The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

“Tanya? Tanya who?”

  “I don’t know,” I realized.

  “Okay. Thanks a lot,” he said, taking back the photograph.

  “She’s not home.”

  “Okay.”

  “What do you want her for?”

  “Thanks,” he repeated, and walked away down the alley.

  Chapter 20

  I Am a New Boy in More Senses Than One

  Disturbed by this news on the eve of Jardin’s wedding, I called Verl. He said lice and ticks were worse than crabs and asked me if Bruno Stark had upset Leila. I told him, too, about the mysterious pronouncement of the man in the overcoat, which had convinced me that Tanya was being pursued by her father or the police and was hiding under the alias of Carlotta Sirenos. Verl thought it more likely that “Tanya” was the alias.

  “A lot of people stay places under a different name for less sinister reasons, Devin. Maybe she had a fight with her husband.”

  “She’s got a gun sitting right out on the table.”

  “A lot of people have got guns; it’s in the Bill of Rights.” And then he was more interested in criticizing the National Riflemen’s Association than listening to me, so I hung up.

  Joely Finn kept me up all night with stupid jokes about venereal disease. “Of course, if this had happened a lot sooner, at least Margery and Marlin might not be in such a fix. The itch might have cooled them off.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked him.

  “Margery told me she’s pregnant. Leila offered to get her some birth-control pills, but I guess they’d already got the jump on them.”

  “Jesus, Bruno Stark is right. This place is a caravan of crap!”

  “Such loyalty!” He threw a pillow at me.

  • • •

  Fittingly, the next morning, Friday, August 2nd, was soaked in gray rain that slapped at the window with its tacked-on screen, the one Mittie had ripped open the night he came with the gun.

  I awoke with a sense of anticipatory purpose as if on Christmas morning or the day of a funeral. From the foot of my bed, I took the blue jeans and sweatshirt that a month ago I had begun wearing every day, washing them twice a week at the Laundromat until now they were that worn, soft comforting pale blue the others wore. (When I had first come to Floren Park, I had dressed up each morning to go to the theater. Now my jackets, slacks, ties, sweaters—all the remnants of Harvard—slowly grew mossy in a dank basement corner.)

  Then standing erect at the bureau, I set my watch to start making allowance for the different time zones, my countdown to the snort of the organ in whatever Charleston chapel James Dexter was to acquire Jardin. Next, I took her framed photograph, turned it face down beneath the superfluous ties in that dark suitcase.

  In the after-image of her gaze, I walked upstairs. There was a peculiar difference to the living room where everyone crumbled coffee cake and struggled into raingear. Nathan Wolfstein leaned with a lank, slickered elbow on the mantel, slowly shaking his crane’s face with its mournful smile. Leila was talking to her mother. And there was the strangeness. Mrs. Thurston was not speaking or cleaning or cooking or even standing or even moving a muscle—and to be able to lie around without moving a muscle was one of her most contemptuous charges against the indigent. More startlingly, it was 9:30, and she wasn’t even dressed, but instead sat fixedly upon her chair in her quilted bathrobe and pointed felt slippers, as still as an Egyptian pharaoh.

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” said Leila soothingly. “I know this is unpleasant. It’s a pain in the ass for everyone.”

  Here, Joely, slurping coffee, stifled a comic wince.

  “But everybody has to get checked,” Leila continued. “Because I’m afraid it doesn’t matter if you always used your own towels and washcloths.” (For these Mrs. Thurston kept guarded in her locked bedroom, not trusting to the warning of their woven initials, ABT, so they were in the bathroom only on these frequent, private occasions when she was.) “Crabs spread. They breed, you see, and they can get into everything. Of course, probably you don’t, but we ought to just check it out, don’t you think?”

  As white and still as stone on her slab of chair, Leila’s mother sat.

  “All Ferrell wants to do is just examine us. Oh, Mother,” Leila sighed, “I feel awful…Okay. You stay here. Lie back down. I’ll bring back some medication, and then…Come on”—this to the rest of us with impatience—“get in the car.”

  Sheepish in the presence of that straight catatonic back, those eyes that stared blinkless as Ozymandias into eternity, we slunk past Mrs. Thurston. We left her there. Amanda Sluford, whom fraternal incest, maternal murder, paternal decapitation, sororal suicide, could not bow. Mrs. Beaumont Thurston, whom double bigamy, multiple treachery, a daughter’s ruin could not break, Mrs. T felled, struck into imbecility by the thought, the image, the possible fact of Spurgeon Debson’s hatched brood of insects nestled in her pubic hair.

  No one spoke on the trip to Dr. Ferrell’s. The outraged anguish in those staring eyes froze us, like the Gorgon’s head, into silence.

  We all stood in the doctor’s office—as inconspicuous, Joely said, as a dozen California grape pickers in Ronald Reagan’s bathroom—and were duly inspected while Ronny tore a phonebook in half to impress Ferrell’s daughter, Bonnie. And indeed, crab hoards were leaping like grunion in the sea of our hair. Jovially, Dr. Ferrell distributed ointment and fine-toothed combs.

  Then it was noon. In Charleston, 2:00. The wedding was at 5:00 there.

  Having unloaded us, her small infected company, with a crate of ham sandwiches in the parking lot, Leila drove off in the rain to beg her mother to accept the salve.

  “I’ll be back,” I told the rest. “I’m not hungry.”

  No one protested.

  • • •

  Slough Lane was a sewer of running mud. Under a tin awning, against the front of his dirty book store, Rings Morelli leaned in his yellow suit and stroked his black patent hair. He surveyed me indifferently as I trespassed on his domain.

  Next door, Tanya was home, like a sorceress in a black kimono.

  “Look who’s here,” she greeted me without much eagerness. “You’re wet.”

  “Could I talk to you for a second?”

  “Sure, have a beer,” she dispiritedly offered, and returned to her sheepskin on the floor beside a game of Solitaire or Tarot.

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke. Well, have a seat. Word gets around. I heard your boss is burning her bridges right and left.” She looked up with a smile.

  “What do you mean, my ‘boss’?”

  “The girl who runs your theater.”

  “Oh, Leila. She’s not my boss. I’m just doing this to help her out.”

  Tanya’s eyes were so bright and vague, I decided she must be on drugs. She sucked somnolently at her cigarette. “Well, whatever, Lady Red was telling me about her. How her husband went crazy and blew himself up.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “I hear he tried to kill her over some left-wing nut she was messing around with.”

  “That’s not true.” At least I didn’t think it was true, or didn’t want to think it was, or didn’t want to discuss it with Tanya. “What do you mean, burning her bridges?” I asked.

  Tanya shuffled, fanned, folded her cards; they clicked and rippled like castanets, “Well, according to Lady Red, your friend’s father-in-law is loaded, really loaded, and he was going to fix her up for life, her and her kids. But she turned him down, told him off in the bar. Red said he was pissed as hell!”

  “Told him off how?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think the general idea was she said he was always trying to buy people, and he’d fucked up his son’s head, and she wasn’t going to let him do that to her kids, and she’d rather be poor. Red said it was quite a spe
ech.”

  She flipped over red and black blurs in a rapid pile of secret significations. Her tone bothered me. It seemed best to say what I had to say, embarrassing as it was, and leave.

  “Look, Tanya. I’m afraid I’ve got some sort of bad news maybe.” I leaned forward with warm earnestness, mingled of guilt and placation. “I was at the doctor’s this morning, and I tried to get you earlier when I first heard about it, but, anyhow, it kind of looks like I may have crabs, so you should use this.” I produced the ointment and comb. “Or, you know, perhaps you’d like to see Dr. Ferrell too.”

  “Shit,” she said, and splayed the cards across the rug.

  “Of course,” I hurried on, “maybe there’s no need. It’s not my fault. We all got them.”

  She looked at me with annoyed skepticism.

  “What I mean is, everybody in the house got them. From the towels and sheets. Somebody brought them in from outside.”

  She twitched an ironic eyebrow. “And I thought you were a virgin.”

  “This has nothing to do with sex. Look, Tanya,” I came to the edge of my chair, “I know this is awful, and I know you must be annoyed. It’s my responsibility, and I’ll be happy to reimburse you for the doctor’s cost, if you want to—”

  She laughed. Laughed? “We’re not talking about an abortion, Devin. It’s crabs, right, not the clap?”

  I shook my head vigorously.

  “So, it’s a nuisance, but I’ve had crabs before.”

  “You have?” She laughed again. What kind of person was she? I was reminded of the plainclothesman. I looked at the pearl revolver still beside the mattress, went over, picked it up; the weight surprised me. “Why do you have this?”

  She didn’t turn to look. “It was a gift.” I squinted down the sights at her picture of Mick Jagger on the wall, then at her back. “Is Tanya your real name?” Her shoulder blades tensed together beneath the black kimono.

  “What do you think?”

  Somehow, I was beginning to feel tricked. The puzzle pieces didn’t fit at all, never had fit, but I hadn’t stopped to notice.

  “Just wondered,” I shrugged stupidly.

  “Did someone say it wasn’t?”

  I looked at her, then studiedly at the gun. “Where’d you get this?”

  “Christ,” she turned and snapped at me with impatience.

  The rain had stopped, and a strong shaft of afternoon sun wriggled through her angled blinds. It struck Tanya full in the face. Something was funny, wrong. She looked wrong. It’s the light, I suddenly realized. I have never seen her in the light. Then, with a jerk of gulled embarrassment, I saw that she was older, older, than she had said (or had she said?), much older than I was; and then my sense of our experience together slipped spinning from beneath me, disorienting me, for what had happened between us had happened for different reasons than I had assumed. It could mean anything now.

  Dropping the gun on her mattress, I moved further from the glare of her face. “A guy was here when I came over earlier,” I said.

  “Here?”

  “On the steps. He showed me a picture of you and said your name was Carlotta Sirenos. He was looking for you. I’ve seen him around before.”

  She tensed to a perfectly still alertness, like an animal at point. “What did he look like?” I watched her eyes as I described the plainclothesman; puzzlement, then decision flecked across them as she stared back at me. She was thinking so quickly and strenuously it was like watching someone do a physical exercise.

  “When did you see him?”

  I told her; I told her what Kim had said that night in the bar, too, about someone snooping around. “What’s going on, Tanya? Is your name Carlotta? Are you in some kind of trouble with the cops? Is it Morelli?”

  “Who?”

  “Rings Morelli?”

  She answered me absently, thinking of something else, deciding something else.

  “Why should I be in trouble with him?”

  “Then you do know him?”

  “Sure, I rent this place from him, and I see him around with Kim.”

  “But is he—”

  “Look, honey,” she interrupted me, not listening anyhow. There was a click inside her I could almost hear, and she stood suddenly as if a phone had begun ringing. “I may be in a sort of a jam. You could do me a big favor.”

  “Okay.” I waited for her to explain what sort of a jam while she took off her kimono, kicking it away from her feet, and walked to her closet naked. She dressed in front of me as if I were the irrelevant matron of a locker room. “That bastard,” she snarled. “He’s put a private investigator on me.”

  “Who?” I asked. ‘Why?”

  “Stay here,” she said. “I’ll be back in a second.” She hid her hair beneath a cloth turban, her eyes beneath sunglasses, swooped up a purse, raked cigarettes into it, and hurried out the door, as if she were late for a luncheon appointment.

  “Tanya! How long—” I said too late. So I was caught there. I give her ten minutes, I told myself. It’s the least I can do. Twenty went by. Probably she went to talk to Kim. Maybe she really was in trouble; her father must have put a detective on her.

  It was after one, the room was muggy and hot, and I remembered with nausea that I was infested with crabs, that at that instant the bloated eggs of vile insects were stuck with ooze to my skin and hair. I ripped off my shirt and pants and followed a memory of the bug-mad Wolfstein to Tanya’s tub, spun the faucets, funneled spurts of purification over my head, and aimed a steady stream onto my crotch as the bath filled.

  It was not enough. I jumped out dripping, got the ointment, found in her caked soap dish a razor with a rusting, hair-clotted blade. Pawing through her medicine chest, I found a new blade, scalded the razor clean. Then, with the willed effort of a cliff diver about to plunge, I sat on the tub edge, stared carefully at the puffs of lather rising from my groin, then stroked down for the shave.

  My focus had been too absolute. Someone had come in. I didn’t hear the door open, but he couldn’t have knocked. The open bathroom door was lined up in his sights, and he saw me before I saw him, because it was my sense of his shock that turned my head, just as his mind assimilated the shock and then roared ahead to fury. He was dark with a muscular, half-bald head; he was tan in a suit made exactly right; he was big. Even then I could think clearly enough to realize, this is the piece that connects the puzzle. Detective. Runaway. Mann Act—how did the Mann Act go? I stared back at him.

  The man filled his lungs: “Who the hell are you?” Tanya ran into the cabin. He was coming at me. “Look here, Al!” she pulled at him from behind.

  Instantaneous thoughts: I’ve got to get out of here. He’s going to kill me. Wait a minute! She calls her father “Al”? Instantaneous actions: He came in the bathroom. I stood. He swung. The razor stabbed a long sting up from my groin. Vomit thick blackness flooded me, took me to the edge, and pushed my brain over.

  I woke up because someone was trying to shove his fist down my throat. No one was. I felt the eye and winced, then became aware of a constant burn at my crotch and knew absolute terror. I reached down to feel, and someone took my hand.

  “A close shave,” Leila said.

  I couldn’t open my eyes. “But not that close,” I managed wanly.

  “No,” she laughed. Then I could see her with my right eye. “Some shiner!” she added, leaning over from a chair close by. From the wall, Mick Jagger was leering at me. So I was on Tanya’s mattress. Forcing my hand against the awfulness of movement, I inched slowly down my stomach until I felt gauze and tape.

  “What happened? What are you doing here?”

  “I saw Ferrell getting in his car, and he told me he’d just fixed you up in here. They had called him. He said you cut yourself and then cracked your head on the side of the tub. Looks to me like somebody slugged you. Anyhow,
you were out cold.”

  “‘They’?”

  “Your friend, the mysterious dancer,” she laughed. “Some friend!”

  “Who slugged me?”

  “That guy? Al Sirenos?”

  “Yeah, who was he?”

  “He said, her husband.”

  “Oh, Christ.” A married woman! What was Spur always saying—rich, perfect! Why hadn’t I known? What was Leila thinking? “Yeah, okay,” I said.

  She held up twenty-five dollars on the bed table. “Apparently his wife borrowed this from you?”

  She’d left me a five-dollar tip.

  Chapter 21

  Mischief

  It would all make sense if I could think it through, but I didn’t want to think it through just then—not while I was lying naked and queasy on her mattress. Above my head, the chain of copper bells stirred in a single spasm.

  “So,” was all I said.

  Leila lit a cigarette, blew the smoke carefully away from me. We were quiet. Leila asked me nothing more, and for once her lack of curiosity seemed…not indifference, but just easiness, and her sitting there was pleasant, as though for us to stay that way was the right order of things, the order of long custom.

  Finally she spoke, “How do you feel?”

  “Kind of thirsty.”

  She brought me a glass of water. As I drank it, the sun fell like gold dust on Leila’s sandaled foot. It was coming through the very bottom blinds, and the slant of light brought back a memory, throbbing my two new wounds.

  “What time is it?” I asked. “Where’s my watch? Look at my watch.” Someone had stacked it neatly on top of my clothes at the foot of the mattress.

  “It’s a little after four, why?”

  So I had missed it. They were already married. There, at 6:00 now, in some catered Charleston home that I had never seen, Jardin was pushing ceremonial cake into James Dexter’s open mouth as Mama and Colum and Fitzgerald and Maeve agreed to look on. It was all over, and I had missed it. That moment when I was to feel the anguish of loss psychically, instantaneously vibrated to me across two thousand neutral miles, I had passed that moment passed out, and if the psychic sound wave had telegraphed my passive prostrate brain, its message was lost forever. “Jardin’s married. They got married this afternoon,” I said.