Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [36]
“Red had you write that?”
“It wasn’t any big deal.”
“Red hasn’t sponsored anyone new in years.”
“This wasn’t sponsoring. He was just trying to show me some things.”
“Ahh.” Furious jotting. “All right, then.” Stan reached into a side drawer, brought out a packet, handed it to Lewis. “Keep in touch,” he said. “Let us know where you are and how you’re doing.”
Lewis hoped that the packet contained money, but found only an AA meeting directory, brochures for several halfway houses, and a list of community health clinics where psychological counseling was offered at little or no cost.
LEWIS did feel guilty, as if he were letting Red down by not taking the job. He decided, as retribution, to give the office a good going-over. File some stuff and toss the junk. Lose those brown roses on the mantel.
He hauled a vintage Hoover out of the storeroom and was merrily bashing into baseboards when Billie Fitzgerald walked through the door. She was dressed, as before, in mud-splattered coveralls, barn coat, rubber boots. Off went the vacuum, in a dramatic de-crescendo.
“I knocked but you didn’t hear,” said Billie. “I’m meeting Red.” She plunked down in an overstuffed green chair. She sat like a man, knees splayed open, coat bunched around her shoulders. Her hair was twisted into a loose knot. “Hey”—she pointed a gloved finger at Lewis—“you’re guy in the truck, right? Who wouldn’t say jack?”
Lewis shot her a surly look.
She laughed. “Red said you’re a scholar. You know, I always think about going back to college. Just to catch up on all those books that supposedly shape our lives but nobody ever reads.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
Pulling off one glove with her teeth, Billie let it drop from her mouth into her lap. “Well, there’s the Bible. You ever read it?”
“Parts,” said Lewis.
“Well, this whole wrecked civilization is based on a book most people have only read parts of.” Her eyebrows were glossy, superbly arched, like flexible brown feathers.
“The Bible’s a good one,” said Lewis. “What else?”
Billie unbuttoned her jacket. Beneath the jacket, her coveralls were open far enough to reveal a few inches of a brown plaid shirt. Layer upon layer: Lewis gleaned no sense of her breasts, waist, thighs.
“Red says I’m a total and complete Machiavellian, but I can’t even remember what he wrote.”
“The Prince. And you don’t need to read it to be Machiavellian.”
“Evidently not.” She began worrying her other glove off with her teeth, finger by finger, which somehow seemed either profoundly lazy or obscene. When the glove came free, Billie leaned forward and dropped it into her lap, a mother cat depositing a kitten. “How ’bout Freud? He gave us the unconscious, right? And the Oedipal complex? And polymorphous perversion?”
Was she flirting? Or was he crazy?
“Can you name a single one of Freud’s books?” she asked.
“Totem and Taboo,” he said. “The Future of an Illusion. The Ego and the Id.”
“So you are a scholar.”
“I didn’t say I’ve read them.”
Billie grinned and whacked her gloves into her palm. She looked like a little girl who set fires just to watch adults panic.
“Okay,” said Lewis. “What else haven’t we read?”
“I never read a word of Emerson, but I heard he’d greet his friends by saying something like ‘What has come clearer to you since we last met?’ That’s been my number-one conversational ploy for years now.”
“I like it,” said Lewis. “Makes you realize conversation was so much more an art in the nineteenth century.”
An eyebrow flexed. “Well, then, what has come clearer to you since we last met?”
Lewis thought of several answers, each more personal—and therefore unutterable—than the last. “Oh, my brain,” he said vaguely. “And what has come clearer to you?”
“That you talk, for one.” She laughed, then grew pensive. “I guess it’s that my son gets more beautiful every day.”
The son. Lewis had forgotten about the son. Some other man’s kid. Lewis had had his problems with other men’s kids. “Uh, how old is he?” He forced interest into his voice.
“Little Bill? Almost sixteen.” Billie