Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [43]
“I inadvertently engender expectations I can’t meet,” he complained to Perrin, who in turn accused him of perfectionism, sexual anorexia, priestliness.
Thank God, then, for Christina. Twenty-seven years old, seven years sober, Christina was an M.F.A. student at the institute down the road, a conceptual artist who earned her tuition by dancing at a strip joint in Valencia. They met at an AA meeting in Buchanan. She asked him out for coffee, then asked to come home with him. The first and only woman he’d had in this house, Christina came almost every night, sometimes arriving very late, after her job, sliding into bed next to him, not even waking him up. She never moved in a single thing, and made do with his toothbrush and combs. They drank coffee together before she left for school. A few times, she brought food and made dinner. He gave her a little money, a ten here, a twenty there, whenever she indicated a need. Eighty dollars, once, for art supplies. He was surprised and pleased she turned up for as long as she did, about two months. They would lie in the darkness and discuss her problems at school, her artwork, and her stripping, which she didn’t mind because her boss was so fierce with the customers. She had gotten sober young, and was self-contained and direct in a way Red admired. Her body was long-waisted and supple and strong from hours of dancing, and with it she pulled him back from a lost, deep place where he’d long ago abandoned his own desires and sense of possibilities.
When she didn’t appear for a week or so, he knew it was over. She did show up once more to tell him she’d met an artist, someone closer to her age, and was going to New York when school was over. She spent the night with Red—one last time, her request. She said that he’d steadied her, calmed her, and thanked him. Now, every so often, there was a postcard from New York, Connecticut, London, all addressed to “My Fine Friend….”
LIBBY had a hard time deciding what to wear. Persona problems, as her old shrink Norma might have said. Which mask to don? She settled on a black T-shirt and a black-and-white polka-dot circle skirt, which turned out to be a little too dramatic.
Lewis showed up ten minutes early in khakis and a green sweater darned, poorly, at the elbows. He roamed around the living room while she applied lipstick and finished drying her hair. She was aware, for the first time, of the preponderance of postdivorce self-help books on her shelves. He asked to borrow a beginner’s Spanish language text.
Dinner, he told her, was at Red Ray’s house. “I’ve been cooking all day. Well, not all day—unless you count soaking beans as cooking.”
“Oh,” she said weakly. She’d been expecting a room full of other people, a waiter, a menu, a ritual to contain them.
“If you’d rather have Basque food or a swordfish steak, just say the word.”
But he’d cooked all day. “No, no. That’s fine,” she said, and hoped it would be.
Red’s house was pretty enough, especially his roses, but all the shabby, shut-up houses surrounding it made her uneasy. Anything could go on in there; she stopped herself from imagining specifics. “Red lives here all by himself?”
“Beats living cheek to jowl with twenty drunks,” said Lewis.
Once inside the cottage, Libby relaxed amid the oak built-ins and glowing wood floors strewn with good Bokhara and Kurdistani rugs. Books filled the walls, and photographs, including a signed Ansel Adams and a Stieglitz. Red also had an impressive collection of Native American pottery and artifacts. “Nice,” she said.
“Red’s such a closet aristocrat. Now, listen to this,” Lewis said, and, using Red’s antiquated stereo system, played Yma Sumac’s Voice of the Xtabay, an album he’d found at the farm’s rummage sale. “Andean birdcalls,” he explained, “by a Peruvian princess.” Libby didn’t tell him Yma Sumac was really Amy Camus, born and raised in Chicago, who later fell into the hands of an imaginative promoter. Some things you didn’t do on a first date, like smash illusions.
Lewis had made red beans and rice. A green salad with Thousand Island.