Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [42]
Red parked in front of the office, then headed across the street to his bungalow. Lewis started up the office steps, shook his head, went banging on Red’s door. “How come you haven’t even asked who I’m going out with?”
“Well, God, Lewis …”
“What if she’s a succubus or something?”
Red burst out laughing. “A what?”
“Who knows what kind of woman would go out with me?”
Red walked over to the coffee maker, dumped some old grounds into the trash. “Okay, then: who are you going out with?”
“That woman in the trailer—where Frank spent the night? Libby.”
“Libby Daw? She’s a plum.”
“A plum?”
“She’s got such a warm, open face.”
So far as Lewis could remember, Libby’s face was okay. Round eyes. Tanned skin. A cute kink in her lip when she talked. She wasn’t ugly or anything, but not beautiful, either: more like cute, even droll. He would never have singled out her face for comment. Her slimness, maybe. Her playing the violin. Her connection to Billie Fitzgerald.
“Yeah, well, anyway,” he said, “I wish I knew someplace good to take her. I wish I could cook, it’s so much cheaper, but I don’t even have a hot plate at the Mills.”
“Cook here,” said Red.
“What, so you can chaperone?”
“I’ll hit the starch wars.” That’s what Red called eating at the Blue House. “If I stay for the meeting and the movie, I won’t be home till eleven.”
“A woman here, after dark, at Round Rock?”
“Why not?”
“Isn’t it against regulations?”
“Only at the Blue House. I used to look the other way there too, but guys started pulling them in off twenty-foot picking ladders.”
“I wish I’d known that.” Lewis slid down in his chair so he could stretch out under the table and nudge Red’s shin with his toe. “Why do you think I moved to town? I couldn’t hack the celibate life. You might’ve adjusted, but I never could.”
Red swung his leg away. “What makes you think I’m celibate?”
“I don’t know—all the lingerie strewn about your house? All the women I see trooping in and out?” Lewis cackled and stood to leave. “I hope to God you’re whooping it up over here, big guy.”
RED POURED himself a fresh cup of coffee and watched through the window as Lewis went back to the office. “Celibate,” he muttered. Such a priestly, ecclesiastical word, and not one he embraced. True, he’d gone long stretches without women, but not because of any vow or conscious effort. As a younger man, a drinking man, a bachelor, he’d hit the hay with the first willing victim. Get him divorced, sober him up, add another thirty pounds of padding and behold: a shy, self-conscious, stuttering man.
He was two years sober and three years divorced before he asked a woman out. Cleo Barkin, who ran the alcohol crisis line, seemed the obvious choice. Beige-haired, whiskey-voiced, and widowed, she was older by six or seven years and unflappable. The whole recovery community, including Cleo herself, considered the match inspired and had them married off long before Red even kissed her. So he never did.
Four or five years later, Doc Perrin told him, “I never thought I’d say this to anybody I sponsored, but you gotta get laid, Blue Eyes. Before that armor of yours gets any thicker.”
Red took two more years to comply.
Roberta was a state health inspector, a tall brunette with dark eyes and big bones who wore some ancient sadness like a murky perfume. They met for lunch in Ventura, then drove around, two large people curled in her Toyota Corolla, until they came to the Jet Motel outside of Santa Paula. After five or six visits to the Jet, Roberta asked Red to be her date at the state inspectors’ Christmas party. He wasn’t ready, Red told her. He didn’t know when he would be, if ever. Roberta broke it off, changed her mind long enough for another afternoon at the Jet, then broke it off again. Back and forth, Red never knowing whether she’d be furious or welcoming. Eventually he withdrew. For months, she called “to hash things out,” until he grew phobic around the telephone. He finally spoke firmly, then harshly, to her.