It seemed that the battery-operated lamp had started to fail too. I could hardly see Allen’s face.
‘Well, like a charm it voiked, as they say. I salted the popcorn pretty heavily and kept topping up Luce’s glass of Coke, and by the end of the movie she was pretty well sideways. I told her I’d run her a bath, and while she was in it I turned on the VCR and the camera, leaving the closet door on my side open just wide enough. Luce came back from the bathroom in her robe and nightgown. First of all she tried to get me to sleep in Frank’s room, and when I started to undress she made a show of protesting, but I knew her heart wasn’t in it.’
He set the tape down and laughed heartily.
‘I’d bought this tape. Ninety minutes. I figured that should be enough, but you know what? It ran out before we did. You want to watch it?’
I couldn’t speak.
‘Well, it’s your call,’ Allen went on.
He sighed lazily.
‘So tell me, Tone, how was it for you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How did you like fucking her worn-out old snatch?’
I finally found my voice.
‘It was just great once I got past the worn-out bit.’
‘Yeah, I heard that one already. Not bad, though. You’ve got a sense of humour, anyway. That’s good. A loser needs that. Winners don’t need to be witty. They’ve won. Humour’s a loser’s saving grace. And that’s what you are, Tone, let’s face it. A loser.’
‘You’re the loser, if anyone is.’
‘Oh, I guess I’m a loser in the eyes of so-called society, no question about it. But in this particular little area, you are. You know why?’
I heard him splash more whiskey into his glass, then drink it.
‘Because I got to fuck her when she was twenty. Not to mention when she was thirty. You should have seen her when she was thirty. Luce once told me that she would have a three-act life. Gauche adolescent, knockout midlife and sweet old lady. Well, I guess I got the first two, while you were stuck with the sweet old lady. Plus you know what? Ben Franklin was right about the oldies being grateful and all the rest of it. What he didn’t say was that there’s a downside too. Same with the uglies. You ever fuck the uglies, Tone? Ever get that desperate? Sure they’ll let you do it. Sure they’re grateful. But they also despise you, just like the sweet old ladies do. For not getting better-looking, younger stuff. It’s kind of a Groucho Marx take, you know? They don’t want to get laid by anybody who’d fuck someone like them.’
There was a long silence.
‘Fifteen years, Tone. One hundred eighty months. Over five thousand days and nights. When she was in her twenties and thirties, with a body to die for and a cunt that wouldn’t quit. We used to do it four, five times a day in the early years. And everywhere. On the kitchen counter, in the shower, on the floor. One time we did it in the toilet on an airplane. Even after the babies we still did it at least once a day. And after I left there was Scott and at least three other guys she had on the side. And then along comes you, a big-time journalist and all. And a distinguished English gentleman, to boot. Well, Luce wasn’t stupid. She could tell a meal ticket when she saw one. She never cared about money when we were together. All she cared about was me and her babies. Nothing else mattered. Nothing.’
I stood up and groped my way to the door. Outside, the night was eerily still. The wind having failed, the sign suspended from the metal mast gave no light.
‘Tone? Come back. I need you, Tone! Don’t leave me alone here.’
I groped my way forward, stumbled on something and fell painfully, grazing my shin. I could just make out the figure of Darryl Bob Allen framed in the faint light from the doorway of the trailer. I stood up, trying to get my bearings in the darkness, then made my way back to the car.
NOT HERE
She said, ‘He said I had the best breasts at San Francisco State.’ It was a casual aside in some conversation I don’t otherwise recall, quite early on in our relationship, and spoken in an almost self-deprecating way, like someone mentioning that they happen to be of the blood royal, as though she were embarrassed at having raised a topic which had nothing whatsoever to do with her personally, but which she felt an obligation to disclose lest the other person learn it later from some other source and feel hurt. Such aristocratic tact can easily come to seem like disdain, however, to those subject to its power.
That phrase haunted me for years. For one thing, it sounded like a line of verse. I’d often tried to add a second to make a couplet, something ending in ‘fate’ or ‘hate’ perhaps, but I could never get it to scan.
Another and perhaps more important reason was that until that moment I had never thought of her breasts as having a past. Still less a future.
It was also notable in that, of all the women I’d known, Lucy seemed the least aware of or interested in her own beauty. In fact she wasn’t really interested in herself at all, even to a fault, I sometimes thought. She took herself lightly, and seemed both bemused and slightly amused by the amount of attention she got.
A steady drizzle dripped down on the window of my hotel room, squeezed out of the clouds I’d flown through the day before, stacked five miles high overhead. The way the room faced, our house must theoretically have been visible somewhere on that low line of hills just beyond the freeway. I’d spent just one night there after Lucy’s memorial service, bunking down on the sofa in the living room. Frank had his old room in the basement, Claire the guest bedroom upstairs which had once been hers.
Even in those extreme circumstances, I hadn’t managed to find out anything much about Frank, as reticent and evasive now as he had been when I’d moved in eight years earlier. His only apparent reference to his mother’s death was a comment he made on the back porch, pointing at the garden.
‘That’s where my tree-house used to be. Sometimes I’d get stuck up there. I was like six. And Mom would climb up and haul me back down.’
His sister put her arm about him protectively. Once again, as so often in this cold town, I had felt myself effortlessly excluded.
All I knew for semi-sure – this on the basis of Frank’s age and birthday, and the family lore which held that he’d been ‘right on time’, unlike his more difficult sister – was that Lucy had almost certainly conceived while I was spending a fortnight in Normandy with my then-wife, trying to resurrect our doomed marriage, a stressful project finally aborted when I got food poisoning from eating the local oysters and had to spend most of one memorable night tiptoeing to the communal first-floor lavatory.
So while I was staring into the porcelain bowl, wondering if the red tint in my vomit was wine or blood, and worrying about whether I had woken Monsieur and Madame Dupont, whose boudoir was just behind a thin sheet of plywood covered in floral wallpaper enhanced with variegated stains and blotches on whose origins I soon learned to meditate whenever the emetic impulse failed, Darryl Bob must have been hurling another bodily fluid into a very different receptacle.
Lucy would have been vociferously urging him on, I knew. She’d done it often enough with me. Sexual ecstasy doesn’t foster verbal inventiveness. There’s a limited number of things you can say in that situation, and I had a pretty good idea exactly what Lucy had said as her husband came inside her all those years ago, quite possibly while I was puking in silent misery in a shit-stained cubicle, surrounded by strangers of whom the most total was my wife.
In this, as in so many other ways, Claire was different. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I’d been doing at the period of her conception. My diaries of that period had gone missing, along with a lot of other things, when I moved to the States. But whatever it was, it certainly hadn’t involved making love to Lucy, watching her remove her clothes and then move towards me with that look of shy, girlish greed. Of all the things that Darryl Bob Allen had told me, that was the one that had got to me most. Like him, I’d never got used to Lucy naked. I knew every inch of her body, but each time she reveale
d herself to me I felt as though I’d never seen her before. I never would again now, and that enigmatic absence would haunt me for ever.
It would also haunt our house, I realized, as soon as Claire and Frank left to go back to their respective lives after the service. I’d declined the company’s thoughtful offer, made to all those who had been intercepted and diverted to the concrete chapel in the main terminal, of a free trip to the site, plus a weekend at Disneyland in a luxury hotel with a no-limit credit card. Now I was beginning to wonder if it might not have been the best idea. Certainly I wasn’t up to spending the night at home alone, in the bed which Lucy and I had shared. In the end I moved out to the distinctly non-luxury hotel that we’d used for our early romantic trysts, before I became legitimized within the family and the nation.
An octagonal art deco tower built in the forties and since refurbished, its rooms were all identical except for the view. I knew that, because Lucy and I had occupied at least ten of them. I didn’t know whether the room I had been allotted on this occasion was one of these or not, but I chose to believe it was. The view was certainly the same, but the one we’d stayed in one memorable weekend may have been on the next floor up or down. ‘I think you just raped me with my consent,’ she said about three in the morning of one of those nights spent making love and talking endlessly about every subject under the sun, fuelled by room service club sandwiches and a bottle of duty-free Macallan.
The décor, which had then seemed pleasantly neutral and unobtrusive, now looked dirty, stale and depressing. On the television news, a state governor defended his decision not to stay the execution of a sixty-two-year-old great-grandmother convicted of shooting her abusive husband. She’d begged him not to kill her, he said, mimicking her frail, whiny tones, so as to spare the anguish it would cause her children and grandchildren, and then went on to affirm his personal belief in Jesus Christ and a policy of zero tolerance. In other news, a first-grader had pulled a gun and killed a six-year-old classmate after a card trade deal allegedly went wrong, and investigators announced the discovery of the flight recorder from the Seattle-bound plane which had crashed into the Pacific near Los Angeles a week earlier, killing everyone on board. Details at ten.
Outside the hotel it was already dark, a dank rain falling on the sad, cracked, crow-infested streets. Down on the waterfront, I boarded the first outbound ferry. Even at night, the coastline was never out of sight, irregular lines of lights marking the shallow shale cliffs, the homes hunkered down amid the stunted conifers, perched precariously on mounds of unstable slurry. These confined waters looked like a shallow lake, but a glacier had hollowed out the inlet to over seven hundred feet, a fjord with no balancing heights. Pointlessly deep, and therefore semantically shallow.
When the ferry docked, I went ashore and walked into a bar in a grim little town infected with the same oxymoronic disease as the sound I had just crossed, a transit camp for resident aliens who had gained what they thought they wanted at the price of losing the one thing which could have made sense of it all. There was no here here, kein Warum . I felt right at home. Welcome to the post-meaning society. Coming soon to a community near you.
I ordered a beer from a tough-looking redhead wearing a T-shirt which read: ‘Don’t Mess With Big Emma’. The other customers, mostly men, were drinking and smoking and chatting and bullshitting, with the barmaid as referee and consultant. ‘You want to just cross that bitch off your stress list, honey,’ she advised someone as she poured my pint.
During the long drive back to Reno, I had asked myself how much of what Darryl Bob Allen had told me was true. According to Lucy, he was a serious alcoholic, preoccupied with madcap schemes that were always about to make the family rich but which eventually left her facing over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of debt. And there had been something else, something which had eventually pushed her into throwing him out.
‘He lied to me. That was the last straw. It was nothing personal. He lied to everyone. He lied to himself. He didn’t even know he was doing it. He’d forgotten the difference, or it meant nothing to him. As long as he believed it at the time, it was true.’
Certainly his portrait of ‘Luce’ as a supercharged fuckslut didn’t jibe with my own memories, but that didn’t necessarily make either it or them false. The Lucy he had known had been half the age at which I’d met her. What I did doubt was the existence of the tapes and photographs and videos he had taunted me with. It all sounded a little too practical and organized for a flake like Allen to have actually brought off. No doubt he’d fantasized about it, just as he had, according to Lucy, about renovating a derelict Milwaukee Road steam locomotive in their backyard, or making a fortune by leaching gold dust out of the floorboards of abandoned miners’ shacks. But I didn’t think it was any more likely that he would actually have brought this plan off.
No, the whole evening had been nothing but a manipulative psychodrama, a guy-on-guy grudge match designed to bleed me of every emotional drop I was good for. Which had been plenty, I had to admit. Plus I had asked for it. I’d been crazy to go in the first place, as my impulse purchase of the revolver amply demonstrated. Allen had accused me of having gone there to kill him, but that was ludicrous. As was my feeble cover story about the children and the will.
So why had I gone? All I could think of was that I must have been suffering from shock. Perhaps I still was. Having lost Lucy, he was the next best thing. That made no sense, any more than taking the ferry over to this no-hope port town and spending the evening getting sideways in some crummy bar.
The hell with it. No one was going to call me to account, and besides, I had a perfect excuse. Hadn’t my wife just died? And these are not good times to die, I thought, signalling Big Emma for a refill. It’s an embarrassment to all concerned, like getting fired from life. There might be an element of bad luck involved, but most likely it reflects on your performance.
Or maybe I had meant to kill Darryl Bob. Why would I have spent all that time doing target practice out in the desert otherwise? I’d certainly resented him. Not so much, as he claimed, because he’d known Lucy when she was younger, but because he was the father of her children. Even after they were divorced and he moved to Nevada, that fact gave him a status in the family which I could never aspire to. The subject wasn’t discussed, but we all knew it. When push came to shove, I was just the hired help. Darryl Bob was a union man.
I pounded my fist on the bar, rattling the ashtrays. What had the perky, self-satisfied, bearded asshole done to deserve such luck?
The answer, of course, was obvious. Lucy wanted babies. At the peak of her fecundity, she’d scoped out Darryl Bob and decided that he possessed the necessary advantageous chromosomal qualities to ensure that their respective phenotypical genetic variations would be preserved in offspring capable of reaching full maturation and competing sufficiently successfully in the food chain both inter- and extra-specially to give them an optimal chance of procreating further generations in their turn. In other words, he’d been in the right place at the right time. All our love and tenderness and humour was so much piss in the wind. We’d ‘done the deed’, but they’d mated. Nothing would ever change that.
One of the men came over and plonked down next to me on the high padded bar stools. The embroidered label on his work clothes indicated that his name was Chuck.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
Realizing that I’d transgressed one of the unwritten laws of the bar, I flashed an ingratiating smile.
‘Sorry about that.’
‘You got problems?’
‘Woman problems.’
Chuck nodded sympathetically.
‘Worst kind. Want to talk about it?’
I shook my head.
‘Only, thing is, we don’t want no trouble here, see?’
I nodded, almost in tears. He was being nice to me, the big galoot. He could have decked me with one hand, but instead he was being kind.
‘There won’t be any trouble,�
�� I told him. ‘I’m sorry, I just lost it for a second. It won’t happen again.’
He nodded some more.
‘Sure you don’t want to talk about it?’
‘Really.’
‘Okay. But if you want some temporary relief and a change of pace, you might want to have a word with Mercy.’
‘Who?’
He looked around the bar.
‘Oh, she’s not back yet. Wait a while. I’ll point her out to you.’
Chuck went back to his Bud and his buds. Instead of pounding the bar with my fist, I stabbed it with my finger.
My recent flight to Reno had not been my first. A couple of months earlier, Lucy and I had gone there together for a weekend break, and driven along the self-proclaimed ‘loneliest road in America’, Highway 50, across northern Nevada into Utah. The trip had been memorable for two things. One was the landscape, a succession of bleak mountain ranges and even bleaker high plateau pasturelands, punctuated at intervals of over a hundred miles by ghost mining towns. The other was the discovery that Lucy had a gambling streak.
Every gas station, convenience store and truck stop we went into had at least three or four slot machines, and every diner and saloon had more. Some had touch-sensitive screens embedded in the table or bar. Lucy had revealed herself to be a compulsive although conservative gambler. She had set herself a twenty-dollar limit, and managed to break even, but when I tried, the numbers never panned out. I’d lost every time.
Speaking of which, I was going to have to earn some money somehow, and soon. I remembered an offer from some foodie mag which I had earlier turned down, a piece on lesser-known French wines which were in danger of dying out. Maybe I should see if they were still interested. It would give me a project, at least. Remembering the song which Darryl Bob Allen had briefly danced to in his trailer, I toyed with the idea of calling it ‘Vins Mourissants’, but I wasn’t sure if the second word even existed.
Chuck reappeared.
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