The Weight of Gravity, page 4
"That's what we call em. Hordes of thirty-somethings who made their millions in the movie business, or in the early days of the silicon, dot-com explosion. Those folks are coming here too, to get away from the glut on the West Coast."
"Seems a shame, somehow."
"What? That they finally found some use for this shit-hole?" Clay laughed. "You're just jealous you didn't stay around long enough to get in on the action." He slapped Max's shoulder. "Enough business. Cin!” Clay shouted over his shoulder as he gestured for Max to take a seat. “Beer, Woman!”
A petite woman with a spunky ponytail high on the side of her head and wearing a thin summer dress crashed through the screen door with four Lone Star beers. She placed them on the metal table, two in front of each man, and smiled at Max.
“Cin, this here is ....” Clay began.
“Oh-my-God! Oh-my-God! You’re Max Rosen, the writer! I’ve read abso-darn-lutely everything you have ever written.” She clutched her hands to her chest and began to bounce up and down.
“Thanks.”
“No, you don’t understand.” She stopped bouncing, reached out and grabbed Max’s are so tightly that he nearly spilled his beer. “I cried when Marjorie De Leone left her husband and children behind to run off with Cliff. I roared when Simon Mooney got stiffed in the ass by the corporation. All of it! Wonderful!” She released him then and bounced behind him to stand on the other side of the table. “Hell, you’re my favorite writer of all time!’
“Thanks for the beer,” Max said.
“Enough, already, Woman. Let the man be.”
“I knew you and Clay were friends in high school, but I never thought you’d come here to visit us,” she said, ironing her dress with her palms while still bouncing lightly on her toes.
“Didn’t I tell you, Woman, that I was the inspiration for all his books?” He turned to Max. “Remember in Miss Tuttle’s class when I told you that you should be a writer? Remember that?”
“Yes, I do, Clay.”
“See, Woman, I told ya.” Clay took a long draw on his bottle, then propped his dusty boots on the table and put his hands behind his head.
“Damn, are you gonna get something special tonight, honey!” Cindy ran a finger along Clay’s shoulders and through his hair before she danced back into the house.
Max sipped his beer. “She’s cute.”
“Yeah, robbed the cradle with that one, but hell. Swe-e-e-e-t. Too, she shops for unmentionables at the Vicky Secret in El Paso. Huh? What do you think of that? That’s all I can say about it. Except, she’s good with the boys, you know?” He emptied his bottle, took aim at a rusty trashcan near the back door, and sent it sailing home. The crashing sound it made when it disappeared into the can told Max that many more bottles met their fate in the same way. “So, what do we owe the honor, Mister Max Rosen? I haven’t seen nor heard from you since you bee-lined out of here after school.”
“Oh, I kept up on people, Clay. I admired what I heard about you?”
“Really? What’d I do?”
“You got out of this place not long after I did.”
“Yeah.”
“But you came back,” Max said. “I never understood why you did that.”
Clay’s chin dropped and he pursed his lips, deep in thought. When he looked up, Max saw him reach out to trace the neck of his second bottle with his fingertip. “Had to.” Clay upended the bottle of beer and nearly drained it. He smacked his lips. “But it was more than family obligation, Max.” Clay then took a pack of Camels out from under his shirtsleeve and lit one. He pulled the smoke deep into his lungs, but Max never saw him exhale. “Cottonwood gets under your skin, into your blood. Something about it makes it hard to stay away. Once you got your fix, you crave it for the rest of your life.” He took another hefty drag. “You and I both started here, so you probably know what I mean. Hell, you’re back, aren’t you?
“Yeah, but I don’t know why.”
“Yes, you do. You just won’t admit it to yourself. That’s a hollow world out there, Max. I tasted it. Not like you, but I tasted it fine. It’s bitter, and it don’t get any better the longer you stay away. Here? Now, here is where the questions are easy to answer and the nights can be sweet with the taste of a woman like Cin. Life is rich here, if you let it happen, Max.” He inhaled slowly, then blew three perfect smoke rings. “Have you seen Erika yet?”
The question caught Max by surprise. Admittedly, Erika was a major reason he’d returned, but he hadn’t anticipated that people would still think of the two of them together. Has she lived all these years with that curse, he wondered?
“No. Should I see her?”
“Hell, yes. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Erika. We both know that.”
“Erika’s married, and besides, what’s she going to say, Clay.”
“She’s gonna say, ‘Baby, I need you so-o-o bad. Right now. Give it to me. Ooo-ooo, yes, Baby, yes!’” Clay laughed hard, until he began to cough. Max held his thumb over the end of his bottle, shook it, then sprayed Clay from head to foot. Clay jumped up laughing. “Cin, more Lone Stars. The man is wasting our good beer.”
“Good beer, hell,” Max said, drinking what little was left. “You wouldn’t know good beer if it hit you in the face.”
Max accepted Cindy’s offer to stay for lunch. She served tuna fish sandwiches, coleslaw, potato chips, and more Lone Star. It all tasted wonderful.
He watched Clay chase his young wife around the kitchen. She teased, playfully hinting at the promise of intimacies to come, and he grabbed at the hem of her dress until he finally pulled her onto his lap. It was great fun for them and a joy for Max to watch.
“Why’d you come back, Clay?” Max asked when Cindy left the room. “You didn’t know you’d find Cindy in Cottonwood.”
“Why’d you leave, Max? By my thinking, that’s the question you should be trying to answer.”
“I’m not sure anymore. I know I hated living here.” Max snapped a potato chip in half and dropped it on his plate. “I wanted more than Cottonwood had to offer, I think. I wanted to do more with my life. It didn’t seem at the time like there was much reason to stay, I guess.”
“What about Erika? You had Erika.”
“She didn’t want to leave.”
“And you didn’t want to stay.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s it.”
“Was it really that simple, good buddy?”
“I don’t know.” Max tossed his mangled paper napkin unto his plate. “I do remember cheering when I heard you hit the road. And then, I remember being pissed off when they said you came back. Boy, you disappointed me with that move.”
“Screw you, Max.” Clay shoved his chair back from the table. “How ‘bout I put my Tony Lama boot up your ass? Look around the room, you idiot,” he said, gesturing with both arms. “I’m not the person who’s unhappy and trying to find myself here. What’re you thinking? You think I’m going to make it easier on you to understand what’s going on in your head, if I can explain why I came back? Is that it? Okay, chew on this! I came back because my family needed me. But more than that, I came back because I didn’t like it out there … couldn’t find anything better … didn’t want to spend my life trying to be happy elsewhere when I knew for certain I’d be happy here.” He got up and leaned across the table just inches from Max’s face. “Now, I may not be as smart as the big city writer, but I’d say, given that I came back years ago, and given that I’m pretty fucking happy here, and given that you’re back here now trying to figure yourself out ... well, I’d say that makes me a bit smarter than you, jerk weed.”
“Hey, look ...,” Max began, but then saw Clay smile. “You’re pulling my chain, aren’t you?”
Clay sat slowly back in his seat. He picked up his bottle and drained it. He held it over his shoulder. Cindy, who’d walked back into the room when she heard Clay rise from his seat, took the empty bottle from his hand and replaced it with a full one. She ran her fingers through his hair. He took his eyes away from Max for a moment, leaned his head back, and she kissed his forehead. She was so tiny that he pulled her arm across his chest and kissed her palm in gratitude. She tussled his hair one more time before leaving. He looked again at Max.
“No, I’m not. Everything I said is true, and you ought to think about it ... including the part about the Tony Lamas.” He rocked back, put his hands behind his head and put one boot on the table. “I don’t have easy answers for you, guy. All I can tell you is that it may not be about Erika, or about living in Cottonwood permanently, or even about living in New Yawk in a fandy-dandy penthouse. Sometimes, what it’s all about is ... just being. And being happy with that.”
“Ooooo, that is so profound,” Max said. I wish it were that simple for me, my friend.
“Yeah, well, you ain’t the only one with a brain, you know ... scarecrow. Beat your pants off in the school science fair, now didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did.” Max reached out and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. He couldn’t remember the last time he did something like that, if ever. He’d consciously nurtured an aversion to touching people in recent years. He even abhorred shaking hands with fans at book signings. Marcie usually ran interference when they began to fawn. The only downside to his no-touch policy was that it put a damper on his never-great-and-now-nonexistent love life.
“Time you completed your mission, good buddy,” Clay said, throwing his napkin on the table and crossing his arms.
“How do I do that?”
“I can tell you where you’ll find the love of you life, most days.”
“What?” Cindy suddenly wanted to know, bouncing back into the room. “You’re in love with someone in Cottonwood, Max?”
“Not sure, Cindy. She’s someone I knew a long time ago.”
“Oh, tell me. Please tell me who it is.” She began to dance around the kitchen.
“You know that lawyer fella who closed daddy’s will ... Hightower?” Clay said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s his wife.”
“Erika Hightower?” Cin screamed. “She comes into the shop where I work all the time. Maxine does her hair.”
“Cin does her nails,” Clay explained to Max.
“She’s a top and bottom girl.” They both stared at Cindy. “Manicure and pedicure, always.”
“Okay, where is she?” Max asked.
Chapter 6 - Erika
She sat before her vanity applying face conditioner. Her palm came to rest on her cheek. She stared into the mirror.
"Damn. What’s happened to you?"
Erika traced her chin with her index finger. "How kind is twenty years on anyone, right? You're acting foolish, Erika." She rose from the table and walked into the closet. "Old boyfriend comes to town and you start counting the wrinkles."
"Mom!"
"Jay," she said, walking out of the closet.
He stood in the doorway, a young man of sixteen who worked hard at looking rebellious, disheveled, and gothic enough to contrast sharply with his conservative parents. He was in the ‘my identity is my own’ stage, trying so hard to be different and only succeeding in resembling a select group of classmates who loved to hate everything, with a smile, just because it was an overt expression of their independence from the rest of the world. There was a half-hearted, immature quality of arrogance in everything that Jay said and did. His mother felt, rightly so, that his hair was too long, that his clothes were purposely, recklessly mismatched, and that he had more chains on his body than the family dog in the backyard. Jay had just begun to pierce things, too; only an ear and a lip, as far as she could see, and Erika suspected that there might be at least a small tattoo hidden somewhere. What annoyed her most was not his attitude, or his hair, but the way the waistline of his pants barely covered the bottom of his butt. There was much too much gray cotton undergarment showing in her opinion. The one constant of Jay’s appearance, endearing in its uselessness, was a tan hoodie that he’d long outgrown, his wrists extending much too far beyond the cuffs. He loved it the moment that his parents gave it to him for his thirteenth birthday, but his body began an almost immediate and rapid spurt to man-size that year. The hoodie had seemed too small for him nearly from the beginning, but he never went anywhere, even to the kitchen table, without it. It defined him.
Still, she believed fervently that Jay wasn’t anywhere near being a lost cause. Erika was certain that he would outgrow this stage, this look, and settle into something more mainstream, if only to get what she and Garner had to offer after high school which was a good university education with an apartment, a car and a fat credit line. Jay wasn’t foolish enough, she thought, to take his rebellion beyond the reach of his parent’s affluence.
"Where's the old man?" he asked.
"Your father? He had to fly to Chicago last night. Some new glitch in the contracts for the Promethean Housing project."
"Stealing more land from the locals?"
"Excuse me?"
"That's what the old man's doing, right? He's scarfing up more land with some legal mumble-jumble, so the corporate fat asses can build their cracker houses."
"Watch the language. Why so interested in where your father is?"
"Never mind." He buried his hands as far as he could in his back pockets, pushing his jeans nearly past his ass, and turned his face toward the window. In the half-light, Erika was reminded of a black-and-white photograph of James Dean. The only thing missing was a cigarette hanging from his lips, a fowl habit she was certain he’d experimented with in the company of his friends, and sitting by the tall windows in the privacy of his room.
Erika approached the doorway. "Did he make plans with you and forget … again?"
"So, what's new, right?" He turned, speaking over his shoulder. "No big fucking deal. Not my idea. He's the one said he wanted to take me to see that new Beamer cloth top. I didn't give a shit to begin with. Not like I honestly expected him to buy me a car or anything."
"I'll take you to the dealership, if you want to go, but we're not looking at sports cars."
"Forget I said anything," his voice echoed in the hall, and he was gone.
It was so like Garner to give lip service to spending time with Jay, and then forget, she thought. He meant well, but never honestly cared whether he spent time with his teenage son, or not. Erika saw the distance building between them years ago. It was heartbreaking, at first, to watch Jay spend days roaming the backyard alone, wasting hours playing catch with himself by throwing tennis balls against the garage. She tried shooting basketballs with him, but it wasn't the same. As he grew up, it became hard to feel sorry for Jay, because they both knew what his father was like. There were no illusions anymore for either Erika or her son. She’d lost a husband and he’d lost a father.
She finished dressing and drove to the gym. Twenty minutes on the treadmill, fifteen on the stair-stepper, then a half hour of aerobics and she could relax in the club Jacuzzi -- content that she'd done her best to slow her body's natural aging.
You can’t start a fire, you can’t start a fire without a spark
This gun’s for hire, even if we’re dancing in the dark
Erika's pace on the treadmill matched the music in her ear-buds. Come on Springsteen, help me find the zone.
The music seeped deeper into her thoughts until it began to paint a memory of a young Max Rosen, sitting in the hallway writing in his journal, earphones plugged into his Walkman. He was singing off-key when she emerged from the piano practice room.
I’m sick of sitting ‘round here trying to write this book …
I need a love reaction, come on now baby give me just one look.
You can’t start a fire, you can’t start a fire with just …
He jumped to his feet, juggling the tape player in his haste to pull the phones from his ears.
"Where'd you come from?" She smiled.
"Better to ask where I'm going,” he answered.
"Why?”
"'Cause life isn't about what's been, but what will be. More interesting that way."
"If you say so. What you listening to and why aren't you in class?
"Listening to Springsteen … he’s from New Jersey, and he’s the hottest rock artist out there,” he said, holding up the tape player, “and school let out forty minutes ago." She looked at her watch. "You always lose track of time when you practice,” he told her. It was a casual statement, not a question or accusation. If anything, Max admired her dedication.
"Have you been out here long?"
"Not long …" They began to walk up the hall. "… just long enough to hear you play a little Schumann, some Beethoven, and a lot of Gershwin -- very eclectic. You really need to work on the second movement of the Tempest Sonata.
"When did you start studying music?"
Max pulled her into an alcove off the hallway. Wedged between soda and candy machines, he put one hand around her waist and the other on the back of her neck. "When I started dating the most musically talented girl in school." He leaned forward.
She remembered that her toes began to tingle even before their lips met. It wasn't their first kiss, but one of the most memorable.
She passed on the stair-stepper, finished her workout in aerobics and spent longer than usual sitting in the Jacuzzi. She closed her eyes and a familiar voice came to mind.
Play for me, Reeki.
Chapter 7 - Max
Clay told Max that Erika volunteered at Borderland Books, Barista & Bagels, where she played mini concerts on the piano for groups of preschoolers and their moms.
“She still plays.” Again, it was a statement, not a question. She plays the piano ... still. And why not, it made sense. The first thing they shared was their passion for art and music. He wanted to be a writer, he’d told her, and she dreamed of being a concert pianist, she’d said. “Art transcends all things,” he’d said to her. “Art can change the world,” she’d said to him. “And, most importantly,” he’d said, taking her hand for the first time, “great art lasts forever.”
