“ ‘I had an old Chevy nobody had driven since my wife died. But Ivory got it tuned up, and pretty soon it wasn’t Hulga driving me to work and bringing me home, but Ivory. Looking back, I can see it was all a plot between Hulga and Ivory, but I didn’t put it together then. Everybody around the trailer park, and everybody that met her, all they said was what a lovely woman she was, big blue eyes and pretty legs. I figured it was just good-heartedness, the Church of God—I figured that was why she was spending her evenings cooking dinner and keeping house for an old blind man. One night we were listening to the Hit Parade on the radio, and she kissed me and rubbed her hand along my leg. Pretty soon we were doing it twice a day—once before breakfast and once after dinner, and me a man of sixty-nine. But it seemed like she was as crazy about my cock as I was about her cunt—’ ”
She tossed her vodka into the fireplace, a splash that made the flames hiss and flourish; but it was an idle protest: Mr. Schmidt would not be reproached.
“ ‘YES, SIR, IVORY WAS ALL cunt. Whatever way you want to use the word. It was exactly one month from the day I met her to the day I married her. She didn’t change much, she fed me good, she was always interested to hear about the Jews at the club, and it was me that cut down on the sex—way down, what with my blood pressure and all. But she never complained. We read the Bible together, and night after night she would read aloud from magazines, good magazines like Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post, until I fell asleep. She was always saying she hoped she died before I did because she would be heartbroken and destitute. It was true I didn’t have much to leave. No insurance, just some bank-savings that I turned into a joint account, and I had the trailer put in her name. No, I can’t say there was a harsh word between us until she had the big fight with Hulga.
“ ‘For a long time I didn’t know what the fight was about. All I knew was that they didn’t speak to each other any more, and when I asked Ivory what was going on, she said: “Nothing.” As far as she was concerned, she hadn’t had any falling-out with Hulga: “But you know how much she drinks.” That was true. Well, like I told you, Hulga was a waitress at the club, and one day she comes barging into the massage room. I had a customer on the table, had him there spread out buck-naked, but a lot she cared—she smelled like a Four Roses factory. She could hardly stand up. She told me she had just got fired, and suddenly she started swearing and pissing. She was hollering at me and pissing all over the floor. She said everybody at the trailer park was laughing at me. She said Ivory was an old whore who had latched onto me because she was down and out and couldn’t do any better. And she said what kind of a chowderhead was I? Didn’t I know my wife was fucking the balls off Freddy Feo since God knows when?
“ ‘Now, see, Freddy Feo was an itinerant Tex-Mex kid—he was just out of jail somewhere, and the manager of the trailer park had picked him up in one of those fag bars in Cat City and put him to work as a handyman. I don’t guess he could have been one-hundred-percent fag because he was giving plenty of the old girls around there a tickle for their money. One of them was Hulga. She was loop-de-do over him. On hot nights him and Hulga used to sit outside her trailer on her swing-seat drinking straight tequila, forget the lime, and he’d play the guitar and sing spic songs. Ivory described it to me as a green guitar with his name spelled out in rhinestone letters. I’ll say this, the spic could sing. But Ivory always claimed she couldn’t stand him; she said he was a cheap little greaser out to take Hulga for every nickel she had. Myself, I don’t remember exchanging ten words with him, but I didn’t like him because of the way he smelled. I have a nose like a bloodhound and I could smell him a hundred yards off, he wore so much brilliantine in his hair, and something else that Ivory said was called Evening in Paris.
“ ‘Ivory swore up and down it wasn’t so. Her? Her let a Tex-Mex monkey like Freddy Feo put a finger on her? She said it was because Hulga had been dumped by this kid that she was crazy and jealous and thought he was humping everything from Cat City to Indio. She said she was insulted that I’d listen to such lies, even though Hulga was more to be pitied than reviled. And she took off the wedding ring I’d given her—it had belonged to my first wife, but she said that didn’t make any difference because she knew I’d loved Hedda and that made it all the better—and she handed it to me and she said if I didn’t believe her, then here was the ring and she’d take the next bus going anywhere. So I put it back on her finger and we knelt on the floor and prayed together.
“ ‘I did believe her; at least I thought I did; but in some way it was like a seesaw in my head—yes, no, yes, no. And Ivory had lost her looseness; before she had an easiness in her body that was like the easiness in her voice. But now it was all wire—tense, like those Jews at the club that keep whining and scolding because you can’t rub away all their worries. Hulga got a job at the Miramar, but out at the trailer park I always turned away when I smelled her coming. Once she sort of whispered up beside me: “Did you know that sweet wife of yours gave the greaser a pair of gold earrings! But his boyfriend won’t let him wear them.” I don’t know. Ivory prayed every night with me that the Lord would keep us together, healthy in spirit and body. But I noticed … Well, on those warm summer nights when Freddy Feo would be out there somewhere in the dark, singing and playing his guitar, she’d turn off the radio right in the middle of Bob Hope or Edgar Bergen or whatever, and go sit outside and listen. She said she was looking at the stars: “I bet there’s no place in the world you can see the stars like here.” But suddenly it turned out she hated Cat City and the Springs. The whole desert, the sandstorms, summers with temperatures up to a hundred thirty degrees, and nothing to do if you wasn’t rich and belonged to the Racquet Club. She just announced this one morning. She said we should pick up the trailer and plant it down anywhere where the air was cool. Wisconsin. Michigan. I felt good about the idea; it set my mind to rest as to what might be going on between her and Freddy Feo.
“ ‘Well, I had a client there at the club, a fellow from Detroit, and he said he might be able to get me on as a masseur at the Detroit Athletic Club; nothing definite, only one of them maybe deals. But that was enough for Ivory. Twenty-three skidoo, and she’s got the trailer uprooted, fifteen years of planting strewn all over the ground, the Chevy ready to roll, and all our savings turned into traveler’s checks. Last night she scrubbed me top to bottom and shampooed my hair, and this morning we set off a little after daylight.
“ ‘I realized something was wrong, and I’d have known what it was if I hadn’t dozed off soon as we hit the highway. She must have dumped sleeping pills in my coffee.
“ ‘But when I woke up I smelled him. The brilliantine and the dime-store perfume. He was hiding in the trailer. Coiled back there somewhere like a snake. What I thought was: Ivory and the kid are going to kill me and leave me for the buzzards. She said, “You’re awake, George.” The way she said it, the slight fear, I could tell she knew what was going on in my head. That I’d guessed it all. I told her, Stop the car. She wanted to know what for? Because I had to take a leak. She stopped the car, and I could hear she was crying. As I got out, she
