Denis Johnson: Angels

“Variety’s important.”

“Yes it is. Variety’s important.”

“Course, you have to be dependable, too.”

“Third one I married was dependable. I could just never get my mind around it — she was so dependable, but then one day right in the middle of everything she says, what was your first wife’s name. I says it was Annie; she says, oh yeah, Annie what, and I says, Annie Klein! What you asking me for? Well, she was just wondering. So about five minutes later she wants to know what was my next wife’s name. So course I told her, which it happened to be the same maiden name as she had. That why you picked me? she wants to know. What do you mean, I told her, coming up on me all of a sudden with this shit — excuse me. She says, so, I’m wife number three, and Roberts number two, but when it comes to number one, honey, I ain’t nothing, and next day she filed. Just all of a sudden like that. I says hey! you’re number one! you’re number one! But she just went on ahead and filed. Very weird lady.”

Jamie said, “You in a band someplace?”

“Me? In a music band, you mean?” He took a pull of his beer, and Jamie fingered the shiny material of his jacket on the seat between them.

“Truth is, I got it at a second-hand type thrift shop,” he said. “I must’ve been under the weather or something. Anyway, what the hell. It don’t fit too bad. You know any jokes?”

“Jokes,” Jamie said, trying out the word as if for the first time ever.

“Yeah, you know. Like ho ho ho.”

“Right,” Jamie said.

A spell of dizziness stabbed her head and then passed away. She sensed how the dead smoke of ten thousand cigarets caked the air. Out there in the blinding day the winter would sting your lungs, but here they carried with them a perpetual stifled twilight and a private exhaustion. She didn’t know if she was coming awake or going crazy.

And Bill Houston said, “How come they ran out of ice cubes in Poland?”

“This a joke now?” she said.

He was irritated. “ Yeah. ”

“Okay — how come they ran out of ice cubes in Poland?”

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you asking me?”

“I must be. Because I sure as hell don’t know the answer. You know what we need?” she said. “Ice cubes.” She had a feeling she might be laughing a little too loudly.

“Hey, I’m really getting off on this whole conversation,” he said with fervor. Good-fellowship thickened his voice. “Now listen: how come there’s no ice cubes in Poland?”

“Because they ran out. We just went through all that.”

He shook his head. “I can see you’re a hard one to deal with,” he said with some respect.

“No, I’m not, really.” She let her gaze drift out into Ohio. Her mood went blank. “It’s just that I’m going to be into some of that divorce stuff pretty soon myself.”

“Don’t let it get to you. You just stand there, and everything they say, you say yes. Pretty soon you’ll be divorced. It don’t feel no different.”

“I think it might probably feel different,” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Never felt a bit different to me. Course, pretty soon, being married was the difference, and getting divorced was the usual.”

“That ain’t going to be my way. I’m single from here on out.”

“You just keep saying that, like I did.”

“You just watch. Once is enough, brother. I had a man running around on me once — that’s all, that’s it. Not no more. Thanks anyway.”

“Well. Takes a lot of will power, stick to the same brand all the time with no variety.”

“ I stuck to the same brand! Wasn’t no trouble to me! He only had to stay out three nights, and I said that’s that. Three nights is just about three nights too many, I says to him. Wasn’t long before I found out who it was, and how many times, and ever-thing. I told him, I’m hard to fool. And I am. Hey.” She stared minutely forward, scrutinizing the nearer distances. “Do I look like I’m loaded?”

Bill Houston said he’d been working some place for the last few months, but she didn’t believe it. He’d had something to do with oil rigging, she wasn’t paying much attention. He’d saved up some money, perhaps a good deal of money, and he was lonesome. Cleveland went by like a collection of billboards.

Without actually deciding yes or no, she found she’d agreed to stay over a day in Pittsburgh and see the town with Bill Houston before travelling on to Hershey, where she intended to take up residence with her sister-in-law. But didn’t Hershey come before Pittsburgh? Or didn’t the place where they were supposed to change for Hershey come first? He didn’t know. She didn’t know, either, and by God she didn’t care. She’d been on this bus five days and couldn’t care less. Let her sister-in-law wait all day and all night at the bus station — let Hershey, Pennsylvania, wait one more day for her; she’d been waiting five days for Hershey, Pennsylvania.

She’d discussed killing herself, she confessed, with Sarah Miller, her best friend, who’d gone to the same high school in West Virginia. Discussed how she’d do it in the style of Marilyn Monroe. She’d clean the trailer completely, and dress up in her black negligee. She’d use Sarah’s ex-husband’s revolver, and Sarah would listen in the night for the shot, and then listen in case the kids woke up. She’d stand right in the doorway when she did it, so she’d be the first thing he found when he came home late from running around on her, stretched out on the floor like a dark Raggedy Ann doll with her brains in the kitchen. Because already he’d stayed out two nights in a row. That was that, that was all, so long. The note would go like this: No Thanks.

But you know who he was doing it with, Bill? Want to know who? Sarah. Old Sarah from the same high school six years ago, same graduation, same California trailer village, and now same lover, same everything, Sarah Miller. Because on the third night, she couldn’t take this treatment, not for one second more. She snuck over to Sarah’s to borrow the gun and there he was, sneaking home, out of Sarah’s trailer with the door creaking so loud in the quiet she took it for herself, screeching, Bill, and he saw, and she saw, and Sarah in the doorway with her panties saw, so everyone knew that everyone else knew what was what with who. If anybody knows how to handle that kind of a scene, they can tell the world on Johnny Carson or whatever and make a million. So she left. What could anybody say? Just had to pack and not look at each other and be very very quiet, even though Sarah came and was going to knock on the door but went away before she could make herself, twice; and then at nine-thirty the Yellow Cab for the Greyhound and the new life; and she’d left him standing in the kitchen with half a grapefruit in his hand. Everyone was observing her as she wept on Bill Houston’s obscenely glamorized shoulder.

She went to the toilet in the back to be sick. Briefly she tried to be graceful, and then she blundered from one pair of seats to the next, commenting angrily on the erratic and inconsiderate driving around here. Wasn’t that the way? Never a bus driver who knows where the road even is. Three feet from the door she declared she’d changed her mind and would be sick wherever she felt like it, and watch out because she probably would, any second now. Right now she’d see if she wanted to walk a bit more, or be sick first. She’d walk up and down the aisle here for a minute, to take the air and cry for a minute.

And goddamn it, didn’t she have a right to cry with the kids driving her crazy for five days on a bus with the windows going by like a movie? You can give her permission to cry or just go on back to your convent with your rose in your teeth. I’ll puke here if I want to or anywhere I want to, Sugar. Keep smiling but I can see what you think, the goddamn white line goes right through me every time I close my eyes five days on this bus. Go on, smile. I can see you got to make yourself smile and smile with your convent funny hat, everybody sees you getting mad just like anybody else nun or no nun. Five days on this smelly bus how long you been on? Your whole life is a bus your convent is a bus you do it with the priests and janitors I’ve read all about you in the medical articles in the papers, lady. Pride goeth before, I know pride goeth before a fall, all I need is wings Lord I’d go with my pride and no one ever have a thing to say about it, specially nuns. You think I got problems? Honey lover baby angel, you got more problems figuring out what to do with that rose than I got in my whole fuckin life. She looked up and she was a woman sailing toward Pittsburgh on the bus, drunk, making a commotion like none she had ever made before.