing small important jobs. My kind of peaceful.

“He’s not a dog,” Ann said.

“I know. He can’t learn to bark. Transcendental.”

“I mean it, Loren.”

Buggie spit out the mouthful of soup he’d been saving. I’ve seen that kid hold stuff in his mouth for hours before blabbing it out at an inappropriate moment.

“I just want the Bug to know the things that were important to me as a boy. I didn’t have a dad to teach me tricks.”

“Such as?”

“Such as…I want to show Buggie how to hitchhike and panhandle in parks.”

“Loren.”

“Real soon I’m going to teach him to roll reefers. He’ll be the best year-old reefer roller in Colorado.”

“You better be kidding.”

“Buggie’ll be the hit of every party. I’ll buy a home movie camera and film him and send it off to Hollywood.”

Ann turned clear around. “Loren, Fred is my son. Not yours.”

“I forget sometimes.”

“Write it down. He’s my son and he’s a person, not a pet.”

“A person, not a pet.”

Buggie lunged forward, arms at full extension, and pushed the soup onto the floor. The bowl landed right side up and spun around and round, showing first Dino, then Barney, then Pebbles.

I said, “Transcendental.”

• • •

A week later, in the parking lot at Wendy’s, Buggie made a fist at a Jeep CJ5 and said, “Car,” just plain as could be.

Another couple of weeks, he learned Mama, TV, me, and trouble. I don’t remember the little punk ever saying “transcendental.”

• • •

After supper we usually sat around and read or watched television until bedtime. The first couple of weeks I lay on the couch a lot, smoking pot, but that gradually lost its charm. Getting stoned alone with someone is different from getting stoned alone alone. There isn’t much use. I had more fun chasing Buggie around the living room. Once he learned to walk, Buggie moved quickly on to running, then constant running.

He ran like a monkey, with both hands over his head, but not like a kid because he didn’t squeal and shout. Whoever heard of a child playing tag without making noise? I’d chase him left around a baby bed, then cut back right to head him off, and he’d scoot under the bed and over an arm of the couch. Buggie wasn’t very fast—he was only one—but he had the concentration of an athlete, say a pole-vaulter or a gymnast. I almost hated to end the game by catching him.

When bedtime finally arrived, I would grab him around the waist and, as I carried Buggie upside down to his baby bed under the mobile of plastic farm animals, he always looked up at me over his bottom lip with that what-did-I-do-to-get-treated-this-way face. Maybe he thought night-night was punishment for allowing me to catch him.

While Buggie and I played, Ann busied around, scissoring figures for the felt board storytime or glueing glitter and poking holes in poster paper. Most nights she practiced songs from a book that showed hand signal accompaniments. Itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout, that sort of thing. To me, it takes at least two grown-ups to handle one child. Four—divorced real parents and new stepmoms and -dads—works even better. But Ann took care of ten. And me. Imagine that.

She didn’t talk much about her business. In fact, Ann didn’t talk much about anything, and because of that, I took a long time getting to know her. We never worked out those subtle signals that husbands and wives who have lived together for years use to get across what they really mean in spite of what they say.

“Would you care to leave the party, dear?”

“Oh, I don’t care, honey, it’s up to you.”

A long-term mate should know whether that particular “I don’t care” means yes, no, or I don’t care, but with Ann, I never knew for certain what she meant, so I had to act on the literal value. Acting on the literal value can cause a lot of misunderstanding.

Another thing I couldn’t catch on to was her thought process. How she chose a movie or why she decided on waffles one morning and oatmeal the next. Ann told me she was satisfied with us and that was all that counted for her, but I wanted to know why she was satisfied so I could do something to keep her that way.

What Ann and I did mostly that summer was make each other happy. Which is a lot to claim. We went from not being together to being together so fast, it’s hard to believe that real love was involved. I felt like I loved her, believed I loved her, but how real can love be with someone you hardly know? Love or not, we caused happiness in each other, and I don’t think either Ann or I had been happy for as long as a summer before. Besides, look at all the loving couples out there who feel miserable most of the time. Given a choice between love and happiness, I go with happiness. Love might come along later.

• • •

For my birthday in August, Thamu Kamala and her mom, Joyce, came over to sit with Buggie so Ann could take me out to dinner. Buggie and I were playing crocodile and the kid when Thamu Kamala marched through the door. Crocodile and the kid involves me slithering around on the rug while Buggie throws couch cushions at my head.

“Mom’s parking the car,” Thamu Kamala said.

“Come on in, we’re playing a game.”

She stood in the doorway, glaring at me on the floor. “Look at you, wallowing like an animal. Buggie must think he’s trapped with a fool.”

I sat up. “That’s some vocabulary for a five-year-old kid.”

Thamu Kamala went into her familiar hands on the hips routine. “I have an IQ of one-sixty-one, which makes me a genius. So there.”

“Okay, genius, let’s work out a truce. We both like Ann, right? We both spend a lot of time in her apartment. I think we should try to be friends.”

Thamu Kamala tossed her hair as contemptuously as a woman twenty years her senior. “I’d rather be dead.”

“That’s a possibility.”

“What’s a possibility?” Ann asked, coming in from the bedroom. She wore her best long skirt and a white blouse with strings tied around the sleeves. Her earrings were gold dangles that I hadn’t seen before.

“Your boyfriend threatened to kill me.”

“Don’t threaten to kill Thamu Kamala.” Ann bent to pluck Buggie from the couch. She held him high and swung him around and across her shoulder. Every time I saw those two together I turned all emotional inside.

Joyce came in the door dressed like a Gypsy fortune-teller. “Who’d you threaten to kill, Loren?” Her eye makeup was excessive and the black fingernail polish overstated the style a bit, but I liked Joyce. I admire any single mother who’s cheerful.

Thamu Kamala hid behind her mother’s sparkly, full skirt. “He threatened to kill me. We should call the police and have Loren hauled away.”

“I didn’t threaten to kill your daughter.”

Joyce smiled, open and friendly, as if she believed me instead of Thamu Kamala. “Her father’s been reading her a book on child abuse among the nonspiritual,” she said.

“That explains everything.”

Joyce laughed and turned to Ann. “You sure look pretty tonight, that’s a beautiful skirt.”

Ann straightened the waistline. “You really think so? I’ve been deciding what to wear all week. Every stitch I own is clean and ironed in case I change my mind at the last minute.”

I wished I’d been the one to say Ann looked nice, but by then it was too late. My only recourse was to play the efficient young family man. “We’ll be home by two at the latest. Numbers are next to the phone. If he cries give him juice, bedtime is seven-thirty, and…and…” I ran out of instructions.

Joyce looked impressed. “My, my,” she said to Ann, “you’ve trained this one well. Thamu Kamala’s father was too cosmic to be bothered by bedtime.”

Ann came up and put her arm around me. “I’ve got a winner, all right. Pop’s in the refrigerator, cookies in the cookie jar.”

“We’ll be fine. Where are you two lovebirds planning to dine?”

Ann smiled at the word lovebirds. “Los Gatos. I heard they have a band. Wouldn’t that be nice? Live music makes a place feel so fancy.”

Single moms will talk all night if someone doesn’t put a stop to it. I looked at my wrist, pretending I wore a watch. “Ann, hon, my birthday will be over soon.”

As we walked out the door, I heard Thamu Kamala say, “Jesus, that guy’s got the astral aura of a goat.”

• • •

All the way across town Ann worried that I didn’t like Mexican food and was just being polite to humor her.

“Why would I do that?” I asked.

“You always sacrifice what you want in order not to hurt my feelings. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather try the Grinning Greek downtown? I don’t mind. I like them both.”

“I have never sacrificed anything not to hurt feelings, and how do you know you like them both if you haven’t eaten in either one, and it’s my birthday. If I didn’t like Mexican food, believe me, I’d say so.”

Ann twisted a button on her peasant blouse. “I wish I could be sure.”

“Be sure. I’m exactly where I want to be, doing exactly what I want to do with exactly who I want to do it with.”

Ann sighed and reached under the gearshift to put her hand on my upper leg. “You’re sweet, Loren. You treat me so good.”

I wasn’t aware of that. We passed a billboard that showed a seductive woman lying on a black satin sheet, wishing someone would ply her with Cutty Sark. I fantasized what it would be like to ply the woman. It made a nice fantasy that I revised several times in the next few miles.

“Do you think Buggie will be all right with Joyce?” Ann asked.

From the Interstate, Los Gatos looked like a big, stuccoed armory under attack by a twenty-foot neon tower. As we swung into the parking lot, “The Lonely Bull” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass blared from speakers mounted on top of the building. I circled the lot twice, passing empty spaces in hopes of getting closer, then when I gave up and returned, the spaces were taken. We ended up parking a quarter mile from the restaurant. Before I killed the engine, Ann jumped from the car, ran around, and when I stepped out, she grabbed and kissed me.

“This is going to be far-out,” she said.

“I never heard you use that term before.”

“Far-out’s what the Maharaj Ji used to say about Mexican food.”

• • •

I held Ann’s hand as we threaded through a cluster of concerned-looking people bunched up in front of the shiny blond hostess. “We’d like a table near the orchestra.”

The hostess had the cheekbones of a Comanche warrior. “What orchestra? Name.”

“I heard you have a band.”

“We have a band. No orchestra. Name.”

“Loren.”

She glanced behind me at Ann. “Two?”

I nodded. The hostess wrote Loren and (2) at the bottom of a long line of names. “It’ll be an hour. You can wait in the bar.”

“Where’s that?”

The blond woman stood up and kept going, up and up, way over my head, I couldn’t believe it. She was the tallest blond woman I’ve ever seen. “Through that curtain.” She pointed. If I owned a restaurant, I’d put a hostess out front who smiled now and then, but I hate to judge personalities.

Rooster piñatas and bunches of dried peppers hung from the bar’s ceiling. Much of the wall behind our table was covered by a weaving of the sunrise over an extinct volcano with a little mud hut and a profiled donkey standing at the base. All the colors used in the weaving were shades found naturally in the desert.

Ann couldn’t let herself relax. “Did you see a phone? I forgot to tell Joyce Buggie likes a glass of kefir at bedtime.”

“I told her he’d drink apple juice.”

“Loren, that’s all wrong. He drinks apple juice in the afternoon and kefir at night. Now I have to call her.”

I knew better than to disagree. “I saw a phone in the waiting room.” Ann left, searching for a dime and a telephone.

The customers all looked either drunk or bored—which I guess is what you get when you sit in a bar for an hour, hoping a table will open up. My entire adult life has been dedicated to the policy that it’s better to be drunk than bored, so I waved the cocktail waitress over and ordered a pitcher of margaritas. The waitress was cute, in a young and restless sort of way, but I wouldn’t say she had any characteristics of Spanish blood. She looked more Colorado Presbyterian sorority sister, the sort of woman who drove a Mustang 2+2, permed her hair, and thought sex was a sin but committed it anyway.

The bartender now, he was authentic—swarthy, dark mustache and sideburns, purple ruffled shirt, sneer. Sex wasn’t sinful to the bartender.

Ann arrived moments behind the Presbyterian waitress with our pitcher. “Joyce says Buggie’s okay. He’s helping Thamu Kamala put a puzzle together.” Ann sat and poured herself a drink. “You don’t think Joyce would lie, do you?”

I used the cocktail napkin to wipe salt off my glass rim. “Why would she lie?”

“I don’t know, but she sounded odd. She said Buggie didn’t want to talk to me.”

“He can barely talk.”

“She said he was having too much fun throwing puzzle pieces.” Ann sipped and made a face. “What is this?”

“Margarita, it’s good.”

She sipped once more. “Is it tequila? I don’t think I like tequila.”

For someone drinking something she didn’t like, Ann sure polished off that pitcher in record time. Whenever I drink or smoke pot or have sex or anything relaxing, I like to think about something other than what I’m doing. Who wants to think, I will now chug this tequila before chugging tequila? It takes away the spontaneity. I’d rather dream about fishing or dead writers or what deeds of valor I would perform if a small plane crashed through the ceiling and cut the bartender in half. But when Ann drank, which didn’t happen often, she forced as much alcohol as possible into her body in as short a time as possible. The only way I could keep up was to concentrate on not daydreaming and pay attention to the rise and fall of margarita in the glass. Every few minutes the shiny blond woman came through the curtain and everyone perked up until she called the name. On the average, though, more waiting people came in the bar than called people went out. Two costumed Mexicans carrying an accordion and a guitar pushed through the crowd, singing, “Girl from Ipanema.”

Ann was shocked. “That’s the band?”

I was mystified. “Isn’t Ipanema in France?”

“California.”

“Are you sure?”

Ann nodded. “Suburb of West Covina. One of my sisters lives there.”

“I didn’t know West Covina had suburbs.”

Ann laughed, not her normal laugh, this laugh was definitely tequila-inspired. “That makes my sister the girl from Ipanema.”

One glass into the second pitcher and Ann started to talk. Her diction came out fine, no slurs, no stutters to speak of. I only knew she was drunk because her eyes glassed over and she talked more than usual about things she didn’t normally talk about.

“My dad would really hate you,” she said. “If the two of you ever met, I think he would shoot you with his pistol.” Every father of every girl I so much as took on a Coke date has hated me.

Ann tossed down half a glass of margarita. “Whoa,” she said, “that really slakes the thirst.”

“Slakes?”

“He would shoot you because you smoke drugs and wash dishes instead of working. But mostly he would shoot you because you have a penis.” At the word penis, Ann had a giggle fit. She scrunched down and checked out the neighboring tables to see if any eavesdroppers showed offense.

“Does your father hate everyone with a penis?”

“Only the ones who know me.” She stared into her glass a moment. “Or maybe he hates me because I don’t have one.” As Ann’s mind temporarily dropped into a remembrance trance, I took the opportunity to catch up on my drink and look at the cocktail waitress again. She wore a short skirt and bloodred hose. Her posture seemed contrived to accentuate the bust area.

I wondered what my mom would think of me if I weren’t related to her and Kathy brought me home. She’d probably give me instant iced tea and Wheat Thins and ask me what my parents did for a living. She’d talk about her younger years, then, as I stood up to leave, she’d smile and say, “Hurry back.” Afterwards Mom would scream at Kathy and take away her phone privileges until she promised never to see me again.

Ann came back with a jolt. “Dad mails out a family newsletter every Christmas. It’s mimeographed with a list of where all us kids are and what we’re doing, who we’ve married, how many children, that kind of thing, but after my sister told him about Freedom, he stopped sending me the letter. Isn’t that sad?”

I hadn’t followed the sequence properly. “What’s Freedom?”

“A hippie I cohabited with. He made turquoise jewelry and sold barbiturates.”

“I’ve heard of him.”

“Did I ever tell you I used to take barbiturates sometimes.” Ann giggled again. “I may not act it now, but I was one wild little teenybopper.”

I tried to picture Ann as wild or a teenybopper, but neither concept would flesh out. To me, she had always been a young mother who had to be drunk to say penis.

“I didn’t shave my legs or pits for four years,” she said, as if to prove her decadent youth.

“Neither did I.” The giant hostess pushed through the curtain and called a name. The people sitting at the next table stood and followed her away.

“Didn’t those people come in after us?” I asked.

“When Daddy found out about Buggie, he took my name completely out of the newsletter. Someone reading it now wouldn’t even know I exist.”

“I could have sworn those people came in after we did. I think the frigid beanpole skipped us.”

“When your own dad denies your existence, it’s hard to believe in it yourself,” Ann said. She looked ready to cry. I’d never seen Ann’s entire alcohol progression, so I didn’t know what to expect. Most women slide smoothly from happy to thoughtful to sad to playful to sexy, but every now and then I’d met one who went happy-thoughtful-sad-hysterical-angry-unconscious. That’s the type you don’t want to take into a fancy restaurant.

“Loren.” The blond tower clamped a hand onto my shoulder. “I called your party three times. Once more and I give away the table.”

“I’m sorry, we were talking and didn’t hear. Ann, you take the glasses, I’ll carry the pitcher.” I never seem to go anywhere without apologizing to somebody about something.

The hostess led us through two or three dining rooms, past the roving Mexican duet who still played “Girl from Ipanema,” to a small, round table under a gory bullfighting painting.

“Here,” she said. “The special is chicken tacos. Your waitress’s name is Toni.”

“Miss,” I asked politely, “I don’t mean to pry, but do you have a personal problem that is affecting your attitude toward me?”

That was a mistake. Her lower lip trembled, then her forehead wrinkled. The lake-blue eyes filled with tears and, as the hostess folded into the chair she had intended for me, she broke into mournful sobs.

Ann said, “Now look what you’ve done.”

The hostess lay her head on the table and wept—loudly. I never know how to act around crying strangers. Everywhere I turned diners stared accusingly back at me. A few even muttered ugly comments. The only comment loud enough to understand came from a cowboy two tables down. “Hostessing is tough enough without assholes giving her a bunch of shit.” He wore a fringe jacket and a gray felt hat, obviously a man who ate meat three times a day and thought anyone who doesn’t chew is a sissy.

“Hey, I didn’t give her shit. I asked if she had a personal problem.”

The cowboy pushed back his chair and stood. “That’s not giving her shit?”

“Nothing like the shit you’re giving me.”

“I’ll show you shit.” He stepped around the table toward me. The whole dining room drew in its breath, poised on the edge of a disgusting scene, and, from the sound of the general buzz, public opinion ran with the cowboy.

As usual in these situations, I was saved by the intervention of a woman. The hostess stepped between me and the cowboy, leaving me with a view of the bra line on her back. She sniffed a couple of times. “It’s okay. It’s not his fault. I shouldn’t have come to work tonight.” Her back quivered a second. “I just thought work might be good for me. I thought I could make it through the shift, but I was wrong. I shouldn’t have tried.”

The cowboy was out of sight in front of the hostess, but from the expression on Ann’s face, I gathered he wasn’t going to stomp me after all. That was nice. Getting stomped would have messed up my birthday.

While Ann and the hostess hem-hawed around, apologizing to each other, I poured myself a margarita and considered the implications. Two of my primary goals are to complete life without hurting anyone or pissing anyone off, yet I seem doomed to fail at every turn. In fact, I hurt more often than I help. How do people manage inoffensiveness? Do people manage it or are my goals automatic failures?

“That sobered me up,” Ann said. “Let’s order another pitcher.”

• • •

We finished the second pitcher before the waitress took our orders, so I don’t recall what I ate. Ann had the chicken tacos and I think I ordered something green and stuffed. Like magic, more margaritas appeared in front of my plate. The way this kind of restaurant works is they make you wait for a table so long that by the time the food arrives, you’re too drunk to know if it’s any good. The rest of my birthday evening was like trying to watch two television shows on one television. Awareness came in, went out, came in again, but the plot kept moving right along whether I was there or not.

I did come around for some important information. From the blur, Ann’s voice said, “I’ve been offered the assistant directorship of a community day-care center, a hundred and twenty kids, eleven teachers, fenced-in play area, a cook who fixes lunch and snack, then cleans up the mess. What do you think?”

“I thought you loved your own kids?”

Ann nodded. “I do, but Thamu Kamala leaves for kindergarten in three weeks, and the Wilderness Society is transferring Jesse’s dad to San Francisco, something to do with whales. The other kids could probably come with me.”

I dropped my fork. I don’t know whether someone picked it up or gave me a new one, or maybe I picked it up myself, although I doubt that. All I know is my hand soon held a fork that looked and felt similar to the one I dropped.

At some point, the cowboy stood over me, breathing like a tired bear. His hands were clenched, so I didn’t look any higher. I concentrated on my refried beans, pretending they so engrossed me that I couldn’t notice anything else. He didn’t say anything that I remember. Later, I raised my head and he was gone.

Ann was still talking, but I’m not sure if I missed a little or a lot. “I’m tired of doing all the work myself, and it would be nice to be around other women. At the big center I’ll earn vacations so we can travel and go camping. I really miss camping. I haven’t been once since Buggie was born.”

“I didn’t know you liked outdoors.” Every time I felt certain about Ann’s values and opinions, she’d say something new and I’d have to start all over.

“Besides,” Ann said, “with the kids gone you could move into my apartment. Or we could rent a house together. Wouldn’t that be neat?”

“You mean live together full time? Leave my place? All my books are there.”

I have a feeling this conversation lasted clear through whatever we ate, but my brain switched to another channel and didn’t come back until I found myself pressed against Ann as she leaned back on the car hood.

I heard myself saying, “Let’s go to my apartment and make love.”

Ann glowed. “Loren, I’m so happy. We’re going to have the most wonderful life together, you wait and see. All my dreams are coming true.”

“Or would you rather do it on the car?”

She kissed me a long time. Finally Ann pulled back and looked full into my face. “Don’t you love being happy? I never thought it could be so much fun.”

The drive home has left my memory banks, thank God. The next awareness wave caught us in bed in my apartment. I wanted to slow down so I could enjoy the prospect of sex without a child between us, but Ann was in too big a hurry to enjoy prospects. She never was big on foreplay. I think Ann got most of her foreplay in her imagination during the daytime, so when our bodies came together, she didn’t have to waste any time.

I lay there wishing I wasn’t so drunk and likely to switch channels in the middle of something nice. This was my chance to writhe around, make all the noise I wanted, and actually think of myself during sex for a change. But somehow I didn’t feel like you’re supposed to feel when you make love on your birthday. I felt like I was listening to the sound track of a dirty movie.

My mood must have rubbed off on Ann because after a while she lay still with her face in my shoulder hollow.

I said, “I love you,” to see how it sounded, but again, the words came out like in a movie.

Ann cried a few minutes, either out of happiness or misery, I have trouble telling the difference. Then I woke up alone in a room full of light.

• • •

The sweat-soaked sheets twisted around my legs, making my first thoughts run to tequila paralysis. Then, when I shook the sheets off and tried raising myself into the hands-and-knees sick-dog position, I discovered I’d slept with my faceless alarm clock as a pillow. The hands had been circling for hours, tying hair and clock into a solid, immovable tangle stuck to the side of my head. Every ticktock boomed in my ear like bombs marching into Hanoi.

I leaned over the edge of the bed and spit some very old-tasting saliva into the wastepaper basket. I said aloud, “This won’t do.”

The pounding clock on my head and the dropping-through-space stomach were awful, waking up alone in my own bed was disorienting, but the bad news was the room full of light. Brightness meant I was horribly late for work. One hand on the clock so its weight wouldn’t rip out my roots, I stumbled across a pile of dirty clothes to the phone and called the Hard Wok.

What I should have done first is put on my boxer shorts because the Chinese gentleman I spoke with fired me and I don’t handle adversity well naked. Who does? A person would have to maintain an almost egomaniacal self-image not to be affected when he’s standing naked and sick with a clock hanging off his head while a short foreigner fires him from the scummiest job on earth. The man said he’d been waiting for an excuse to get rid of me. He said the kitchen crew refused to work any longer with a spook who argues with himself in funny voices and slow-motion fistfights the dishmachine. That was his exact word for me—spook. Maybe it means something different in Chinese.

Midway through the conversation, the green, stuffed thing unexpectedly came back up. I returned as soon as possible, but the phone line was dead. I found my boxers and put them on and sat, watching Guiding Light and feeling sorry for myself because I couldn’t hold a job I didn’t want anyway. I’ve never been good at doing things I don’t want to do. Soon the room stopped lurching and I staggered downstairs to see if Ann could cut the alarm clock out of my hair.

• • •

My firing brought a quick end to the separate apartments debate before it even began. The Guaranteed Student Loan wouldn’t pay off until school started in mid-September, two weeks after rent was due. Moving in with a woman out of economic distress is generally a major error, but, in this case, I probably would have taken the plunge anyway—eventually. Besides, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice.

We boxed up the books, plants, TV, underwear, and posters of famous (dead) writers, carted the load downstairs, and stuffed it into two vacant baby beds. Ann was tickled pink.

“It was all on purpose, you know.”

“What was on purpose?”

“I got you drunk and seduced you on your birthday just so you’d oversleep and lose your job and move in with Buggie and me.”

“Seduce means to persuade somebody to do something they don’t want to do. I’ve never been seduced in my life.”

“Well, I did it on purpose anyway. I want you stuck with us forever.”

I have to doubt that Ann got me drunk so she could get me fired. Ann was incapable of harboring an ulterior motive.

Before I lost the dishwashing job, I didn’t realize the amazing amount of difference between living with a woman and staying with her every night. Bathroom privileges, for instance, or the fact that Exercise with Jeanie came on opposite Andy Griffith. Or dishes. Whenever I washed the dishes before my books moved downstairs, I was rewarded with deep appreciation and love. Suddenly I was expected to do my part. No more “Oh, Loren, you’re so sweet, you don’t have to clean up this mess.” Instead, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, and every other Sunday, she flopped on the couch with Buggie and said, “Your turn, pal.” Same with laundry, trash, and dirty diapers.

Even worse, I lost my safety valve. When Buggie decided he hated everyone and everything, or when Ann played her Rod McKuen albums about the earth and the sky, or when I simply felt like being by myself for a while, I could no longer say, “See you later, honey,” and go home. I considered taking up smoking so I could run out to the 7-Eleven once a day, but that idea seemed stupid even for me.

Another thing—a person who lives alone for many years tends to develop disgusting habits. Thoughtless nose probing, for example. Talking to myself at meals, leaving notebooks and socks wherever they drop, drinking straight from the milk carton, leaving the toilet seat up, scratching whenever and whatever itched. Overnight I had to start watching myself. I hate watching myself.

• • •

Another main difference between living alone and living with a woman and her child is that you’re forced to pay attention to holidays. Holidays are a time set aside for feeling secure and smug, and they tend to be depressing if you aren’t. Secure and smug. The year before Ann, my junior year at DU, I beat the holiday manics by reading The Grapes of Wrath clear through Thanksgiving weekend. Christmas—the biggie—I settled into bed with a family-size bag of Doritos and a notebook and spent the day listing 101 offbeat ways a person can get himself killed. Easter was easier. Good Friday I ate a half ounce of psychedelic cacti and dry-heaved from the Passion to the Resurrection.

But people with children actually look forward to the holiday season, at least they pretend to. They use holidays to mark the passage of time, bring out the cameras, record growth. Holidays become bribes: “No bubble blower now, maybe if you’re a good boy Santa will bring you one,” or deadlines: “If this kid isn’t out of diapers by Labor Day I’ll scream.” When a couple gets old, they fondly look back on the Easter Dobie wet his pants in church or the summer vacation they packed four kids and two dogs into the station wagon and drove to Knott’s Berry Farm.

I can’t really say what it felt like or what I thought about on a day-to-day basis that first year. The routines are fuzzy, but each holiday is stored on tape somewhere in my cerebral cortex to be replayed whenever the nostalgia impulse overcomes common sense.

There’s Halloween. I dressed up as Aunt Jemima, black face, boobs, the works. Buggie took one look and cried for three hours. Thanksgiving we ate fresh pineapple and trout a la Hemingway for breakfast, then drove down to Colorado Springs to visit Garden of the Gods Park. Buggie said a five-word sentence and that night Ann and I made love on the couch while Casablanca played on the Channel 11 holiday movie.

Buggie was still too young to understand Santa Claus theory—the strange fat man who brought free stuff in the night—but he liked to open boxes. Ann individually wrapped all kinds of stocking stuffers, and Christmas morning while we sat on the couch, warming our hands around mugs of hot coffee and rum, Buggie tore through package after package. Colored felt-tip pens, tiny race cars, bags of gummy bears, pop-up books, a pretend telephone that rang when you twisted the dial—Buggie pulled each one out of its colored paper, glanced at it a moment, then tossed the present toward us, the paper toward the tree, and moved on to another box.

“He’d be just as happy if I’d wrapped forty empty boxes,” Ann said.

I leaned back, faked a yawn, and slid my arm around Ann. The feeling of family was almost spine-tingling. Why hadn’t anyone ever told me what Christmas morning with a loving woman and a young child would be like? I’d have run off and married at fourteen.

Ann shifted into my arm. “I hope he likes the turtle.” She’d spent weeks choosing between a stuffed giraffe and a cow, and, as the stores closed Christmas Eve, ditched both for a giant green turtle with half-closed eyelids and a striped baseball cap that I objected to on the grounds of unrealism. A turtle can’t pull a baseball cap into its shell.

“I bet he loves it.”

“You always bet he loves anything, Loren. Do you realize how important presents are at his age? That turtle could affect Buggie’s whole life?”

My present for Buggie was a twelve-volume set of O. Henry short stories that I’d found at a yard sale across from campus. The plan was to read Buggie one story every night at bedtime—all 241 of them over and over—until he was old enough to read by himself. I thought an O. Henry story a night for several years would affect Buggie’s later life more than a turtle with a baseball cap, but Ann had been so proud when she brought the turtle home from the Target Store that I didn’t say what I thought.

Buggie’s present-opening method was more or less unique to my experience. He didn’t tear on the ends or seams. Instead, he clawed right at the middle of the package until he’d gouged a hole, then he ripped the wrapping paper into strips. The floor looked like refuse from a New York City ticker tape parade before he finally dug his way into the next-to-last box and pulled the turtle out by one of its ears. He sat back, staring at the turtle seriously.

“I didn’t know turtles have ears,” Ann said.

“I didn’t know they have baseball caps.”

“Eekle,” Buggie said.

Ann laughed, warm and at home. “No, it’s a turtle. Turtle like in the rabbit and turtle story.”

Buggie looked over at us. “Eekle.”

Ann set down her coffee mug and leaned forward. I could tell she was pleased with Buggie’s reaction to the turtle. At least he hadn’t thrown it into the pile and gone on to the next unwrapping job. “What should we name him?” she asked.

Buggie held the turtle to his chest, “Hawiet.”

“Harriet,” I said. “That’s a girl’s name. Why would you name a boy turtle a girl’s name?”

“He can name her anything he likes.”

“Hawiet.”

While Buggie crawled toward the big O. Henry package, Ann took our cups to the kitchen for more coffee and rum. I watched Buggie drag Harriet around the big box, muttering to her or him, whatever the turtle was, in some language that runs between babies and stuffed animals. I couldn’t help but wonder if my mom felt this together-with-a-spot-in-the-world glow on my second Christmas. Or Garret’s. Or Patrick’s. It seemed impossible not to feel worthwhile and loving under these conditions, but if Mom had felt something good then, I wondered what happened later. Could the same thing ever happen between Buggie and Ann that had happened between my mom and me? Or Ann and her dad? This was a depressing line of wondering. How could something so simple as a parent’s love for a child get so complicated? The worst things in life are always the best things gone bad.

“Here,” Ann said. She handed me a package.

“What’s this?”

“Your present, silly.”

“What is it?”

“Open it and find out.” I daresay those five lines were being repeated in six million homes across America at that very instant. There’s something nice about tradition. It doesn’t have to be original.

I held off on my gift a few minutes, savoring the feeling. Besides, Buggie was on the edge of discovering literature. He tore straight through the top of the paper, completely unwrapping the box before lifting the top flap. Then he reached in and right-hand-threw the first book at the television. The second was left-handed into the tree. Once all the books lay scattered around on the floor, Buggie tipped the box sideways and crawled in. He sat in the box, holding Harriet by a flipper and looking out at us with those melting panda bear eyes. I could have cried from love.

Ann sighed. “Oh, look, don’t you wish we had a camera.”

I smiled because deep in my sock crib was a Kodak Pocket Instamatic I hadn’t had time to wrap. “Maybe Santa will bring one next year,” I said.

“Next year he’ll be too big.”

“For what?”

Ann’s present to me was a pair of woollysock slippers with leather soles and a red monkey head on the front. While Ann looked proud, I kicked off my flip-flops and tried them on. They felt real comfortable and warm, but I wasn’t completely happy about the monkey heads.

I hugged Ann. “Thanks, darlin’.”

“Loren, this is the best Christmas of my life.”

We kissed a long time until I started to get excited and slid a hand down to her breast. Ann had very sensitive breasts, I guess because she’d nursed Buggie for so long. I could almost always get her wet by touching her breasts.

“Maybe we ought to go back to bed while he plays with his toys,” I murmured.

Before Ann could answer, Buggie took off up the Christmas tree. I heard a sound like a pop and opened my eyes in time to glimpse a shaking tree; then it fell, breaking bulbs, shorting out lights, knocking a philodendron into the turntable, crashing both to the floor. I jumped the end table and waded into the mess, knee-deep in branches, pine needles, and wrapping paper. I couldn’t find Buggie. I couldn’t hear Buggie. He should have been screaming his little head off, but, when I froze for a moment, I couldn’t hear a thing.

Ann was on her knees beside me, digging through the branches, her eyes jittering around, all whites like a wild horse when it’s scared. I jumped from the pile and lifted the whole tree up by the four-legged base. Buggie lay on his back, covered with needles, looking up at us with that expression on his face. That Buggie’s-been-betrayed-again expression.

Ann scooped him up and hugged and cried and ran around the room until Buggie got the idea and started crying also. He looked okay to me, just a little surprised. I think Ann’s carrying on affected him more than the fall. Ann circled the room three or four times, too worked up to settle in one spot. Finally she stopped and glared at me. “Don’t you ever kiss me in front of Buggie again.”

That seemed like an odd thing to say. “You think Buggie climbed the tree because we were kissing?”

“Why else? Every time I start to feel good, something bad happens. I’m not going to feel good anymore.”

“Ann, that’s not rational.”

“Who says I’m supposed to be rational?”

All day, Ann concentrated on feeling as depressed as possible so nothing bad would happen to us. She didn’t even perk up when I gave her the unwrapped camera. To watch her fussing around the apartment, roaming from place to place, yet never letting Buggie leave her sight, you’d think this wasn’t Christmas and we weren’t all together.

• • •

Maybe her “act the opposite of how you feel” logic worked because the day before New Year’s Eve, something good happened. We found a two-bedroom duplex on the same block as Ann’s day-care center. The duplex was blue with a big fenced-in backyard, a single garage, and a private patio next to a rock garden with some prickly plants that weren’t dead. Ann and I talked in plurals about the duplex. Our bathroom. Our broken oven. We should find a set of chairs for our kitchen. For the first time, I didn’t feel as if I was living in someone else’s place.

Ann had been poor for so long, she’d become a real pro at secondhand-store shopping. Not that I hadn’t been poor as long as Ann, it’s just that I don’t have standards when it comes to my surroundings. A foam rubber pad on the floor and a phone company cable spool were good enough for me. I never had the patience for the secondhand circuit.

Ann had plenty of patience for both of us. We made all the rounds; found a beautiful iron bed frame at the Salvation Army, an overstuffed rocker and love seat at the St. Vincent de Paul Store, a firm mattress and springs at a garage sale in Aurora, and best of all, two long chests of drawers with most of the paint and some of the knobs still like new. No more baby bed storage.

“We can get rid of the cribs now,” I said, though I should have known better. No woman has fourteen places for babies to sleep unless she wants them.

Tears formed. “I like my cribs. Some of these have been with me since the Divine Light. Look, see this spot? Buggie knocked a tooth out right there, and Joyce gave me that one on Thamu Kamala’s third birthday. Jesse swallowed a peach pit and almost died in that one. I saved him. How could I throw out the crib Jesse was in when I saved his life?”

“We don’t need them anymore.”

“We don’t need your desk either.”

Ann and I compromised. We carried all the various bits of baby paraphernalia out to the garage except for three especially meaningful pieces. I had a hell of a time getting them all in, had to pile the frames and little mattresses two deep, baby beds on bottom, cribs, cradles, and bassinets on top. You’d think Ann was having her cat put to sleep. She said bye-bye to each piece.

“The beds will still be here when you need them.”

“It’s not the same, Loren.”

I shut the garage door and, so far as I know, neither one of us saw those cribs again for four years.

She shouldn’t have threatened my desk. It was a beautiful desk I found sitting next to a Goodwill Industries dumpster in the Cinderella City parking lot. Like to never fit it in the backseat of my car. My desk was a slightly larger version of the one I sat behind in the second grade—chair welded permanently to the desk legs, pen trough on the far side of the sloping top. The lid flapped open so if I wanted anything from inside, I had to clear the top and stack all my papers and typewriter on the floor.

I loved that desk. Loved typing at a fifteen-degree angle and doodling Charlie Brown pictures on the wood. For authenticity, I ruined a steak knife carving and on my chair, so when I typed a long time and stood up, you could read LOREN LOVES ANN and SENIORS ’68 on my butt—if you could see my butt.

The desk didn’t see much use that spring, though. I finished the Western in October, and by January, schoolwork had lost its charm. This was the last semester of my senior year and all my classes were required subjects I’d been avoiding since high school. Geometry. Botany. Ethics. What does an English major need with ethics? Even my English classes bored me silly. “Jonathan Yardley’s Place in the History of Literary Criticism” and “Major Colorado Poets.” Like any writer, in fact like anybody I’ve ever met, including critics, I think the literary critic belongs in the same category as the blowfly. And Jonathan Yardley is to literary criticism what belladonna is to the dry mouth. As to “Major Colorado Poets,” the quality drops off dramatically after Peter Pym, the Western Shakespeare.

My New Year’s resolution was to survive the semester and graduate. Within a couple of weeks, I realized I’d set my sights too high and modified the goal to survival until Easter vacation. By Lincoln’s birthday it was survive until Friday afternoon. The ethics class was the worst. Ethics must be my tragic deficiency.

• • •

Spring break we drove across Idaho to visit Ernest Hemingway. Ann wanted to see Zion National Park, but I had something important to discuss and Hemingway was the closest dead writer of major magnitude. I promised her Zion in the summer, a false promise because events came up that summer and Ann never made it to Zion. I feel kind of bad about that.

The trip was a disappointment. Buggie caught the croup, or what Ann called croup, the cabin we rented came without hot water, the Chevelle threw a radiator hose, and, the real disappointment, Hemingway didn’t provide any answers. The bum hardly provided any waves, just a few weak hisses, more like swamp gas than immortality. I’ve always suspected that macho woman-bull-lion-killer act hid a shallow personality. Maybe his heroes showed no emotions because Hemingway had none himself. I don’t see any use in admiring a person without emotions.

Almost a foot of slushy snow covered the grave, but that’s no excuse. If emanations can pierce the coffin and six feet of dirt, snow should be child’s play. A dead greeting card designer could vibe through a foot of snow. It may be that Hemingway used up his creativity in life—I can respect that. What good does creativity do a dead man? Still, you’d think something would be left, a few inventive ashes or something. Of course, I’m not Hemingway’s type. It could be that way down in the ground, he sensed an antihero overhead, a wimp who likes women and thinks bullfights and wars are silly, and he decided not to emit while I was in the vicinity. Figures the self-idolizer would turn into a snobby corpse.

Still, I was disappointed. I loved my family, they made being alive mean something, but we’d been together a year and that first rush of mattering was slacking off a bit. With graduation looming in the near future, I needed some reassurance that life was more than a personal adventure. I’d decided happiness meant a lot, but I wanted something else—something bigger than love between two mortal people.

Hemingway never was big on reassurance in his life and writing. I guess I was asking too much to expect it from him after his death.