“Eliot, the new girl’s here. You’ll want to meet her. And . . . it’s a surprise, Eliot. Please come now. He’ll be so disappointed.”
“Why? He already hired her, didn’t he? Tomorrow’s time enough for me to meet her. And the only surprise around here is that we don’t all die of boredom.”
He picked up his glass and let a trickle of melted ice wet his lips. He should have brought the pitcher of gin and lemonade. Have to remember, he told himself sternly, no half measures from now on. Been too moderate around here. Moderation’s no damn good for island living. He stood up. The sea tilted and the rock tried to slide him off into the water. He could hear vicious laughter, masked as waves rushed around stones. Beatrice caught his hand and led him out of the jumbled rocks.
“Come on, let’s take a walk,” she said. But the drunkenness was passing, and he shook his head.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Sitting too long, that’s all. Let’s go to the damn party and get it over with.”
She half led, half pushed him along the cypress boardwalk toward the main house.
“The new girl. What’s she like?”
“I’m not sure. You know she got over on the pretext that I had recommended her. Turns out that we lived in the same town back when we were growing up. So I should know her, except that I’m ten years older than she is. I dated her brother when I was sixteen, but I can’t remember much about her. Or her brother either, for that matter. She was Gina’s age when I saw her last. She’s twenty now, a student, looking for summer work, perfect to spell Marianne while she has her baby, and so on. But you’ll see.”
Just what we need, he thought. A young single girl to liven things up around here. “Is she pretty?”
“No. Very plain actually. But do you think that will make any difference?” Beatrice sounded amused.
How well we know each other. She can follow my thought processes, come to my conclusions for me, without even thinking about it. A simple temporary dislocation of the ego. The boardwalk led them around the ruins, and they approached the house from the back. Curiously old-fashioned and unglamorous, one floor that rambled, deep porch; there was a lot of ironwork, grilles, rails, scrolls and curlicues that should have been offensive but were pleasing. They skirted a swimming pool that had been concerted to a sunken garden and walked along the ornate porch to the front entrance. Wide windows, uncovered, with massive shutters at their sides. View of a room the width of the house, fireplace on one wall, bar and stools, low, gold gleaming cypress furniture, red Spanish tile floors that didn’t show the scars of the constant polishing of the sand. Beyond the room there was a terrace, shielded from the sea wind by a louvered wall of glass. Moving figures broken into sections by the partly opened glass slats, the hum of voices, echo of Spanish guitars. All substantial and real, all but the fragmented people.
Eliot took a deep breath and entered the terrace. Beatrice paused a moment to speak to Mr. Bonner, who would go over to her place to babysit. Eliot was aware of their low conversation, as he was aware of the new girl who stood out because she was new and very pale. Not pretty. Homely, actually. He nodded at Mr. Pitcock, whose eyes always seemed to see more than was visible. He was seventy; why weren’t his eyes starting to dim? Pitcock knew that he’d been drinking, knew that he’d tried to forget the party, knew that if Beatrice hadn’t been sent after him, he would have passed it up. So fire me, he thought at the old man, and knew that the old man was aware of that thought also. They shook hands and Pitcock introduced the new girl.
“Donna, this is the project director, Dr. Kalin. Eliot, Donna Bensinger.”
“Hello, Eliot.” Too fast. Should have called him Dr. Kalin. He didn’t like her pasty skin, or the limpness of her hand when he touched it, or the pale, myopic eyes, and the thin dun-colored hair that looked as if it needed a shampoo.
“I hope you won’t find it too dull here, Miss Bensinger,” he said, and looked past her at Ed Delizzio, who was standing at the bar. “Excuse me.”
He thought he heard the dry chuckle of Thomas Pitcock as he left them, but he didn’t turn back to see. “Christ,” he said to Ed. “Just - Christ!”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Ed poured a martini and put it in Eliot’s hand. “Drink. That’s all that’s left.” He refilled his own glass. “After this breaks up we’re going to play some poker over at Lee’s house. Want to sit in?”
“Sure.”
“The buffet is ready in the dining room.” Mrs. Bonner’s voice was eerie over the intercom.
“Come on, let’s eat.” Pitcock led them across the patio, into the house, his hand on Donna’s arm, talking cheerfully to her. He was tall, straight, bald, brown. Why didn’t he stoop and falter?
Mary and Leland Moore beckoned to Eliot. Mary was small and tanned, hair sun-bleached almost white. She always seemed breathless. “Can you come over later? The boys are playing poker.”
Eliot accepted again and they went into the dining room with the others. On the table was a glazed cold turkey, hot lobster in sherry sauce, biscuits, salads. There was an assortment of wines. He picked at the food and drank steadily, refusing to pretend an interest in the small talk and forced gaiety about him.
“I have no theory to forward as yet, sir,” he said distinctly.
“Damn it, a hypothesis then.”
“I don’t have that much yet.”
“A hunch. A wild guess. Don’t couch it in formal terms. You must be thinking something by now. What?”
“Nothing. Can’t you get it through your head that I won’t be forced into a generalization.”
“You’re afraid to.”
He reached for the champagne and when he raised his gaze from the iced bottle, he caught the bright blue eyes on him. For a second he almost believed they had been speaking, but then he heard Marty’s voice, and a giggle from Donna, and he knew that he had said nothing. The old man continued to watch him as he poured more champagne, spilling some of it, and replaced the bottle. “Fuck off,” he said, raising his glass and returning the silent stare. Donna giggled louder and this time the others laughed also, and the old man’s gaze shifted as he, too, chuckled at Marty’s story.
After they ate, Mrs. Bonner appeared with a birthday cake, and they all sang to Eliot and toasted him with champagne. At eleven thirty Beatrice signaled that they should wrap it up. Eliot stood up and made his way to Pitcock.
“Thanks for the party,” he said. He was very unsteady.
“Wait a second, will you. I have something for you, didn’t want to bring it out before.” The old man said good-bye to his guests and then left Eliot for a moment.
If he brings me a check, I’ll rip it to shreds before his eyes. He thought longingly of another drink, but he didn’t want to delay to mix it and drink it. The old man returned carrying a bulky package. He watched Eliot’s face as he tore off the wrappings.
“I know how much you’ve admired my Escher works; thought you might like one.” It was a large, complicated drawing of builders who were destroying what they built, all in one process. Eliot stared at it: the figures seemed to be moving, toiling up stairs, stairs that flattened out and went down again somehow even as he watched. He blinked and the movement stopped. “Thanks,” he said. “Just thanks.”
Pitcock nodded. He turned to the window to look out at the beach. “It’s a strange night, isn’t it? Don’t you feel the strangeness? If it were August I’d say a hurricane was on its way, but not so soon. Just strange, I guess.”
Eliot waited a moment, wanting to force the talk to the futile project, the open-ended task that Pitcock had hired them to do, but he clamped his lips hard and remained silent.
“You accept the job then?” the old man asked, in the plush office on the thirtieth floor of the glass and plastic building in New York. “Without questioning its merits? Promise to see it through?”
“I’ll sign the three-year contract,” Eliot said. “Seems fair enough to give it that much of a try.”
“Good. And at the end of
the three years, we’ll talk again, and between now and then, no matter how many doubts you raise, you’ll carry on.”
Eliot shrugged. I will do my best to uphold the honor of the project. He said, “I don’t pretend to think that we’ll be able to accomplish anything, except to add to the data, and to bring some order to a field that’s in chaos. Maybe that’s enough for now. I don’t know.”
The old man turned toward him, away from the window. “It’s working out. I know you don’t agree, but I can feel that it’s taking shape. And now this feeling of strangeness. That’s part of it. Undercurrents. Someone’s projecting strong undercurrents, strong enough to affect others. You’ll see. You’ll see.”
The others were loitering near the sunken garden, all except Beatrice, who had gone ahead to relieve Bonner of his babysitting chores. Eliot fell into step beside Mary.
Soon she’ll say, you’ve been awfully quiet, something to that effect. And I’ll say, thinking. Been here two years and two months, for what? Doing what? Indulging a crazy old man in his obsession.
“Eliot, are you going to stay?”
“What?” He looked at the small woman, but could see only the pale top of her head.
“You’ve been acting like a man trying to come to a decision. We wondered if you are considering leaving here.”
“I’ve been considering that for two years and two months,” he said. “I’m no nearer a decision than I was when I first took it up.” He indicated the house behind them. “He’s crazy, you know.”
“I don’t know if he is or not. This whole project seems crazy to me, but then, it always did.”
“Is Lee getting restless?”
“Isn’t everyone?”
“Yeah, there is that.”
The trouble was that there were only ten people on the island and they all spent nine-tenths of their time on it. They were all tired of each other, tired of the island paradise, tired of Mrs.
Bonner’s turkeys and champagne parties, tired of the endless statistics and endless data that went nowhere.
We go through the motions of having fun at the parties, and each of us is there in body only, our minds busy with the data, busy trying to find an out without cutting off our connections with the old man. Each one of us afraid the goose will suddenly stop production, wondering if we have enough of the golden eggs to live on the rest of our lives, wondering if any of this is worth it. If anything out there in the real world would be any better, make any more sense. Twenty-five thousand a year, almost all clear, living quarters and most of the food thrown in, no need for cars or servants. Company plane to take us away for vacations, bring us back. Travel expenses, hotel expenses, everything paid for. Looking for ways to spend money. Endless project at twenty-five thousand a year, a raise to thirty, or forty? Keen eyes that see too much, files with too much in them, birthdays, childhood friends, illnesses, mistakes almost forgotten, but in the files. Mary was talking again.
“I almost wish we never had come here, you know? Lee would have been fine. He had a job at Berkeley all lined up. He would like to teach, I think. But probably not now. Not after this kind of freedom and so much money.”
“He can always quit,” Eliot said more brusquely than was called for. He liked Mary. Mary and Gina were the only ones that he did like. Neither was a threat to him in any way.
“At least we can always say that, can’t we?”
They paused at his house and he remembered that he was supposed to bring some mixer. “I’ll be over in a few minutes,” he said, and left her as Lee and Ed drew near. He put the drawing down, but he didn’t want to look at it again yet. Not until he was sober.
He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror and thought, thirty. Good Christ! Back in April Beatrice had become thirty, and had cried. Then, furious with him for taking her, with herself for needing solace, she had run away from him, and since then had been cool and pleasant, and very distant. If he cried now, would she appear from nowhere to put her arm about his shoulders, to pat him awkwardly as she maneuvered him into bed and reassured him that he still had most of his life ahead? He laughed and turned away, not liking the mirror image. He was deeply suntanned, and his eyes were dark brown, his eyebrows straight and heavy, nearly touching, like a solid, permanent scowl.
“Just one thing more, Mr. Pitcock. Why me? Why did you select me for this project?” The contract was signed, the question made safe by the signatures.
“Because you’re avaricious enough to do it. Because you’re bright enough to see it through. Because you’re cynical enough not to get involved personally no matter what the data start to reveal.”
That’s me, he thought, searching his kitchen for mixer. Avaricious. Bright. Cynical.
Donna was seated at the round table, across from an empty chair, his chair. He put the mixer down and looked at them. Ed Delizzio, twenty-five, a statistician from Pitcock Enterprises. Dark, Catholic, observed all the holy days, went to mass each Sunday, had a crucifix over his bed, a picture of Mary and Jesus on his wall. Marty Tiomkin, atheist, twenty-four. Slavic type, tall, broad, serious, with a slow grin, a slower laugh, thick long fingers. Probably could swim to England, if the spirit ever moved him. Very powerful. He was the computer expert. He could program it, repair it, make it go when it was sick, talk it into revealing correlations or synchronicities where none seemed possible. He treated it like a wife who might fly to a distant lover at any time unless she received unswerving loyalty and devotion. Marty and Ed had been hired at the same time, almost two years ago. At first they had had separate houses, like the rest of the staff, but after a month they had decided to share one house. Inseparable now, they went off on weekend trips, during which they picked up girls from one of the northern islands, or made a tour of the houses of Charleston. Now and then they brought girls back to the island with them.
Donna was next to Marty, and on the other side of her was Leland Moore. He was tall and intense, probably the most honest one there, tortured by the futility of what he was doing, but also by the memory of a fatherless childhood in a leaky fifteen-foot trailer that his mother kept filled with other people’s ironing. He wanted land, a farm or a ranch, with hills on it, and water. Slowly, month by month, he came nearer that goal, and he wouldn’t leave, but he would suffer. Sitting by him was Mary, who worried about her husband too much. Who couldn’t understand poverty as a spur because she never had experienced it, and thought only black people and poor Southern dirt farmers ever did. Beatrice wasn’t there.
“I can’t stay,” Eliot said. “Sorry. Too much booze too early tonight, and the champagne didn’t help. See you tomorrow.”
To sit across from Donna all night, to watch her peer at her cards, and watch those pale fat fingers fumble ... He waved to them and shook his head at their entreaties to stay at least for a while.
“Will you show me the offices tomorrow, Eliot?” Her voice was like the rest of her, just wrong, too high-pitched, little-girl cute, with the suggestion of a lisp.
He shrugged. “Sure. Eleven?”
He walked up the beach. The tide was coming in fast now, the breakers were white-frosted and insistent. In the woods behind the dunes night life stirred, an owl beat the wind steadily, a deer snorted, the grasses rustled, reviving the legend of the Spaniards who walked by night, bemoaning the abandonment of the fort they had started and left. The air was pungent with the sea smells, and the life and death smells of the miniature jungle. He walked mechanically. Whatever thoughts he had were dreamlike in that he forgot them as quickly as they formed, so that by the time he turned at the end of the island and retraced his steps along the beach, it was as if he had spent the last hour or more sleepwalking. He stopped at the pier and then walked out on it to the end where he was captain of a pirate ship braving the uncharted seas in search of unknown lands to conquer. It was flat and stupid and he let it go.
The pier was solid, a thousand feet out into the ocean; it seemed to move with the motion of the sea and the constant pre
ssure of the wind. Eliot leaned against the end post where a brown pelican roosted every day to watch the sea and the land, alert for subversives, immorality, unseemly behavior, including littering of the beach . . .
Lee Moore’s house had a light; the others were all dark. Eliot wondered if they were still playing poker, if Donna Bensinger had won all their money, if Lee and Ed were singing dirty sea chanteys yet. He flicked his cigarette out into the water. Thirty, he thought, thirty. Forty thousand dollars in the bank, more every day, and no one to tell me to do this or that, to come in or stay out. Freedom and money. The dream of a sixteen-year-old washing dishes after school in a crummy diner. Buy a boat and go around the world after this is over. Or start traveling on tramps and never stop. Or—get a little place somewhere and let the money draw interest, live on the dividends forever. Or ... He heard voices. Two pale figures running along the sand toward the waves. The tide had turned again. The urgency was gone. Proof, he thought, right here before our eyes day in and day out. Never changing, eternal cycles; he didn’t know if he meant the tide or the couple. He looked at the nude figures. It had to be Donna, pale hair, white body. The man could have been any of them, too far up the beach to see him clearly. They ran into the surf and she shrieked, but softly, not for the world to hear. The man caught up with her and they fell together into the shallow water.
Orbit 10 - [Anthology] Page 21