Dan Wakefield - Home Free

Gene scratched at the back of his neck.

“Well, yeh. I guess I have. Had that happen to me.”

“And how did you feel? The truth now. How did you really feel?”

“Shit, man.”

“You felt like shit?”

“I felt like I was in jail.”

“Exactly.”

“It seems like you just can’t win. If it’s something to do with love.”

“It ain’t easy,” Barnes said.

They walked back to the bar of The Pier and Barnes bought Gene and him some very dry martinis straight up. The liquid smooth and cool.

Gene had taken to hanging out after work at The Damariscotta Pier. It was a nice bar and restaurant with windows looking out over the tidal river. The tables were filled with families and parties, couples and assortments of summer people hunting up and down the coast like dogs on the scent—of sea and the unmentioned magic powers they presumed it contained, the allegedly healing elements of ocean, sun, gullsound. Attain a tan and with it inner peace. You gotta believe.

Out the windows Gene could see the people clamber on the rocks, taking each other’s pictures. He had the feeling they were trying to prove they were alive, that they could look at them later kept neatly in a book to prove that they had lived, had once been in some particular place a particular expression on the face. So . Snap.

Usually Gene sat at the bar part and drank beers and looked, not for action but amusement. He didn’t want to get in the act, he just wanted to watch it. It was like some uncut documentary film in which you only heard some of the words; you had to guess a lot of what was happening and who the characters were. Sort of like an Andy Warhol thing. Very with-it.

One particular woman kept eyeing him.

He had seen her many times in The Pier, laughing too loud, always with a man, mostly a different man. She had a mane of wavy tangled dirty blond hair tied with a rubber band, she wore loose shift dresses of different solid colors—orange, blue, green—that came just to her knees, no stockings, and a pair of scuffed, run-down black high heel shoes that must have been ten years old. She was big, big all over, and the shift was like a tent to cover it, except for the calves, which were thinner than the rest of her, more proportioned, and were usually streaked with dust or dirt. Her blue eyes were dim, indifferent. The only part of her that sparkled was a large diamond wedding ring.

One night she stopped by where Gene was sitting at the bar, pinched the flesh of his arm, and looked at him as if she was considering cooking him.

“Come see me,” she said.

When she’d left Gene said to the bartender, “Jesus, who was that?”

“Stella the Divorcée,” the bartender said.

It was still that big a deal, being a divorcée in a small town in Maine. Like the scarlet fucking letter or something.

When Gene got off work a couple days later and was walking to his room a car honked. It was Stella the Divorcée, behind the wheel of a canary yellow Olds convertible.

Gene smiled and put his hands on the car.

“Hi,” he said.

“You didn’t come see me,” she said.

“Not yet.”

“Get in.”

He did.

Why not?

Her house was off a dirt road way back in the woods, but it was one of those split-level modern jobs with picture window. The effect of house and setting was confusing, like someone had clipped a picture out of Better Homes & Gardens and pasted it onto a page from Field and Stream .

“You know what this is?” she asked pointing around her.

They were sitting in the living room, drinking Four Roses on ice.

“No,” Gene said.

“This, my boy, is an actual, honest-to-God American Dream House. The genuine article. The one that begins with the little wifey-poo sitting home in the shabby rented job clipping out pictures and ideas from House Beautiful , and big hubby promises someday all that shall be hers and by God he delivers. He is a contractor and so he supervises the whole thing with little wifey-poo at his side, making sure all the little loving details are just so, and then while wifey-poo is safe at home scanning Family Circle for further helpful hints and finishing touches to make everything more perfect big hubby has to go to Boston on business in the conduct of which he comes across the cutest little nineteen-year-old clit you ever laid eyes on and after some months of guilt-ridden dalliance comes home crying to wifey-poo he can’t live without her—not little loyal wifey-poo, he can live without her all right, he means little Miss Nineteen-Year-Old Clit.”

She finished off her drink, went into the kitchen, and came back with the Four Roses bottle. She set it on the coffee table. Formalities, such as they were, were over.

“I’m sorry,” said Gene.

“Ha! Forget it. I got me a deal, brother. I got me my little Dream House and I got me good alimony and I intend to see it keeps coming. I got me a little shop, driftwood crap for tourists, and it doesn’t make money. It’s not supposed to. All I have to do to keep it coming is not get married and I can’t tell you how easy that is. At first I sat here in shock and soon found everyone thought cause I was divorced I was laying every stud in the county so I figured if they think so why not? And I eat and drink what I want when I want to. No more counting calories, no more pushing away from the table, no more Royal Canadian Air Force Exercises. What the fuck, I said one day puffing and aching, let the fuckin Royal Canadian Air Force do them. Why me? Yeh, you see little wifey-poo also kept nice and slim for big hubby cause he liked it that way, he liked the nice narrow little waist and the good measurements. Well, little wifey-poo kept it that way, but it wasn’t enough. I could stay slim for him, but I couldn’t stay young for him. You can’t starve and sit-up yourself back to being nineteen, buster.”

“No,” said Gene.

She took another belt of the drink and laughed.

“The little clit won’t stay that way either. She must be up to twenty-five by now, and they’ve moved to Southern California, land of the nubile beauties. Hubby’ll never last the course. He’ll end up payin double and livin in a tent on the beach humpin teenyboppers.”

“Sounds like it,” Gene said.

She lit a cigarette and turned to stare at him.

“You’re pretty cool,” she said. “I don’t see you runnin after all that little pink twat around The Pier.”

“No,” he said.

“You don’t like it?”

He shrugged.

“Too much trouble,” he said.

She threw back her head and laughed, hard and harsh.

“Too much trouble,” she said. “I like that. I approve of that.”

She poured more of the whiskey into their glasses. Gene was drinking his faster, too, now. For a while they just sat there drinking the whiskey down, like they were ill and they had to get a whole lot of this medicine in them. She put her glass down and put a hand on his thigh and looked him straight in the eyes.

“One thing I got going for me ,” she said, “is I’m no trouble at all.”

“That’s good,” he said.

He did not find her attractive but found himself becoming oddly aroused by her, as if her bitterness and desire were a kind of stimulant. Also, she really wasn’t so bad. She was fat, was all. Maybe that would be nice.

She mashed her cigarette out.

“Let’s go,” she said.

He followed her into the bedroom. She kicked off her heels and then before she pulled the shift up over her head she said:

“I want you to know what you’re getting. You’re not gettin nubile. You’re not getting peach fuzz and hard little titties.”

“I know,” he said.

“Good.”