MY NEW GIRLFRIEND, LINDA, HAS JUST called to tell me she thinks she`s been bad. I`m watching the news with the sound off, but the sports is about to come on. There`s a catch in her voice I don`t like. Burt, my 8-year-old son, is still shooting baskets in my tableless kitchen, providing his own play-by- play. He also makes sure I am watching. Linda works three nights a week as a reference librarian in Skokie, and these are the nights that Burt has been spending with me.
”Just a second,” I say, then tell Burt again to go brush his teeth. I`ve already pasted his brush. ”I`m just getting Burt off to bed here.”
He dribbles the quarter-scale ball through his legs, ”goes baseline under pressure” with an ornery look on his face, ”gets triple-teamed and does a three-sixty” as he pushes off under the basket, then spins up a left-handed layup, ”making it talk off the glass.” It rims around twice and goes in.
”Bad?” I ask Linda.
Burt punches the air with his fist, jerks it straight back, then asks me,
”That Mom?”
”Can you talk?” Linda says.
I hold up my fist in response to his layup and shake my head no. It most certainly isn`t his mother. ”I`ll be off in a minute,” I tell him. ”A figure of speech,” I tell Linda. ”I just need a second to-”
”Check,” she says. ”Got it.”
Burt rotates the ball in his palms and gives me his look.
”Just go and brush.”
He shoots one last turnaround jumper-”Pippen for three at the buzzer”-
misses it, ”grabs his own rebound, gets fouled.”
”Ho, Burt, I mean it. Let`s go.”
He makes a fast sign of the cross, lines up a free throw, relaxes his shoulders and exhales. Without looking back at me, he swishes the free throw and skulks down the hall toward the bathroom. The ball rolls across the warped beige linoleum, wobbles a little, then stops.
OK, I put my head back on the arm of the couch, prop up my neck with a cushion, try to sound casually curious. ”Motorhead bad?” Like I find it too hard to believe.
”I think so,” she says.
I`ve been calling her Motorhead lately, and thinking of her as Motorhead, because she`s planning to buy a new car and has spent the last month compulsively dealership hopping, studying spec sheets and consumer reports and running on rather incessantly about twin-port injection, power-train warranties, yen, cams, transmissions and numbers and angles of cylinders. Motorhead is also the name of a band alleged to be so very nasty and heavily metallic that if they move in next door to you, your lawn will die.
”Let me guess. You picked up the five-liter Mustang with the flamethrower decals.”
”The what?”
”A Corvette?”
”I haven`t decided yet, Ben. I guess I can`t deal with the cheeseballs who sell them. So, by the way, how are you?”
I still own half of a lawn and a house, but I just don`t go to them any more. Motorhead is also the first girl or woman with whom I haven`t been sexually dysfunctional since Leona, my wife, got a boyfriend last spring and formally, through our former lawyer, requested that we be separated. I moved out five months ago Saturday; in a month things will all be official. But I`m already drinking much less, and my extravagantly detailed fantasizing about a reconciliation is more or less over. I`ve torn up some photographs, too. I`ve even been getting some sleep, with the help of B complex and Dalmane. I had a few dates before I met Linda, most of them fixups by people at work, but none of these ever worked out, including the two with Leona. With Motorhead, things have been different. I even have learned how to don prophylactics without losing one reason for wearing them. Sometimes.
”Well,” I tell her, ”I guess I`m doing fine. How`re you?”
”Have you listened to your present yet?”
Two days ago she gave me a battered used copy of ”What`s Words Worth?”
Motorhead`s second live album. It`s next to me here on the couch. The cover features a bust of who else with the blade of a short ax sunk deep in the top of his skull.
”I`m afraid that I haven`t,” I say.
”Well, gee,” Linda says.
I listen for Burt down the hall. His video hoop game I`d be able to hear from his room, but I don`t. Something tells me, however, that he isn`t yet brushing his teeth. I pull out the Motorhead liner and read a few lyrics.
Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain
Two thousand years of misery, of torture in my name
Hypocrisy made paramount, paranoia the law
My name is called religion, sadistic, sacred whore
They are sung by either Filthy Phil Taylor, Lemmy or Fast Eddie Clark. The liner notes don`t make it clear.
”Plus I wanted the studio version,” I say.
”We`ll see what we can do,” Linda says, ”as long as you still insist on calling me that.”
”So tell me about it,” I say. I want to know how she`s been bad.
She asks me instead how my son is. She very much wants to meet Burt, but I`ve told her it isn`t quite time yet. The latest agreement I have with Leona is that we won`t introduce him to any third parties till we mutually agree he is ready. Our principal criterion-we`ve actually typed this stuff up-is that the person will not be a negative influence. Even Leona admits that she made a mistake by taking him to the movies with Mel, her third boyfriend, the week I moved out. We want to expose him to as little confusion as possible. Plus I figure the longer I hold out with Linda, the more pressure there`ll be on Leona not to take my son out on her dates or start having sleepover parties. I hope.
”Burt`s not bad,” I say, not on purpose. Have Motorhead`s lab tests revealed she has AIDS? Is she pregnant? I replay the ways this is possible. There are, after all, one or two. ”But so tell me how you were,” I say.
”I JUST PULLED THIS PRANK,” SHE ANNOUNCES. ”Or maybe I should say, this stunt.” Her accents and pauses, plus the way she enunciates every last consonant, make my brain produce aural endorphin, so things she says don`t always register. Her voice, as a matter of fact, is the thing that I like most about her so far. It makes her sound fragile but street-smart, high-class, with undertones, hints, of debauchery. She also will holler and bark when we`re watching TV and a team plays tough defense. So she doesn`t have AIDS, I decide. I sip some more Bushmills and listen.
She tells me a man with a Thai or Vietnamese accent has just called the reference desk and asked her how to spell ”restaurant.” ”He was opening one and was painting the sign and writing the menus, and he didn`t have a dictionary. Either that or he did have a dictionary but he couldn`t find the word because he didn`t know how to spell it.”
”Did he also ask if you had pig`s feet?”
”Like I say, I may be dumb, but I`m not pretty.”
This is not true. Motorhead looks like a pocket Grace Kelly with bangs. Same cheekbones, same yellow hair, pretty much the same nose and eyes. Not quite as tall, though-not even as tall as Leona-and much plusher torso and lips. ”My poor bee-stung lips,” she has called them. Her legs aren`t long, but she doesn`t look bad in black jodhpurs. She is medium vain at the most. She`s also terrifically booksmart.
”How about Prince Albert in a can?” I say. I can`t help it.
”Didn`t ask me that, either.”
At least twice a shift, she has told me, she is asked to spell words. She also converts fifths to liters, plots H and D curves, ascertains whether cockroaches have a discernible odor, performs on-line searches on corporate takeovers, proofreads 11-page term papers on ”Hamlet” written by 15-year-olds, calculates the time in Managua when it`s noon in Chicago on May Day, explains how it is that flames won`t point down. Once, when a dictionary definition proved inadequate to the task, she demonstrated for a Bahraini sheikh`s niece how to curtsy. She has also reminded me that polls say librarian is our country`s most trusted profession; commodities trader is second to last, behind lawyer.
”Even still, sort of sounds like the prank was on you.”
”It wasn`t,” she says, rather firmly. ”Don`t be a dip, Ben. OK?”
”You say so.”
She repeats that the caller was Thai, or Asian at least, and insists that his question was serious. ”So listen,” she says. ”I`m telling you something, OK?”
”OK.” I`m wondering how to spell ”restaurant” too. So I listen.
”Here`s the thing,” Linda says. ”I looked it up, right? But when I told him how to spell it, I kind of accidentally on purpose transposed the `a` and the `u.` ”
”You didn`t.”
”I did.”
I picture the menu, the sign, the urbane Third World restaurantgoers shaking their heads in bemusement. ”Pretty tasty,” I say. ”Pretty tricky.” ”Pretty nasty,” she says. Clears her throat. ”It`s not mine to resist such temptations, I guess. Do you know what I mean?”
Not exactly.
She says, ”Just a second, OK?” I hear a male voice ask a question. The next thing I know I`m on hold.
I sip some more Irish and review the warm facts. Four or five years ago my little Motorhead had what is now called a substance-abuse problem. She didn`t just say no. She was snorting cocaine for the most part, injecting
”the occasional” speedball and dealing ”as kind of a lucrative lark”
with her carpenter-skankmeister boyfriend. She has shown me some snapshots. Linda looked skanky but 20 pounds lighter, the boyfriend looked just like Pat Riley, and both of them looked pretty shady. And these are the pictures she`s shown me. At some point two sets of unfriendly persons with badges and handcuffs and automatic weapons-serious dealers and officers of the law, it turned out-got involved. But that is now long in the past. No trace of punctures, no love lost-she tells me-on boyfriend, no record. (Her father`s a big-time attorney.) Two sets of lab results negative. She got herself clean, went back and finished her master`s in Information Science at the University of Chicago, found a good job. About the only substances she abuses these days, to my knowledge, are cognac, champagne, Irish whiskey, an occasional Marlboro Light.
Perhaps it`s the interface between time zones and curtsies and speedballs that intrigues me so much. I don`t know. I do know I`m terribly fond of the way that her system processes alcohol. A finger of cognac leaves her all flowering wisteria and handjive, and champagne makes her talk like Rosanna Arquette. Even splitting three-fourths of a liter of dark, smoky Irish with me makes her mouth taste like banana yogurt and leaves the rest of her body and brain in a squall of Hibernian candor-instead of all bad blood and bus fumes, like mine. I can only imagine what junk did.
”I`m back,” she announces. ”Guy wants to know who his congressman were.”
”Who they were?”
”Don`t we all?”
”Do we?”
My call-waiting signal cuts in. We ignore it, or try to.
”Forget that,” I tell her. ”Go on.”
”Anyway, Ben, what I`m saying is that, to tell you the truth, I really don`t feel so hot about it any more.”
Instead of asking when she hasn`t been telling the truth, I tell her, ”I do that all the time too.”
”You do what?”
”You know. Almost misspell it, misspell it, that way.”
”Not on purpose, you don`t.”
This is true. ”Though it`s not like I have all that many.”
”Just a second,” she says, then puts me on hold.
