Benchley, Peter - Novel 07

by Rummies (v2. 0)

  By now, the walks had become cherished times of discovery. Priscilla's family code had forbidden the expression of feelings, and so, over the years, the unused muscles of her emotional center had atrophied. Those extremes she could not control she suppressed chemically. Now for the first time she was exercising those muscles, and like a paraplegic relearning to walk, each new step was an experience of sublime joy. Nor had she ever been encouraged to have opinions: What possible good could they do her, went the logic, when everything of importance in her life was decided for her by parents and lawyers and accountants? Suddenly in Preston she had found someone who asked what she thought about things, who listened, who commented, who cared. In the beginning, of course, she hadn't thought much about anything, so Preston had urged her to analyze and appraise and come to conclusions, and now as she developed opinions she collected them and prized them, as if each were a child to which she had given miraculous birth.

  Preston was utterly smitten with her. That was the word he had lit upon: "smitten." He had never contemplated the word "love." Love was out of the ken of aging farts like him, something (like acne) reserved for the young and callow. Besides, what was there to be in love with? His role as Pygmalion to her Galatea? No, he didn't have that kind of ego. Her sweetness and innocence? If that was all you wanted, you might as well buy a puppy. Sure, he loved her beauty, but how do you actually love beauty? Hang it on the wall and adore the bejesus out of it? What had smitten him, he thought, what had captivated and transfixed and obsessed him, was an amorphous quality Priscilla represented, a resurrection of his dreams, a tantalizing echo of what might have been.

  He refused to consider the possibility that what might have been could yet one day be, for this was an infatuation like that experienced by teenagers on spring-break cruises. She was right: Nothing was real here. Reality was Volvo keys and dental bills, commuter trains and cranky parents. An emotion born in a fantasy land had no future except as a fantasy.

  Right?

  Maybe.

  So what? One day at a time, they said, and that's how he was living it.

  "Yes." She squeezed his finger. "I've decided that happiness isn't having more. It's wanting less."

  "That's nice."

  "I may have read it, but I think I just made it up. Anyway, it's true." She smiled at her own decisiveness. "All my life, the people who've wanted me to be happy—and my parents really do want me to be happy, I know they do, even though I'm beginning to think that maybe it's because if I'm happy that proves they're good parents and they can chalk it off like it's another chit they've earned at the club, they've passed Parenting— they've always begged me, ‘Just tell us what you want.' I never knew how to ask for what I wanted, 'cause I never knew what it was, so I'd think up things and convince myself I wanted them, like cars or horses or who cares, and everybody, myself included, would be disappointed when I didn't bubble over like Shirley Temple—one of my doctors made me watch all her movies to learn what happy was—and now here I am without anything, I mean without any thing, and I think I'm happy."

  "It can't only be not having something that makes you happy," he said. "You must have found something you didn't have before."

  "A friend." She squeezed his finger again. "My truest friend ever."

  This woman is ten years old! Preston hated his thoughts. They were making him feel like a child-abuser. He wanted to say. Doesn't that confuse the female in you? Doesn't it make your guts rumble? It sure confuses me. My own pitiful version of Twist's mighty Lawrence feels like he's being whipsawed between heaven and hell.

  But he was ready to say none of those things. He was searching for a less dangerous response when she rescued him.

  "You know what made me think all that stuff?" She pointed up at the mountaintop on which Stone Banner's white redoubt glowed in the starlight like a fairy-tale castle. "Do you think Mr. Banner is happy, up there alone with everything anybody could ever want?"

  "Who knows what makes him happy? He's helped a lot of people. Maybe there's comfort in that."

  "I wonder if he has a friend."

  "What makes you think he's alone? I'll bet he—"

  "He told me."

  "He . . . when?”

  "The other day. He stopped me in the hall. He sure is handsome."

  A sack of ball-bearings dropped into the pit of Preston's stomach—dense, incredibly heavy pellets of jealousy. "What did he say?"

  "Not much. Just that he sometimes holds A.A. meetings up at his house on Sundays to—the way he said it—ward off the lonelies. He said maybe I'd come up sometime."

  "Don't go." The flat command in Preston's voice surprised him.

  "Why not?"

  Because I don't want you to! "Because ... because . . . You don't really believe he's alone, do you? He's probably got a flock of bimbos up there catering to his every whim."

  Priscilla was silent for a moment as they reached the apex of their walk and turned back toward the clinic.

  Then she said, "Sex is a bummer."

  "It is?"

  "It's just a way for people to show who's boss."

  "You've decided that."

  "That's how it's always been for me. People've always wanted to ... to do it ... to me just to show they can."

  "It doesn't have to be that way."

  "That's what Barbara Cartland says, but she isn't real either."

  By the time they reached the point where they would part to reenter the building by the doors through which they had left, Priscilla was not holding his finger, was barely grazing it with the tips of her own. She seemed subdued, either confused or depressed.

  They stopped, and Preston said, "See you."

  She gripped his finger again. "Would you kiss me?"

  "Wh—? ... I mean, sure. But why?"

  She smiled at him. "What a silly question. Because I'd like you to."

  "To prove it doesn't have to be that way?"

  "This isn't sex, dopey. It's friendship."

  Oh yeah? I put my mouth on yours, and feel your lips, and taste you, and this isn't sex? What is it, cribbage?

  "Okay."

  He bent down to her and put a hand gently on her cheek and the other index finger under her chin and tilted her head up to him. His lips, open, touched hers, closed, and he smelled Opium and dared his tongue to caress the softest—

  A light exploded in his face, and a voice shouted, "Hold it right there, Jack!"

  They jerked apart and turned and blinked into the beam of a flashlight.

  “Who the fuck are you?" said Preston, opting for aggression over submission.

  "The nightmare in your wet dream," said the voice, which sounded young but bloated with a cockiness that came (Preston guessed) from the armor of a badge and a gun.

  The light swung around and passed quickly over a tubby figure in a security guard's uniform. From its hip was slung a revolver that would have made Clint Eastwood walk with a list. Then the light swung back again to Preston and Priscilla.

  “What do you want?" Preston asked.

  "It ain't what I want, bub. It's what you want, and it looks like you ain't gettin' any. Not tonight. What's your name?"

  Priscilla said, "That's disgusting."

  "May be, honey, but you were the one kissing it."

  Preston said, "This is absurd. I was kissing my friend good night."

  "I don't blame you. What's your name?"

  Preston paused. "Harry Reems."

  The guard thought for a beat, then said, "Bullshit. Harry Reems ain't here. I'da noticed."

  'Scott Preston," Priscilla said imperiously. "My name is Priscilla Godfrey. And I find this whole business in very bad taste."

  "That's your problem."

  Preston heard the scratch of a pencil on notepaper.

  Priscilla said, "What's your name?"

  "What's my name got to do with it?"

  "I intend to report this incident."

  “That's my job!"

  'Then we'll both report it,
and we'll see whom the district attorney believes."

  “The who?''

  Priscilla held out her hand to Preston. "Good night, Scott," she said. “Thank you for the walk." She turned and marched toward the clinic.

  The light followed her, and Preston in his darkness heard the guard mutter, "Holy shit!"

  Marcia awoke, wrenched from her sexy dream by the rush of water and clunk of plumbing from the toilet in the apartment next door. She didn't bother to look at the clock on the bedside table. It was 5:45 a.m. It was always 5:45 a.m. exactly when the short-order cook in the apartment next door exploded in a carnival of excretions.

  Marcia had long ago concluded that the man's peristalsis was run by a quartz movement, and that his toilet functioned on a Jeep transmission.

  She looked over at Dan, debating whether or not to wake him and use him to finish off her dream with a dash of the real thing. He slept on his back, his mouth open, his eyes never completely closed. A sliver of white eyeball showed between the lids. He looked dead.

  One appetite soured, others clamored for attention. Her bladder suddenly felt full. Her mouth yearned for the bitter balm of coffee. And though the prospect of running made her knees and ankles ache, she had been clean long enough not to doubt the tonic that exercise would give her. Get the beta endorphins pumping early on, and she could deal with whatever the day threw at her. Miss them, and every minor glitch would summon forth an imp to taunt her from the alleys of her mind, begging her to ease the pain with just one drink, just one pill.

  As she sat on the John, she tried to remember what time last night she had had her last pee. It seemed that the intervals between urgent pees were growing shorter, that she couldn't hold her water the way she used to. Not surprising. Her kidneys probably looked like used Brillo pads, after twenty years of fighting toxic chemicals. Damage done is damage done. What would it be like in five years? Would she be peeing every five minutes? Have to wear a bag?

  Probably.

  Stupid bitch.

  Stop it!

  Destructive thinking. Which leads to despair. Which leads to hopelessness. Which leads to . . . Hell, why not have a couple of short ones, take your mind off it awhile?

  She laughed aloud, amused and amazed at the relentlessness of the demon that would live forever within her, pleased and grateful that she recognized all its cues and could parry every thrust.

  No. Not every thrust. Never say "every." Never get cocky, or one day you'll wake up on the floor of some gin mill and say to yourself. How did that happen?

  "Good morning to you too, you devious bastard," she said to the demon, and she stood up and flushed the toilet and pulled on her running shorts.

  She didn't bother to lock the door as she left the apartment. She hadn't seen the key in months, assumed she had lost it, and besides, keys were a sour little joke to the residents of the Montevista condominium units.

  The locks were about as secure as Sesame Street lunch-boxes, and every door in the place could be opened with a harsh word. (Those who had gone to the trouble of installing dead-bolt locks had found them neatly and completely removed, a procedure that required no surgical skills since the doors in every unit were made of two layers of pressed fiberboard with hollow space between.) Security in Montevista was maintained by a simple principle: If you don't own anything worth stealing, nobody will steal it. When Marcia had first moved in, she had owned a Sony Worldband radio, a JVC VCR and a Panasonic color television, as well as various items of jewelry of some intrinsic (but mostly sentimental) value. All had vanished within a week, and she had then had to endure the initiation rite of visits by several cluck-clucking neighbors who recited the facts of life in Montevista. Now she owned a ten-dollar radio and an old black-and-white TV, and when she and Dan wanted to watch a videotape, they rented a VCR with the tape.

  It was not only abject surrender that had made the neighborhood quite safe. There was also a pervasive attitude of Enough Is Enough, as if the community had concluded that it had done its part to accommodate the Dark Side, and now it deserved to be left alone. One night a pair of drunken thugs had mugged a couple in front of their building. The couple's cries awakened some neighbors, and before the muggers could reach the end of the block they had been bludgeoned senseless with baseball bats.

  Marcia walked out onto the stoop in the chill blue morning, careful as always to avoid the crumbling sandstone of the second and fourth steps and to check for rats breakfasting on the uncollected garbage beneath the stoop. She took a couple of deep breaths and began to lope along the sidewalk.

  Trained though she was to ward off black thoughts, to search for the tiniest thread of gold in every cloak of dross, her day inevitably began in a mist of gloom. She didn't know why. Perhaps it was the nature of addictive personalities to look on the down side of everything, to regard the proverbial glass as always half empty, not half full. Perhaps that was why they turned to chemicals, to bring them up to a healthy level of optimism. Or perhaps it was the old cliche that the trouble with being sober was that when you woke up in the morning, you knew that this was as good as you were going to feel all day long. Whatever, it always took her several minutes to slip into the rhythm of running, to get her mind to drift, and those moments were assaulted by the nasty reality of the 140 units of the Montevista condominiums, followed by the rest of the dusty, dirty little town of Tesoro, New Mexico.

  It wasn't that this was a poverty pocket, far from it. It wasn't Appalachia or Harlem or some Cleveland ghetto. There was no unemployment here. People made a living: eighteen, twenty-two, maybe even thirty thousand a year. A used car in every garage. They were teachers and mechanics, waitresses and truckdrivers, bartenders and nurses and shoe clerks and . . . substance-abuse counselors. The rocks on which the society was built. And the society, in its wisdom, didn't value them much. Nobody was going anywhere. This was all there was, this was as good as it got. Live for today, because tomorrow's going to be just the same. No future to hope for.

  What the society seemed to value—from what you read, anyway—was stockbrokers and bond traders and lawyers and movie stars and hockey players, people who generated money without producing anything of substance, people who sat back East and got rich by being limited partners in tax-shelter scams like the Montevista condominiums in Tesoro.

  Stop feeling sorry for yourself!

  She turned the comer by the lumberyard and ran past Manny's Hermosa Cafe, whose huevos rancheros did a better job than Drano in cleaning out your plumbing. She was beginning to feel suffused with the crisp, clean air, and the grimy cloud was dissipating.

  Nobody had forced her to ingest every chemical combination known to science, or to drink every liquid fermented from malt, rye, barley, wheat and potatoes. Nobody had whipped her into being a counselor. Being a counselor was her life insurance.

  She was doing okay: twenty-four thousand, plus full medical and dental, plus retirement at half pay after twenty-five years. Dan did about the same. Of course, they'd do better if—as Dan kept suggesting—they actually moved in together. Save about a thousand a month, what with cutting one rent and one set of utilities. But— as she kept responding and he refused to believe—they'd do better for about fifteen minutes, until Stone Banner (or, just as bad, anyone on his board of directors, a roster of worthies that included two retired studio executives, two defeated senators and three professional-team owners, one each from the AFC, the NFC and the NBA) found out about the arrangement, and then they'd both be on the street and scavenging for food stamps.

  Dan was sweet, but he was an unregenerate flower child. He didn't realize that peace and love had been nailed into their coffins by James Earl Ray and Lee Harvey Oswald.

  She was cruising easily as she passed the Senorita Linda Beauty Salon. She had gone a mile. By her training schedule—two hundred yards for every cigarette she smoked the day before—she had about a mile and a half to go.

  The formula was idiotic, self-deceptive, self-destructive.

 
; But then, that's what being a junkie was all about.

  When she returned, Dan was in the shower. Marcia poured herself a cup of coffee and turned on Good Morning America. A reporter was interviewing a prostitute at a hookers' convention in Las Vegas. The topic: techniques of safe sex in the age of AIDS. All very decorous, the reporter red-faced and squirming as he tried to construct clinical questions out of euphemisms.

  Another thing to be grateful for. When Marcia was hooking, AIDS didn't exist in humans. Patient number one hadn't yet screwed the monkey, if that was really how it had jumped from apes to people. If AIDS had been around, by now she'd be one more Jane Doe rotting in a potter's field somewhere.

  Speaking of sex . . . maybe she'd go join Dan in the shower. Always a good way to start the day. Better than a Bloody Mary.

  The phone rang. She thought of not answering it. She hated the telephone. It was a bearer of bad tidings, especially at seven in the morning. The best she could hope for was a wrong number, or maybe a computer offering free dance lessons.

  As she listened to the caller from the clinic, all her lubricious thoughts seeped away. Her work day had begun.

  "Who was that?" Dan came out of the bathroom, buck-naked and scrubbing his hair dry.

  "Your princess and my Yalie have been at it again."

  "What happened?"

  "Security guard caught them necking in the desert last night."

  Dan draped the towel over his shoulder and filled a coffee cup. "I thought you talked to him."

  "Twice! I leaned all over him, told him he was victimizing her, told him no matter what she looks like she's really about twelve, gave him the whole arrested-development number, told him what he's doing is hitting on his daughter.''

  "You think it's true?"

  She shrugged. "I'm not a shrink. I just wanted to disgust him. WASPs disgust real easy."

  "And he said . . . ?"

  "Denied everything. Fucker's a master of denial. Reminds me he's married, Priscilla's just a friend, what's wrong with having a girl as a friend, they haven't done anything, not going to do anything ... He won't admit his marriage has already hit the iceberg and it's probably too late to keep it from going to the bottom."