Homesick for Another World(24)
I often wondered whether Paul understood what it meant to make love to a woman, just the basic practicality of what goes where, what it would mean to begin and finish. Perhaps he’d had some experiences with women he didn’t care to share with me, though I think if he’d had any, he’d have bragged about them plenty. “Sex o’clock, Larry,” he said daily before waddling over to his room, shutting the door, and pulling out his box of pornography, I assumed. A birthday trip to Hooters had been his idea. He’d gone to a Hooters once in Las Vegas, he claimed, and had the time of his life.
“Las Vaginas,” he joked. “Food and girls, girls and food. Mm,” he said. He licked frosting off his fingers. “Hooters has everything.”
“I’ve got money,” said Claude, though I don’t think Claude had much sexuality.
“They’ve got food here,” Francis reminded us, poking at the cake with his pinkie.
“Larry will take us to Hooters,” Paul announced, smiling proudly. “Girls,” he said. “Ooh.” He shut his eyes and lifted his arms, twisting invisible knobs as though they were a woman’s nipples. He gyrated, licked his palm. I hid my revulsion behind a cough. “Girls,” he cried again, his eyes rolling back in ecstasy. “Girls, girls, girls.”
? ? ?
Lacey and I had never been close. We never bonded. She loved me no more than I’d loved her mother, I guess—the sort of strained affection captured best in stiff family portraits taken at the mall, a hand cupping a shoulder, a benign tilt of the head, eyes wide and vacant for the camera. My wife had insisted on posing for those photos every Christmas, and I had complied until I couldn’t stand to anymore.
“Take the photo without me,” I said to her one year. “Mother and daughter.” I expected her to put up a fight, but she simply stirred the cream into her coffee, a smudge of bright pink lipstick on the porcelain rim. I watched her sip and squint as though she were imagining it—mother and daughter.
“You’re right, Larry,” she said. “It’s better without you.”
We talked like that. She bought herself expensive jewelry with her father’s money—gold tennis bracelets, heart-shaped pendants, something called chocolate diamonds—and wrapped them up and signed my name on the gift cards. “To my dear wife, with love, Larry.”
“Oh, honey, you really shouldn’t have,” she’d say after dinner, pulling the box out from under her seat cushion. She put the bracelet on, held her wrist out admiringly. Of course it felt awful. “I love you, Larry,” she’d coo, getting up to kiss me on the cheek. Her lipstick was always thick and greasy. It took cold cream and a shave to get it off my face the next morning. Her jewelry sat in towering stacks of little boxes on her dressing table until she was dead and Lacey came and swept them into a plastic laundry basket along with a few items from the closet—a fur coat, a few purses, some fancy shoes. Everything else got donated. Her makeup and perfume I threw in the garbage, much of it unused, unopened.
? ? ?
Francis decided to stay behind while we went to Hooters. He joined a group in the TV lounge to watch Les Mise?rables. All the residents at Offerings loved Broadway shows. There must have been two dozen VHS cassettes of musicals on the shelf—Annie Get Your Gun, Bye Bye Birdie, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Wizard of Oz. Grease was the big favorite. Everyone knew all the songs by heart.
“Les Jizz,” said Paul, cackling.
“How much money should I bring?” asked Claude, fingering through his wallet.
“Bring it all,” said Paul.
I did nothing to rein in their excitement. Claude put on a clip-on tie. Paul paced in the hallway as I filled out the form to borrow the van.
“Going out?” asked Marsha Mendoza as she walked past.
“Birthday dinner,” I answered, gesturing toward Paul and smiling as best I could. Marsha gave Paul a hug. He groaned as they embraced, eyes widening lecherously. I looked away.
“Hooters, huh, Paul?” I asked after Marsha had left.
“Hooters,” he said and chuckled, wiping his mouth with his hairy forearm.
On the way there, stopped at a red light in the Offerings van, I watched all the regular people mill down the sidewalk. I rarely interacted much with anyone back then who wasn’t retarded. When I did, it struck me how pompous and impatient they were, always measuring their words, twisting things around. Everybody was so obsessed with being understood. It made me sick. I glanced up at Paul in the rearview mirror as he touched his fat, chapped lips. His hands always smelled of butane and the powdered cheese and spices that coated his favorite corn chips. I could hear Claude breathing from the backseat. He was always congested, his nose always whistling like a drafty window. I checked my reflection in the vanity. I sprayed my mouth with Binaca.
“What’s that?” Claude wanted to know, but I didn’t answer.
“Hoot hoot,” said Paul, slicking his hair back with sweat when the light turned green.
I had been to Hooters once before. With all the nice restaurants in town, my father-in-law had taken me there for lunch on my fiftieth birthday.
“No disrespect to my daughter,” he’d said, swinging the door open to that nauseating aroma of french fries and cigarette smoke and beer. My birthday falls around Christmastime, so all the waitresses wore stockings with one green leg and one red leg under their tiny orange shorts, little red Santa hats with big white pom-poms, a tuft of fake mistletoe tied with silver twine like a pendant around their necks. Their “wifebeater” tops left very little to the imagination. I tried to hide my concern, but it was impossible. Hooters was no place for good people.