MEANWHILE—BACK IN BED—THE DEFIANCE HAD NOT entirely faded from Cindy Sanders’ face. She swallowed a big glob of Brie and washed it down with three big gulps of apple juice, watching me closely to see if I was going to mount a serious campaign against her engagement.
I kept quiet. Every single time I’ve gone one-on-one with female defiance, I’ve ended up face down on the floor, twitching weakly. One thing I’ve learned to do without is the myth of male dominance. Possibly there had actually been male dominance in other eras, but constant exposure to women on the order of Boss Miller and Tanya Todd convinced me it had gone the way of the dodo and the great auk.
“I want to get something straight,” Cindy said. “Did you really know Big John Connolly, or were you just conning me?”
“Sure I know him,” I said. “Why would you doubt it?”
“Let’s put it this way,” she said. “Why would you doubt that I’m engaged to Harris? Do you have some notion that you’re better than he is?”
“Not better,” I said. “Maybe just a little more practical. What if you start the wedding and Harris can only decide to put one leg through the door of the church?
“Of course you could marry him in the park,” I added. “No doors.”
For some reason her mood lightened.
“In L.A., maybe,” she said. “If I wanted some freako L.A. wedding, I’d marry the head of Fox and get the Dalai Lama to preside. Members of Harris’ family do not get married in parks.”
“I guess he did look pretty proper,” I said, trying to remember Harris. All I could remember was that he was tall, aristocratically thin, wore a suit, and had an anguished gaze.
“Changes clothes three times a day,” Cindy said, tapping me gently on the chest with the handle of the knife. “I didn’t have to make him buy a dinner jacket the first time I took him out.”
“My gosh,” I said. “I’m just a scout. It’s not every day I meet a girl like you.”
“I’d like to hear more about your wives,” she said. “They don’t seem to have taught you much.”
“They weren’t teachers, just wives,” I said. “They both work for Boss.”
Frankly I was beginning to be sorry I had popped off about her engagement, since the remark had set in motion an interrogation whose purpose was more or less a mystery to me. Cindy was now gathering historical data of a sort all women feel they have an automatic right to. Even Coffee had suspended her antihistorical bias long enough to secure a thorough account of my prior relationships, when we first met.
“I know a flea-marketer’s daughter who doesn’t work for Boss,” I said, to change the subject.
“Where does she live?”
“Zanesville, Ohio,” I said, a direct lie. For some reason I wasn’t ready to come clean about the flea-marketer’s daughter, who actually lives near Augusta, West Virginia, not much more than a two-hour drive from Washington.
“Yeah,” Cindy said, looking at me closely. She had probably activated her truth radar, an instinctive lie-detecting mechanism I’m convinced all women have. It is an enormously sophisticated mechanism which frequently enables women to skip quickly over the fact of the lie and zero in on the motive behind it.
I’ve often been stunned to discover that women can discern with great precision the true motive behind lies I had thought I had merely wandered into casually, as I might wander into a junk shop.
There’s really no winning against equipment so finely calibrated, but there are certain evasionary tactics that will sometimes delay the inevitable reckoning. I decided to try and camouflage the lie with a sprig of truth.
“I have a confession to make,” I said. “I wasn’t conning you yesterday. I do know Big John Connolly. But the Big John I was actually referring to was Big John Flint.”
Big John Flint is a phenomenal trader whose antique barn just outside Zanesville, Ohio—where I had just fallaciously located Beth Gibbon, the flea-marketer’s daughter—was a mecca for scouts of all descriptions. Since the business that had brought me to Cindy was antiques, I assumed she would assume I meant Big John Flint when I uttered the phrase “Big John.”
The fact that she thought I meant Big John Connolly was probably what prompted her to ask me to the dinner party.
Cindy owned three trend-setting businesses, two downstairs and one upstairs in the large building on O Street.
One of them was an antique shop called Schlock, my reason for being in D.C. in the first place. Next door was her dress shop, Fancy Folk, and upstairs, over both shops, was her very avant-garde gallery, which was called Sensibility.
At the time of my arrival Sensibility was filled with the bread sculpture of an émigré Latvian peasant woman. Many of the sculptures evidently represented the eternal feminine, being a mixture of lumps and indentations. “Women are the bread of life, in Latvian folklore,” Cindy explained.
Before I went to see Cindy for the first time, Boog advised me to dress as vulgarly as possible, reasoning that what had worked for him might work for me.
“A tasteful Texan ain’t gonna play,” he said. “It’ll just confuse the natives, what few they is.”
I decided to ignore this advice. I put on a beautiful white doeskin jacket I had bought from a Blood Indian in Montana, and got my Stetson out of its hatbox in the rear of the Cadillac. The Stetson was a brown 100–X beaver, with a hatband made from the skin of an albino diamondback. It had been the Sunday hat of a famous Texas Ranger captain and had probably not been out of its box six times when I bought it from a spur-scout in the Rio Grande valley.
I put on my yellow armadillo boots and a thin silver concho belt that had belonged to a Zicarilla medicine man.
After some thought, I decided to put my Valentino hubcaps on the Cadillac.
Valentino hubcaps were in the form of silver cobras, very graceful. Anyone who flea-markets much will have seen one or two such hubcaps, all of them purporting to be off Valentino’s own cars.
In fact, almost all the hubcaps now being traded are the work of a well-known hubcap forger from Torrance, California. He was finally exposed in the sixties, but not before he had salted the market with several hundred cobra hubcaps. The one detail he neglected, or was too cheap, to duplicate, was the eyes. Valentino’s cobras had real rubies for eyes. And of the many cars he owned, only four—all Hispano-Suizas—were equipped with the silver-plated, ruby-eyed cobra hubcaps.
I had one of the four true sets, bought from Valentino’s secretary, an aged, contentious, dipsomaniacal woman named Beulah Mahony, who ended her days in a dingy apartment on De Longpre Street, in West Hollywood.
I almost didn’t buy the hubcaps from her, not because I doubted their authenticity but because I hated to think of Beaulah without them, knowing, as I did, that they were her last link with youth and glory.
Also, the hubcaps were her last means of securing herself a little company.
Many aged, lonely people own a treasure or two and quickly learn to use them as a tease. By letting it be known that they might—just might—sell the treasure, they can entice collectors and scouts to visit them again and again, if only for long enough to share a cup of coffee or watch a soap opera with them. If the object in question is desirable enough, the old person can sometimes scratch out a marginal social life on the strength of it.
The true test of the honor and discipline of a scout lies in his treatment of the old man or old woman with only one treasure left. When they finally give in and sell it, it means they’re done: tired of the small indignities of the tease.
When they sell it, people stop coming to see them and they die.
My claims to virtue are modest, but at least I never went to L.A. without checking on Beulah Mahony—not that she was invariably grateful for my loyalty.
Beulah was a querulous old orange-haired woman, frenzied one day and apathetic the next. She was so incurably addicted to holding garage sales that the last time I saw her she had even sold her cheap formica table and had made a crude replacement out of forty or fifty phone books she had managed to gather up around her apartment building. She just piled them up in a block and ate off them. For drinks she mixed gin and Kool-Aid, probably because Kool-Aid was the only mixer she could afford.
Beulah’s attitude was not unlike Momma Cullen’s. Any form of charity, even a buddy check, was an insult, but somehow she had figured out that I really liked her, an affection she rightly judged to be a weakness on my part. Consequently—in common with all the other women in my life—she saw no reason to refrain from harsh judgment.
We sat at the phone book table, drinking the revolting drink from two pink glasses Beulah had managed to withhold from her last garage sale. Outside the window, a ditch-digging machine was eating its way down De Longpre Street, belching and roaring as it crunched through the asphalt.
“Jack, I don’t know what to do about you,” Beulah said, occasionally pulling out a sprig of her orange hair and tossing it on the phone books.
“It’s a selfish life, driving around buying things,” she added. Being Valentino’s secretary had not blurred her sense of values, those having been inculcated long ago in her hometown, Topeka, Kansas.
“A man your age needs responsibilities,” she said. “Kids, in other words.”
It was a common theme. Both of my ex-wives had hinted darkly that our marriage would probably have worked out if we’d only had children, though, so far as I could see, they were both as frightened of the prospect as I was.
“If you don’t want none of your own you could always marry a divorcée,” Beulah suggested. “Plenty of them around, and most of them got kids they don’t know what to do with.”
“I don’t think I’d know what to do with them, either,” I said, honestly.
Beulah snorted. “Raise ’em to be solid citizens,” she said. “Decent citizens.”
She had a profound belief in the decency of American citizens in general, though the mostly seedy citizens of her own decrepit neighborhood had often let her down.
“You want to know something, Jack?” she said. “I stole them hubcaps. The one criminal thing I done in my life, besides taking off my income tax, once in a while.”
“My goodness,” I said. “Why?”
“Justice,” she said. “I figured they was my due. I worked for the man eleven years. Some queer would have got them if I hadn’t, so I stole ’em in the confusion. And you finally bought ’em off me, after all this time. Life’s funny.”
And she laughed at it cheerfully, the laugh of a decent old lady from Topeka who had managed to go only slightly batty.
“It’s a good thing L.A. is a big town, with fat phone books,” she said. “Otherwise I’d be eatin’ off the floor.”
Six months later, when I checked in again, Beulah was dead, buried, and forgotten, except by me. A family of nine Vietnamese lived in her apartment. They hadn’t met Beulah, but they remembered her final table.
“Many phone books,” the father said, and the whole small, neat family smiled.