Something to Be Desired (8 page)

Lucien started the car and moved down the road toward town. He tried to put some diplomacy and gratitude in his voice. “This sounds best for both of us,” he said.

“You sickening fuck,” she said. “I feel like a sewer.”

The ranch house had a springy floor. Lucien’s mother’s house in town also had a spring to it. When Lucien was a child he could run through the first floor and cause the china to tinkle in the cabinets for a minute and a half. A train on the bridge would do the same; and the second-story sitting porch trembled at traffic or even, it seemed,
the shouts of the neighbors from down the street. But this was a different motion, less the consequence of human pounding than some catarrhal moan from the ground, borne through the timbers of the house.

Part of the problem was that Lucien had got rid of the furniture. There was plenty of it, too. And behind the two mortifying unsprung beds there were hair-oil spots, but he thought, We’ve got plenty of haunts without this.

It was a heavy, windless fall of snow, a perfect day to burn furniture without fear of starting a grass fire. Wet and croaking ravens hung on the telephone wires, black and unassembled, like rags. He was drinking. He hauled the brutal beds, the all-knowing sofas, the crazed mechanical La-Z-Boy prototype which some solitary
Popular Mechanics
reader had put together and whose experiment Lucien made a shambles of. These, surmounted by chrysanthemum-print linoleum in quarter-acre lots, doused with number 2 diesel fuel, took only a match. The first lit up the fine, dense snow and produced the effect of sunny fog; anything at a middle distance—horses, trees, fences—shone through with an intense gray like spirits banished from the furniture. It did not seem then to Lucien as he paced around the draconic snow-licking flames with his bottle that there could be a way to call him unlucky; or upon consideration, to subject him to opinions of any kind. He was lying to himself.

The bedroom was empty of everything except what would furnish a dormitory room; the vacancy seemed more rueful than the furniture had. And there were bullet holes in the mystery circles of hair oil. But nobody is improved by having his child taken away. Today it was official.

·  ·  ·

The sound of snow slumping from the barn, the chinook winds at night, coyotes below the house competing with noisy ballgames on the television, wood smoke and the moan of tractor engines, serious flotation of the river in his drift boat, generally good behavior if you omit one five-hundred-mile blackout on the interstate. Which nobody got wind of.

Wick Tompkins had his small low offices across from the monument to the fallen cavalryman, a grimacing bronze fighter already dead, falling on an already dead horse, seizing the shaft of the arrow that pierced his tunic, suggesting that the last man still left alive in the world was the bowman. Wick liked to point out that the chap would have had to be standing somewhere right close to his secretary’s desk when he got the trooper.
Since Emily’s departure Wick and Lucien had become friends.

The secretary winked up from her new data processor, then rolled fresh boilerplate onto the screen. This machine had made Wick a man of leisure: Wick now weighed two hundred forty pounds. He smiled all the time, and his smile said, This better be funny.

“Lucien, come in here and close the door. I don’t want anyone to see you. Your hat, give me your hat.”

Lucien reached his Stetson to Wick, who hung it on a trophy for the champion mare at the Golden Spike show in Utah.

“Herbert Lawlor informs me that you have threatened him with a letter.”

“I did not. I wrote him a letter.”

“I’ve seen the letter.”

“So you know that Herbert Lawlor is hysterical.”

“The letter has threatening overtones. It is a pissing fight with a skunk. It is the very thing you are not to do. You’re having fun out on that crummy cow camp, aren’t you?”

“I’m making repairs.”

“And you are floating on the river?”

“Almost every day.”

“I think that’s grand. Especially if you let me do the communicating with Mr. Lawlor. It’s demeaning for you to take these things into your own hands. I am paid to demean myself, though I dream of glory as well as weight loss and sex miracles with strangers.”

“I’ll do better at everything if I can see my boy.”

“You will see him at Christmas, and you’re going to have to get used to that.”

“Christmas.”

“That’s the
next
time, not the
last
time.”

“How do you know when the last time is?”

Wick Tompkins drew on his cigarette, made a tentative gesture to stub it out, decided that too much of it remained and said, “I think that is a disastrous remark.”

“It’s not a remark. It’s what I think.”

“It’s a disaster.”

When young girls learn the new dances, thought Lucien, it is the last time the new dances are interesting. I am in town, thought Lucien, why not make the most of it?

He sat down at the counter at DeWayne’s Place, a hangout for people dramatically younger than himself, and drank coffee, the fastest beverage in the house. DeWayne’s was an old soda fountain, in the same family since Eisenhower. Grandpa, Dad, Edd, Edd Junior, still there: a dynasty of soda jerks. He drank as much coffee as fast as he could and watched a two-by-four opening at the end of the room where the young girls danced together to a jukebox. Their movements were strange and formal, glassy and distant; and everything wonderful about their bodies was under twenty-four months old. They moved toward the bellowing music, then moved away, gazes crisscrossing. They arced toward the surrounding columnar tables and quick-swigged pop without losing the beat. Though much of this struck a deep chill in Lucien, part of him desired to be a shallow boy with a sports car. Anything he’d ever done seemed like old tickertape.

Lucien knew that he had to practice an upright existence. He was being watched, not by everyone as he imagined, but fairly closely watched. People seemed to think he was waiting for Emily.

When he emerged from DeWayne’s, he felt as though his trousers were undone, or that his face and neck were a mass of hickeys. He saw two people he knew. One was the messianic Century 21 realtor, H. A. “Bob” Roberts. Bob cried out a greeting. He coasted past Lucien with a marathoner’s stride, but kept his face locked in Lucien’s direction.

The other was Mrs. Hunt, Lucien’s mathematics teacher of years back. She had been retired for a long time and now stalked Main Street reproaching former students, some of whom were grandparents and had had quite enough of this from her over the years.

“Aren’t you a little old for that place?” she asked Lucien.

“I guess I am,” Lucien said, staring at a smile that revealed three quarters of a century of cold fury. “I’m kind of chipper when I’m in a spot like that. What d’you think?”

“We’re talking about self-control, aren’t we, Lucien?”

I ought to pound this geek, he thought.

It was the perfect setting. Lucien sat with Dee at the first table this side of the closed-circuit television screen, an immense thing which stood huge and pale in the dark room. Along the wall were dark, empty, intimate booths, and they seemed as infested with ghosts as Mexican catacombs. The bartender put so much shaved ice in the blender drinks that Lucien never knew why his head was numb and his wrists ached. All he had to go by was mood swing.

“What in God’s name am I doing here with you?” she said.

“I couldn’t guess.” He stared in fear at his drink.

“Did I tell you how glad I was you were able to catch a few fish the other day?”

“No, you didn’t, but thank you.”

“So this is love.”

“Well, it’s very nice, isn’t it.”

“So this is your capital F love.”

“No, frankly, it’s not. But it has a nice side. Barkeep, may I have a black olive?”

“For your margarita?”

“Precisely.”

The bartender arrived and dropped the olive from about two feet right into the sno-cone.

“Thank you,” said Lucien, staring straight at him.

Dee was actually pretty, except that, to Lucien, her neck seemed a little strong, a little sculptural. A blue vein crossed it like something hydraulic. Perhaps if her head had been a trifle bigger … Then everything else would have been out of whack. Lucien had been through this before: change shoe size, hollow the ankles a bit along the tendon line, rotate the ass a few degrees north. After that you might as well load it out in a wheelbarrow.

“I ran into my old math teacher. She was cruel and made me feel old.”

“I’ve got a good buzz now.”

“I hadn’t been doing anything wrong, and she kind of nailed me.” Lucien watched her with a wary gaze.

“Le buzz magnifique!”
Dee cried.

“So as to what you’re doing here, I don’t know and I don’t care. This old broad made me feel like a bum waiting for his heart to blow up in some bus station.”

She stared at Lucien for a long moment.

“Say my name.”

“Oh, darling.” Lucien felt panicky.

“ ’Cause you don’t know the goddamned thing, do you. What do you take me for, a Kleenex?”

Lucien made a smile. It looked right and understanding. It looked okay. He thought if dismounting were given the same importance in sex as it is in horsemanship, this would be a happier world.

“Stay right there,” she ordered him. “Don’t move.”

She went to the bar and had a word with the bartender. He leaned on the hand that held a towel. From Lucien’s distance, the bartender looked like Father Time. He blinked while she talked to him, nodded, wiped at the bar suddenly, and she curved on back to the table.

“Don’t worry about a thing. I’ve got a late date with the bartender. He dearly loves to party.”

“So everything’s fine …?”

“Yeah,” she said, feeling in her purse for a cigarette. “Said it’d be about half an hour.”

“Dee!”
Lucien shouted, but it was too late.

A Kleenex. It was astonishing that she could make a remark like that, whatever her bitterness. Lucien, with not a little delusion, attempted to picture her husband, the background of the bitterness. Her husband belonged, by all Lucien could tell, to that class of people, usually vainglorious cuckolds, who chainsaw through trailer houses, use dump trucks for revenge upon their wives and girlfriends and are eventually captured, lambs with anomalous records, by baffled authorities, accorded treatment for stress and released into a new world.

Lucien drove up the valley. The purling creeks glittered in the hillsides. It is still heartening, he thought, that the water goes on going downhill.

So he launched his drift boat again. He floated and
smoked between the chalk cliffs. For a couple of hours he let the river take him away, toward the bubble of the ocean, toward teeming populations with women who looked like they came from Egypt, who did not seem to have been raised on pancake mix. For a while he felt the nation and its people coming to him, and then he dragged the boat out on a gravel bar, spooking eight fledgling ducks whose takeoffs failed. They pinwheeled into the reeds and disappeared.

I am a family man, thought Lucien, despite what has been stolen. He persevered in viewing himself as a victim.

Please send one tall bottled spirits of oleander. The north wind is tearing this joint up. Please send one sentimental war memorial heated by the sun and suitable for emplacement on coastal Bermuda grass. Am anxious to review above-captioned properties with canal and floating coconuts as pistol targets. Guard dog an unnecessary extravagance, also dismantle hydroponic tomato system as I am in all respects devoid of a green thumb especially as it applies to my own life.

Lucien thought, Possibly I should not have thrown out all the furniture. The wind has a bit of a run at things as is, don’t you think? Of course it has. It’s like being left in the barn.

He sat bolt upright in the cane rocker, an amber shooter of whiskey in his hand. The cruelest thing I did on my father’s death was to request “no keening” of my relatives. We could start from there. Sixty-six years of his wreaking havoc did not seem an appropriate background for some loud Celtic attempt to grease the boy to heaven. I’ll take my lumps; he’ll have to take his. If he’s going to heaven, it will have to be as an exemplary
criminal, a figure of pathos, there to give the chiaroscuro effect to happy souls who have everything.

As to my child, maybe I am doing no better. Perhaps I
should
deal with principals only, phone it in without too much English on it, looking at myself with the instrument to my ear in the wind-shuddering front window and ascending foothills enameled on the darkness. Punch in this Yankee-Doodle area code, digits falling through the computer. If I get a boyfriend, I’ll sing “How’s My Ex Treating You?” with castrato enthusiasm. Calm down.

“Suzanne?”

“Yes?”

“It’s me.”

“What time is it?”

“About eleven here. I can’t see my watch.”

“Huh. One here. What’s up?”

“Are you having company?”

“What’s up, Lucien?”

“I’m afraid I’ve been rude to your lawyer.”

“Oh, so I’d heard. You’re going to have to stop that.”