Dan Wakefield - Home Free

Everything wasn’t all fun and games, though. One night lying in bed after love he asked her how come she never got married, she must have got asked a lot. She said in a flat, toneless voice she’d got asked a lot and said no a lot. Then she raised up on an elbow and fixing her eyes on him so he couldn’t look away, so he couldn’t forget, she laid on him her feelings about “The Horse-Carriage-Love-Marriage Syndrome.”

“People mistakenly think those things go together but they don’t have to go together at all. Not even horses and carriages much less loves and marriages. There are plenty of horses that aren’t tied to carriages and that’s the kind I’d be if I were a horse. Untied. Not pulling a big load of people behind me like a woman drags a family all her life. If I were a horse they wouldn’t even get a bridle on me. They call that ‘breaking’ a horse. Well no one will ever break me .”

Gene gently put his hand on her arm.

“No one here’s tryin, babe.”

“You promise?”

He did.

It was the first time he’d ever had to promise a woman not to marry her in order to stay with her.

Something new.

There always was with Lou.

Like the time in the spring when she came home with a small jar of supermarket red caviar and a bottle of New York State champagne to celebrate her getting a two-year appointment in the History Department at Northeastern University in Boston beginning next fall.

“Far out,” he said. “I can learn to do baked beans.”

“Oh,” said Lou, not heavy just curious-sounding, “you coming, too?”

The thought of not living with her made him feel dizzy, like looking down from some incredible height onto nothing at all below.

He realized she was his life, in a way that he’d never really had one before.

But he couldn’t tell her that.

“Boston’s got lots of colleges,” he said. “I might as well finish up there as anywhere else.”

“I can’t promise anything,” Lou said. “About us, I mean.”

“Who can promise anything?”

“Just so it’s understood. We’re both free.”

He patted her hand.

“Hey, roomie, I know how ya feel.”

She smiled.

“OK, roomie,” she said.

Gene popped the champagne and put on Jeannie C. Riley singing “The Harper Valley P.T.A.”

Rents were sky-high in Boston but they found a one-bedroom apartment whose drawbacks in comfort were balanced by economy. It was on Carver Street, which ran for just a block down from the Trailways station out to Boylston across from the Boston Common. It looked almost like an alley, and winos were fond of using its entryways for shelter during their deadened sleep. Gene and Lou learned to step through without disturbing them.

Other people might have been freaked by the blaring announcements of bus departures and the neon throb of a parking lot sign pulsing in their living room window, but Gene had lived for a year with Lou in her apartment that was over a chiropractic clinic on the highway heading into Urbana across from an all-night diner whose wagon wheel symbol glowed in the dark and attracted all kinds of last-minute, tire-skidding customers. They figured that must have been practice for the place by the bus station.

The important thing was this was their place, for in Urbana Gene had just lived at Lou’s. He wanted to make it nice, their nest, so he stripped off the dank, dark wallpaper, painted white, decorated with plants and posters. Philodendron, Swedish ivy, asparagus fern. See Madrid, Ski Sugarbush, Stop the War.

Now they could get it on.

Their lives.

Gene had never really thought that way before, he had just sort of let things happen. Now he was anxious to please, wanting to make sure Boston would be a good trip for them. Since Lou didn’t go for pledges or promises, much less marital contracts, Gene just figured he would see that everything was so cool she would have no reason to split, it would just be the natural thing to keep on together.

Before he could look for a college in Boston to cop the last twelve credits he needed he had to get some bread together. When Lou started teaching at Northeastern Gene got a job tending bar at The Crossroads over on Newbury Street off Mass Ave, working the eleven-to-seven shift. That left a hunk of the mornings free and he promised himself he was not just going to lie around doing some kind of dope and listening to records, he was going to make some use of his time. What he was going to do was, for one thing, get into cooking.

He liked to cook because you had to concentrate and your mind couldn’t drift into thinking of other shit Cooking kind of affected his head like a mild sort of dope. He was damn good with any type of eggs and tough on stew but he wanted to get into serious recipes, work up a regular repertoire. He went out and bought himself a paperback James Beard cookbook and a stockpile of gourmet devices from whisk to garlic press.

They had to eat late, of course, but Gene made what preparation he could in the morning so when he blew in after work he was ready to roll. Lou really seemed to dig it, she liked good food but cooking to her was a hassle, a distraction that fucked up her head from work she was doing, like lecture preparation, thesis research, the kind of things that didn’t mix with trying to remember how many cups of this and dashes of that. So she sat reading and thinking and having a martini or so in the living room while Gene did his thing in the kitchen. It suited them both. That’s what he wanted.

But the night he made his most ambitious meal, a surprise he’d been preparing to spring from the time he first saw it in James Beard, she wasn’t there.

Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding!

He had the day off and had got this incredible dinner on. Always before, she was home when he got in from work a little past seven, so he planned the meal for then, timing everything so the roast would be rare the way she liked it, the pudding a risen prize.

Now it was eight. The pudding had fallen. The beef was well past well.

Where ?

There, now.

She came in laughing, high.

With this guy.

Barnes, his name was.

From what Gene could gather out of the excited garble of her talk she had picked him up or let him pick her up (although she didn’t say it that way) at Waldenbooks on Boylston Street. His pitch was he was a writer and wanted to buy his book for her, he liked to think people like her would read it. (She fell for that ?) Then to celebrate the fact she was going to read it he offered to buy her a drink at Gatsby’s bar across from the Statler and after the second drink she said for Godsake you’ll never make a profit like this, buying your book for people and then buying them drinks, she said he had to come back and have a few drinks with her and her roommate.

Gene could tell she hadn’t bothered to mention she roomed with a guy.

This Barnes was one big disappointed dude. Tall and slightly stooped, head pulled in as if afraid of a swat, long sallow face that was winsome before he laid eyes on the roomie and now was decidedly woeful.

Lou very merrily told poor Barnes to make himself at home and handed the book he wrote to Gene while she went to make her martinis that usually tended to put everyone at ease, consisting as they did of a tall glass full of gin, an ice cube, and two portions of vermouth applied with an old Murine dropper.

“Wow!” she called from the kitchen. “What smells good?”

“It might have been dinner,” Gene said.

She didn’t seem to hear.

Gene held Barnes’s book in his hand. A paperback. The cover had a picture of a sexy blonde, hair strewn around her and skirt uplifted. Over the body in dripping red letters were the words Death of a Deb .