It was time Figman fixed his first home-cooked meal. Until now (indeed, for the entire three months he'd been living in Artesia) he'd eaten all his meals in restaurants. He was sick to death of restaurants. He gagged at the thought of another Big Mac or Whopper. He was bored with Kwan Den, the Town House Cafeteria, and Eileen's Tac Olé. Even La Fonda, which drew people from Carlsbad and Roswell for its chile rellenos and hot sopaipillas, no longer held any appeal. But mostly he was sick of cigarette smoke.
Figman had never lived in a place where people smoked so indiscriminately. Few of Artesia's restaurants had non-smoking sections; more often than not, Figman was forced to choke down his meal amidst the noxious fumes from somebody else's filthy habit. In New Mexico, people smoked in stores, in elevators, in markets, and in theaters. They smoked walking down the street. Sometimes they didn't smoke at all, just held on to their burning cigarettes or placed them in ashtrays while they ate. Figman was unaccustomed to such rudeness. In L.A., one would sooner enter a restaurant naked than holding a cigarette. In L.A., people cared about whom they poisoned.
Figman, who had located a frying pan for his steak and a small saucepan for his instant mashed potatoes, soon realized he had no suitable pot in which to cook okra. He'd bought a half-pound of the stuff. It was green and pointy and looked as if it wanted to be boiled whole. (Boiling was what Figman assumed one did with it, though he wasn't entirely sure.) The metal drawer beneath his oven contained a few pans of the wrong size, ei ther too large or too small. Okra, he figured, required a medium-sized pan. Figman was hungry. His potato flakes were measured, and his saucepan of water and milk stood waiting. His steak sizzled over a low-to-medium flame.
When Verdie opened the door to her trailer, Figman was struck simultaneously by its foul odor and the presence of a man. He'd expected her to be alone. There'd been no car in the driveway but her green Impala; he'd seen no one tread past his windows. But here was this fellow in a plaid shirt and bolo tie seated at her kitchen table.
"Well, hi there," said Verdie. "Come over for a drink?" Her breath smelled of Scotch whisky. She wore a pink sweater over white slacks and the same pink-purple lipstick as before. The man looked up at them.
"I'm sorry to bother you," said Figman, standing on the top step of her trailer. "Do you have a saucepan I could borrow?"
"Sure, hon. Come on in while I hunt for one." She handed Figman the drink she'd been holding. The glass was sweaty.
Figman stepped through the doorway of the single-room trailer. It was a hurricane on wheels. Clothes and unwashed dishes were strewn everywhere. In the kitchenette, trash overflowed onto linoleum that looked as if it hadn't seen soap or wax in a decade. The sink was full of dishes in brownish-gray water. Paint peeled from the two cabinet doors that still clung to their hinges; fingerprints marred their button handles. Verdie's dinette, a formica table wiped surprisingly clean, was encircled by three matching metal-frame chairs, their plastic seat covers cracked and grimy. The place stank of mildew, fried onions, and unemptied ashtrays. And he'd thought the Pontelle sisters had been dirty.
Verdie dug around in her kitchen, hunting in corners, opening and slamming shut drawers, rummaging into the backs of doorless cabinets. Beyond the kitchenette lay Verdie's living room, dark and depressing as the living room of any thirty-year-old trailer could be. Its walls were covered in fake wood paneling that Figman thought must certainly absorb whatever daylight managed to seep through the curtains of her weird little windows. The carpet, which looked like a remnant of his own, was soiled and covered with pink fuzzballs the color of Verdie's sweater. She had no TV. The corner revealed a tiny bathroom. A sofa sleeper, opened and unmade, filled almost the entire width of the trailer's far wall, blocking access to a second external doorway. Directly over the center of her sofa bed, a red Christmassy fixture hung suspended from an extension cord looped twice around a screw-hook in her seven-foot ceiling. Verdie's entire trailer was not much larger than Figman's bedroom. He wondered what terrible necessity had forced her out of her house and into such a trash heap.
Verdie cussed as she ransacked the insides of a high cabinet. The man at the table eyed Figman. He and Verdie obviously had been playing poker. Plastic chips lay in a pile in front of her empty seat. The man cleared his throat. Verdie stopped her foraging. "Jeez Louise, how tacky can a body be? Poe Titus, this is Louis Figman. Louis, this is Poe."
Poe Titus? What was it with the names in this town? The man tipped his cowboy hat. "Nice to meet you, Louis."
"Likewise. But people call me just Figman. It's sort of this thing I have."
"Well, nice to meet you, Just Figman," said Titus. Verdie broke into fractious laughter, a rooster crowing to greet the dawn. Figman felt the veins in his neck swell.
"Well, I ain't calling you Figman," said Verdie. "I don't call nobody by their last names."
"That Jewish?" asked Titus, fingering the tidy stack of chips in front of him.
Figman ignored the question. He leaned back against the refrigerator, an old Amana with dust on its top and jelly smeared on its pull-down handle. He studied Verdie's companion. He looked like a man suffering from unrequited life. Tall and gaunt, he appeared to be a few years older than Verdie, which, as Figman remembered, was as many years as there were cards in a deck. Smoke rose from the cactus ashtray on the table.
Figman, who had never seen Verdie with a cigarette, assumed Titus to be the current source of the trailer's rank odor. He wondered whether the stench in his own house, which had yet to air from his drapes and furniture, had come from this Titus fellow. He wondered, too, if Titus was responsible for his kitchen floor's scuff marks. Figman checked out the man's shoes. He wore red leather cowboy boots with two-inch wooden heels.
"Eureka," said Verdie, producing a pan the size of a washbasin.
"Oh, no. I'm sorry," said Figman. "I should have been more specific. I need one a little smaller. Something medium. To boil okra in."
"I hate okra," said Poe Titus.
"Well, let me see," said Verdie, getting down on all fours. "Hand me that flashlight there, Louis." She motioned toward the countertop. He looked for a flashlight amidst all the clutter but couldn't see one."It's right up there," said Verdie, "just behind them dishes."
Figman walked the two steps to the half-moon window above her sink, the window that comprised the left eye of the face that started at him across his backyard. Sure enough, directly beneath its sill in a pool of standing water lay an old metal flashlight. It felt heavier than Figman remembered flashlights ever feeling. He wiped it dry on his 501 jeans. "You ought not let this thing get wet," he said, handing it to her.
"Oh, hell," said Verdie, laughing. She shone it into the dark cavern beneath her corner counter, then crawled halfway into the space as she banged around, hunting for just the right size saucepan for Figman's okra. Poe Titus reached for the bottle next to his ashtray and poured himself another drink. Figman, who wished he'd chosen a less elaborate vegetable, stared down at the glass he was holding, slender and covered with multicolored dots. Its ice was half melted and its rim was smudged with Verdie's fuchsia lipstick. He wondered what flavor it was, and how vile it must taste mixed with cigarettes and Scotch whisky.
Figman remembered women from the taste of their lipstick. Few women wore the same brand and color, and Figman was able to separate them in his mind this way. Lipstick tasted like nothing else, its flavor waxy and ersatz— not truly cinnamon or genuinely peach, but something not quite cinnamon or almost peach. Dee, his last girlfriend, wore sort of a licorice flavor, though its color had been pink. She'd cried when Figman announced he was leaving, so he'd given her his stereo and bed, the two things he'd thought would most remind her of him.
Aside from Dee, few women stood out in Figman's memory. There was Lizzie, a bank officer who talked too much but enjoyed making love in parks and on the beach. There was beautiful Gwen, who hated sex but was thrilling to be seen with. There was Mary