Hothouse

By Maxwell Robinson

I went back home for Christmas for about a month. You know, freshman year and all that, they wanted us out by the fifteenth or something so I packed up my shitty little Silvertone and a couple of books of poetry and got on the first Amtrak to Fort Worth Central. And I couldn’t focus. I got too hopped up on cheap dining car coffee and I couldn’t stop staring at miles and miles of dead yellow grass. So I just had this little book of Rimbaud or some shit on my little tray, drinking a coffee, wearing some stained sherpa jacket and these beat-to-shit Justins. I looked like a dick. Everybody probably thought I was trying to be Townes Van Zandt or something. And it was a bunch of students on there, you know, but they were headed for Dallas, cause all those fucking people live in those fucking Dallas suburbs. Gawking, like they do. You can’t even be white trash anymore. You have to be some guy trying to be white trash, and then everyone thinks you’re a dick. Snickering, teeth clacking, they don’t have to be anything, and then they make it a pain in your ass. 

I made my dad real pleased, at least. I’d made good grades my first semester. I mean, I’m not pitying myself, but I didn’t really get along with a lot of the folks down there, and I had a rough go of it sometimes, but I told my dad it was going alright. It was only sometimes. I liked campus in wintertime. Wearing cardigans and penny loafers and all that, leaves on the ground, makes you feel smart as hell. And girls dig it, you know, if you look smart or whatever but you don’t have a stick up your ass. I met this one girl. I think she was reading Nabokov or something in the lounge in the philosophy building and I got her number and we went and got coffee a couple times. Nothing crazy, I don’t think any of it was really a date, we just sat around and talked. Her name was Erin. She was from one of those Dallas suburbs and her folks were these really uptight Irish Catholics and I think she got a kick out of me because I knew about books and all that but I didn’t know anything about the pope or all that Old Testament stuff or incense and I didn’t really care about it all that much. 

But the train was nice. It wasn’t too jumpy and it was nice out and we went during the daytime which was nice because I can’t stand riding the train at night. People were quiet and the coffee wasn’t burnt. When I got off the train the air felt like gnats chewing on my cheeks and my nose felt like someone had poured drain cleaner down it. I walked down the platform a little ways and had a cigarette, not because I really wanted one or anything but because it seemed like the right thing to do on a cold day after you step out of a train and you’re waiting for someone. I had to stamp the thing out before it got to the filter anyway because I saw my dad pull up in his green F150 and I didn’t want to stand outside for any longer. I threw my suitcase and my guitar case in the back and got in the cab with him and he told me he was glad to see me and he missed having me around and I told him I missed having him around too and all that. 

When we got home I unpacked all my stuff and dad grilled some hamburgers for dinner. We watched an old John Wayne movie on TV – I wanna say it was Liberty Valance – and my dad had his left leg propped up on a little ottoman thing I guess he got from a junk shop and put a pillow under his leg and wrapped it in a blanket. I knew it’d been giving him trouble but I hadn’t seen him do that before. He didn’t seem like he was in pain. He’s a big guy, you know, real big-shouldered, and he’s the same height as me except I’m a hell of a lot reedier. And his nose kind of crinkles the same way mine does when he grins, and he grinned a whole lot when I was there. He didn’t usually. It made me really happy to see him so happy but it wigged me out a little bit. 

That’s why I didn’t ask him about the leg. I didn’t want to ask him about something that’d bum him out. I didn’t ask him about work either. Just how it was going and all that and he said it was fine. I asked him about hunting and fishing and movies and all the stuff he liked to do. And that really made him happy. It made me happy too, you know, not just because it made him happy or whatever, even though that made me happy, but because I like hearing him talk about that stuff. And he has his buddies from work and his old army buddies but I worry about him getting lonely up there. He can handle himself, I know he can. It just really freaked me out seeing him so happy to have me around. 

I got pretty sick of hanging around a couple days in. I mean my old man was at work all day and there’s no good view around the house, cause we’re in the middle of nowhere as far as the greater Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is concerned, and everything’s just flat and it’s yellow-brown dirt and dead grass and when I didn’t have the front door open and just the screen door there at the front it felt like a hermetically-sealed space station that was running out of air but it was too cold outside to go out and it seemed like too much of a pain in the ass to do anything about it. And then whenever dad got home he was too tired to do much of anything. So I could entertain myself playing some stuff on guitar, along to records or whatever, or write some stuff, but you can only kill so much time in the day. I fed the cat at noon every day but he’s real old and doesn’t really socialize much. 

So I called Erin up and we made plans to meet up on Thursday, because neither of us had anything to do during the day and I wanted to be at home on the weekends to spend time with dad and the cat. I asked her if there was anything good in Dallas and she said there was a cool art museum downtown that didn’t charge students for entry, which seemed like a good deal because I was pretty hard up and it seemed more scenic than going to the spot where Kennedy caught lead, which was the only other thing I really knew you could do in Dallas. And I took the train. I took a bus to the station, which was fine, you know, cause I was really out in the middle of nowhere and nobody even takes that bus so you didn’t have any basketcases or egg-smelling troglodytes. 

Then I got on the Trinity Metro line, which is nice, it’s kinda like Amtrak. The seats are cushioned and they fold down and they have cupholders and all that. I don’t know why, because the line only runs straight from downtown to the airport. And then once you get to the airport you have to switch to DART, which is the Dallas train, and it goes more places but Jesus Christ is it a load of shit. All the seats are that shitty little plastic they made chairs out of in elementary school, all the trains are this weird shiny .32 pistol color with smudges and stains all over them. They look like they haven’t changed at all since the seventies. When I first got on there was a guy chain-smoking newports and just leaving the butts on the ground in a pile at his feet, just dropping them there. I never even saw him use a lighter. He just used the burning tip of the last one to light the next and then stamped them out on the floor. Then there was a fat guy in a wifebeater watching porn with the volume turned way up, a woman on a walker whose skin was leather and who didn’t have any teeth, et cetera for about forty-five minutes until I got off at the station. Then I waited fifteen for Erin. 

I was starting to lose my nerve a little when she finally got off. She had this real bohemian-chic thing going on with her outfit that I hadn’t seen her do before, she had these high-heel tobacco-brown boots and flares with all this strange kinda cowboy embroidery on them and this tight knit blouse with these red flowery patterns running over the shoulders. Then a shaggy fake-fur coat – she was vegan, I remembered that much – and this really heavy blue eyeshadow and a new bob cut that squeezed her face thin and made all the weight in her head pool at her chin like a squash. Her skin was the same milky, fleshy color as the sky and her hair was the same color as her freckles. I mean, I thought she looked really great, I sort of felt like a chump, I was probably wearing a sweater and chinos or something, but all of this is more memory than fact. I don’t know how fat the guy on the subway was, really, and maybe the leathery lady had some teeth in her head, but everything gets staccato and thin, bulbous and engorged, rhythmic and interminable, nothing’s ever anything less than a caricature. 

I asked her how she was and how her day was going and I told her she looked nice and she giggled and said things were going pretty alright on her end. She had this real breathy voice and I always wondered if she tried to lower it on purpose, because there was always this slight grain to it that didn’t strike me as something someone from where she was from would sound like. I forgot what suburb she was from so I asked her, and I probably made a joke about it so I wouldn’t sound like an asshole for forgetting. We got to walking. 

“Plano,” she said. 

“Oh, yeah, shit, Plano. I’ve been there a couple times, I think,” I said. 

“What for?” she asked, and giggled again, real higher than her speaking voice. “I don’t really remember,” I said. “I must’ve been pretty little. I don’t know. Don’t they have something about trains there?” 

She giggled and blinked once and then twice. “Yeah,” she said. “There’s a little museum for it. It’s really corny. I drive by it all the time. It’s been there forever.” 

“Yeah, yeah, that’s it,” I said, “I was pretty little, then. I think my dad took me down there. I was on this real train kick when I was six or seven or something. He wanted to humor me, I guess.” 

She laughed and I laughed back but her laugh was a little thinner than mine and mine seemed a little too heavy. “You were one of those kids who was into trains? Dear God.” And she laughed again.

“I mean, it was something we did together, you know?” I said. 

“Are you still one of those guys who’s into trains?” she asked. 

“Into trains?” I asked. 

“You know. Those guys who go and watch trains, collect the schedules, gawk at the engines.” The way she said gawk sounded like someone stepped on a pigeon. “Oh,” I said. “No, no.” 

“Are you sure?” She asked, and she smiled and bumped into me on the sidewalk. “Yeah, yeah. No, I don’t really keep up with – trains?” I said. 

“Trains,” she said. “You seem like you’d be one of those guys.” 

“How come?” I asked. 

“I don’t know,” she said. “It seems like something you’d like.” 

“What else do I seem like I’d like?” I asked. 

“I don’t know,” she said. “Are you one of those obsessed record collector types?” “No, no,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m real neurotic enough to do that. I mean, I knew some of those guys in high school, and they look at the serial numbers and all the different pressings and the factory and –” 

“English football?” she asked. 

“I’m American,” I said. 

“Plenty of Americans like it,” she said. 

“In Dallas?” I asked. 

“Well,” she said, “Dallas is boring. It’s Republicans and rednecks.” 

“I heard the Cowboys are alright this season,” I said. 

“Do you really watch football?” she asked.

“I mean, not really, unless it’s with my folks,” I said, “but I heard from my dad they were playing pretty hot and got into the playoffs.” 

“Don’t you think it’s stupid?” she asked, and she didn’t look at me but she smiled. “I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t you go to the UT games?” 

Her face tightened up. “I mean, with friends. My roommate’s boyfriend is in a frat, so we go in a group. It makes for good conversation.” 

“Good conversation with who?” I asked. 

“Well, people care about football,” she said. “They take it seriously there. You know that.” 

“But if you don’t, why hang around people who do on account of something you got no interest in?” I asked. 

“I mean, you’re going to an art museum, aren’t you?” she asked. 

“I like art plenty,” I said. 

“Like who?” she asked. 

“I dunno,” I said. “I like Schiele.” 

“Schiele?” she asked. “Where the hell’d you learn about him?” 

“I mean,” I said, “probably from some book somewhere. But I like him?” “What,” she said, “because he painted naked women?” 

“Didn’t a lot of painters do that?” I asked. 

“Sure,” she said, “but Schiele was a perv. Are you a perv?” 

“I don’t think I am,” I said. 

She giggled and grinned. “We’re just about there and you haven’t tried to hold my hand or anything.”

“This is the first time we’re going out, isn’t it?” I asked. 

“Sure,” she said, “but a lot of guys are really forward about this stuff.” 

“What do other guys have to do with anything?” I said, and I probably said it a little coarse. 

“Grow up!” she said, and laughed again. “How many dates do you get?” 

“Enough, I guess,” I said. 

“I went out with this guy the other week,” she said, “an analyst guy who’d just got out of McCombs. The guy bought me dinner. And a glass of wine!” 

“Are you still seeing him?” I asked. 

“God, no,” she said. “There was nothing to talk about with him. All he cared about were stock markets, football, and suits. I don’t think he would’ve known anything about Schiele.” “Well,” I said, “don’t blow smoke up my ass here.” 

“I’m not,” she said, “I’m just saying.” 

We got to the place and it was this real squat kind of building with a line of windows wrapping around it like a strip. It was kind of funny looking, because everything around it was a heady skyscraper type thing flanked by cold gray-whitish skies like liquid dandruff and big plazas with red-brown leaves carpeting the bricks. We went in and, like she said, they didn’t charge us or anything. The first room was that really abstract stuff, which I don’t really dig, but I didn’t want to come across like some kind of wiseass or anything so I just looked at each one for a while and didn’t say anything so she’d get the impression I was really thinking about each one. After that was the renaissance stuff and some greek and roman sculptures and that kind of thing, which I think she really got a kick out of. She would straighten out her back and put her hands in her coat pockets – I don’t think she ever took her coat off, I don’t know why – and would make a face like she was pressing her bottom teeth to the roof of her mouth. Maybe it was the Catholic thing, I don’t know. 

I had to bite the inside of my cheek whenever she was looking at one of those paintings with some poor woman stripped nude, her tits hanging out and all that, getting tortured by demons with swords or spears or whatever. She looked at those all serious and I couldn’t shake the notion that it was probably just porno for whatever nobleman commissioned it from whatever painter. But she seemed like she knew more about this stuff than I did so I didn’t want to say anything. I don’t think we really said much of anything the whole time we were in there, we just went from place to place and sometimes we sat down because my feet started to hurt because I was wearing these real cheap derbies that looked pretty slick but I’d gotten from Goodwill on the off-chance that I’d ever need them, which of course proved to be the case. I kind of resent it when I’m right like that and I think I resented her for it there. She had the luxury of being smart in this real graceful, collegiate kind of way, I was just kind of smart in the way my cat was smart, I guess, but only insofar as it involved cheap shoes. 

Then we got to the more modern – not really modern, you know, like a hundred years ago – stuff, which I could gel with a bit more. I knew a little about dada and surrealism and that whole mess cause in my senior year of high school I found this book Octavio Paz wrote about Duchamp and I hit the ground running. It messed with my head more, I really dug it. It didn’t make me feel smart or anything, mind you, I wasn’t a real asshole about it, I just liked it. And that was when I first talked a bit more in the museum. Still not a whole lot, but more than I was prior. They had some Picassos in there – real bush-league Picassos, mind you, we were in Dallas – but then we got around to some stuff Ernst and Dix had painted and I leaned over and tapped her on the shoulder and I said man, isn’t this stuff neat? I mean this is cool as hell, right? And she nodded and narrowed her eyes and smiled a little ways and went back to that same little pose she did whenever she was looking at the paintings. 

But the thing that really fucked me over was this Magritte they had in there. And it wasn’t like it was a shitty painting or whatever, I really liked it, and Magritte’s great, I was just being a fucking dumbass. I really loved it. It was probably my favorite painting there. It was really well done, it had these real light brushstrokes and it was almost like something your grandma could hang up in the den, but it was this pair of pants standing on a table. That’s it. There wasn’t any background, it was just a table and these pants. The pants didn’t even have legs in them. They had pleats, they didn’t have any legs. And I started laughing at it! Not like I was making fun of it, though. Laughing like you do when a guitar player plays something really good, or something good happens in a movie. You know, this whole time I was thinking, man, Magritte is the fucking man, this is fucking great, he’s really onto something here. I really dug it. I still really dig it, honest. Not like some kind of fall-on-my-knees ecstasy like you read about in books, like when all those music critics first heard The Rite of Spring, but just really profound respect for this guy. And I laughed, because a pair of pants standing on a table is funny as hell and I think Magritte would have thought it was funny as hell too. 

But when I quit laughing and turned to see Erin she was giving me a look like I just took a shit on a shag carpet. She came over to me and she whispered something like, are you alright, but what she really meant was what the fuck are you doing you’re embarrassing me you dumb fucking asshole. And when she whispered her voice was higher up than it was when she was just talking at a regular volume, and I laughed even more because I wanted to say I knew it, I knew it, I fucking knew it man. And then she got even more pissed. I quit laughing and we went through the rest of the place, and she still did that little pose, but you could tell by her chin and the way she notched her shoulders that she was gritting her teeth and balling up her fists in her pockets. I thought it was harmless but I didn’t want to say anything about it and run the risk of pissing her off even more. And we went back to not really saying anything. 

When we left it was getting pretty dark. I was hungry and I asked if she was, and she said that she could eat. I asked her if there was anywhere good around here and she said there was a nice Italian place a couple blocks down, in the same direction as Dealey Plaza. I asked her how expensive it was – like I said earlier I was pretty hard up – and she said it wasn’t crazy, you know, but it was a nice place. And I was thinking I’d pay for her, so I asked how much a meal was. She said twenty or thirty dollars and without thinking about it I said holy hell. “What’s the matter with that?” she asked. 

“I mean, that’s kind of pricey, don’t you think?” I asked. 

“Well, sure,” she said, “but it’s a date, isn’t it?” 

“I mean, yeah,” I said, “but I mean, I don’t know.” 

“We didn’t pay for museum tickets,” she said. 

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said. 

“Then what’s the issue?” she asked. “You’re a gentleman, aren’t you?” 

“I like to think I am,” I said. 

“So I’m good enough for you to make a fucking idiot out of yourself in an art museum but not enough for you to buy me dinner?” she asked. 

“It’s just really pricey,” I said. 

“You’re in Dallas,” she said. 

“I really don’t have all that much money,” I said, “and I gotta get my dad a present for Christmas, and –”

“It’d be more believable if you said you were getting one for your mom,” she said. “Well, I ain’t,” I said. 

“So you do this to every fucking woman in your life?” she asked. 

“What,” I said. 

“You’re a fucking creep,” she said. 

“She’s not around,” I said. 

“I don’t fucking care,” she said. 

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t really buy you that, but there’s probably a McDonalds or something around here –” 

“Drop dead, you fucking asshole,” she said, and walked toward her train stop. And she said it higher-pitched, like when she was whispering. 

Her stop to get back where she lived was the same one I needed to go to to get where I lived so I killed some time. I found a McDonalds and had a hamburger and a cup of coffee. When I got home my dad asked how the date went and I told him it didn’t go so hot. He told me there’d be plenty of women out there. And I told him he was right, but this one stung, and he seemed like he understood that. 

*** 

A couple weeks later it was Christmas. I got my dad a new tackle box and book about Clint Eastwood movies I thought he’d like, with all these nice, glossy pictures and he was really happy about it. I only got one thing, which is fine, I’m pretty used to that, and it was this big trapezoidal box thing. When I opened the box there was a guitar case inside and inside the guitar case was this beautiful, expensive Martin D15. I said holy shit dad, how did you get this, and I said it because we don’t make a whole lot of money, and he said don’t worry about it. I teared up and I hugged him and I told him I loved him and he told me I loved him too. I got the thing tuned up and played him some old blues songs, Elizabeth Cotten Skip James kind of stuff, and he said it sounded great and I sounded great and he was proud as hell of me. And then we got drunk on cheap red wine and Pabst and watched Die Hard until we passed out.