Making Love (38 page)

“They're causing interference.”
 

“I knew they were good for something. Would you object to WNEW-FM?”
 

“No, of course not”
 

Janis Joplin came over loud, panting, and clear. Bob hummed along gaily. She knew she had a friend for life in the front seat.
 

She gave Luckmunn a brief physical. He was attractive, well proportioned, much smaller than Sonny, but his face had a muted forced delicacy because part of his nose had been lopped off and was the size of a peach pit, with a wide gully underneath. It was like a nicely designed compact car, twin-cam nostrils, and an overhead aluminum shaft. He seemed to breathe by means of fuel injection. It didn't go with the face.
 

“What about this place, Jane?”
 

She saw wasteland, desolate swamps, the air in the car a combination of the Passaic River and Monsanto chemicals to the right of them, discharging pus from steel geysers.
 

“It's potential,” he continued idealistically. “It needs work, admittedly, but it's got greatness within it.”
 

For a moment she thought she was being abducted by a madman who got his inspiration from the sores and pock marks of the earth. He waited for an answer, approval, but she had to admit she didn't understand what point he was trying to make.
 

“Reclaiming land, filling in swamps, creating communities for people of all races and religions.”
 

“Christmas is in the air. Good will toward men.”
 

“I mean it,” he protested.
 

“Charles, you're pitching me. I won't invest.”
 

“You're not getting my point.”
 

“Which is that you're a speculator, building houses, so that you can get the most profit.”
 

He laughed, caught out.
 

“Jane, I wouldn't take that from anyone, but you know what, you're right. You've seen through me.”
 

“It's like looking through a pane of glass.”
 

“That's hurtful. You didn't mean it.”
 

“Why?” He was unprepared for a dialectical argument. “Admit it to yourself.”
 

“Well, a buck's a buck.”
 

“True enough.”
 

“I'm a self-made millionaire.”
 

“Go to the head of the class.”
 

“You're a smart young lady. My judgment of you was right. You've got intelligence.”
 

Nancy drifted to the surface of his mind, disembodied, a summer illusion, extending to November. He banished her.
 

The end of his shopping tour for a mate was in sight. The interest that accrued on her fortune made him giddy as he made some swift calculations. He wondered if there were any legal precedent for taking her surname, joining it to his in a resounding double barrel? Luckmunn-Siddley? Siddley-Luckmunn came out, a breach-birth, but decidedly masculine. Maybe he'd keep her for a while, housebreak her. He'd never had such an arrangement, since his sexual adventures were swift and unpredictable, subject to change without notice. The unutterable
mazel
of his situation buoyed him, then came up stillborn. How would she react to such a suggestion? Spit in his eye, no doubt. Destroy him with a look. Apart from her fortune, another consideration loomed ahead, not entirely peripheral either: Jane would be the ultimate sexual experience, the
de profudis
ass-on-the-table message for which no answer would be required. His invasion plans were suddenly disrupted by aggression from the territory he'd mentally conquered.
 

“You know something, Luckmunn, I feel like Joan Crawford riding with Sidney Greenstreet in the back of a late movie.”
 

“Why do you keep calling me Luckmunn?” he barked.
 

“Because I know you don't like it.”
 

“You want to upset me?” he asked, horrified.
 

She closed her eyes, disdaining a reply. The steady heating had made her drowsy, and she drifted off to sleep, leaving Luckmunn the task of gathering up the coffee containers and generally policing the back seat. Nervous aggravation made him hungry, and he nibbled surreptitiously on the Danish. This was definitely not going according to plan. He wondered why she wasn't
relating
(his favorite word for situations involving human intercourse). Sleeping, she appeared vulnerable, innocent, marriageable. Awake, a tough customer. A real puzzle. His eyes ravenously coasted over her form. How could he find an edge to close her? Rejection he could accept with grace, but ridicule he found unbearable. Fine lover, he'd put his quarry to sleep.
 

The specter of Monmouth Heights loomed in the distance. He nudged Jane, preferring other means to waken her, but contented that he'd got a knuckle in the profile of her breasts. Another time, another place, for the showdown.
 

“I don't want you to miss a thing.”
 

“Where are we?”
 

Her question was superfluous. They turned down a side road, pebbles caroming musically off the windshield. The sign announced luckmunn ville, a community of the future. This statement was enforced by a huge billboard, showing a blowup of Apollo 11 and a smiling Neil Armstrong in his astronaut gear, the builder's personal emissary, pointing his finger at a message from the moon for all mankind.
Take left fork two miles ahead, and see the future, $19,999
Armstrong assured everybody.
 

“Is this legal?” Jane asked. “Or is he endorsing your homes?”
 

“He's endorsing them. But it's not quite legal. If he comes out here, I'll take the board down and no hard feelings.”
 

“Why didn't you get George Wallace?”
 

“You know something, Jane, that's not a bad idea. You've got a business mind. A flair.”
 

Lake Luckmunn, the rear end of a swampy morass with bogs for tributaries, lay just ahead. Despite the bone-chilling temperature, it stubbornly resisted freezing.
 

“Someday soon, sailboats will be sailing here.”
 

“The Luckmunn Regatta.”
 

“Keep coining with the ideas.”
 

Luckmunn Wood, a place for lovers to spoon and families to picnic beyond the lake, would no doubt be so employed by the year 2000.
 

“It's got everything,” Luckmunn noted. “When I'm through, there will be five hundred homes in this area.”
 

Bob negotiated the car past some fallen trees and into a clearing on the left, which spoke well for Armstrong's navigational abilities. There were a number of tents.
 

“It looks like an Apache village, destroyed,” Jane said.
 

“I know now how you got your eye black and blue.”
 

The car stopped at a hut and Luckmunn walked out on a plank to avoid the mud. Three men in overalls greeted him.
 

“Is there a work stoppage?” Luckmunn asked suspiciously. “I'll get the union down here.”
 

“It's lunch hour, Mr. L.,” a burly man replied.
 

“Jane, I want you to meet Mike Delaney, my foreman.”
 

Greetings were exchanged, and Luckmunn, still on the plank, insisted on a tour.
 

“It's pretty muddy.”
 

“Can we drive?”
 

“You might not get your car out.”
 

He looked at the skies, a supplicant.
 

“The rains.”
 

“No,” Delaney said, “it's been real clear. But we're working in swamp.”
 

A short redheaded man, highly excited, spittle oozing from the corners of his mouth, rushed toward them and began to shout.
 

“Calm,” the builder demanded. “There's a lady present. You're a master carpenter.”
 

Boards were extended on the ground, forming a pathway. The carpenter led the group to a model house, caught at an early stage, a shuddering frame, racked by the winds.
 

“This is Mr. Ryan,” Luckmunn told Jane. “One of our nation's great carpenters.”
 

“What's this supposed to be?” Jane asked.
 

“A model home!”
 

“Well, you might ask,” Ryan piped in.
 

“There was supposed to be a model ready two weeks ago.”
 

“Mr. Luckmunn,” Ryan began, his hands shaking with grief, “I've worked with all kinds of material. Poor, good, mediocre, but this wood is the worst. It shanks, splits, shrinks, and won't even burn.”
 

“It's fireproof?” Luckmunn asked. Maybe this was a new discovery.
 

“It's almost not wood,” Delaney interjected.
 

“I'll admit it's a bit on the youthful side.”
 

“It's an infant,” Ryan continued, speaking in a holler. “Look at that grain.”
 

“I will, if you moderate your tone. This is supposed to be the living room,” Luckmunn informed Jane. “Stone fireplace, eventually.”
 

“Look at the grain,” Ryan said a bit softer. Luckmunn saw strange octagonal knots. “Ever see wood with leukemia?”
 

“Of course not I don't know what you're taking about.”
 

“You're looking at it. This stuff a forest ranger or even Smoky the Bear would pray got caught in a fire.”
 

“People screwing me on every side,” Luckmunn protested. “I'm trying to build a better world and you talk to me of lumber.”
 

“It's sick wood,” Delaney insisted. “We got woodpeckers refusing to land on the roof, running for their lives, and men out with skin rashes.”
 

He turned to Jane, his eyes downcast, forlorn. His mission to impress her doomed....
 

“These things happen,” she said. He was close to tears.
 

“Jane, I appreciate that remark.”
 

Gusts of cyclonic force railed against the frail structure. The elements of nature had risen in consort to defeat him. The moment was rudely broken by Delaney.
 

“And the shingles, Mr. L. We got an ad out that says we use Manville asbestos. This stuff is leftovers from linoleum, and flammable.”
 

“I ordered asbestos. The best!”
 

“It won't even take glue, which the wood repels in the first place.”
 

“This is a nightmare.” He made a desperate effort to regain his wits. “Are we selling?”
 

“Fifty deposits.”
 

“That's better. All we need now are houses.”
 

The group was joined by a third man who wore thick gloves and mud-splashed glasses. It was evident that he was either in cement or the victim of a highway accident.
 

“I want houses provided, and that's final.”
 

“So do we,” the cement man said, removing his gloves. “But the foundations are sinking into the swamps. Last week, only, I almost lost two men in quicksand. One of ‘em the plasterer, and he refused to come back.”
 

“Where's the union?” Luckmunn growled.
 

A tall reed of an individual came forth, reeling a bit drunkenly as he walked the plank.
 

“Henry, what in God's name is going on out here?”
 

“We've had the plumber die on this job, Mr. L.,” the union representative said mournfully. “And there's no heights involved. I mean if it was a bridge or somethin' I could justify it. The secretary-treasurer is shoutin' for my head.”
 

“Is he still on salary, the dead man?”
 

“I forgot to take him off,” Delaney answered.
 

“Take him off the payroll. I got enough zombies here bleeding me without having to support dead people. I take it we're insured.”
 

“Yes, the family'll get compensation.”
 

He fluttered his hand weakly, dismissing them, and stood ghostlike staring at the wall-less shell. “Jane, what do you think?”
 

“You're in trouble.”
 

“What could have gone wrong?”
 

 

* * * *

 

Luckmunn sat silently on the endless drive back to the city, the specters of lawsuits haunting him, New Jersey, words never to be uttered in his presence. He cursed it, a Mafia-ridden land mass. Yet another sinister plan to decimate the Jews.
 

“What are you going to do?” Jane asked.
 

“Close down. I never should've left Long Island. I'll go back to Huntington or maybe even further. I've got a nice-size parcel in Suffolk. They'll appreciate me out there.”
 

Luckmunn Ville, he thought disconsolately—knowing for sure that his extraterrestrial development must have been exactly what Neil Armstrong saw on the moon—a community of the future, fine for spider farming and not much else.
 

He was too distressed even to notice that she'd stopped disparaging this grandoise monument to himself, his creative spirit, a venture, so he'd told his investors, that found its historical equivalent in Rome.