I walked the two miles back to the corner where I used to live, the lost Ghost Mansion. It was as dark as a dark house in a horror film. Was the woman I loved asleep in there? I turned and started down the hill toward my apartment. Oh, I was separated all right, and none of the pieces were big enough to be good for anything. I said Lily’s name and made one quiet resolution: no more nightcaps. At all.
DR. SLIME
THIS IS ABOUT the night Betsy told me she was leaving, the night that marked the end of a pretty screwy time all around. Everyone I knew was trying to be an artist, or really was an artist on some scale, and this was in Utah, so you can imagine the scale. Betsy had been almost making a living for several years as a singer, local work for advertising agencies and TV and radio, and my brother Mitchell, who loved her and with whom she lived, was an actor and model for television ads and local theater and whatever movie work came to town. I mean these were people who had consciously said, “I’m going to be an artist no matter what,” and that seemed kind of crazy and therefore lovable because it is more interesting than anything nine to five, and I found myself taking care of them from time to time over a three-year period, sponsoring meals and paying their rent two or three times a year, and hanging out with them generally, because I am a regular person, which put me in awe of their refusal to cope with daily duties, and I’ll just say it here, rather than let it sneak in later and have you think I’m a vile snake: I came to develop, after the first few months of catching midnight suppers after Mitch’s shows and lunches downtown with Betsy after her auditions or after she’d recorded some commercial or other, a condition that anyone in my regular shoes would have developed, I mean not a strange or evil condition, but a profound condition nevertheless, and the condition that I bore night and day was that I was deeply and irrevocably in love with Betsy, my brother’s lover, though as you will see it netted me nothing more than a sour and broken heart, broken as regular hearts can be broken, which I probably deserved, no, certainly deserved, and a condition regardless of its magnitude that allowed me to do the noble, the right thing, as you will also see, since I think I acted with grace or at least minor dexterity under such pressure.
I am not an artist. I am a baker for a major supermarket chain and it is work I enjoy more than I should perhaps, but I am dependent on my effort yielding tangible results, and at the end of my shift I go home tired and smelling good. On the day I’m talking about here I came home to my apartment about six a.m. having baked three flights of AUNT DOROTHY’S turnovers all night—apple, peach, and raisin—I am AUNT DOROTHY—and found an envelope under the door containing fifteen twenties, the three hundred dollars that Mitch owed me. The note read “THERE IS MORE WHERE THIS CAME FROM. M.” Every time he paid me back, this same note was enclosed. It meant that he had found work. His last gig for a smoked-meat ad paid him eight hundred dollars a day for four days, the only work he had in seven months. Mitch was feast or famine.
I put the money in the utility drawer in the kitchen; I would be lending it to him again. I didn’t know what it was this time, but Betsy had called a couple of times this week worried, asking about him, what he was doing. He had a big bruise on his neck, and a slug of capsules, unidentifiable multicolored capsules, had begun appearing in the apartment.
“He’s an actor,” I told her. This is what I used to tell our parents when they would worry. It was a line, I had learned, that was the good news and the bad news at once.
“Yeah, well, I want to know what part beats him up and has him carting drugs.”
I wanted to say: So do I, that no-good, erratic beast. Why don’t you just drop him and fall into this baker’s bed, where you’ll be coated in frosting and treated like a goddess. I’ll put you on a cake; I’ll strew your path with powdered sugar and tender feathers of my piecrusts, for which I am known throughout the Intermountain West.
I said: “Don’t worry, Betsy, I’ll help you find out.”
IT WAS THAT night that she came over to my place on her scooter about seven o’clock and told me she knew something and asked me would I help her, which meant Just Shut Up and Get on the Back. She wore an arresting costume, a red silk shirt printed with little guitars and a pair of bright blue trousers that bloomed at the knees and then fixed tight at the ankle cuff. I scanned her and said, “What decade are we preparing for?”
“Forties,” she said, locking up. “Or nineties. You ready? Have you eaten?” I had only been on that red scooter two or three times and found it a terrible and exquisite form of transportation, and the one legitimate opportunity this baker had for putting his hands on the woman who quickened his yeasty heart, in other words, Betsy, my brother’s lover, his paramour, his girlfriend, his, his, his.