Part 9 (1/2)
Madam says, ”Who would do this to me? Who could hate me this much?”
The host says, to Albert, ”Would you call an ambulance?”
That was Tyler's first mission as a service industry terrorist. Guerrilla waiter. Minimum-wage despoiler. Tyler's been doing this for years, but he says everything is more fun as a shared activity.
At the end of Albert's story, Tyler smiles and says, ”Cool.”
Back in the hotel, right now, in the elevator stopped between the kitchen and the banquet floors, I tell Tyler how I sneezed on the trout in aspic for the dermatologist convention and three people told me it was too salty and one person said it was delicious.
Tyler shakes himself off over the soup tureen and says he's run dry. This is easier with cold soup, vichyssoise, or when the chefs make a really fresh gazpacho. This is impossible with that onion soup that has a crust of melted cheese on it in ramekins. If I ever ate here, that's what I'd order.
We were running out of ideas, Tyler and me. Doing stuff to the food got to be boring, almost part of the job description. Then I hear one of the doctors, lawyers, whatever, say how a hepat.i.tis bug can live on stainless steel for six months. You have to wonder how long this bug can live on Rum Custard Charlotte Russe.
Or Salmon Timbale.
I asked the doctor where could we get our hands on some of these hepat.i.tis bugs, and he's drunk enough to laugh.
Everything goes to the medical waste dump, he says.
And he laughs.
Everything.
The medical waste dump sounds like hitting bottom.
One hand on the elevator control, I ask Tyler if he's ready. The scar on the back of my hand is swollen red and glossy as a pair of lips in the exact shape of Tyler's kiss.
”One second,” Tyler says.
The tomato soup must still be hot because the crooked thing Tyler tucks back in his pants is boiled pink as a jumbo prawn.
11.
IN SOUTH AMERICA, Land of Enchantment, we could be wading in a river where tiny fish will swim up Tyler's urethra. The fish have barbed spines that flare out and back so once they're up Tyler, the fish set up housekeeping and get ready to lay their eggs. In so many ways, how we spent Sat.u.r.day night could be worse.
”It could've been worse,” Tyler says, ”what we did with Marla's mother.”
I say, shut up.
Tyler says, the French government could've taken us to an underground complex outside of Paris where not even surgeons but semiskilled technicians would razor our eyelids off as part of toxicity testing an aerosol tanning spray.
”This stuff happens,” Tyler says. ”Read the newspaper.”
What's worse is I knew what Tyler had been up to with Marla's mother, but for the first time since I've known him, Tyler had some real play money. Tyler was making real bucks. Nordstrom's called and left an order for two hundred bars of Tyler's brown sugar facial soap before Christmas. At twenty bucks a bar, suggested retail price, we had money to go out on Sat.u.r.day night. Money to fix the leak in the gas line. Go dancing. Without money to worry about, maybe I could quit my job.
Tyler calls himself the Paper Street Soap Company. People are saying it's the best soap ever.
”What would've been worse,” Tyler says, ”is if you had accidentally eaten Marla's mother.”
Through a mouthful of Kung Pao Chicken, I say to just shut the h.e.l.l up.
Where we are this Sat.u.r.day night is the front seat of a 1968 Impala sitting on two flats in the front row of a used-car lot. Tyler and me, we're talking, drinking beer out of cans, and the front seat of this Impala is bigger than most people's sofas. The car lots up and down this part of the boulevard, in the industry they call these lots the Pot Lots where the cars all cost around two hundred dollars and during the day, the gypsy guys who run these lots stand around in their plywood offices smoking long, thin cigars.
The cars are the beater first cars kids drive in high school: Gremlins and Pacers, Mavericks and Hornets, Pintos, International Harvester pickup trucks, lowered Camaros and Dusters and Impalas. Cars that people loved and then dumped. Animals at the pound. Bridesmaid dresses at the Goodwill. With dents and gray or red or black primer quarter panels and rocker panels and lumps of body putty that n.o.body ever got around to sanding. Plastic wood and plastic leather and plastic chrome interiors. At night, the gypsy guys don't even lock the car doors.
The headlights on the boulevard go by behind the price painted on the Impala-big wraparound Cinemascope winds.h.i.+eld. See the U.S.A. The price is ninety-eight dollars. From the inside, this looks like eighty-nine cents. Zero, zero, decimal point, eight, nine. America is asking you to call.
Most of the cars here are about a hundred dollars, and all the cars have an ”AS IS” sales agreement hanging in the driver's window.
We chose the Impala because if we have to sleep in a car on Sat.u.r.day night, this car has the biggest seats.
We're eating Chinese because we can't go home. It was either sleep here, or stay up all night at an after-hours dance club. We don't go to dance clubs. Tyler says the music is so loud, especially the base tracks, that it screws with his biorhythm. The last time we went out, Tyler said the loud music made him constipated. This, and the club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the center of attention but completely cut off from partic.i.p.ating with anyone else.
You're the corpse in an English murder mystery.
We're sleeping in a car tonight because Marla came to the house and threatened to call the police and have me arrested for cooking her mother, and then Marla slammed around the house, screaming that I was a ghoul and a cannibal and she went kicking through the piles of Reader's Digest Reader's Digest and and National Geographic, National Geographic, and then I left her there. In a nutsh.e.l.l. and then I left her there. In a nutsh.e.l.l.
After her accidental on-purpose suicide with Xanax at the Regent Hotel, I can't imagine Marla calling the police, but Tyler thought it would be good to sleep out, tonight. Just in case.
Just in case Marla burns the house down.
Just in case Marla goes out and finds a gun.
Just in case Marla is still in the house.
Just in case.
I try to get centered: Watching white moon faceThe stars never feel angerBlah, blah, blah, the end
Here, with the cars going by on the boulevard and a beer in my hand in the Impala with its cold, hard Bakelite steering wheel maybe three feet in diameter and the cracked vinyl seat pinching my a.s.s through my jeans, Tyler says, ”One more time. Tell me exactly what happened.”
For weeks, I ignored what Tyler had been up to. One time, I went with Tyler to the Western Union office and watched as he sent Marla's mother a telegram.
HIDEOUSLY WRINKLED (stop) PLEASE HELP ME! (end) Tyler had showed the clerk Marla's library card and signed Marla's name to the telegram order, and yelled, yes, Marla can be a guy's name sometimes, and the clerk could just mind his own business.
When we were leaving the Western Union, Tyler said if I loved him, I'd trust him. This wasn't something I needed to know about, Tyler told me and he took me to Garbonzo's for hummus.
What really scared me wasn't the telegram as much as it was eating out with Tyler. Never, no, never had Tyler ever paid cash for anything. For clothes, Tyler goes to gyms and hotels and claims clothing out of the lost and found. This is better than Marla, who goes to Laundromats to steal jeans out of the dryers and sell them at twelve dollars a pair to those places that buy used jeans. Tyler never ate in restaurants, and Marla wasn't wrinkled.
For no apparent reason, Tyler sent Marla's mother a fifteen-pound box of chocolates.
Another way this Sat.u.r.day night could be worse, Tyler tells me in the Impala, is the brown recluse spider. When it bites you, it injects not just a venom but a digestive enzyme or acid that dissolves the tissue around the bite, literally melting your arm or your leg or your face.
Tyler was hiding out tonight when this all started. Marla showed up at the house. Without even knocking, Marla leans inside the front door and shouts, ”Knock, knock.”