Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  The female poets were rather uncommunicative but the male poet, Evan, was friendly enough. He was a pleasant-looking, gray-haired man in a turtleneck sweater. He was friendly, although he did ask Mel if she was a poet, and when she replied, No, a novelist, he looked at her like he would a smear of excrement on the bottom of his shoe. The three of them sat on one side of an empty chair and Mel sat on the other, with Evan closest to her. The empty chair was apparently reserved for the poet laureate of Georgia, who was a no-show and was rumored, according to one of the taciturn female poets, to have a “drinking problem.” (Me too! Mel said, gaily lifting her glass.) After that, the female poets pretty much left her alone.

  By the time she had finished her second cactus banger (named, no doubt, for the way her head would feel in the morning), Mel was beginning to enjoy herself. She stacked and restacked her novels in a series of intricate pyramids and began to call out to people hurrying by on their way to the nonfiction table, “Sir, you look like a man who knows his way around a crime scene,” or “Madam, when was the last time you read a good romance novel about a serial killer?” In this fashion she managed to draw a pretty good crowd to the Poets’ Table, which Evan, at least, seemed to appreciate. He even managed to sell a few of his slim volumes of poetry, and after a while had lapsed into an almost jovial mood. Mel signaled the waitress and ordered another cactus banger for her and one for Evan. She’d never yet met a poet who didn’t drink, and Evan, as it turned out, was no exception.

  “Ah, tequila,” he said, lifting the drink Mel had ordered for him. “Nectar of the gods.” It was a nectar Evan seemed all too familiar with, and before long he was ordering tequila shooters Mel had never even heard of, while the crowd of fascinated bibliophiles swirled around them and the lady in charge tried desperately to keep her owthas at the Poets’ Table in line.

  “Have you read any James Dickey?” Mel asked, lining up a couple of Mexican samurais in front of one of her dwindling book pyramids. She was only trying to make friendly conversation. The truth was, she hadn’t read poetry since college, and the only poet she’d been able to think of in her inebriated state was Dickey.

  Evan ordered another round of shooters. “Dickey!” he barked disdainfully. “That no-talent charlatan! That double-crossing imposter! I taught with Dickey at Vanderbilt, and I can tell you, that man’s no poet.”

  Mel, a little surprised by his vehemence, said, “But Deliverance? That’s a pretty good novel.” She grinned and lifted her shot glass to the spinning crowd. “After all, it put Georgia on the map!” She tossed her drink back and set the glass down on the table.

  “A good novelist, yes!” Evan thundered. “A good poet, no!”

  Mel thought, Hey, to each his own, Bud. The cocktail waitress brought more Mexican samurai. The festival woman had warned her to cut them off thirty minutes ago but the waitress was working a double, and this was the most fun she’d had in ages. Who knew writers could be so entertaining?

  “They say he was an airplane pilot,” Mel said.

  “Who says?”

  “He does. I read it in an interview.”

  “Dickey’s a liar, I tell you! The man’s a lying chiseler. A fornicator, a hypocrite, a two-bit trickster! You can’t trust a thing he says. You can’t trust him.” And with that Evan the Poet stood up and lurched off in search of a bathroom.

  “Dickey slept with his wife,” one of the other poets said to Mel by way of an explanation.

  The crowd, drawn by the melodrama at the Poets’ Table, had begun to desert the nonfiction writers in droves. The non-novelists stood on tiptoe, craning their necks to try to figure out what Mel’s successful sales technique might be so they could steal it and use it at future book festivals. One of the poets argued bitterly with someone in the crowd over the mechanism of iambic pentameter. At the fiction table, the sole remaining writer put her head back and snored at the ceiling.

  It was at moments like this that Mel had to remind herself that this was the life she had chosen. The failed love affairs, the children she would never have, the dull routine of a normal life, these had all been sacrifices on the altar of creative endeavor. Every decision she had ever made had brought her here, to this place, to this moment in time, a long line of choices and effects stretching back to that night in the darkened auditorium when she had listened to Pat Conroy speak and decided to become a writer.

  Evan appeared sometime later, wedged between two burly book festival bouncers. He had misbuttoned his tweed sports coat and clamped his cap down at a jaunty angle on his gray curls. Mel could see the bottle of Casa Noble in his pocket.

  “They’re kicking us out!” he said, pointing with his thumb at one of the bouncers. “The drivers are here. Let’s take this party back to my place!” The rest of the writers were being housed in a seedy downtown hotel. Mel hadn’t had the heart to tell them about the two-bedroom condo on Tybee Island.

  “I’ll have to take a rain check,” Mel said, wondering for the first time in several hours what Booker was doing. “I’ve got an early morning flight.”

  Someone turned the lights up and the club employees started breaking down the tables. Under the harsh overhead lights, the room looked suddenly stripped and forlorn. Mel got up, gathered her purse and coat, and stumbled out into the rainy night to look for her driver.

  A month after returning to New York from the book festival, she moved out of the brownstone and in with Booker. Richard seemed to take her request for a divorce rather well, too well, really (Mel began to wonder if he might have something going on the side. Not that she would blame him if he did). They turned the gritty details over to their lawyers and began going through the process of obtaining a respectable New York divorce.

  The change in living arrangements should have energized Mel but instead she found herself sinking into one of her depressive episodes (her Black Slumps, she called them). Her love life was going fine; it was her career that had begun to stagnate. She had begun to find herself bogged down in the sand trap that came with writing a series. Readers expected the same thing every time they opened a Flynn Mendez novel. The novels were gritty without being too disturbing, and there was always an element of humor to offset the tragedy. Crime-solving in Manolo Blahniks. Kind of a Moonlighting meets Dirty Harry, as the boys in the marketing department liked to describe her books.

  But Mel was tired of writing the same thing every year. She’d been watching a Discovery Channel show not too long after her divorce was granted, and she’d come up with a great idea for a novel. And it would not be a Flynn Mendez novel. Mel pitched the idea to her editor one day over lunch at Felidia. It would be a thriller, the story of strange cattle mutilations occurring in Montana at the same time that a series of brutally mutilated bodies are cropping up in New York, the presumed work of a serial killer.

  “Can you make it funny?” her editor asked.

  This was a year after she’d left Richard and moved in with Booker. It was during a period of continuing adjustments in her life, personally and professionally, a midlife crisis coming twenty years too early. She and Booker were talking about getting their own place but rent-controlled apartments in New York City were hard to come by, so they made do at Booker’s Tribeca loft, which was really more like a college pad than a grown-up’s apartment. Mel had tried redecorating but Booker didn’t like his stuff touched; he liked the basketball goal where it had always been, he liked the overstuffed La-Z-Boy recliners that doubled as a sofa positioned in front of the big-screen TV, he liked the beanbag chairs that made it easy to sprawl while playing video games scattered around the room like some kind of exotic fungi. He had a fit when she threw out his Heather Locklear posters (she let him keep the porn videos), and when she replaced his water bed with a king-size box spring and mattress, he pouted for two days. Mel realized then that she’d have to tread lightly; she’d have to replace one thing at a time and then wait for him to adjust before trying anything else.

  It was a new experience for her, treading
lightly. He was the only man she’d ever done that with, the only man she’d ever tried not to upset. The only man she spent all her time trying to please. To please Booker she learned to cook, she learned to play poker, she learned to skydive. She wrote scripts for his documentaries, she helped him organize his office, and she made calls to wealthy patrons who might finance his projects, using those few contacts, among the many she’d had while married to Richard, who still spoke to her after the divorce. She kept herself lean and attractive, and scoured lingerie catalogs in search of outfits she thought he might like.

  Booker looked upon sex as a normal part of everyday life, like eating and sleeping, and since he was very good at it, and put a lot of time and effort into making sure Mel enjoyed it as much as he did, she didn’t complain.

  She made sure he ate well, made sure he took his vitamins, made sure he had clean underwear when he went for meetings with the studio execs. She organized poker nights with his friends and then stayed around to make sure they had enough to eat and drink.

  In between taking care of Booker, she signed a contract to produce two more Flynn Mendez novels. And she began secretly working on her magnum opus her novel about the New York serial killer and the Montana cattle mutilations, tentatively titled Dead Meat.

  All in all, her new life with Booker was not what she had imagined. It was not what she had thought she was leaving Richard for. It was exhausting. Especially in light of the fact that she was pretty sure he was cheating on her.

  Not that he would ever admit it, of course. Booker was far too charming for that. He didn’t like upsetting people. He liked everyone to be happy, and he didn’t care what he had to do to ensure that they were: lie, cheat, steal. (Was it any coincidence that the charming serial killer in her new novel so closely resembled Booker?) She listened to him calmly lie to his producers about shooting schedules and postproduction delays, and she realized that Booker was a consummate liar, one of those people who can convince himself that something is true until it becomes, to him at least, true. One of those guys who could lie on an FBI polygraph test and pass with flying colors. So when she called a number that occurred with great regularity on his cell phone bill and a woman named Lucy answered, or when she went to surprise him at a shoot only to find that he wasn’t shooting that day, Mel listened to his smooth assurances with a great deal of skepticism.

  She married Booker (against the advice of several of her friends and her own good judgment) and over the next few years, she adjusted to her life with him (after all, one of them had to adjust). But over time she found that the little eccentricities she had once seen as adorable—his fickle nature, the boxes of Captain Crunch in the pantry, the all-night X-box tournaments with his friends—were gradually beginning to lose their charm.

  Still, there was the matter of that dimple in his chin. And the sex. There was that.

  Mel’s mother died when she was thirty-three, the same year she married Booker, and she went back to Howard’s Mill for the funeral. She didn’t see Leland again for another five years, although she talked to him from time to time on the phone, usually when he’d been calling repeatedly, and she had no choice, finally, but to call him back.

  He was looked after by a live-in nurse, a widow from Guadalajara named Mercedes who had come north to settle close to her son and his family. Mercedes had raised thirteen children, an occupation that served her well in caring for Leland Barclay, and she didn’t take any shit from the old man. She understood English well enough but preferred not to use it, so over the years she and Leland developed their own language, a mishmash of words in both tongues. They relied more on tone of voice than actual language in communicating with each other.

  “Goddammit, woman, I need a bath!” Leland would shout at her. “A baño, comprendez, puta?”

  To which she would inevitably reply (with an obscene gesture), “Chinga tu madre!” which, roughly translated, meant “Bathe yourself, you old goat. You stinking, pus-filled son of a whore.”

  “I don’t know why she stays with you,” Mel said to him once.

  “Well, Sister, why does anyone stay with someone who makes them miserable?”

  “I don’t know—why?”

  “Money.”

  “It’s not all about money,” Mel said coldly.

  “Spoken like someone who’s always had plenty.”

  “I don’t want your money. I don’t even cash your checks anymore.”

  “Don’t matter to me if you do or you don’t,” Leland said. “Everything I got is yours one day, whether you want it or not, Sister.”

  “I don’t want it. Leave it to your favorite charity.”

  “You’re my favorite charity.”

  “Leave it to Mercedes.”

  “Huh!” He snorted loudly. “I put that old puta in my will and I’ll be dead by sundown.”

  “You should marry her, then. She’s perfect for you.”

  “Now, Sister, don’t be jealous. I loved your mama, in my own way.”

  “The same way you loved Junior?”

  “A man does things he’s ashamed of later on. We can’t all be saints.”

  “That’s a clever way of putting it.”

  “I might not have been the best daddy in the world, but I did the best I knew how to do.”

  “Well, that’s all right then.”

  The summer she turned thirty-eight, she came home to Howard’s Mill. She flew into Nashville and rented a car, coming in on the south side of town. It felt odd driving through the quiet streets where she had spent so much of her unhappy childhood. She drove past the country club, past the Dairy Freeze, past the Dixie Drive-In and the ramshackle high school where she had spent long hours counting down the days until she could get the hell out of this hayseed town. The high school was abandoned now in favor of the new county school built out from town. Someone had broken out most of the windows, and the darkened building stood back from the road in the middle of a weed-choked lot covered in kudzu. Everything looked smaller than she remembered, and dirty. The whole town seemed to be drying up, at least the older downtown section, where desolate storefronts advertised GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sales or optimistically proclaimed FOR LEASE. All the growth over the last few years had occurred out by the expressway, miles and miles of fast food chains and strip malls and gas stations that sprouted up around the exits like hemorrhoids. At night, the town looked like the Vegas Strip. Leland had sold the downtown car dealership years ago, and a modern new dealership had sprung up on the outskirts of town, complete with rows and rows of shiny new automobiles and signs that advertised FAST EDDIE’S AUTO! NOBODY WALKS, EVERYBODY RIDES! FAST EDDIE—THE WORKING MANS FRIEND!

  She’d come home to see Leland because she’d been dreaming about graves. Every night. Not newly dug graves with their fresh mound of dirt, but ancient sunken burial spots covered in creepers and twisting vines. Her therapist said that the graves symbolized unfinished business and that it might be time to go home and confront Leland once and for all, but Mel thought that interpretation weak and decided to stop therapy instead. She had a problem with the direction the therapist was taking, not to mention her fixation on the so-called maternal aspects of her relationship with Booker. Mel was pretty sure the dreams would stop once the therapy stopped.

  But they didn’t stop. They got worse. They got so bad she couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t eat, she couldn’t write. So, in desperation, she went home to do battle with Leland. She came home for the Mother of All Battles, the Armageddon of Dysfunctional Family Meltdowns. She hated to leave Booker home alone—there was no telling what he might get up to, but she had no choice. There was something she had to get off her chest.

  Still when she saw the frail, diminished Leland she was unprepared for the effect it had on her. She had come home expecting to do battle with the bully of her youth, and instead she found a doddering old man. Leland, the rogue tyrant, had disappeared, and in his place was a thin, frail creature, a wispy little gnome of a man who looked like he mig
ht blow away in a heavy breeze. He was as small as a child now and walked with a cane, bent over at the waist and moving with the small mincing steps of a geisha. His hair was long and yellowed with age, and his big hairy ears sprouted on either side of his head like toadstools.

  The sight of him compressed her heart like a vise. All the ugly things she had saved up to say, all the poison she had stored in her heart for thirty-eight years, stayed buried where they were. She could no more confront him than she could kick an old lame dog who showed up on her doorstep looking for a meal.

  “Did you tell him how bad he fucked up your life?” Booker asked when she got home. “Did you beat him within an inch of his life?”

  “Shut up, Booker.” She’d made the mistake of telling him about her therapy dreams, a decision she now regretted.

  “I knew you couldn’t. I knew you couldn’t bring yourself to do it.” He sat in a recliner with a bowl of Cocoa Puffs resting on his lap, looking as fresh and rosy-cheeked as an English schoolboy. The older he got, the younger he looked. There was only three years’ age difference between them, but Booker seemed to be regressing further and further into boyhood as she began the steep climb to forty. It was just a matter of time, Mel knew, before people started mistaking her for his mother.

  “Why don’t you stay out of it? It’s none of your business.”

  “It’s none of my business when you can’t sleep at night? It’s none of my business when you walk around the house all day in an old robe and a pair of ratty slippers?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “You fuck off.”

  “Next time I’ll send you. You’re so eloquent. You’re so good at cleaning up messes.”

  “Why would I want to go down there where everyone talks like Gomer Pyle?” He put his hand up like a traffic cop stopping traffic. “Sha-zam!” he said. “Ga-aw-lly.” He laughed and dropped his hand.