Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [9]
Sleep eluded him. With the not drinking, his body was on tilt. He could feel his blood and juices trickling and eddying and sloshing in confusion. He lay wide-eyed and electric for hours on end. He followed the progress of a vigilant moon from frame to frame in the bay window. The house surrounded him, a many-chambered hope.
In the morning, her capable hands tugged him from sleep, pinched him awake. She’d be dressed, her hair hidden under a scarf, sleeves rolled up, breath steamy from coffee. Time for Home Improvement! Fix It! Do It Yourself! And in the middle of this mad race toward perfection, Red Ray decided to go on a diet: one thousand calories a day.
When he told Yvette, she grabbed a handful of his abdominal sag. “I won’t object,” she said.
In the first week, he lost eight pounds. “I set them free,” he told Yvette, “like Prospero released Ariel and all the sprites on the island.” The second week, he lost four more pounds. He grew twitchy. His mouth stung from a steady diet of pineapple paletas. The iambs in Coriolanus thumped in his head, spilled over into unworkable legalese in his briefs. The client wishes only for some justice. A settlement of forty grand will do … The rumblings in his stomach gave him visions of a Dantean Hell.
When he closed his eyes or gazed at a blank piece of paper, the word “diet” floated there, a photographic afterimage; a diminutive of “die,” it occurred to him. In the fourth week of this self-imposed starvation, self-pity staged a coup and took over as the governing factor in Red Ray’s life.
“I’m only drinking until I drop twenty more pounds,” he informed Yvette. She had already turned her back on him and was striding deep into the house. He stumbled after her, bumping off the hallway walls. From various rooms, workmen stared out at them. He caught up, gripping her shoulders. “Listen,” he said. “It’s very self-regulatory. I can’t possibly get drunk. If I can only ingest a thousand calories a day, that’s at most ten shots of scotch or six and a half cans of beer. Or four beers and three shots of bourbon. And that’s assuming I eat nothing at all!”
THE TOWN of Rito, population 750, had grown up around a large packing house. Most of the inhabitants were descendants of original Morrot serfs who, in one of “Don” Henri’s fits of benevolence, were allowed to buy small plots of land. Homes in Rito were modest and varied; a small wood frame house sitting next to a pink cinderblock cube, which neighbored a river-stone cottage whose yard stretched into a weedy vacant lot. Beyond the lot were two shacks sided in asphalt shingle and a fifties stucco tract home replete with fancifully scalloped plywood trim. Then another lot, a whitewashed wood bungalow, and so on, until the orange groves took over. The vacant lots served as a kind of village green where townspeople staked goats and ponies, and chickens roamed freely. If the community ever felt any pressure to cultivate the well-barbered suburban look found farther south in the bright new developments of Simi Valley and Newhall, nobody in Rito responded. Still, there was plenty of front-yard one-upmanship: birdbaths abounded, as did plaster animals of every species and whirligigs made of bleach bottles. There was even a half-ton pair of concrete tennis shoes, and in front of one home, ornamental bombs were planted nose-up and painted Caterpillar yellow and John Deere green. Cacti and the more prickly and primordial succulents proliferated, making the lush yards lusher and the austere, swept-dirt ones more forbidding. The favorite planters were old rowboats and red Cudahy lard buckets.