Authors: Jacqueline Briskin
But he gallantly insisted on paying her check. When she stumbled on a curb in the parking lot he put his arm around her, squeezing her
to his soft body as he led her to a Ford sedan. “It’s a rental,” he explained. “I’m in LA on business and staying at the Ramada Inn. What say we adjourn there?”
“Great idea,” she repeated.
God, am I ever drunk
, she thought incredulously.
What am I doing? Better an old slob who wants me than Curt who doesn’t.
After locking and chaining the hotel door, he embraced her ardently.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Ted,” he muttered, offering no patronym.
“I’m Joscelyn.”
Sober, she would have been uncertain what to do next with this complete stranger, but being drunk she simply unzipped her skirt, stepping out of it. He was throwing off his clothes.
The rolls of flabby chest and big belly were bluish white and covered with coarse brown hairs except for the smooth, bald band that marked his beltline. His uncompromising lack of physical grace pleased her. Here was a man who was suited to her. Hugging, they moved to the bed, and she was overtaken by the blunted desire that liquor imparts. She entered into Malcolm’s old call-girl game, making love to a stranger whose name might or might not be Ted, with a cold, clinical explicitness that left both of them gasping and drenched with sweat.
Immediately afterward she fell into a stuporous sleep, jerking awake in the dark with a headache, a vile taste in her mouth, and
oppressive thoughts of her dead husband, of her brother-in-law’s rejection.
Turning on the bathroom light, she quickly gathered together her clothes. As she bent to adjust her small breasts in the bra, her partner drowsily folded his fat arms under his head. “Know my motto, Joscelyn?” he asked in a self-congratulatory tone. “The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat. The moment I saw you, so thin and prim in your blue outfit, I said to myself, ‘Ted, forget all these wild young chicks. The one over there by herself is the girl who’ll fuck your brains out.’”
Since this was a compliment, Joscelyn formed a smile as she let herself out. By the time she was back at the Bel Air house her hangover had lessened while conversely that stupid pass she’d made at Curt gnawed yet deeper. To face him again was unendurable.
She turned on her crooknecked desk lamp, methodically composing a letter of resignation on a legal pad, crushing the long yellow sheets four times before she had the right tone, neither recriminatory nor self-abasing, but businesslike. After typing the draft up on her letterhead, she folded it into an envelope, going over to the window.
By now it was light out and the pool was white with Curt’s churning strokes. He swam savagely, as if trying to escape something or someone. She stood for several minutes, her cheeks indrawn with thoughtfulness as she watched him do his frantic laps.
He didn’t desert me in my terrible time
, she
thought.
Sighing, she tore the envelope in half, dropping the pieces in her wastebasket.
She joined him for breakfast. Curt, as was his habit in the early morning, spoke very little, but he did inquire, “Good time last night?”
“Super.”
They would both ignore the previous evening’s incident, although whenever she thought of her hands caressing his thighs she would burn with shame.
That morning on the way to work she rented a brand new, furnished one-bedroom. When she got home that evening the servants informed her that Mr. Ivory had taken off for an unspecified length of time.
On the morning of March 22, 1974, at a few minutes past seven, Crystal was stepping cautiously along the planks laid across a corner of the acres of umber mud that had been hardpan when she had arrived yesterday. There had been no clouds then, and there were none now, but during the night she had been awakened by equatorial rain richocheting against the metal roof of Gid’s trailer.
Though she had been told often enough about the humid heat of the Tasi copper and gold mining project in New Guinea, the physical actuality shocked her. The sun was already an electric hot plate relentlessly simmering the muggy air, and adding to the general discomfort were the nonchalant swarms of mosquitoes and the grinding, deafening complaints of heavy machinery.
The Tasi Valley, whose topography was already rearranged by the Talbott crew, lay deep within central New Guinea’s Oranje Range—jungle-furred, mineral-veined mountains that had not yet been properly explored. At the cost of nearly a billion dollars in the next decade, this remote isolation would become a gold
mine, an open-pit copper mine, smelters, a township. The Tasi was the largest project Talbott’s had ever undertaken alone, and Crystal, who popped up at sites to inspire her crews with her beauteous presence, was putting in her first duty visit.
Above her, the grinning, shirtless driver of a Caterpillar circled his hard hat in a wild west salute.
Crystal lifted a hand in response. The mushy ground was softer here, and her movement disturbed her balance. The board beneath her teetered.
Gid grasped her elbow in his large, moist, steadying hand.
“Careful, Mother,” he shouted.
Blue eyes narrowed in concentration, she stared at the paved area surrounding temporary headquarters, focusing her attention on the nearest trailer along whose side was a spray-painted poster:
WELCOME TO TASI, MRS. TALBOTT
. The red letters shimmered in the heat. As her feet encountered the softening blacktop she let out a spontaneous sigh of relief.
Gid and the project leaders, four muscular, tanned men who smelled of sweat and Cutter’s insect repellent and wore only khaki shorts with their mud-caked boots, looked expectantly down at her.
“I ought to be used to it by now but I never am,” she shouted over the din. “First there’s the drawings, then the scale model. But the site itself is always the real miracle.”
The engineers beamed.
“Right on, Mom,” Gid said with his endearing smile. He jumped up the metal steps to open the trailer door for her.
Then the two of them were alone, surrounded by the blessed air conditioning and the comparative quiet of Gid’s living quarters/office. When her sons had completed Stanford, Crystal had started them on their real education, as outlined by Gideon years ago: the two were shifting through the Divisions, and this was Gid’s fourth month at the Tasi.
Touching her scented handkerchief to her face, she sat at his desk, which was cluttered with papers, notes, diagrams, empty mugs and a magnificent, creamy orchidaceous bloom in a Pepsi bottle. “What time’s that staff breakfast?” she asked.
“Not until seven thirty. You have an entire half hour to recuperate,” he said, opening his refrigerator for one of the small Perriers that he had stocked for her.
She took an appreciative swallow. “What’s being done about the mosquitoes?”
“We’ve brought a duster in.” Gid had raised his left wrist and was fingering a shiny, unscratched new silver identification bracelet, an adornment that surprised Crystal: Gid lacked all vanity about his appearance. “Mom, tonight at the party there’s somebody I’ve been wanting you to meet.”
Crystal, who had been following the flight of a small, iridescently crimson bird of paradise as it looped above the man-made desolation of mud toward the towering, moss-festooned trees
of the uncleared jungle, jumped so that mineral water spilled. “Somebody? A girl, you mean?”
“She’s of the female persuasion, yes. Don’t look so worried, Mom. She’s not a Melanesian.”
“You know the rule. You and Alexander aren’t meant to date employ—”
“She’s not one of us Talbott slaves,” he interrupted with one of his undisciplined smiles. “But if she were, the hell with rules.”
“I hope you don’t show that attitude around the men.”
“Mom, you know me better than that.” His voice softened. “Her name’s Anne Hunnicutt, and she’s pretty unique.”
Crystal’s emotion was sharply delineated, recognizable. She was jealous.
Jealous? Of Gid?
Even with her beautiful, brilliant Alexander she’d never been one of those hedgehog mothers who shoot out bristles of antagonism toward every young female. So why should she now feel echoes of the desolation that had engulfed her after Gideon’s death?
“Anne’s a homegrown product,” Gid was saying. “Born and raised in Berkeley.”
“Why is she here?”
“Her doctoral thesis is on the Massim and ambilineal descent—you know, am I my mother’s son or my father’s?”
“You mean she
lives
with the headhunters?”
“There’s no unattached heads around here—unless you count some of the rest of the Berkeley team. There’s about a dozen of them in a village a few hours from here by jeep.”
Crystal formed an image of a thick-legged, earnest-jawed female anthropologist in a pith helmet stalking an immensely rich young bachelor remote from his natural habitat.
Her blouse was sticking to her back like a hot poultice. “I have to get ready,” she said peevishly. “And Gid, can’t you do something about this desk?”
While she took her second trickly, tepid shower of the morning, she decided that it was up to her to break up this unsuitable attachment. A decision that was translated into self-righteous maternal duty by the time she slipped into gauzy cottons that smelled of fresh ironing—Anina, as always, had accompanied her. Mitchell was already in Tokyo, the next leg of her journey.
Fortunately the Tasi project was ahead of schedule and under budget so she did not have to pay attention to drawn-out reports and agitated eight-millimeter films of progress. She meted out praise with automatic smiles and spent the time brooding how to sever the relationship between Gid and the hefty, khaki-clad female whom she visualized meeting that night.
* * *
The bash was held on the blacktop. The lights strung between trailers dimmed and pulsated whenever the makeshift combo stationed on a flattop truck became unbearably loud. The amateurish, overamplified musicians served one useful purpose: they drowned out barks and alien cries emerging from the jungle.
In Crystal’s honor, the few women (secretaries, office workers, the wives of the three top men on the project) wore dowdy formals while the engineering and administrative staff had donned dark suits. The “outdoor guys” sweated into checkered sport jackets. Locals padded around barefoot to offer paper plates of tiny, charred hot dogs, Velveeta cheese melted on Ritz crackers and a spicy local concoction made with pork and coconut.
The roar of a Talbott helicopter had announced the arrival of Anne Hunnicutt, who slipped unseen into Gid’s trailer to change. Crystal, a pro at such large employee gatherings, permitted everyone to admire her diamonds and black organza Lanvin—her soignée perfection juxtaposed against the primitive site—while she pretended to listen to the booming of Ian Ramsay, the project manager. Her glance kept wandering to the light that glowed behind the curtained windows of the trailer.
Then the girl was in the doorway, glancing around.
Anne Hunnicutt was quite small, and dressed Berkeley style in a Mexican blouse and floor-length patchwork skirt that looked shapeless enough to be homemade. Crystal tightened her mouth, grudging her son’s beloved one minor point. Good hair. In this light it gleamed a rich auburn and fell thick and straight almost to her waist.
Gid had gone over to the steps. His back was to Crystal, but she could see his big hand reach out delicately to the girl’s narrow waist, where she had tucked the orchidlike bloom from the
Pepsi bottle. They stood that way, the lights flooding over them like a benediction, for a few moments before they linked arms, laughing together as they circled the bar table and came across the blacktop. Crystal saw that Anne’s left foot came down with eccentric force. The girl limped.
Crystal knew she had a major battle on her hands.
From the beginning Gid’s friendships invariably lacked in some dimension—the child was Chinese or Jewish or orphaned or on scholarship—and no matter how Crystal had tried to sway her son, he had stubbornly kept these inappropriate attachments even unto today.
Anne had the inevitable redhead’s lavishment of freckles, lighter on her straight nose, sprinkled heavily across her cheeks almost like rouge, an apricot conglomeration on her shoulders and arms.
“Mrs. Talbott, how terrific to finally meet you,” she said. Her smile had a warm immediacy. “You’ve got a great press agent.”
“You mustn’t believe all you hear,” Crystal responded stiffly.
“Oh, I didn’t,” the girl said, reaching for Gid’s hand. “With a son like this, I never believed for a minute that you
were
gorgeous?”
Gid laughed.
“Gid tells me you’re an anthropologist,” Crystal said.
“Humbly following in Margaret Mead’s footsteps.”
“Aren’t these New Guinea tribes terribly
primitive?”
“I know it looks like that from the outside, Mrs. Talbott, but their social structure’s elaborate and quite sophisticated. In our village, which is quite small, the men have a ceremonial clubhouse, and none of the younger men are allowed in until after their initiations—it reminds me of the Faculty Club back home.”
“It must be fascinating.”
Anne laughed. “Mrs. Talbott, you sounded exactly like my mother just then. She thinks I’m insane to be here in New Guinea. If I’d listened to her, I’d be in law school at Berkeley—my father taught at Boalt—picking off a bright young lawyer.”
“Instead of a bright young engineer,” Gid said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the girl.
“I hate to admit it, Talbott,” Anne retorted, “but sometimes Mother’s right.”
They both chuckled.
Crystal asked, “When’re you going home?”
“In a few days.” Anne blinked, suddenly looking far softer and younger. Gid reached for her hand. “My grant’s run out,” she went on, “and my job at the Bancroft Library starts the first of April. While I’m working on my thesis I’ll need every cent I can earn.”
Couples had begun dancing. Ramsay strode over and in his capacity as big cheese at the Tasi begged Crystal to do him the honor. As he bounded her across the blacktop, Crystal caught glimpses of Gid and Anne facing each other and gyrating, her not ungraceful swoops flaring the patchwork skirt against his gray
flannel trousers.