My big mistake was allowing happiness to creep in.
It’s worse than complacency; or maybe it’s just the same goddamn thing. But for somebody like me, for somebody with my sort of past, allowing the present to lull you into happy complacency is the surest fucking way to insure you’ll have no future at all.
I met Linda when she was vacationing up at Lake Geneva, just another cute blonde among many cute college girls, many of them blond. She wore white-a white tank top that made her seem flat-chested (which she wasn’t, really) and white cut-off jeans, cut so short that the lower moons of her cute little ass showed through fringe of the cut-offs. She had china-blue eyes and short, very curly, white blonde hair, a tiny nose and the whitest teeth you ever saw; when she smiled, it was Dimples City-and you just had to like her. Or anyway I did.
I lived, at the time, in an A-frame cottage on Paradise Lake, a small, private lake with a scattering of summer homes. Paradise Lake held no truck with tourists, other than those visiting relatives in one of the cottages, and it afforded me plenty of peace, quiet and privacy. Nearby Lake Geneva, on the other hand, provided plenty of pussy, to put it bluntly, and when I first met Linda that was all she meant to me.
Maybe she made a little more impact on me than the average college girl I’d pick up, in those days; she was, after all, very innocent, or as innocent as a girl can be who goes to bed with you the day you met her. She wasn’t terribly sexually experienced, and her idea of being daring was to smoke a little dope. She didn’t strike me as terribly bright, but she was funny and cute and when she called me on the phone three months later, I remembered her almost immediately.
“Jack,” she said. “This is Linda. Remember me?”
“Sure,” I said, unsurely.
“You know. Linda.”
And the inflection in her voice brought her back to me.
“Well, Linda. Where are you calling from?”
“H-home.”
The catch in her voice, and the static on the line, sent me a message.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “And where is home, anyway?”
“Home is Indiana.”
As in back home again in.
“Okay,” I said. “Now tell me what the trouble is.”
“My folks. They’re…”
And I could hear her crying.
“Linda, what is it?” I tried to be sympathetic, fighting irritation.
“My folks were killed last week.”
“I’m sorry. What do you mean, killed?” That word meant something different to me than it might to some people.
“Automobile accident.” She swallowed. “New Year’s Eve.”
It was the first week of January. Linda’s parents were just another statistic.
“I’m sorry, kid,” I said, trying to mean it, wondering why the hell she was calling me.
“Funeral was a few days ago,” she said.
“Yes?” What did this have to do with me?
“I need to get away for a while,” she said, in a rush. “I wondered
… I wondered if I could come up and spend a few days with you?”
“Well…”
I mean, Christ, she was just some one-night stand. What the hell was this about? That was all I needed, was some college girl moping around my place for a week.
“I don’t have anybody, Jack. Any — body. My friends are all back at school. My folks were all I had, except for my brother, and he headed back to San Francisco this morning. Now I’m all alone in this house and I don’t have anywhere to go.”
“Well, uh… go back to college with your friends, why don’t you? Best thing in the world for you would be get back in the swing of things.”
She paused. Then: “I flunked out. I’m not going back this semester.”
She began crying some more.
I’m not particularly soft-hearted, but I remembered her being a good kid, and who knew? Comforting her might add up to my getting laid regular for a week or so. Would that be so bad?
“You can come stay with me, kid,” I said. “Long as you need to.”
“Oh, Jack… Jack, I knew I could depend on you!”
Why?
“Why don’t you fly into Chicago,” I said, “and I’ll pick you up. At O’Hare.”
We’d made the arrangements, and she came and stayed with me for a week. Pretty soon the week turned into a month, and a year later, in a little chapel at Twin Lakes, I married the girl.
Here’s the deal. I was thirty-five. I was getting bored with one-night stands and my own microwave cooking. I wanted some company, and she seemed pleasant enough. She talked too much, but most people do. She was beautiful, a terrific cook, and she kept out of my way. What more could I ask?
For many years the notion of living with one woman was out of the question for me. I was in the wrong business to accommodate what Donahue and the women’s magazines would refer to as a “relationship.” But that business was behind me. I had retired, after socking away a hell of a nest egg. I could live off my investments, one of which was an oddball business called Wilma’s Welcome Inn which was just five minutes from my A-frame.
The Welcome Inn was a rambling two-story affair left over from another era-gas station, restaurant, convenience store, and hotel sharing one somewhat ramshackle roof. It struck some chord in me, reminded me of something from my childhood, a place I’d gone with my parents I think. Anyway, I liked the place, for no good reason, and I also liked the gal who ran the place, Wilma.
But Wilma-a nice fat woman who made great chili-died a few years ago, leaving the place in the unsteady hands of her boyfriend/bartender Charley. He was having trouble keeping the business afloat without his porky pillar, and Wilma’s daughter, a zaftig babe in her late teens who wanted nothing to do with the business except for any money it generated, was not happy with Charley letting things slip; she was threatening to can the ex-con and sell the joint. So I bought it from the girl (who used the dough to stake herself to a move out to California, where she planned to break into the movies-right) and kept Charley on.
When I was a kid back in Ohio, I tinkered around with cars and had worked in a garage when I was in high school and junior college; so I was able to get the gas station on its feet easily enough. I’m also fairly handy with a hammer and nails and paint brushes and such and was able to do some remodeling, make the Welcome Inn less ramshackle, though rambling it would always be. At first I hired a woman away from a place in Lake Geneva to handle the hotel and restaurant, but she was a smart-ass, and eventually Linda took over.
Linda was no rocket scientist (I handled the books) but people liked her, staff and customers both, and she was damn near as good a cook as Wilma had been.
So my life had settled into something not unlike normalcy. The vacation center we were a part of lent itself to water sports in the summer and skiing in the winter and there was plenty to do, including make a little dough at Wilma’s Welcome Inn.
Both Linda and me got pudgy. Mine came from too much of her cooking, both at home and at the Welcome Inn, and from a general laziness-I ran the Inn like any good executive, delegating responsibility and filling my own life with relaxation. I listened to my stereo (Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Mel Torme) and read paperback westerns (they engaged my brain without taxing it) and watched old movies on TV (we had a satellite dish) and generally lived a life of leisure, acquiring the spare tire that went with it.
Linda’s extra weight came from another source: my dick.
“You’re pregnant?” I said.
“You sound… disappointed… or mad or something.”
“Well, hell-how should I sound?”
We were discussing this at the A-frame, sitting out on the porch in deck chairs, looking out at a lake bathed in moonlight. Her eyes were a similar color-washed-out blue. I really liked the color of her eyes.
“You should sound happy,” she said. Her eyes were tensing.
We hardly ever argued. In fact, I can’t remember arguing with her. Sometimes I got mad at her when she was a little thick about some business aspect at the Inn, but when all was said and done, I cared more about her than any of that other shit, so I tended to cut her some slack. I mean, fuck, I didn’t need the money. The Inn was just something to do.
“Happy isn’t my style,” I said.
“Sure it is,” she said, and she got up and sat in my lap and smiled at me, dimples and all, though I could tell she was still sad.
“You want to break this damn chair?” I said.
She just smiled some more and hugged me around the neck and said, “I’m not that heavy yet. I’m only a month or so gone.”
And she was a little thing, after all. I bet she didn’t weigh a hundred pounds.
“I thought you were using something,” I said.
“I was. I stopped.”
“We should have talked about it.”
“I thought you’d want a child with me. You said so once.”
“I was drunk. And you know I don’t drink, and when I do, I can’t be held responsible.”
“Well, you’re responsible for this,” she said, and patted her tummy, and her smile shifted to one side of her face, crinkling it.
Goddamnit, there’s no way around it: I did love her, or as close to it as I’m capable.
I said, “If I was going to have a child, I’d want it with you.”
“Well, I should hope to shout. I’m your wife, aren’t I?”
“Only one I ever had,” I said, which was a lie. I was married one other time, but that was in another life, the life she didn’t know about.
“We’ll be a family,” she said sweetly. “Won’t that be wonderful?”
This girl thought life was a fucking Christmas card.
“Linda, I don’t know about bringing anybody else into this goddamn place.”
She looked confused. “What goddamn place?”
“This world. This planet. It’s no prize.”
“Our life isn’t so bad, is it?”
“We have a great life.”
“So, why not let a third person in on it? A person who’s part of us, Jack…”
I shook my head. “You don’t understand, kid. This is a very protected life we got going here. We’re the couple in the plastic bubble-nothing touches us. But a kid-he’s going to have to go out in that world and face all the bullshit.”
“How do you know it’s going to be a he? And what’s wrong with going out in the world?”
“For one thing, it’s crawling with people.”
“I like people!”
“I don’t. I’m not so sure pulling another passenger onto this sinking ship is such a hot idea. What’s he got waiting for him? Or, her?”
She gave me a sideways look, trying to kid me out of it. “Don’t be such a Gloomy Gus.”
“Read the papers. They’re full of famine and AIDS and nuclear bombs.”
“Jack, you don’t read the papers.”
“Well, hell, I watch TV. And I’ve been out in that world, baby. It sucks.”
“I don’t know why you feel that way.”
“Well I do.”
“Why? Have you had it so bad?”
“Not lately.”
She cocked her head, gave me a smirky, pixie look. “When did you ever have it bad?”
I tasted my tongue.
“I never mentioned it before…”
Her eyes narrowed. “What, Jack?”
“I… I saw some combat.”
“Combat? Where?”
“Where do you think? In the war.”
“What war?”
I sighed. “Vietnam, dear. A distant event in history that happened during your childhood. Let’s just say… I’m not wild about bringing somebody into this life when Vietnams are still a part of it-and they are.”
She looked very troubled. She was sweet but she wasn’t deep. “I never heard you talk like this.”
“Sure you have.”
“Not so serious, at such length. I… always thought it was a joke, the things you say, the way you see things. You always made me laugh. It was just, you know… sick humor.”
“Defense mechanism.”
“What… what makes life worth living then?”
She was really getting upset; I decided to smile at her. Said, “Life’s worth living as long as somebody like you’s in it.”
She beamed and hugged me.
I held her for a while. Listened to the crickets.
Then she drew away and said, “Jack, you don’t really… you wouldn’t have me get… rid of it, would you?”
Her lip was trembling and her china-blue eyes were wetter than the goddamn lake.
What else was there to say?
“Of course not,” I said. “What do you think I am? A murderer?”