Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [40]
Victor was bold, too, with medical advice: “That rash on your arm? Looks like eczema. Old Rafael Flores got rid of mine overnight—a little vinegar and a sweeping’s all it took. Want his number?” Lewis, picturing his arm being scraped raw with a steel brush, demurred.
Lewis ordered takeout breakfast burritos from Happy Yolanda’s, bought vintage gabardine shirts at St. Catherine’s Thrift Store, did laundry at the Casa de Wash ’n’ Dry. Where, on a Saturday morning in June, he found a phone number on a matchbook pulled from a pair of jeans. Under the number was an H or an L, followed by a squiggly line. While kids raced wire carts inches from his toes, Lewis sat in a yellow molded-plastic chair and tried to remember whose number it could be. The prefix was local. Probably a newcomer he’d met in a meeting. Dodging crazed children, Lewis left the laundromat and crossed the street to a pay phone. Once the ringing began, he remembered.
I told Al I wouldn’t sleep with him anymore, Libby wrote in her journal. I said it was getting too weird with the girlfriend, the lying, etc. He said he was sorry about the lying, sorry it had to end, and sorriest about all the sex we wouldn’t have. I feel nothing but detached. Maybe this is what it’s like to be a man. Going in, taking what I want, getting out fast. The Billie Fitzgerald approach: use ’em and lose ’em, she always says. I asked her if she’s ever been in love. I hope not, she said. I hope none of those regrettable skirmishes with the opposite sex was love.
Not even with Little Bill’s dad?
Her face gets that plaster of Paris look. That’s not a topic for today.
How can she be so intrusive and so secretive at the same time? Maybe that’s not such a—
The phone rang.
“Sorry I never got back to you about the coffee,” Lewis said. “I lost your number, but I’m doing my laundry and and I found it in a pocket. I don’t have the coffee information with me. Maybe you’ll talk to me anyway. Laundromats make me so forlorn. Am I taking you away from anything?”
Were all men going to apologize to her this week? Was she insane to be charmed by this outburst?
“Before I forget,” she said, “are you Red Ray’s secretary?”
“Yeah! How’d you know?”
“When I described you, that’s who Billie thought you were.”
“And how did you describe me?”
“Thin, black hair, good laugh.”
He demonstrated the laugh, then said, among many other things, that he was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, son of a Hollywood producer—a TV producer, nobody famous. He’d been married once, and divorced, “back in the Neolithic.”
“What about you?” Lewis said abruptly. “Ever played your violin in a symphony?” He was a particular fan of Beethoven and Mahler, he said, and she could’ve guessed. Wagner, too. The tonnage. The origins of gravity.
“So you want to have dinner sometime?” he said.
“Okay.” She felt a little worn out just from listening to him.
“Saturday? A week from today?”
She checked the calendar, half-hoping the Cactus Pharaohs had a gig. No dice. “That’s fine.”
Should he come pick her up? At first she thought, no, no, better to agree on some public place. In Rito, however, that meant bars—not such a good idea, given his AA status. Then she remembered that Lewis had already been to her trailer; if he’d wanted to come and chop off her arms at the elbow, he could have done so months ago.
“That would be good,” she said.
Falling asleep that night, it hit her. Unless she counted caving in to Al Keene’s ever-present horniness, this was her first real date in nine years.
With a drunk, no less.
LEWIS bit into his sandwich, a peculiarly fluorescent-pink ham salad on white, yet another Round Rock variation of shit on a shingle. Friday was Ernie’s day off, and the replacement cook reliably presented food that made everyone grateful even for Ernie’s meager abilities. “Where do you take someone out to eat around here, anyway?”
“The Basque Garden in Buchanan’s