Merde Happens

by Stephen Clarke

  I then got in line at the coffee-chain stand, where customers were taking a full minute each to reel off the blend of coffees and flavorings that they wanted. I ordered two single shots of espresso and, in a spirit of discovery, a mango and banana mocha slushie.

  "Twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four ounce?" I was asked.

  "Small, please," I said, pointing to a beaker the size of a fire bucket.

  I sat in the car and snacked while Alexa took her turn in the restrooms. On her way back, she stopped to press the toe of her shoe on to a puddle of water that was covered in thick brown ice.

  "Are you sure the ferry will go tonight?" she asked. "That ice is very solid."

  "Yes, certain," I said. "It sails at six o'clock." Though I was beginning to wish that I'd written down the phone number of the ferry company, and maybe even called them before heading down this one-way road. What was that Alexa had said about men not asking for directions?

  4

  The trees had thinned out. The Garden Parkway had become the Bog Parkway. My thoughts were getting pretty boggy, too.

  The highway was now snaking between flat areas of marshland that were patched with residual snow. Then suddenly, the marsh opened out into a lake surrounded by frosted reeds. I felt the wind swipe the Mini up on to its toes.

  "Look at that," Alexa said. "Look at the ice."

  "It's only a pond," I said. American ponds had to be ten times bigger than European ponds, right? "It's probably freshwater. Everyone knows seawater doesn't freeze."

  A couple of miles further on, we soared over a short but steeply curving bridge, like the parabola of an arrow fired into the sky. From the summit we got a clear view of the distant Atlantic shoreline—high-rise hotels, water towers looking like sputniks waiting for blastoff, gray shadows in the fading daylight. And between us and them was a gigantic, white expanse of ice.

  "Must be freshwater," I said, anticipating a comment from the passenger seat.

  "I'm not sure," Alexa said. "On the map, it looks like it's a kind of, how do you say it, lagon. You know, open to die ocean."

  "Oh, so now you can read a map?" The satisfaction of scoring conjugal argument points was almost totally canceled out by the realization that she was right—farther ahead, the ice met the horizon at a point without any trace of high-rise, or even low-rise, buildings. The lagoon seemed to open out into the sea. It was almost certainly part of the ocean. And it was frozen.

  But no, be optimistic, I told myself. This is America. Don't give in to French defeatism. In France, everything is potentially crap. The French will tell you why your idea won't work, and say, "OK, if you want to make a fool of yourself, we'll give it a try." And then they'll be so late and halfhearted that of course it fails. In the USA, though, anything is potentially brilliant. They say, "Let's go for it," and they really go for it.

  I pressed hard on the accelerator. Fifteen minutes later, the terminal loomed ahead of us, a floodlit blue metal archway. Beyond, I could see two white ferries apparently hovering in tlie freezing fog.

  "Look, no queue, brilliant," I said with American-style positivity as I weaved through the empty approach lanes.

  I could feel Alexa eyeing me skeptically.

  A man in a yellow fluorescent jacket stepped out of a toll-booth and pointed up at an electric signboard. He read the glowing words for me, in case I was illiterate, blind, or stupid. I felt a little of each.

  "All ferries canceled due to freezing weather, sir."

  "Ah," I said. "When do you expect them to restart?"

  The ferryman puffed out a foggy laugh. "Sir, if I knew when the thaw was coming, I'd be getting my backyard ready for planting."

  "So you have no idea at all?"

  "No, sir."

  "How thick is the ice, then?"

  "Why? You thinking of skating across, sir?" He got a laugh from Alexa.

  "No, I mean, it's seawater, isn't it? It can't be that thick. Seawater doesn't freeze properly, does it?"

  "No? You never heard of the North Pole?"

  "Ah, but isn't that ancient freshwater? I saw this TV show about how they were drilling into icebergs and getting pure drinking water."

  The ferryman's frown told me that we might be straying slighdy off the subject. And by this time, the subzero fog was beginning to make both of us blink painfully. So I thanked him for die info and reversed away from the tollbooth.

  "What are we going to do now that we have come two hundred kilometers down an impasse}'" Alexa asked.

  "Let's get a hotel for the night and have a rethink. There are bound to be some near by. Cape May's a seaside resort."

  "Oh, excellent. You mean we don't have to wait until Miami for a swim? And maybe we can go ice-skating on tiie waves."

  She kept up the sarcasm all the way into town.

  5

  "Stephen King," Alexa whispered. Being French, she pronounced it "Steffen," but I knew what she meant.

  The streets were dark and misty. Gothic houses loomed, their wooden turrets and pointed rooftops in spooky silhouette against the pewter sky. They had shuttered windows and rickety stairs leading up to empty porches deep in shade, perfect hiding places for madmen—or madwomen—to lurk in wait for their victims.

  That was it. I realized what they reminded me of— Psycho. This was a whole town of guesthouses where knife-wielding wackos lived with their mom's corpse. I was almost glad that they all seemed to be posting "no vacancy."

  We cruised the crisscross of streets looking for an open B&B, but there was no sign of activity except for the occasional flap of a flag in the wind. There were Stars and Stripes outside practically every house. It felt as if they were saying, "Ye non-Americans, do not dare to enter here," or something similarly doom laden.

  "Let's go," Alexa said. She had switched the light on in the car and was studying the New Jersey page in her atlas. "We can turn back toward Atlantic City and then go into Philadelphia and get the highway." It seemed that the urgency of the situation had cured her two-dimensional map allergy.

  On cue, our headlights picked out a Vacancy sign.

  We stopped and stared at it. A varnished board carved with daisies (or were they bullet wounds?) was hanging by two small chains from a post shaped like a gallows. The word vacancy was painted on in black, and the slot where the no could be slid in was empty.

  "Should we try it?" I asked. The timing did seem a bit too convenient, like that scene in Rosemarys Baby when the pain in Mia Farrow's tummy is so bad that she decides to get a scan. Immediately, the pain stops and the devil's spawn is free to carry on its evil growth. Was the town luring us back into its clutches the instant we'd decided to leave? "I'll go and check whether it's a mistake," I said. "Maybe the 'no' just fell off."

  "I'll come with you." Alexa was gazing up at the purple-and-green-painted house. She didn't seem too keen to stay out here alone.

  "Look, if I don't come out in two minutes, or you hear a bloodcurdling scream, just drive away and leave me. Oh, I forgot, you can't drive automatics."

  "Huh, I will ask, Mister Macho," she said. Next second, she was striding up the stairs onto the porch.

  The front door opened before she could ring the bell or knock. A white-haired, white-faced woman appeared in a pool of yellow light. Her mouth opened and shut, but no sound came out.

  Of course, once I got the car window open, I could hear slightly better.

  ".. . dollars a night," the woman was saying. "Just one night?"

  "Just one night," Alexa said.

  "Go to the end of the block, turn left, pull into the second driveway, not the first, and keep going till you come to a backyard. I'll come around and let you in." The woman said all this in a slow, trembling voice that really did sound as if she'd just been aroused from the dead. You kind of wondered how many of her resuscitated relatives would be waiting in the backyard with cleavers. Or at least you might have wondered something like that if you hadn't been a steely-nerved, stiff-upper-lip Englishman like myself.


  We drove toward the corner as instructed. In the mirror, I could see the lady watching us, as if checking the street for witnesses to our disappearance.

  6

  The hall was decorated with a framed photo of a large lighthouse, a poster of laughing tourists on a sunny beach, and a watercolor that was either a cloudy sunset or two seagulls in a bloody midair collision.

  The landlady was only about sixty, rather than the six hundred or so I'd imagined. She was swathed in a long bottle-green cardigan, the same color as the columns holding up her porch outside. The cardigan had a high collar, so that her tightly permed gray hair looked like the ornate cork on a perfume bottle.

  She asked us the usual questions about where we'd come from and where we were going. Fortunately, she didn't put the two together and ask why the hell we'd ended up here. We explained our strange accents, and she told us that she lived with her sister, who would be putting some coffee out in the hall at eight fifteen the next morning.

  "You don't do breakfast?" I asked.

  "Oh no. Coffee at eight fifteen."

  "Is there anywhere we can get some dinner?"

  "Oh yes." She gave us a couple of leaflets for places that were open all year. One of them, a pub, looked promising.

  "Can we walk there?"

  "Oh yes, they're all within ten blocks of here." She seemed to start every sentence with oh, as if life were full of surprising questions, although she must have been asked the same things by every single guest. Perhaps she'd forgotten them all since the summer season ended.

  "Do you have Internet?" Alexa wanted to know.

  "Oh sure. But the computer's switched off. You can use it in the morning." She frowned, as if thinking "If you survive the night, hahahaha!" Although she was probably just trying to remember how to turn on the computer.

  Our room was morgue white, with an old metal-framed double bed, a modern air-conditioning/heating wall unit, and a large fridge with a long notice taped to the door about what not to put in it. I didn't check whether "guests' severed heads" was on the list.

  The room was icy cold, but our landlady—who appeared silently behind us—switched on the heater and said it would be cozy by the time we got back from dinner. She gave us an absent smile, as if associating us with the word dinner had set her tastebuds fluttering.

  If ghouls and monsters were regulars at the pub, they'd decided to boycott it that night. The place was full of disarmingly normal people. Middle-aged, middle-class couples, a group of baseball-capped fishermen types, an aging hippie, and even a few twentysomethings.

  It was so normal that when Alexa and I walked in—two obvious outsiders—the conversation didn't drop a single decibel, except maybe for the people nearest the door, temporarily paralyzed by a lungful of freezing fog.

  The pub looked surprisingly English. It had high wooden seats running along the bar, a checkerboard floor, and mugs hanging from green beams on the ceiling, as if put there to catch a hundred leaks.

  We sat at a table and started to read the dinner menu.

  "Hi, can I get you folks something to drink?" A young, shaven-headed waitress with four earrings in each lobe was smiling at us.

  "I see you have New Jersey wine," I said.

  "Yeah, we have a Chardonnay, a Merlot, and a Riesling."

  "This is produced near here, not just shipped in and bottled?"

  "Oh yeah, sure."

  Alexa looked dubious—the French are willing, at a pinch, to acknowledge that Californian wines might be good enough to drink rather than pickle gherkins with, but offering her a New Jersey Riesling was like asking her to drink crop spray. Even so, she agreed that we should try one glass of Merlot and one of Chardonnay.

  The waitress then did something astonishing. She asked to see our ID.

  "You're carding us?" I couldn't believe it. I'd been over twenty-one long enough to have forgotten the hangover the day after my party, and that was one unforgettable hangover. And Alexa was twenty-four and had that European sophistication that gives a woman her full maturity.

  "Er, well. . ." The waitress was hesitating. Perhaps my surprise had added a few wrinkles to my forehead.

  "No, please, look," I begged her, fishing in my pocket for my passport. "You have no idea how flattering this is. I haven't been paid such a great compliment since my doctor told me I have a beautiful appendix."

  Alexa groaned. Oops, I thought. I'd forgotten about not joking around with women under the age of ninety.

  The waitress pretended to study my passport.

  "It wasn't really a compliment, sir," she said. "We can't be too careful. Some people age prematurely." Was I imagining things, or did I really see her wink at Alexa? In any case, Alexa's groan mutated into a grin. Womankind one, manhood a resounding zero.

  Alexa had a misnamed filet mignon. Mignon means cute, but this would have been like calling a brontosaurus cute. In fact, it might well have been a whole brontosaurus buttock. Even so, she chomped through all of it, along with a shipwreck-sized portion of fries.

  I had an "ocean burger," meaning that it was topped with shrimp and cheese. Shrimp on a burger? Maybe they had too many and were trying to find ways to offload them. Shrimp and vanilla ice cream, coffee with a shrimp on top. It went down nicely with the New Jersey Chardonnay, though, which had a slightly metallic aftertaste but made the world seem a warmer, friendlier place.

  We walked back to the B&B on a cloud of alcohol-based bravado, defying any nutcases to come out of their gothic lairs and cleaver us. I apologized to Alexa for causing our daylong bickering session about maps and asking directions.

  "I was a bit nervous driving on these roads in such a tiny car. But I've learned how you do it now. All you need to know is what number road you want, and whether you're heading north, south, east, or west, and the rest is easy. Pretty soon we'll be on 95 south, and we'll just stay that way till Miami."

  "And tomorrow, I will learn to drive Thelma en automa-tique," she conceded. "I will look sexy driving a Mini, no?"

  "You'd look sexy driving one, outside one, on top of one, anywhere."

  "On top of a car? You imagine me in a bikini in a car magazine?" It sounded tetchy, but her eyes had lost the slightiy steely look that they'd had all day. She pulled down the scarf and rollneck jumper she was wearing and—just for a second—bared the tops of her breasts at me.

  It looked as though I'd been forgiven for my screw-up in Boston, and would soon be getting an even closer look below that neckline. I said a silent prayer of thanks to the grapes of New Jersey.

  * * *

  Our room was now so well heated that the only option was to go to bed naked. This did our mood of reconciliation no harm at all, of course, and we snuggled down under the thick duvet and began to make the most of each other's closeness.

  The only thing was, I wondered whether Alexa shouldn't turn the volume down a bit. She kept asking me, rather loudly I thought, and in very understandable English, what I was intending to do with her body now that it was naked and "vulnerable to caresses." I didn't want to inhibit her, but apart from her voice, the whole house—no, the whole town—was eerily silent. I decided it was best not to spoil the mood, and instead of mentioning the volume problem, I simply kissed her hard on the mouth, so that my skull acted as a kind of sound insulator.

  Meanwhile, the floorboards seemed to have detected the variations in weight distribution and were starting to creak like a mountain just before an avalanche. I hoped that the landladies were fast asleep, deaf, or out haunting somewhere.

  I clenched every muscle in my body and operated a strict go-slow policy that French workers would have been proud of. Even so, my ferociously disciplined tantric antics were making the metal bedframe rattle, and Alexa was squeaking like a ticklish mouse.

  Then she reached up with her arms and calves and clutched me down on top of her, and all attempts at noise limitation were blown to pieces. The floorboards bucked and squealed in agony, the headboard hammered holes in the wall, and the
springs twanged like a piano falling down an elevator shaft while the two of us performed a duet for gibbon and grizzly bear. Never mind the landladies, I'm sure the guys out at the ferry terminal cocked their heads and began to prepare for a hurricane coming in from the east.

  In the subsequent calm, we lay there and giggled into each other's ears.

  "Her!"

  We both held our breath and listened.

  "Her!"

  There it was again, a voice so clear that I even bent down to check that there was no one under the bed.

  "Her!"

  It seemed to be accusing someone of something. But who? And what?

  "Her, her!"

  I finally realized that it was a woman coughing in the room below us. Not very violently, either. The ceiling was so thin that we could hear her as if she was standing beside our bed.

  Alexa and I shared this thought mutely, our eyes wide and staring at the floor. Then Alexa laughed.

  "Don't worry, Paul," she whispered. "They have a B&B. In summer they hear this from every room, every night. And no doubt every morning, too. They are probably happy to hear the sounds of summer again."

  Which was one way of looking at it. The other was that an old lady had been lying down there, alone in bed—or, even worse, in bed with her sister—eavesdropping on my sex life. Not exactly a turn-on.

  Until, that is, Alexa said that she'd like to have a go at making the whole house creak again.

  "Lie on your back," she told me in French, "and hold on to the rails of the headboard with both hands. Now relax, and don't move . . ."

  When a guy has a French feminist girlfriend, sometimes he just has to grit his teeth and do what she says.