Thomas McGuane: Driving on the Rim

Tessa asked me over one night for drinks. She had done a beautiful job of making her apartment habitable, with comfortable old furniture that she’d bought cheap and upholstered. She also had a good many of Hoxey’s prints on loan, though, as she explained, she was really just storing them, and her collection changed as things were sold from Hoxey’s inventory. She made a little face when she told me that she couldn’t afford to get attached to any of the prints, quite a trial for her, as she loved the art of all nations. Cocktails and art, I thought; maybe I’ll get into her pants. I’m sure that at the time I had a big goober smile on my face as I contemplated such an outcome. Tessa said I reminded her of Li’l Abner.

“Because I work upstairs, I’ve had to become a walker just to get outside,” she said, making our drinks in a blender. “You start getting curious about different neighborhoods — where the railroaders lived, where the ranchers retired, where the doctors and bankers lived. In the winter, when the wind is up, I have to tie a scarf over my face. Anybody you see in the street is ducking for a building, kind of like in the Blitz.”

As I waited for my drink, I found myself leaning forward in my chair with my hands pressed between my knees. It was only when she stopped to look at me that I realized my posture was strange. I pretended that I was just stretching and leaned back in an apparently casual but quite uncomfortable position. As Tessa came toward me with a brightly colored drink, both she and it seemed to be expanding, and when she handed me the drink I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to hold it. I felt suddenly that everything was bigger than me, that I was in over my head, trying to handle a situation which, when I was rich, I would take to like a duck to water. But things settled down quickly as soon as she returned to her seat, and I was then glad to have the drink because I was a bit cotton-mouthed. I had gone from my first impulse of getting into her pants to fearing that she’d try to get into mine.

I was not much of a drinker; water would have served as well. That summer I’d made an experimental foray into a local bar, feeling that I needed to learn to be more social. I struck up a conversation with a somber middle-aged fellow in a rumpled suit. He looked so gloomy that I regaled him with what I felt were uplifting accounts of my struggles at school. He stared at me for a while, until I sensed that all the timing was disappearing from my delivery. Finally he said, “Hey, boss, I got to go. You’re creeping me out.”

“Now,” Tessa said, “let’s start at the beginning: what do you think being a doctor will do for you?”

“I don’t know.” My answer came out so quickly it startled her. She leaned back into the sofa — she was at one end, I at the other — with her elbow propped on the back of it and her fingers parting the hair on the side of her head.

“You don’t know?”

“I wish I did. Sorry.” Involuntarily singing out this last word.

“No, that’s all right. That’s fine. If you don’t want to talk about it, I’m okay with that.”

I didn’t share the image that I had of myself, still dark-haired but with a graying moustache, going up the gangplank of a yacht. I kept sipping my drink, looking into it as if it were a teleprompter and I were the president of the United States. The colorful liquid seemed like something I had found. I don’t know why I made people so uncomfortable. As a kind of icebreaker, I thought to ask her a question.

“When people use the expression ‘rest in peace’ do you think they have some basis for saying it, or is it just wishful thinking?”

I can’t imagine what made me believe that she’d have the answer to this doleful conundrum. But surely my mother’s poor health was on my mind.

“You mean, about the dead? ”

“Sure.”

Tessa looked at me for a very long time before saying anything.

“You know, let’s try this another time. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s me, but at this point in time and space it’s just not happening.”

I backed out of there like a crab. I felt sorry for Tessa; she probably had trouble sleeping after this weird visit from the new neighbor. I just didn’t know what to do about it — an apology would have made it seem even stranger.

Thereafter, we sometimes ran into each other in the hallway adjoining our apartments, and it did not get any less awkward. I made increasingly maladroit attempts to be cordial, these being received with growing skepticism, even revulsion, until upon seeing me Tessa would dart into her apartment and slam her door. What was strange was that if I lingered in the hallway after she’d gone inside, I would always, moments later, hear her phone ring.

Once she said to me, “I know you’re tracking my movements.” And another time, “Don’t think you’re fooling me.” And another, a cry,

“Please stop!”

“Stop what ?”

A mirthless laugh followed and a slammed door.

I made every effort to avoid these encounters. Indeed, I did start tracking her movements, if only to avoid her. She headed upstairs to work for Hoxey at exactly nine, out for the mail at ten thirty, lunch with Hoxey in his apartment Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, catered by Mountain Foodstuff, out to lunch Tuesday and Thursday, but always back by one thirty, dispatching UPS and FedEx and other outbound packages at four o’clock, at which point her workday was over. I really didn’t have a bead on her activities and so came and went from my apartment nervously. When she had men over, they seemed to linger around my door as if on the lookout for me. One strapping fellow with a shiny black goatee positioned himself as though to actually block my way. I gave him a big smile and pushed past. He smelled like motor oil. He said, “Hello, Doc.” Tessa must have told him that I was in pre-med. I said hello. I was glad to get inside, and when I looked through the little spy hole in the door, I saw into his ear.

Concentrating on the Help Wanted ads calmed me down. I had discovered that I needed to look for work elsewhere, as people in town knew who I was and — this really is very funny — held my studies against me. “You can’t paint my house,” Mrs. Taliaferro said. “You’re going to be a doctor!”

“Not necessarily!” I said in my warmest tones, while hers cooled markedly. I have no idea why I answered her that way. I was sure I was going to be a doctor, but when I was under pressure to make conversation, it was as if all my life’s plans went up in smoke. I felt the need to persuade Mrs. Taliaferro that I would be a lifelong house painter.

I kept studying the paper. I recognized that real opportunities existed for those who would sell cars or apply siding, but given the trouble I was having with my communication skills, I thought those occupations might not be up my alley. Still, I really felt that once I got my timing back — and it was a timing issue — I’d be able to look into a different set of prospects. I was very much focused on the chance to be unexceptional; if I had the opportunity to keep my head down, I meant to take it.

I got a job working for a very nice guy, or so I thought, named Dan Lauderdale. He was an attorney in Billings who specialized in whiplash and owned a cute little turn-of-the-century cottage in Harlowton, which he used as a weekend place — or, rather, somewhere to vacation with his secretary, who did not enjoy the same legal standing as his wife. “Lawyers like me make doctors leave the profession every day!” he joked. “Stick to painting houses.” But he was an amiable fellow with a big laugh that drew one’s attention away from his shrewd, close-set eyes. His dark brown curls were so uniform and regular as to suggest the work of a beautician. When I asked him if they were natural, he told me to mind my own business with such vituperation that I actually flinched. The previous owner of his cottage had used stolen Forest Service paint for the trim and shutters, and Dan now wanted it to be all yellow, “like sunshine, get it?” I was basically rehearsing what I thought to be the style of my current position when I said, “ No problema, ” but he must have sensed something wrong with my delivery, for his eyes grew narrow and he just said, “Right.” Many years later, Dan Lauderdale would become a well-known judge and part of my life.