“Well,” L.T. would say, putting away his Thermos and then standing up and giving a stretch. “It has all led me to create what I call L. T. DeWitt’s Theory of Pets.”
They’d look at him expectantly, just as I had the first time I heard him use that grand phrase, but they would always end up feeling let down, just as I always had; a story that good deserved a better punchline, but L.T.’s never changed.
“If your dog and cat are getting along better than you and your wife,” he’d say, “you better expect to come home some night and find a Dear John note on your refrigerator door.”
He told that story a lot, as I’ve said, and one night when he came to my house for dinner, he told it for my wife and my wife’s sister. My wife had invited Holly, who had been divorced almost two years, so the boys and the girls would balance up. I’m sure that’s all it was, because Roslyn never liked L. T. DeWitt. Most people do, most people take to him like hands take to warm water, but Roslyn has never been most people. She didn’t like the story of the note on the fridge and the pets, either—I could tell she didn’t, although she chuckled in the right places. Holly . . . shit, I don’t know. I’ve never been able to tell what that girl’s thinking. Mostly just sits there with her hands in her lap, smiling like Mona Lisa. It was my fault that time, though, and I admit it. L.T. didn’t want to tell it, but I kind of egged him on because it was so quiet around the dinner table, just the click of silverware and the clink of glasses, and I could almost feel my wife disliking L.T. It seemed to be coming off her in waves. And if L.T. had been able to feel that little Jack Russell terrier disliking him, he would probably be able to feel my wife doing the same. That’s what I figured, anyhow.
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So he told it, mostly to please me, I suppose, and he rolled his eyeballs in all the right places, as if saying, “Gosh, she fooled me right and proper, didn’t she?” and my wife chuckled here and there—those chuckles sounded as phony to me as Monopoly money looks—and Holly smiled her little Mona Lisa smile with her eyes downcast.
Otherwise the dinner went off all right, and when it was over L.T.
told Roslyn that he thanked her for “a sportin-fine meal” (whatever that is) and she told him to come anytime, she and I liked to see his face in the place. That was a lie on her part, but I doubt there was ever a dinner-party in the history of the world where a few lies weren’t told. So it went off all right, at least until I was driving him home. L.T. started to talk about how it would be a year Lulubelle had been gone in just another week or so, their fourth anniversary, which is flowers if you’re old-fashioned and electrical appliances if you’re newfangled. Then he said as how Lulubelle’s mother—at whose house Lulubelle had never shown up—was going to put up a marker with Lulubelle’s name on it at the local cemetery. “Mrs. Simms says we have to consider her as one dead,” L.T. said, and then he began to bawl. I was so shocked I nearly ran off the goddam road.
He cried so hard that when I was done being shocked I began to be afraid all that pent-up grief might kill him with a stroke or a burst blood-vessel or something. He rocked back and forth in the seat and slammed his open hands down on the dashboard. It was like there was a twister loose inside him. Finally I pulled over to the side of the road and began patting his shoulder. I could feel the heat of his skin right through his shirt, so hot it was baking.
“Come on, L.T.,” I said. “That’s enough.”
“I just miss her,” he said in a voice so thick with tears I could barely understand what he was saying. “Just so goddam much. I come home and there’s no one but the cat, crying and crying, and pretty soon I’m crying, too, both of us crying while I fill up her dish with that goddam muck she eats.”
He turned his flushed, streaming face full on me. Looking back into it was almost more than I could take, but I did take it; felt I had to take it. Who had gotten him telling the story about Lucy and Frank 281
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and the note on the refrigerator that night, after all? It hadn’t been Mike Wallace or Dan Rather, that was for sure. So I looked back at him. I didn’t quite dare hug him, in case that twister should somehow jump from him to me, but I kept patting his arm.
“I think she’s alive somewhere, that’s what I think,” he said. His voice was still thick and wavery, but there was a kind of pitiful weak defiance in it, as well. He wasn’t telling me what he believed, but what he wished he could believe. I’m pretty sure of that.
“Well,” I said, “you can believe that. No law against it, is there?
And it isn’t as if they found her body, or anything.”
“I like to think of her out there in Nevada singing in some little casino hotel,” he said. “Not in Vegas or Reno, she couldn’t make it in one of the big towns, but in Winnemucca or Ely I’m pretty sure she could get by. Some place like that. She just saw a SINGER WANTED sign and gave up her idea of going home to her mother. Hell, the two of them never got on worth a shit anyway, that’s what Lu used to say.
And she could sing, you know. I don’t know if you ever heard her, but she could. I don’t guess she was great, but she was good. The first time I saw her, she was singing in the lounge of the Marriott Hotel. In Columbus, Ohio, that was. Or, another possibility . . .”
He hesitated, then went on in a lower voice.
“Prostitution is legal out there in Nevada, you know. Not in all the counties, but in most of them. She could be working one of them Green Lantern trailers or the Mustang Ranch. Lots of women have got a streak of whore in them. Lu had one. I don’t mean she stepped around on me, or slept around on me, so I can’t say how I know, but I do. She . . . yes, she could be in one of those places.”
He stopped, eyes distant, maybe imagining Lulubelle on a bed in the back room of a Nevada trailer whorehouse, Lulubelle wearing nothing but stockings, washing off some unknown cowboy’s stiff cock while from the other room came the sound of Steve Earle and the Dukes singing “Six Days on the Road” or a TV playing Hollywood Squares. Lulubelle whoring but not dead, the car by the side of the road—the little Subaru she had brought to the marriage—meaning 282
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nothing. The way an animal’s look, so seemingly attentive, usually means nothing.
“I can believe that if I want,” he said, swiping at his swollen eyes with the insides of his wrists.
“Sure,” I said, “you bet, L.T.,” wondering what the grinning men who listened to his story while they ate their lunches would make of this L.T., this shaking man with his pale cheeks and red eyes and hot skin.
“Hell,” he said, “I do believe that.” He hesitated, then said it again: “I do believe that.”
When I got back, Roslyn was in bed with a book in her hand and the covers pulled up to her breasts. Holly had gone home while I was driving L.T. back to his house. Roslyn was in a bad mood, and I found out why soon enough. The woman behind the Mona Lisa smile had been quite taken with my friend. Smitten by him, maybe. And my wife most definitely did not approve.
“How did he lose his license?” she asked, and before I could answer: “Drinking, wasn’t it?”
“Drinking, yes. OUI.” I sat down on my side of the bed and slipped off my shoes. “But that was nearly six months ago, and if he keeps his nose clean another two months, he gets it back. I think he will. He goes to AA, you know.”
My wife grunted, clearly not impressed. I took off my shirt, sniffed the armpits, hung it back in the closet. I’d only worn it an hour or two, just for dinner.
“You know,” my wife said, “I think it’s a wonder the police didn’t look a little more closely at him after his wife disappeared.”