Something to Be Desired (18 page)

Lucien left. He was astounded at Suzanne’s description and the depth of her feeling. He had a drink at the bar, drove two buckets of balls at the driving range, shucked half a dozen air-fresh Chesapeake oysters with his personal prying iron, ate them, made ten or twenty effective business calls and bought James a fishing rod. He just wished he had Suzanne and that they
were back on the Gulf Stream in a light norther in their old sloop bound for glory. He wished he were still playing third base, guarding the hot corner all those summers ago. Principally, he was exhilarated by her rage.

But it seemed to be true: she hated him.

“Antoinette,” he said a while later, “get the number, the long-distance call, Suzanne made from the White Cottage around half past ten. Then put a call through for me to that number.”

He waited as it rang and then was answered. It was the man who had called. “Yeah,” said Lucien. “I got you an answer on Suzanne Taylor’s return to work. She’ll get there when she gets there. Okay? She’ll get there when she gets there.”

“I think this is very sad for you,” the man said. “I’d hate to be in your position.”

Things at the spring grew very busy without warning. The Elks booked two luncheons, which on top of the built-in traffic made things burdensome. Nor was Henchcliff taking it as well as he might have. “Lucien,” he said after the second day of this, “we had a very specific conversation about what was expected of me and what was expected of me the way I saw it was high-grade, high-priced cooking, which cannot be done at the same rate as franks and beans. I don’t see this as an eatery.”

“I know that. But bear with us, we’re in business here. We’ve got to take it as it comes.”

“
You
have to take it as it comes. I’m a cook, I’m an artist.”

“No,” said Lucien. “Cooks are not artists. Somebody should have explained that to you.”

Henchcliff pushed his hands deep into his pockets and bucked his elbows in close to his ribs: heavy weather ahead. “You want to spend a couple days with me in front of that oven?”

“I pay you to do that. Plus I’m the wrong guy to be having this conversation. I don’t give a shit what people put in their goddamn mouths. In fact, long conversations about what people put in their mouths bore the hell out of me. I’ve got plenty of problems of my own right now, Hench. It’s not like I’m interested in trying yours on for size. Why don’t you quit crying and go to work?”

Antoinette, on the other hand, was booking them hand over fist. She really thrived on pressure. If it slacked off, she went creative, and that’s where trouble began. Now, seeing her bent grimly at her ledger, Lucien felt a flood of warmth that watching loyalty produces. He of course knew it was illusory, but what wasn’t. He leaned over and gave her a serious hug.

He checked the linen carts and occupancy list; there was a Billings car in staff parking and he had it towed. He had Shane paint out the graffiti in the bar men’s room and he checked the liquor inventory against the bartender’s sheet. The olives were down. The tar had firmed up in the parking lot, so he took down the rope and flags that cordoned it off. There were three trucks with whitewater rafts slung up in their beds waiting to park, and he waved to the drivers as they moved onto the new tar with an adhesive sound. He filled the bird-feeders and did up the wire ties on the garbage bags behind the
kitchen. He ran a stick up into the mouths of the six drainspouts and dislodged leaves and sculch. Four of the six ran copious water though it was a sunny day. Seamless gutters. He threw a tarp over the log-splitter and pulled the rolling doors shut in the front of the tractor shed. He had all the fiery cheer of a man with a family business.

He skipped his dinner and worked until dark. His muscles ached and he took a long shower to feel better. That night Suzanne let him stay. The clean, painted white walls of the room made their shadows vivid; and beyond the door he could see James sound asleep on the daybed with true stories of the American West piled by his side.

“James, what are you interested in?” Lucien had the willows bent down and he was trying to dislodge James’s trout fly. James put his fly in the brush more than he put it in the water.

“A lot of things.”

“What are you best at?”

“What?”

“What do you do the best?”

“Aren’t I going to find out from you?” asked James.

The stream wound through brush in open country. There were antelope off near the limits of visibility, and rising and settling clouds of blackbirds. The pools were sandy and the trout hovered in small schools like fish in the ocean.

The next day a small thing happened which Lucien took to be a sign, a good sign. He went to town ostensibly to do some banking but really because the luncheon special
at the Part Time Bar was split-pea soup, Lucien’s favorite. All municipal matters were being settled in the booths and along the counter. The poker machines had until Friday to get out of town, and most people seemed glad to see them go. Two cowboys were disputing whether or not Tom Horn really shot the kid, and withal, there was an atmosphere of time arrested for an appropriate review period or just a decorous tableau. But the sign actually was Dee, Lucien’s old squeeze, with a booth of her own. Lucien sat down. She was wearing her jeans and a pink sleeveless sweater. She was attractive. No wonder I was always sticking my dick in her, thought Lucien.

“Guess what?”

“I can’t,” said Lucien.

“I’m leaving Shit-for-Brains.”

“Hasn’t he been a good husband to you?” Lucien asked, knowing right away that it would have been darned hard to say anything sillier. He ordered the soup.

“You’ll also be delighted to hear I’m leaving town.”

“I’m not delighted to hear that.”

“We found ways of passing the time,” she said. “Me and you.”

“We certainly did.”

“My sister’s a florist in Salt Lake,” she said. “They’ve got a video dish. I can stay with them until I learn the ropes. I don’t know squat about flowers. But then, what did you know about hot springs?”

“Nothing,” agreed Lucien quickly.

“You just fucked the right murderer.”

“Ha ha ha.”

“What’s funny? With me it was a gutter salesman. But I can’t take it anymore. Wednesday he got one of
these electric garage doors, and we haven’t been able to get the car out for three days. I walked downtown. So that’s it for me. I don’t care how many Mormons Salt Lake’s got. I’ve had a picture of that seagull since sixth grade and I knew someday I’d go. Also, Shit-for-Brains is about to receive news of foreclosure and I don’t want to be standing there when that one hits. It’s real simple around our place: I want to be somebody and he wants to be nobody. It’s just exactly that black and white. I’m gonna go down to Salt Lake with all those Mormons and sleep my way to the top.”

“It’s hard to think of the right thing to say, Dee.”

“Why say anything? You’ve got it made. But remember this, old Dee was there when you were walking the hoot-owl trail.”

That night Lucien played checkers with James and lost. The little boy sat in a plaid bathrobe and carpet slippers—where did children get carpet slippers these days?—and played to win; Lucien couldn’t stop him. Lucien helped Suzanne put him to bed; she’d bought him a globe during the day and he twirled it slowly as he drifted off murmuring the names of the countries. They made love and Lucien fell asleep thinking about Dee out on that highway; she probably took a few pills to get the trip behind her.

Sometime late, in the middle of the night, Suzanne got up and said she could hear the brindle dog drinking out of the pool. Lucien asked what difference it made. “I guess none,” said Suzanne. “Doesn’t anyone own him?” Lucien threw his head back on the pillow because somehow Suzanne had made it seem such a despairing question. “I thought if I chased him away from our pool he’d
go home. But that doesn’t necessarily follow if he has no home.”

“Suzanne, please stop this.”

“I will. I’m going on and on, aren’t I?”

“A little.”

“Am I okay to make love with?” Suzanne asked.

“What do you think?”

“Well, you were never like this with me before. I think you want me.”

“I do,” said Lucien.

“I mean, more than before.”

“Something was the matter with me before,” said Lucien.

“That’s not the matter with you now?”

“Here’s hoping,” said Lucien.

“Here’s hoping!”

“I didn’t mean that. I just didn’t want to jinx myself. I know we’re happy, a bit at least. I’m thinking, little steps for little feet. All I’d need is some jinx now and that would about do it.”

Lucien wondered about her work. He knew that there would be a certain lingering foulness about his enquiring as to her relationship with her employer. And besides, he was briefly bored by matters of sexual envy. It was like talking endlessly about the toothed holes in people’s faces through which they passed pieces of food. Finally, enough was enough, though the variegated impulses continued to leave a ranker scent trail than the most ancient jackal. In the end, one was put off by the body itself, a virtual Kelsey, suitable for donation to some godforsaken college. One wanted the brain, a pure sensorium, flying around without weight. The poor old dick was continually fighting gravity: making trouble in resistance, falling down
the wrong pant-leg in remission. Younger owners each considered his a lordly shlong; but finally it is seen for what it is, a little maniac.

There was a bedside lamp, and Lucien wrote their initials in the light covering of dust, thinking, I do in fact love this girl. When she fell asleep once more, he got up quietly and went in to look at James. It seemed to Lucien that children took up great space when they were awake and then became so small when they fell asleep. James looked completely different because he did not wear his thick glasses. The odd way in which he hovered within his own clothes was replaced by a carelessness that relieved Lucien as he looked at the boy. It was as though James could someday emerge from his frightened self and go on and be happy and maybe through some as yet undiscovered process lay claim to the years his father misused. Lucien knew perfectly well that this last thought was completely foolish; but it gave him peace and he was able to sleep immediately, as people with self-respect are said to do.

Sweet is fleet. They could pick up and go. They were their own society. They could go back to Green Turtle and take the place at Black Sound. Lucien could even paint a little. James could collect hermit crabs out of the mangrove roots for bonefish bait and they could run down to Manjack and fish the flats. Or back in the USIA! In many ways that was an interesting job, all right, and he could get back to it before he lost his Spanish for good. Anything was possible once the center had been restored. Not that Lucien was thinking there were anything less than countless scars from the past, near and far. He thought now he could get over Emily, as he had seen her
for what she was and she was out of the question, and she was gone. Obviously that all made him sad, but her chain of bad luck seemed something he lacked the power to break. If that was fatalism, then it would have to be. Nor would he brood about Suzanne’s interim love life. Certain things had become tedious, and watching himself start over again like a cat on perpetual linoleum was something he would do no more.

They had to get an ambulance for one of the nannies. She just wouldn’t wake up. She had paid off housekeeping to stay out of her way, and there were all sorts of food scraps from the kitchen that had to be cleared out. She woke up at the hospital and was vacationing again in a few hours with the Australian nanny, who looked like she herself would conk out in a matter of a few more hours. All the nannies were on some kind of marathon; two of them could take it and keep on eating and, clearly, two couldn’t.

Lucien drove his truck into Deadrock for a cortisone shot. During the long winter alone, he had actually gotten tennis elbow from self-abuse. Now it wouldn’t go away and he was accepting treatment. His doctor, of course, tried to have a discussion about larger health issues. Lucien scotched that.

“I’d like you to pay a little closer attention to your health. This is the middle of your life,” said the doctor.

“You got that right. And it runs about a hundred years in length with record-breaking happy stretches.… Pump that sonofabitch. I’m a working man with a family to support.”

Then he took a walk through the streets of Deadrock, retracing a few childhood paths, remembering places
where dogs got him on his paper route, and seeing the fine big houses, as well as the small homes in which there was owner pride; the different buildings where his father had had offices and the small pharmacies where his mother had secured wacky prescriptions and home-permanent kits. There were kids running along the sidewalk, many of them the kind of reasonably comely youths in which an already typed and crude adult can be seen. He saw where he learned to play third base and where he lost a big fight with his best friend and where he made his first wages pumping gas and working for a roofer. He could still remember leaving an unfinished brake job, the sedan up on the hoist, to go off and try to be a cowboy in the hills around town. He stayed away from the house where he had lived with his mother. Was it like women and childbirth in that the pain was not remembered? He still loved the place and saw no reason that you could not live there and always be happy.

He drove back to the house. When he went inside, Emily was sitting at the table reading the local paper. “I brought you a coconut from where the trade winds blow,” she said.

“You did?” he said vacantly.

“I put it on your side of the bed,” said Emily. Her hair was bleached bone-white and only her eyes were made up. She had a thin, hell-bent air.

“So!” said Lucien in a tone of discovery. “You’re back.”

By five Lucien was at the airport with the mayor, the city officials of Deadrock, a handful of community leaders and prominent ranchers, a Production Credit Association man, a trio from the Chamber of Commerce, one woman from the Better Business Bureau and the Deadrock High School band. Lucien still did not have the correct name of the sister city, but its delegation stuck out like a sore thumb climbing off the airplane. For one thing, they were tiny people and wore dresses or sarongs that swept the tarmac; you couldn’t tell the men from the women, and until one of them stepped forward at the end, there seemed to be no order to their arrival. They merely swept off the plane and moved haphazardly around the runway. One of the baggage handlers shooed them along toward the terminal. Once they got inside, an old man not much more than four feet high made a speech in his native tongue, a coursing of percussive notes across an unfathomable scale. A couple of the ranchers took it upon themselves to herd these people into the waiting cars. Lucien was not much help. In fact, the mayor studied him for a moment and asked, “Cat got your tongue?” Lucien shook his head quickly, then listened as the leader of the delegation from wherever it was said in perfect English, “We got jet lag. Time to sack out.” The line of cars strung along the interstate toward Deadrock and the hot spring.