Hob Broun - Inner Tube

Consider the pure illogic of the realities that pen us in. For Violet, no medication can shorten the hours of insomniac despair which have dogged her all her life. For Ellen, there is no escaping her Seattle cat disease, tiny parasitic bundles that lie in dormant wait on the surface of her kidneys. For both, sharp intelligence is a frequently unwanted gift, a precision tool for the measurement of pain. But I doubt either one of them would trade places with the other.

It’s Ohio Wesleyan in a romp, but Violet has regained her poise. Of the four Santa Clarans, she is the only one to rise above defeat, a flat smile hinting at scorn for the whole exercise. So, with some physical discrepancies (vestiges of baby fat, nails long and painted instead of chewed away), I recognize my wife at thirty-five in this girl of twenty. Switching faces, evading judgment: that mercurial essence is here.

Violet made a joke of subtlety. We were together quite a while before I learned not to anticipate. The fretful neurotic would suddenly take on the hauteur of her noble Bavarian forebears. It was best not to grow comfortable with one’s conclusions. Violet could be at her most tyrannical while pleading for support. Similarly, when arranging some form of subjugation for herself, she was always in command, the author of the playlet. But don’t let such dualities lead you to suspect a simple scheme. Because Violet made all the stops. Her feelings were irresistibly lush and came in tropical profusion.

I’ve found all I’m going to in this tape; no point sitting through it a second time. Ah, swollen youth, how quickly it deflates. And anyway, who was it filed for the divorce? Shit. Can’t go forward, can’t go back. Nobody’s fault, no one to prosecute on this one. We can’t overcome time, separately or together, or clear away the residue it leaves in passing. Still, it should be possible to replicate small pieces of the past. I know how that would be….

Bit by bit, my sleepless fruit heiress cradles into me. Her skin is hot and smooth, like her breath. I decree the smell of orange blossoms. The trees are reaching in the window, I say. And into fine, Aryan hair, I sing the soft, slow tunes that please her. “Mood Indigo” and “Buttermilk Sky” and so on.

Violet, my fragrant bloom, if only you could learn to be casual about things like that.

THE SUNSET, LACED WITH hydrocarbons, was deep purple. Unseen mechanisms turned on lights that beamed cheerlessly on antique shops and design studios along Wilshire Boulevard. Knees against the dashboard, I filled my nose with the smell of good green government ink. I was with my friend Marsh; we had just delivered three crates of psilocybin mushrooms grown from mycelia sent by his stepmother in Olympia, and the money was spilled between us on the seat — fresh, clean bills like chard right out of the garden.

“I’ve been curious about the Solomon Islands,” Marsh said.

I said that was fine, but neither one of us had a passport

“They grow a variety of banana that can weigh up to—”

He was interrupted by an oncoming skateboarder with phosphorescent tape strips hanging from his chin and a bubble pipe clenched in his teeth.

“Youth,” he said, as the kid swerved around our fenders and jumped the curb. “What a dismal job.”

We were passing a carton of orange drink back and forth, working away at a sack of jelly doughnuts. Spotted with confectioners’ sugar, the steering wheel looked as if it had been incompetently dusted for prints. What a pair of night crawlers we made. I craved a leather banquette in some maudlin piano bar, but Marsh, whose enthusiasms were unpredictable, wanted to play miniature golf.

“Precision, precision,” he said. “Like the blossoming of a…”

Who cares! Enough of this aimless remembering. One damn thing I don’t need is to develop a new bad habit. Stick to the tense present and thrive.

Good advice. Except the immediate issue is a thing thirty years old. Double takes and padded shoulders. My Little Margie.

I could be pulling the lobster shift in a machine shop, crumbs of steel flying off my lathe. I could be sitting on a tractor, discing fragrant black ground for sugar beets. But this is my hazardous profession; it turns me backward, pushes me into not just my own past, but everyone else’s. It propels me without pause from one memory bit to another, feeding on parallels and associations.

I see the cardboard skyline through the window of Vern Albright’s office at Honeywell and Todd, Investment Bankers. I see the spires of the Woolworth Tower and the Chrysler Building paralleled in the fountain pen set on Vern’s desk. I remember staying home from a fourth-grade geography test, the images of a marvelously complete Margie world, city styles distant as Rangoon viewed from a terrace of indulgent pillows.

Enhancement mechanism: I close in and in on the trompe l’oeil skyline until the benday dots of the composite photograph are like a galactic cloud of dust and gas within which time stands still, all motion is perpetual. Negro elevator boys flinch and roll their eyes, powerful men spray frustration through thatchlike mustaches, taxicabs lurch and revolving doors revolve.

With the frame advance control I achieve a kind of lurching space travel, hopping from blur to blur until, deactivating gridlock, I retreat and retreat…. And here’s Margie in an elfin sportswear creation — white shorts and tunic with saucer-size black buttons — practicing her conga moves in preparation for a trip to Havana with Dad, who’ll be closing a big deal with Señor Mercado, owner of vast sugar plantations. (I remember eating flan in a Cuban place on Eighth Avenue with a girl who admired Angela Davis.) Margie’s boyfriend, the human ashtray, Freddy Wilson, watches disconsolately from the candy-stripe sofa.

“Sure I want you to have a good time, but what about all those shiny-haired caballeros down there?”

“Honestly, Freddy, do you think I’d fall for…”

But wait. Here’s Vern emerging from the elevator, puffed with pride at having just been named to a seat on the Traffic Commission.

“Oh, no, it’s Dad! Freddy, you’ve got to hide!”

(I remember part of an old dream: On the lam in bayou land, paying for roadhouse tamales with a Calvin Coolidge twenty-five-dollar bill.)

Freddy crouches on the terrace. Tipsy with civic triumph, Vern decides to view the beauties of Manhattan, to fill his lungs with sweet spring air. Wretched craven Freddy, born to lose, would sooner dangle from a chrome railing eleven stories over Park Avenue than jeopardize little Margie’s Havana spree.

I look to my manifest for a client name, but the space is blank. Curious. Paperwork, repellently, is a strong point of mine. Up to my elbows in the long gone, but what I can’t remember is why I’m here so late, whether there really is a client, if I’m just running myself through a maze again.

Vern grabs the phone like it’s a rainbow trout about to get away.

“But, Mr. Honeywell!”

The Mercados are in town and, of course, Honeywell’s invited them to stay at the Albright apartment, given them a key, they’re on their way now…

“But!”

(I remember thick, loud people who came one summer, and how the man put me on his lap, said, “Little fella, put up those dukes.” Later, I poured bacon grease in his bathrobe pockets.)

Margie chirps and gurgles like a drive-time dj.

“Oh, Freddy, you’re so wonderfully brave.”

She packs him away in the foyer closet, but Vern has the damning evidence of Freddy’s straw fedora, and teeters in his righteous advance like he’s just fallen out of a hammock.

“We had a bargain, baby, and you’ve broken it.”