Exclusive Excerpt: "Fugue"
A New Novel by Paul A.Toth

Chapter Eight Continued: Never made coffee

The one thing Rosie never made for breakfast was coffee. Coffee's a business drink. Rosie and I had no business other than biding time, so coffee was a rarity. Yet there I was not three miles from home when all that food started making me sleepy, my mind slow as syrup in the early morning haze.
     There was one stop before the highway: Rosie's future love nest, the Giant Travel Plaza, which served as liquor mart, gas station, restaurant, grocery store and condom dispenser for a hundred mile radius. I bet everybody in that circle had their Giant route memorized, every tree, every bump in the road. I was no different, and it wasn't hard finding my way even with half-closed eyes.
     Soon the waitress led me to the usual orange vinyl booth.
     "Just coffee."
     "Yuh," she replied, as if I wasn't worth the expenditure of a single actual word.
     I must have sat there for an hour, drinking one cup after the next. Between cups, I went to the register and bought my first pack of cigarettes in years. Then I sat down and unwound the wrapper, a habit still so familiar it was tantamount to time travel. The nicotine high surprised me. By the time I'd quit, cigarettes were as intoxicating as oxygen, but now it electrified me. Soon, I was dizzy with the caffeine-nicotine buzz and feeling confused.
     I sat there holding my head and watching the other customers, truckers mostly, all in baseball caps and none looking too thrilled to exist. I knew they lived a hard life, but I could offer no sympathy if their only succor would come in the form of Rosie. The thought irritated me, my skin percolating.
     A likely candidate sat facing me in the next booth. He was Rosie's kind of guy, skinnier than me when we'd met, lean as quality pork. Every now and then he caught my stare. I could read his lips: "Whatchoo lookin' at?" And then he said exactly that.
     "Not looking at anything."
     "That supposed to mean something?"
     "Just drinking coffee."
     "Then drink it and look at something else."
     I tried but couldn't. If there's one sure way to make my brain go down a road, it's to erect a bright red "WRONG WAY" sign. And so my eyes kept trailing back to him. Suddenly, he seemed to occupy my bed, Rosie bouncing up and down, telling him how good it was to have a skinny white guy underneath her again. She'd probably say, "I thank the hell out you, Jesus. It's been a long time."
     Suddenly, I was staring at a Led Zeppelin belt buckle.
     "What'd I just tell you?"
     I'm a little short when it comes to testosterone. I felt the need to be honest, to resolve this mess before it spilled in every direction. "I'm just worried about my wife, that's all."
     "What's your wife's name, pal?"
     "Rosie."
     "Well, then, let me ease your mind: Rosie ain't the name of the somebody-else's wife I'm sleeping with. Now quit staring at me."
     He went back to his booth.
     "It's not just that," I said, loud enough for everyone in the joint to hear. "I don't want any man in this place thinking funny thoughts about my wife. She's a vulnerable woman."
     Now they all stared at me. I heard the mumbles but not the words. I could guess. I grabbed my cigarettes. I left five dollars on the table and received not so much as a nod of thanks from the waitress.
     At the register, a new cashier, young girl with porcupine hair -- if porcupines dyed their hair purple -- said, "Now what?"
     "One lottery ticket, numbers 0903-0903-0903."
     "Ya, right, hon'."
     "What's that supposed to mean?"
     "It means that's a bad number. No number like that ever came up."
     "It's the number I always play, my wife's birthday, September third."
     "Well, blurt that out, too, so all your rivals can buy her a birthday card."
     On the way out, I remembered it was the end of August. I hadn't realized that Rosie's birthday would occur in the beginning of my time away from her. In the parking lot, I dug a quarter from my pocket and dropped it in the pay phone.
     "You?" she said. "You gonna leave, leave. What the fuck you want?"
     "I just wanted to say," I began, but then I started crying again.
     "Wanted to say what?"
     "Say -- happy -- birthday. In advance."
     "Lord Jesus fucking Christ, you crying? Don't call back 'til you been gone a while. A long while."
     She hung up. I wiped my eyes with a shirt sleeve as my friend from the next booth walked past, shaking his head. I stood there a minute, and then his truck rumbled to a stop beside me.
     "She must be some woman," he called down from the cab.
     "Yeah," I said, "she is."
     "Well," he said, tipping his cap, "good luck, buddy."
     I stood in the parking lot and watched his truck pull away. He extended his arm and waved goodbye.
     The sky was postcard blue with aluminum sheen. The front of the lot was lined by trucks, the back by wrecked and inoperable cars the owner must have bought at auction, fixing and selling them in the town I was going to next, Gooseberry. Green dumpsters overflowed with sun-roasted mufflers and hubcaps. The parking lot, simultaneously luminous and dull, might have been my brain turned inside out. Before I went anywhere, I had to send off these sad butterflies landing on my heart.
     "Fly away, melancholy pollinators, for I am no flower."
     In the car, I switched off the radio, drowning out Country Bob and the Texas Deadbeats or whoever the hell wailed away: "I took a shot of whiskey, then she took a shot at me."
     That's all I needed now, to think about drinking. I didn't drink often, only when it sealed my nerve endings like glue. But afterwards, the residue bound my fingers and toes and everything else, paralyzing me. Sitting in a parking lot fading like a glossy car magazine in the sun, I could have used a bottle. But I must have blown my liver, and I could hardly afford to start this journey with a three-day hangover.
     Then, as so often happens, I began to feel a little better, not despite the reasons for my gloom but because of them. I was glad Rosie answered the phone the way she had. What man would stand for her behavior? If I was Country Bob, Rosie would think twice before slapping me around. Country Bob would stagger home from The Starlight Lounge at three in the morning with lipstick on his collar and would never bother lying about its cause.
     It might be said I put my cowboy hat on right about then. "To hell with Rosie."
     I started the car and headed to Gooseberry, location of the bank. Only that morning had it come clear to me I should have kept better track of Rosie's financial doings.
     So I drove, smoking cigarettes fast as I could put them out. Every once in a while, a cloud blocked the sun. It was Rosie. I'd start feeling sleepy again and longed to rest my head on her shoulder cliff, in which the likenesses of more than four presidents might have been carved. Then the cloud passed, the day brightening. In the glare, Mary Whitcomb shimmered. I thought about her poky hipbones. I thought about her breasts, the opposite of Rosie's, nature balancing the scales. I thought about that flapper hair. And I remembered that awful painting looking down upon us, its lipstick-sunglasses-shopping-mall glamour always ruining the moment.
     "It's Patrick Nagel. Nagel's famous."
     "I don't care. I don't like it."
     "So you're an art critic and retired lathe operator. I didn't know."
     "I'd like to throw that piece of shit over the balcony."
     "Go ahead. Don't let go."
     But like I said, after a while that menthol coolness turned into something sweet, and she'd start crying.
     "I love that painting," she'd whisper, sniffing. Then she'd pull herself together and say, "Go pick up my friends."
     And so I'd gather the stuffed animals I'd kicked off the bed in the middle of the night.
     It wasn't always that way. Long as I averted my gaze, which tended to go wherever I preferred it not, everything was lipstick and fishnet stockings. I was younger then, about the last time I was young at all. I liked black and white movies, especially late at night, and Mary seemed to fade right into the television set. The less we talked, the more she disappeared into fig-leaf figment. Unfortunately, by morning the news was on in full color. Mary transformed into a 21st century phony who might have taken the place of the woman in that painting. She'd awake at noon with designs on shopping malls, where she somehow managed to find the concoctions of clothes that made her Zelda Fitzgerald the Second. I can do without the shopping mall. They give me anxiety attacks. And so do banks.
     So I steeled myself like George Reeves before heading into Gooseberry National Bank, a name probably chosen to disguise the fact there was nothing national about Gooseberry; it was as local as a pothole.
     When I walked inside, a long line of customers awaited me. The tellers were pretty, every one of them. I bet the manager threw their resumes in the trash and based his decision on interviews -- modeling auditions, that is. I'd been in that bank a hundred times, and for as little as I knew about my finances, these tellers knew less. They should have been called non-tellers, keep-it-quieters. Yet the lines never seemed long looking at them, nor my unanswered questions so irritating when they said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Thomas, but you'll have to speak to a manager about that." Of course, there would be a shrub full of Gooseberries waiting to see that manager, and I would give up before seeing the manager every single time.
     This time would be different, a simple transaction anyone could handle, even women with fingernails so long they could count my money long distance.
     "What I'd like to do," I said, "is withdraw everything from my account."
     "Name, sir?"
     "Jonathan Thomas."
     "I remember, now: John."
     Yes, John Thomas, har-har. I preferred Jonathan. If in a good mood, Johnny was okay. Rosie liked Tom. Nobody ever got it right.
     "Jonathan. And like I said, just withdraw everything from my account."
     I gave her my account number.
     "You've got three thousand dollars available."
     "That's got to be a mistake. I've deposited close to three hundred thousand dollars into this bank."
     Three hundred thousand, not three thousand. Before Rosie took over, I made a few good investments. Now Rosie handled them.
     "Well," the teller said, "let me check your last few deposits...Um, the last ten deposits were made into another account, under your wife's name. But that's not a joint account. You need your wife to access that money."
     "I don't need to access it, but I'd like to know what's there. You can tell me that, can't you?"
     "I'm sorry. I just can't."
     "Oh, damn," I said in a manner suggesting it was a word I rarely employed and usually spelled aloud to avoid swearing. "I don't know what I'll do. This is a real fix."
     "I'm sorry, Mr. Thomas, but it's against our po -- po --"
     "Policy? I understand. It's only -- well, I can't say right now. It's a personal matter. I'm sure you understand. My wife is leaving me and, frankly, I hadn't planned on it. Now rent's due and --"
     "I really can't, Mr. Thomas."
     She leaned toward me, motioning that I come closer.
     "It's a lot," she said. "A real lot."
     "Okay," I replied, satisfied with the closest I had ever come to an answer at the Gooseberry National Bank. Besides, it was Saturday, the bank closed at one o'clock, and it was ten to one. There wasn't time to dig deeper.
     One minute later, I was on another pay phone.
     "I'm at the bank. Now Rosie, where's all that money? All that money I made, all that money I invested?"
     "Didn't I just get done telling you not to call?"
     "But it's something I should know about. I thought those accounts were joint. Now you got it all tied up in your name."
     "You're not gonna wander off and take all that money. I know you. Your mother told me all I need to know. You can bet your ass you won't be stranding me. I ain't the Titanic. I got plenty of lifeboats. If it's money you're so worried about, I'll start saving some by getting this goddamn phone shut off."
     How I wanted to call a mother now as Rosie slammed the phone again. What lost boy doesn't want to hug the apron? But I couldn't phone my real mother, and the other -- the one who raised me like a weed -- made a poor substitute. Wasn't naming me John Thomas enough? Wasn't that when the war started, the day she took me into her home?
     There was something that divided us, a deck of cards cut in two by a dealer. Maybe the dealer was a god, if there was one, or maybe it was my father choosing the Army and Vietnam -- or rather, a Vietnamese woman named Sun -- over the woman I called Mother. Whatever the reason, Mother and I were Pakistan and India, only there was no Kashmir at stake, just the savoring of each point we won. My victory was never phoning her, never taking her calls. Only Rosie answered, and only Rosie called. When I listened, I never detected the slightest positive conversation about me. It was always, "Your son's doing this, doing that, and then he, and then, and then he..."
     I had more than enough cash for this trip, even if it took me farther than San Diego. But what if I returned home to find the locks changed, Rosie and my replacement peeking through the curtains, a hyena and her zookeeper laughing like it was the happy ending of a children's book?

                                  And then the bad man
                                  wandered home.
                                  Expecting a hug,
                                  He heard instead moans:
                                  Rosie was not alone.

     What pictures I painted. But I'd have to cross that bridge later, even if it opened beneath me, Rosie and the trucker waving from a boat below that left a trail of foam in its wake.
     "Bye, asshole," Rosie would shout. "Thank you, Lord, with all my fucking heart!"
     I drove out of Gooseberry wondering whether that letter wasn't Rosie's elaborate way of leaving me, a painless extraction. Was I a dentist's patient, gassed full of a black and white daydream Rosie had induced by somehow sending that letter herself? She knew I was a sucker for movies and probably guessed I was ripe to be sucked into one. Soon as I was gone, she'd find a new man and either take over the cabin or burn it down, leaving me to figure out the scheme when it was too late. But it was hard to believe our ties had come unbound. After all, she was the one who tied me to the bedposts.
     "I loves you, Porgy," she'd said, and "love" was a word Rosie rarely mentioned. I guess I liked her pushing me around at the same time I despised it. I was a guy in a wheelchair, hating his situation but occasionally enjoying the ride and even the resentment of the person providing it.
     I was getting paranoid. My mind works in terms of story, but the world doesn't. The world never says "The End" but keeps going, the plot forever expanding, its shooting location 24,000 miles round and six feet deep. And even if I pinched a piece no bigger than the space between my thumb and finger, seen through a microscope it was one hundred times as big and complicated. Some people narrowed and confined the plot. I tried but couldn't do it. Everything seemed equally possible, perhaps even equally true.
     Rosie kept me snapped in place, and I was a crucial Lincoln Log in our cabin. Maybe with me gone, she'd find the roof leaked.
     "Rosie isn't going anywhere," I told myself, trying to calm my imagination.



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