Going Down Fast: A Novel Read online

  “Back when he was married I think he screwed around with her. Used her in a film.”

  “Which pray god he doesn’t show tonight.”

  But Rowley would not smile, rapping on the door. Leon let them in, framed in the lit door with his bulky hirsute body and massive head like a chimpanzee. He grinned at Rowley who gave back the same calculating grin as they sidled round each other.

  “How are you making it?” Leon said in his high harsh voice. As if contemptuous of height he slumped, leaning to look up at Rowley out of narrowed eyes.

  “Not busted yet. How’s the single life?”

  They spoke and looked at each other with the same mixture of distaste and curiosity and warmth. Leon shrugged. “Doesn’t make much difference, my marriage was never what you’d call a fulltime thing. It wasn’t something all-over demanding like going steady or being engaged—hey, Caroline?” He turned toward the couch—a piece of Danish modern that looked as if an unclean elephant had nested there. Caroline sat beside another, younger girl, thin and black. When Caroline caught their gaze, she held up her hand with the diamond.

  “In Firenze,” she called, “but he’s American. He’ll be here next month. Rowley, aren’t you going to say hello? Don’t you ignore me a minute longer!”

  A dozen people milled around the large front room that had changed little since the time Leon was married to Joye. Inside the peeling walls, the flaking paint dabbed with squashed roaches and old film star posters, stood the furniture one or the other prosperous family had given them for marrying each other. Festooned from the ceiling were Joye’s stubborn attempts at decoration: a net of pebbles, a wobbly mobile of bicycle parts, some gourds and Indian corn strung up wizened and miscolored as shrunken heads. Leon’s editing table stood against one wall with a rack of clips by the small splicer. The screen was furled in its case, thank god, beside a flood without a bulb. Books were piled on the floor and boxes stood under tables or on chairs, half packed or half unpacked. Old butts lay in drifts against the walls with old paper splices.

  She would call no one here a friend, nor were they currently Rowley’s. There was one black filmmaker and his boyfriend, who left shortly, some stray girls, but the knot of men around Leon had known each other at the University. Their talk bristled with names at least one of them would have forgotten. Remember, said the natty one as they stood outside the kitchen, and they laughed ritually and the fat one slapped his thigh. Rowley would not join them: he used but did not sentimentalize his past. He had many pasts and she was always discovering a new one like a corridor opening out of a casual sentence: “One time in Duluth when I was working on the ore boats …” “When Kirk and I hit Baja California in his jeep …” “So my old man sent me down to the picket line at the East Gate …”

  “Owen,” Leon was saying. “Course you haven’t seen him around. He’s locked up.”

  “How come?” the natty one asked. “What did he do?”

  “Heard voices, man. His folks committed him.” Leon drew his finger across his throat. “This time he’ll never get out.”

  The fat one shook his head, his jowls drooping in mournful folds. “What a rotten deal. Poor old Owen.”

  “Shut up, Fisher!” Leon’s voice rose like the whine of a saw. “I came to you asking you to find him a job in your father’s snot-works, and all you had to say was, gee I’m busy. You sent him up there too, and don’t forget it.”

  Fisher flailed his arms shouting as Anna finally slipped past into the kitchen to get a beer for herself and another for Rowley, still chatting with Caroline. He took it and thanked her without breaking the rhythm of his story, standing with one foot on the rung of a chair. Climbing in the High Sierra. One good reason she did not enjoy parties as much as she used to.

  He certainly was not handsome with his crooked nose and scar and his droopy walrus moustache and strange upslanting eyes, his ruddy face, his hair long and shaggy. He had a good body but thick in the waist. A fine man to cook for, with eagerness to try and strong belly and good teeth. In the bathtub he played like a porpoise and sang. He dropped to sleep like a ton of child. His other accomplishments were, alas, obvious. She had little against him except that he did not know he was mortal.

  Caroline was lit up for him, signals hoisted. The girl beside her, looking the room over with a wondering disgust, contrasted strongly. She was perhaps nineteen with coppery black skin very smooth against the mattress ticking of her shift. Her hair was cropped close to her head in tight natural curls, set on a long neck. Black swan. Coltish long arms and legs. Her face, unmoving, had the slightly flattened precision of a mask. She brought out Caroline’s coloring—the brown-blond haziness, the camelshair pastels. Next to her Caroline looked sexy, full of sap, but also a little obvious with her brows and lashes heavily made up, large complaisant mouth, a bigboned hippy selfconscious body that men would call childlike without meaning that. Regular soft features that Leon kept showing in that pretentious film wrapped in slimy seaweed or with beetles crawling over.

  Turning away from Caroline and Rowley the girl got up, slight and graceful. Anna intercepted her. “Like me you don’t know these people? I’m Anna Levinowitz.”

  The girl looked up with a chilly appraising stare. “Vera Jameson. I’ve known Caroline for years. We’re both from Green River, Michigan.”

  “Are you going to school here?”

  “No.” Sparks. “Teaching it. And you too, right?”

  Anna nodded. “At the University extension.”

  “From the manner, you had to.”

  Put down, Anna smiled stiffly. “So you’ve known Caroline a long time. What brings her back to Chicago?”

  “She’s staying with me, though she’ll be moving into her own place Monday.” A cool high spring clear voice. “If you’re interested in her plans, why don’t you ask her?”

  “As you see, she’s talking to someone.”

  “Oh, to him.” Vera’s manner was not hostile, merely remote, she decided. “But I thought you came with him?”

  Anna nodded. “As usual.” Like talking with a precocious twelve-year-old. That was why she had thought Vera so young. Lovely in a fragile way, like those teacups mothers collect on bricabrac shelves. Small ears bared by her cropped hair. Lithe body designed for the sort of shift she was wearing, pleasant, summery, cool.

  “Then why don’t you go over?”

  But her sharp teeth and candor bit. “I think people talk best by twos.” Why didn’t she? Afraid to be thought to interfere. Too proud. Too stubborn.

  Vera considered that gravely. Then with a broad but fleeting smile, “That’s true, that’s very true. Because the two of you work out a shorthand way of saying things. You don’t have to spell everything out.”

  Surely Vera was thinking of a man.

  “Listen, Fisher, I’m tired of you talking a good game!” Leon shouted and they both turned. The fat man, Fisher, had his coat on and was plowing toward the door with Leon urging him on and the natty friend hanging on both their arms. “You’re living like a fat fungus off the past. You think because you smoked pot seven years ago with some musicians, that makes you a radical. I’m tired of you coming around beating your gums. Come back when you’re ready to change your life. Now go home and stew in your smell!”

  “Who made you an expert on how to run my life? I’m married to my wife. I still got my kid. I support them. I hold a good job—”

  “Get out, Fisher, or I’ll break your jaw!”

  Caroline had come near with a loosemouthed, excited look, while Vera backed away with a grimace. “Why are they screaming?”

  “Unclear.” Anna watched Rowley steer them outside, then shut the door against those who pressed after. With a graceful moue of incomprehension, Vera turned and moved off. She behaved as if she did not know what a party was, did not sense the mandate to behave as if she was enjoying herself. Since the filmmaker had left she was the only Negro, but that did not seem to explain anything as she examined the prints on the w
all, stood on tiptoe to give the mobile a poke, looked over the people with the same detached curiosity, and when spoken to replied literally to questions. Probably she had come as a favor to Caroline. And if she were in love, of course the room was empty.

  Anna turned, meaning to talk to Caroline, but found her path blocked by a soft plump young man with the face of an ill-tempered rabbit who must have been staring at her. “I’m Leon’s brother,” he said with a damp menace.

  “Hello, Leon’s brother, did they run out of names before they got to you?” She did not have any desire to flirt with him, but he looked so sorry. Like calling on a longwinded student for the sake of his ego.

  He was Sidney. “I’m only invited because he wants to borrow my Porsche. Probably he wants to pretend it’s his in front of some girl, so she’ll take off her clothes for his movies. He calls it art.” Sidney snickered into his glass.

  Nuts at parties, the ones with a bomb or a grievance in their pocket or their pants, always sought her out. Leon came shambling back in alone to squat on his haunches before Caroline.

  “You didn’t get into a fight!” Caroline said.

  “With Fisher? He wouldn’t have the guts to hit his kid.”

  “What did you do with Rowley?”

  “He’s out there playing peacemaker. So what’s this about being engaged?” He rocked back on his heels.

  Caroline held out her ring as if she expected it to speak.

  “He goes around and he tries to make me loan him my Porsche,” Sidney was saying peevishly, “and he gets money from our mother and presents, all behind the old man’s back, and he calls them both by their first names. If I ever called Mother by her first name she’d slap my face, but he does it all the time.”

  “What does that mean?” Leon was rasping. “You love him?”

  Caroline shook out her lush shoulderlength hair. “Well of course.”

  “That’s never of course,” Leon snarled. “Why aren’t you with him?”

  Rowley came in alone and was stopped by an acquaintance. She heard his laugh boom.

  “He wheedles in, he says tell me this, old Sid-boy, tell me about that, and then he’s trying to run my life,” Sidney hissed, leaning close. “All he cares about is sex and free-loading.”

  “Honey,” Caroline argued, “can’t you see that’s no way to begin? He’s in Santa Barbara on business.” She patted Leon’s cheek. “In the meantime I found a great job. I’m working in the Rising Sun coffeehouse. We wear mesh stockings and slinky short tops—”

  “If you’re in love with him, why aren’t you with him?”

  “I think it would be a miserable way to begin a marriage with me sitting in a motelroom all day twiddling my thumbs.” She leaped up. “I’m dying for a beer.”

  A moment later she reappeared to dodge across the room calling, “Rowley! You have your car, n’est-ce pas?” She took his arm. “Crisis! We’re running low on beer. Let’s go foraging.”

  Leon went after her. “Low on beer? Hold on, I’ll go.”

  “No, honey, that’d be silly. You bought the first load.”

  Vera crossed over. “Drop me off then. I’m sleepy.”

  Anna stepped forward but Sidney was not nearly done and he blocked her without breaking the thread of his righteous lament. After they had driven off she stood in fitful apprehension with Sidney’s voice slopping over her. “Everyone in the family’s sick of him because of the way he acts. Then he has the nerve to come up to my apartment and put his feet up and ask for Scotch and tell me I should quit working for my uncle and go on a diet and lift weights and take LSD and be as crazy as he is.”

  What was Caroline dying to say that she had to catch Rowley alone? Or did she merely want to escape Leon? Great interest in what need not concern him. She could feel her attentive smile hardening across her face. Finally the beer really did run out and people began to leave all around them. At one point she noticed Leon sitting on the couch, bowed as if tired, and knew he was listening to Sidney. Twice he looked up at his brother and his face was contorted with pity.

  Finally he broke in. Pounded numb with boredom she collapsed in a chair. Then she saw that only the three of them remained.

  Sidney offered with sullen humility, “Come on, I’ll give you a ride in my Porsche.”

  Heat rose along her body. “No thanks, my friend’s coming back.”

  As Leon shut the door after Sidney, making sad sucking noises, he said. “So sure?”

  “Why not?” She wanted to sound calm but sounded only silly. She paced once around the coffee table, then afraid of showing her tension, sat again. Vera had invited them in. Caroline had a real problem to talk over with him: why him? All beer stores closed. Flat tire. An accident. Accident? That damn billygoat!

  Leon clasped his hands behind his thick neck, stretching. “They’ve had time to brew that beer. Face it, we’ve been deserted.”

  “Why assume the worst?” She drew up her long legs into the chair.

  “If it happens to be true?” His eyes studied her legs, then withdrew as if shyly. “Coffee?”

  She nodded. Pushing his glasses back on his nose, he shambled into the kitchen to make instant coffee and bring back two hastily rinsed cups. Returned to his seat he looked at her steadily: looming head with a brow ridge over the eyes. The eyes behind heavy glasses were a milky opalescent gray-blue, far apart and commanding. Hard pale eyes that fixed on her with hesitant friendliness and unwavering inquisition. His jaw protruded squarely, his mouth was large and lax. His reddish hair was cut short, showing a small bald spot on the crown, hair that grew longer on his arms and the backs of his hands than on his heavy skull. His broad shoulders sloped out to big elbows, outsized knuckles. The eyes brooded on her with tender patience, waiting for her to admit her position.

  She held the cup between her palms, sipping. He had turned out all lights but those around the island of couch and chair, separated by a teak coffeetable pitted with cigarette grooves, ringed with coffeecup stains, bleached by alcohol, loaded with forgotten glasses, old film magazines, rumpled cigarette packs, a weary tie, an infant’s blue knitted sweater, very dirty.

  “My poor ball-less brother. He thinks life would be easier if he’d been the oldest and got everyplace first. I keep telling him, go to a new place then, kick them all in the teeth, me too.… You got brothers and sisters?”

  “A younger sister, Estelle.” The hour, the island of light, his brother’s confession, his manner all conspired to create an artificial intimacy. She had a fear she labeled irrational that he was about to make a pass.

  “And does she hate you too?”

  “She doesn’t know me well enough.”

  “Hating can be a form of honest response.” It seemed to her he was looking at her with the same pity he had shown for Sidney.

  She burst out, “You think they’re in bed.” Her voice husky. He opened his mouth but she forstalled him, picking the phone off the floor to dial Rowley’s number. Ring, pause. The phone stood on his bedside table. Ring, pause. Ring, pause.

  “Hello?” Rowley’s voice went through her.

  Her hand came up to her breasts, protecting. If only he had not answered. He always thought it might be his father taken a turn for the worse, the studio, someone in trouble.

  “You bastard.” She slammed the receiver. Bending she put the phone back and rose turned away so that she need not meet Leon’s gaze too quickly. Slowly she moved, feeling her body tear. What she had done to Asher had come back to punish her. “I’ve got to go home. I’ll call a cab.”

  “I’ll give you a ride.” He got up.

  “Don’t bother, please. A cab is easy.” She wanted to run out of his sight.

  “I’ll drive you.” He was holding open the door. As they walked out, the phone rang. Leon looked at her, raising his brows.

  “Answer if you want to. Only I’m not here.”

  “Let it ring.”

  At his old Buick Leon paused to look at the street, turned by the mo
on into empty facade. She stared too, wanting conversation to ward off pity or condolence. “Lived here long?”

  “Six, seven years. They’re going to tear it all down.”

  Faded gaiety of prim carnival houses with spooled storefronts silvered by moonlight. Down they would come to a pile of warped boards.

  “My building’s condemned too. Urban removal. They’re going to dig a great hole with their steamshovels and throw us in.”

  “And my old man Sheldon will be in the driver’s seat piling dirt on my head.”

  She was puzzled but too weary to care. “Turn right. I’ll show you …”

  “I know.”

  As he pulled up he reached across and gripped her door handle. “Look here, you wouldn’t rather go have a drink someplace?”

  “Thanks but I’m dead tired.”

  “Guess you and Rowley will make it up tomorrow.” He let go of the handle.

  She got out at once. “You guess wrong but it doesn’t matter. Thanks again.” Inside she could not climb the stairs, dim, steep, straight up. She stood by the mailboxes. The steps were a sacrificial pyramid. She would climb, mount her stone bed and her loosened heart would be torn free and fed to a god of justice because she had done in Asher, because. With heavy thighs she pulled herself up.

  She let her purse drop and trudged into the other room. As she threw herself on the bed the mirror snapped her, black hair hanging forward, face strangely calm. She lay prone. She could not move. Hours ago she had found out and she knew it and knew it and knew it, him with Caroline.

  Pounding on the door. She groaned. More pounding.

  “Annie! Open the door!”

  She stumbled up. Stopped and automatically smoothed her hair. He did not have a key. Her hand froze to the knob. Let him go away.

  He beat on the door. “Annie! Let me in.”

  A door opened up the corridor. She turned the knob. “Yes?”

  He pushed in giving the door a cuff shut. His face was furrowed with anger, his eyes hot. “What the hell are you trying to do?”

  She eased away, staring at a point above his shoulder. He seemed huge and bright, he hurt her eyes. “Nothing to say.”