The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  “Devin?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. What are you doing up so late?”

  “Trying to wind down, I guess. I’m reading some plays.”

  “Which plays?” I stood whispering in the dark, the light behind her hurt my unaccustomed eyes.

  “As You Like It.”

  “Really?”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if things were that way? I mean, as we’d like it. Everybody gets reconciled. And we all sit down for a big, joyful feast.”

  “King Lear’s closer to the way things really are.”

  “They’re worse. Not many of our Lears ever stay out in the storm long enough to understand anything. Well, I’m sorry to bother you. Good night, Devin.”

  “Good night. Try to sleep.”

  Her door closed. The thin angle of light swept past my bare feet. I felt like I was walking around in a dream, strange and impalpable. What in hell was that all about, standing in the dark at 3 A.M. exchanging literary criticisms through a bedroom door? What in the world was Leila doing up reading Shakespeare in the middle of the night when everything was falling apart and she ought to be asleep? I wanted to go in and ask her, but I had chosen distance and disapproval and had kept to them until now—mostly because I didn’t know how to get back.

  Then, during the night something happened to all of us, as if a mountainous Puck had come along and sprinkled impetus over our wills. Mrs. Booter’s eviction, like a foreign invasion, had filled us with tribal fervor. After a summer of collective indifference, we woke up ready to do a play. And with no more reason than we had ever had in the last months of calamities, everyone woke up happy. Upstairs, Mrs. Thurston persuaded Nate to eat an egg. Then she sat down to write her dry cleaning plant and extend her extension of her leave. In the backyard, Maisie and Davy giggled. For love’s sake alone, Sabby had overcome her terror of the freeway on-ramp and was driving by herself into Boulder to Xerox copies of All My Sons. Marlin and Margery left with her. At the boarding house, Suzanne, Pete, and Ronny packed up the company’s belongings under the suspicious eye of Mrs. Booter. Joely and I would take Pete in; the children would sleep with Leila so Suzanne and Sabby could have their room. Ronny and Seymour would use Mittie’s office at the theater. Things were tight, but what did we care! Why, when Margery and Marlin got back from the abortionist, we could move Mrs. T into bed with Wolfstein, and let them have hers. So there was a letter for Marlin from his draft board in Dayton, propped up on the mantel! It would all work out. There was a bright golden haze on the meadow, and the corn was higher than Mrs. Booter’s eye, and God was in his heaven winking over the circle of mountains that morning.

  The silver linings, of course, had clouds. As Joely and I were setting out for the theater, a Porsche pulled up in the driveway. From it slid a man in his early thirties, expensively hip, Carnaby Street mod, in a soft leather jacket and love beads by Tiffany’s.

  “Peace,” he urged glibly, like a campaign sign. “Is this Spur Debson’s place?”

  “No, it isn’t,” I let him know quickly. But I was wrong.

  “Yeah, he’s out in back—far end of the yard,” Joely told him.

  “What are you talking about? Spur’s not out there.” Of course, then it occurred to me that Spur would have to be somewhere, so why not where we were?

  Joely pointed out Leila’s old wooden trailer, her gypsy wagon with its red roof and window and its two red-hubbed tires at the end of the backyard among a group of aspens. There, from its roof, flew one of the little shat-upon American flags.

  “Far out,” grinned our guest, reaching in his car for a soft leather Gucci briefcase. We waited until he had knocked on the wagon, been told through the shut door to go fuck himself in a gas chamber, and then, amazingly, been allowed inside.

  The next morning, our spirits were slipped into another of fortune’s slings. Since the day when Sheriff Booter had first thrown the Mexican flower ladies off his streets, Leila had been following quietly behind him—out of the same impulses, I suppose, that she followed those trucks to retrieve abandoned chickens—campaigning to rescue them. Now she gave her second speech before the town aldermen, asking them to grant street- vending licenses to these three old women. They said they knew what she really meant: she meant license not just for flowers, but license for hippies to sell dope, free love, protest marches, anarchy, and Eugene McCarthy posters. She said no, she was speaking only as a local businesswoman whose establishment had been, in the past, income-producing for Floren Park, and as such she wished to remind them that street vending added local color, and local color, like picturesque old Mexican women singing, “Fiori, por favor,” amid pots of bright blossoms was also income-producing for a town whose only business was tourists. They said they thought they knew what sort of local color she had in mind, and did she or did she not know there was a guy out on the streets selling filthy feces. She said she did not know. (For she evidently hadn’t run across Spur in the last week.) She concluded her speech by reminding them that they, she felt sure, were the last people who needed reminding of the rights of the individual. Then she thanked them for their time, and they thanked her, and she left, and the next day most of the local businesses canceled their ads in our playbills and on our street parade posters.

  All morning, Sabby answered the office phone, sobbing between calls at this latest assault on Leila as Navajo jewelry, Austrian sportswear, Japanese restaurant, Danish toys, mountain landscapes, and trout in plastic bins rang up to ring off. Most gave no reason, but the lady at Western Outfits, Mrs. Booter’s cousin, was jubilantly blunt, telling the blushing Sabby that after what she’d heard about her and the rest of her hippie friends, she wouldn’t dream of having her name associated in print with such trash.

  Leila didn’t give up, but went down Main Street, store by store, to ask why. Some of the merchants she had shopped with summer after summer looked sheepish, but no one changed his or her mind. I stood behind Leila and listened to their excuses.

  On the other hand, Mr. Ed Hade, owner of the largest car dealership in the state, did not want to cancel. In fact, he might even take out a full-page ad. He might, in fact, be willing to sink some money in the theater: what else was money for but to shell out. “Ain’t that so, little lady?” he puffed at Leila from his tan vinyl chair in his office at the rear of his indoor coliseum of Cadillacs and Buicks. “Maybe you and me can make a deal, what you want to bet? You’ve always looked to me like the kind of girl that knew what was what.”

  “What did you have in mind, Mr. Hade?” Leila agreeably asked.

  “What did I tell you, she’s smart, ain’t she?” He was asking not me but the air, so I kept my eyes on the fake-paneled walls lined with bowling trophies, and Shriner citations, and the photographs of his fat children. “Oh, well, now, this isn’t what you’d exactly call the best time and place for talking over a deal, now is it?”

  “It’s fine with me, but of course if you’re busy, we’ll come back tomorrow.” She sounded like a charity booster for the D.A.R.

  “Well, I was thinking more in terms of you and me getting together tonight over a drink or something. Informal-wise.”

  But Leila just smiled. “I work nights. You know: put on plays. You should come one night. Bring your family. We’re pretty good, aren’t we, Devin?” She touched my arm.

  “The best in town,” I told him, but he glanced over me without seeing.

  “How about afterward?” he pressed.

  “I don’t think so, Mr. Hade. My mother sits with my children, and I like to get back home with them as soon as possible.” She smiled again, “Devin and I will be glad to drop by here tomorrow, though.”

  “Sure,” I echoed dutifully.

  Hade’s chuckle was forced. His thick arm, matted with freckles and reddish hair, leapt out and hugged Leila quickly. “Huh. Huh. Huh. I don’t believe yo
u’re quite catching my drift.”

  “Oh, I think I am,” Leila sweetly replied. “Please call me about the ad, then. Devin.” And I sailed in her wake out the door.

  “Creep,” I muttered, remembering with pleasure the way the Marine had slammed him into the side of the bar that night.

  “Oh, he’s no different than most. No better. No worse.”

  “Leila, what are you going to do? I mean, maybe you can keep the theater going without Bruno, but you can’t keep going without ads. That’s half your income.”

  “I know.”

  “And Bruno’s going to buy the place and close it down anyhow.”

  “Not just yet,” she said.

  • • •

  Turning off Main Street into the Arcade, we saw Rings Morelli walking toward us with Kim. She was wearing long chandelier earrings of green glass and looked misplaced in sunlight—unnatural, like a painted metal cutout. I had never seen her except through the dark smoke gauze of the Red Lagoon Bar, where (since Tanya’s departure) she danced alone. Morelli nodded his head and said, “Mrs. Stark,” as they passed. She nodded back, and said hello to Kim.

  “‘Mrs. Stark’?” I mimicked. “How does he know you?”

  “Mr. Morelli? He owns the big dance hall on Main Street. We’re in the same business. Entertainment.”

  Someone else in the entertainment business was coming out of the streetcar diner: Spurgeon—carrying two large valises full of his merchandise. Beside him, smoking a blue cigarette and talking briskly, was the Porsche/Gucci hippie. By all reports, during the past week, Spur had been doing a booming business. Like a carpetbagger with his big valises, he kept on the move, one intersection ahead of the good sheriff Booter, whose trained nose had undoubtedly caught a whiff of Spurgeon’s trafficking in public obscenities. Joely said he used to think Spur’s plays were pure shit, but he must have been wrong because Spur couldn’t even give those plays away, and pure shit was clearly a bestseller. Indeed his turnover was rapid. College kids on their way through to the purity of mountains, teenage runaways, guru-followers, summer-of-love-ers, all were eager for Spur’s emblems of Amerika. Even some older tourists bought the flags and rockets on the suspicion that poop art might be pop art of an Andy Warhol fashionableness.

  “Spur!” Leila called.

  “I hope,” I threw in quickly, “you’re going to ask him to start paying rent. He can afford it.”

  “Rent?”

  “He’s living out there in the backyard in your gypsy wagon.”

  “Are you kidding? He didn’t ask me.”

  “Surprise. Surprise.”

  We walked over. Gucci’s grin shot out at Leila.

  “Spur, are you using my trailer? I wish you’d let me know,” she said for openers.

  “Okay, babe, okay, everything’s cool, I’m splitting tonight.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Moving in with my partner here.”

  “Partner?”

  “Well, ah”—Gucci gave a deprecatory smile—“friend, really. Vic Falz.”

  We all shook hands.

  “Are you interested in Spur’s work?” she asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” he promised us.

  My God, was somebody going to produce one of those awful plays? Not even Leila had been willing to do that. Maybe he collected folk art. Political art?

  “You must be very happy, Spur,” she turned to say.

  But Spurgeon, ever the Beau Brummel of etiquette, was already striding away up the Arcade, a suitcase under each arm.

  Leila called after him, “Wait a minute, Spur, okay? Could I talk to you for a second?”

  “No sweat,” he yelled. “You’ll get your bail money back.”

  “It’s not that. I’d like you to—”

  “Later, chick, okay? I gotta go. Let’s go, man. Bustville!” And he was around the corner.

  “Nice to meet you,” his partner told us, and rushed after him.

  “Boy, Spurgeon must have radar.” I pointed out Deputy Maddox closing behind him the door of the shooting gallery at the other end of the Arcade. He must have been in there practicing his aim in case there were any more public disturbances in Floren Park.

  “Can you believe that guy?” Leila laughed.

  “Spur? No.”

  “The other one—Mr. Falz. If this is for real, it’s got to be those stupid posters or something. Nobody would seriously consider putting on Napalm or Dachau, but, you know, he does look like a producer. The Hair kind. In the sort of theater-in-the-round where the cast strips and runs out and feels up the audience. So all the Long Island lawyers can get their rocks off on the bouncing boobs.”

  “What would Mr. Hade think of his ‘little lady’ if he heard you talking like that?”

  “Mr. Hade assumes I talk like that. And that is why he wants me to have a little drink with him ‘or something.’ So he can get his rocks off listening to me talk like that.”

  “But you don’t talk like that in front of him.”

  “Oh, he probably thinks we only do it after dark.”

  I laughed and put my arm around her, and we left together to bring her children home from their day camp.

  • • •

  The next day Leila cooked breakfast for twelve people with her mother, talked to Wolfstein about Arthur Miller, swept and made beds, drove me to the Laundromat with Mrs. Thurston, told stories to Maisie and Davy as she drove to the grocery store, the hardware store, the thrift shop, talked to the kids at the McCarthy campaign headquarters, talked to a plumber and to the realtor about the stopped toilet at the house, fixed lunch for twelve people with her mother, discussed a set for All My Sons with Joely and me, drove the kids to day camp, drove Pete Barney to Dr. Ferrell’s to renew his asthma medication, drove with me and Sabby to Boulder to pick up posters from the printer’s, stuck them up in the part of town where summer school students were drinking beer and buying records, drove back to Floren Park for a rehearsal reading and casting of All My Sons, talked to the flower ladies about their rights, served to ten people the spaghetti she’d made while fixing breakfast, showed Sabby how to make up her eyes, picked up the kids from day camp, went to the theater, got into her costume, and performed the lead in The Fantastiks to an audience of twenty-seven, accompanied by Pete on the piano, went to the Red Lagoon Bar, had a drink with Kim, and was joined by Dennis Reed and Suzanne, searched for and found Wolfstein slumped in a corner booth and brought him home, studied the part of the mother in All My Sons, and fell asleep.

  “That child is simply going to drop dead in her tracks, and it won’t be long,” Mrs. Thurston warned me.

  We were in the lobby putting Cokes in the freezer and setting out a few candy bars. There were no longer enough customers to warrant the bright, popcorn-showering machine of the Fitzgerald era.

  “Yes,” she nodded fiercely, “Leila Stark is a fool, killing herself to no earthly avail. Trying to prove…well, you tell me, Devin, honey, because the Lord knows I fail to understand her motivations. It appears she is under the impression that she can keep this fool theater running, when it’s as clear as the sky,” she dropped her voice to an audacious whisper, “that not a soul gives a good goddamn.”

  I think if she had pulled up her dress and shined her buttocks at me, I couldn’t have been more surprised than by this profanity.

  “Well, Devin, I’m sorry,” she added in response to my shock, “but I swear to the Lord I just get so exasperated, I could weep vexation. Just look at her trotting all over creation and annoying the law officials of this town—whom, honey, she is in no position to antagonize—all on account of those three pitiful old Mexican women that ought to be in a county home in the first place. Just yesterday, ‘Leila, darling,’ I asked her, ‘what are these flower-sellers to you? Surely you have problems enough of your own.’ ‘Mama, they’re peo
ple,’ she says to me, as if I had insinuated they were anything else. ‘They have a right to earn their livelihood.’ ‘Why, I don’t dispute that for a minute,’ I told her, ‘but, darling, are you going to go sit out on the sidewalks with them and make sure they are allowed to earn it? Are they worrying about your livelihood? Of course they aren’t! Never crossed their minds once!’ Oh, Devin, why doesn’t she use the head on her shoulders and call Bruno up and say, ‘Your grandchildren and I will be on the next plane to Portland, Oregon, Bruno. The next plane. Now, you just go out and find us a nice little house and start making arrangements for me to get myself a college education, and you set aside a trust fund for Davy and Maisie so those blessed children can get themselves a college education too.’ If she had an inch of sense, she’d be on the phone to that man right this minute. Of course, I can see the temptation of keeping this theater open pure and simple to spite Bruno Stark because my truthful opinion is he’s just the sort of puffed-up Mr. Own-the-Whole-World that it’s almost your moral duty to pull up short. But we have to face reality, Devin, and Leila cannot support herself and her babies even the way she lives…out of Salvation Army bins, and Mexican food with no nutrients in it, and the Good Lord knows where she got some of those rags she’s dressing that poor little boy and girl with…even so, you cannot make a living by putting on amateur dramatic performances that nobody cares about. I supported two husbands”—she wrung the two Coke bottles in her hands by their necks as she evoked those deserters’ memories—“and a child, and an invalid sister—even if it was purely psychological in Nadine’s case—and I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I handed her some more bottles. “But I don’t think Leila’s planning to keep the theater open after this month. She knows the Menelades are selling it to Mr. Stark.”

  “Yes, and he bought it for pure spite, just so he could shut the door in her face.” She slammed down the cooler lid. “No, not this theater, Devin. Leila Stark is planning to open her own theater, coming right back to North Carolina, where I have to make my living and hold up my head, and starting up her own theater in the woods, if you can believe what my daughter has been telling me. And this one isn’t even going to charge! ‘Free for People,’ she advised me. And I suppose everyone concerned is going to sleep on the clouds and eat daisies!”