Everyone had his or her separate commitments. Max had his patients, the sometimes impossible demands of the practice. Dennis took guitar lessons twice a week and baseball practice on three nights. And she was always working upstairs in her office, always seemingly threatened by the guillotine of some deadline or other or forever running back and forth with her portfolio in her car and going to endless meetings with editors and publishers. These were more than separate commitments. They were separate lives.
She moved across the room to her son and slung one arm around his shoulder, drawing his face close to her own. He permitted this affection for as long as he thought it was cool, then shifted slightly away, embarrassed.
It’s going to be good, she thought.
During the whole summer that lay ahead of them they would begin to make connections again. They would be whole again, safe in a place where the strident demands of the city couldn’t touch them, where there would be no threats against their unity.
She looked around the kitchen. It’s going to be damn good. And the prospect expanded inside her. The forest. The isolation. The family.
The summer that lay in front of them assumed the tantalizing aura of an oasis, a cool green lovely place where one might be still for a time.
2
Max crossed the floor of the untidy bedroom, edging his way around the suitcases that lay in a pile and two huge boxes of books and magazines he intended to take with him. Books he hadn’t had time to read—he never had time for anything any more. He stared absently at titles. The Arthurian Legends. Heading Toward Omega. World Religions. These books arrived in neat little packages each month from the book club he’d joined; sometimes it was weeks before he even bothered to unwrap them.
He sat on the edge of the bed gazing at the pale summery light that lay upon the window, the color of a bleached rose. From downstairs he could hear the sounds of Denny and Louise. Could you lose yourself in books? he wondered. Could you just shut yourself away in a forest and be free? His hand trembling, he rubbed his eyelids for a time.
He rose from the bed and went to the window. He ran one hand loosely across his jaw as he stared out into the street, which ran steeply downward and along whose curbs cars were parked at angles that defied gravity.
The tension that ran through him was almost painful. He took a small silver pillbox from his pocket, removed a pale blue tranquilizer tablet and swallowed it dryly. He noticed there were only twelve pills left in the box, which meant he would have to fill certain prescriptions before he left town. He’d drive to different pharmacies the way he usually did, filling a prescription here and another there, feeling the way he always felt—like a criminal, a junkie, somebody who couldn’t climb down from the cross of his own addiction. Then he rejected the idea of addiction; what he was going through was something else, a temporary condition, some unwholesome infection at the center of himself.
He went back to the bed and sat down. He was tense because he knew he shouldn’t be using the telephone in the bedroom to call Connie. What if Louise picked up the downstairs receiver? What if she listened in to his conversation?
Voices still drifted up from below. Your wife and son, Max.
Max gazed at the bedside telephone and his hand went slowly toward it. Forget it, Doctor, he thought. Let it go. It isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference now. He turned to look at the open bedroom door and dialed the number.
There was a sigh in Connie’s voice when she answered.
Max said, “I’m going. First thing in the morning.”
“I figured you would.”
He was silent. He wanted to hang up. An image of Connie Harrison went through his mind and he could see her standing with the receiver pressed to her lovely face, strands of hair falling against her cheeks, her fingers twisting the cord around and around. There was an ache of longing inside him.
“I have to,” he said.
“If you think it’s what you want, Max.”
“Look …” And he started to fish through his mind for a definitive statement, a suitable epitaph to put on the grave of the romance. Nothing came.
“Well,” the girl said. “It’s been nice. Maybe it could get even nicer someday. I’ll console myself with that thought. How are you going to console yourself, Doctor?”
There were footsteps on the stairs. Imagining Louise coming up, Max said good-bye hurriedly and replaced the receiver. He stared at the dead black telephone for a time, then the sounds from the stairs stopped and a silence, as unexpected as it was ominous, pulsed through the entire house. Connie, he thought. He stood up.
Connie Harrison was a graduate assistant in the English department of City College, a girl with a strangely fragile quality. She was emerging from a divorce and she’d first come to Max about four months ago because of her insomnia. He’d prescribed Halcyon. Some weeks later she came back to ask for something stronger because she was still suffering bouts of sleeplessness. This time he’d given her Dalmane in thirty-milligram capsules. She returned a third time. She talked about her personal concerns, her anxiety about her thesis, her loneliness, the death of her marriage. The girl’s unhappiness echoed inside Max.
He was attracted to her. When she sat close to him in the office he had the urge to touch her, to make love to her on the floor beside the desk. It was the first time in his entire married life he had ever been tempted, the first time the prospect of infidelity had ever occurred to him.
And it scared him. The girl was willing, he knew that from the beginning. And so was he.
He stared into the palms of his hands and saw a thin film of moisture. He remembered the first time he had touched her—a quick embrace, a soft kiss in the parking lot of a downtown bar. And she had done nothing more than hold him tightly against her, her anchor in the stormy fuss of everyday life.
He held his hands out in front of himself to see if they were steady yet. How are you going to console yourself, Doctor?
He lay back across the bed. He shut his eyes. The diazepam in his bloodstream had begun to calm him but it was a temporary relief at best. He saw, with a vicious clarity, the hotel room with the window that overlooked the Bay. He saw Connie Harrison standing alongside the bed and the way the lamplight had shadowed her features and how she’d taken off her blouse and skirt and sat down on the edge of the mattress beside him. He saw himself bend his face toward her breasts, felt the palms of his hands against the curve of her hips. She made love gently, slowly. What he remembered was how she didn’t close her eyes, how she kept staring at him with an intensity that excited him. She wanted to see everything; she wanted to do everything. And Max wanted her in return, again and again and again.
The lies came very easily to him. He’d been surprised by his own facility for them. A medical conference, Louise. A last-minute emergency, Louise. The guy’s appendix ruptured right there in the goddamn office, Louise. Dear Christ, he’d built a fragile construction of mistruths that some god-awful hurricane was going to blow away, revealing the truth, raising all the skeletons he feared.
The lies came as easily as the prescriptions he’d started writing for himself, using fictitious names as recipients. The Valium. The Darvon. The Nembutal. Anything to kill the ache. Anything to defuse the anguish.
And now he was running away.
He was running toward what he knew best. His marriage. His family. This safe little life he’d made. A life he had always imagined stretching ahead of him like a highway with no detour signs. He did not want to inflict hurt and pain on his wife and son.
He was aware of Louise standing alongside the bed. He raised his face, looked up at her. The pale light stroked her skin, made puzzling little shadows in her cheekbones and the corners of her mouth. Had she heard him on the telephone?
She asked, “Well, Doctor? You ready for the great outdoors? You all psyched up about splitting this scene?”
I love you, Louise, he thought. “I’m ready,” he said.
As she sat down beside him
he caught her hand and pressed it against his lips, a gesture that surprised her.
“You sweep me off my feet,” she said,
“And you thought romance was dead, didn’t you?” He lay back across the bed, head propped on one hand, and looked at her. Why did he keep hearing some of the things Connie Harrison had said to him only the night before? You’ll never be happy without me, Max. We have an affinity for each other.
An affinity, he thought. A bond. I know you, Max. He felt an edge of despair.
“I had my suspicions,” she said. She was silent, looking around the chaos of the bedroom. “I can’t wait, Max. I can’t wait to get out of this town. Now I know we’re really going and it’s not just some wild dream, I’m impatient as hell. And I don’t care if Professor Zmia has a harem or cooks up weird concoctions in the kitchen or holds strange rituals … I just don’t care.”
3
Dennis Untermeyer sat in the back seat of the Volvo and watched an unfamiliar landscape unfold. The city had vanished hours before and now little towns flickered past in the late afternoon light. Willows. Artois. Corning. Every so often he’d listen to a snatch of conversation between his parents up front, but mainly he tuned them out because they talked about people he didn’t even know—one of his dad’s patients, an author whose books his mother illustrated. The conversation became a drone, like two flies buzzing in an enclosed space. Charlie Wisdom wants pastels, nothing but quiet pastels zzzzz like he’s never heard zzzzz of bold colors. I told her zzzz you need a zzzz psychiatrist zzzz not a GP.…
Dennis shut his eyes and chewed on a stick of spearmint gum. He wondered about the wisdom of spending three months buried in a forest but that had not been his decision to make; like most families, his was not exactly a democratic institution. It had all started simply enough last April when out of the blue his father had mumbled something about how he’d like to get away for a while. His mother had picked up on this in a casual kind of way. What do you have in mind? she’d asked. Max had mumbled again; he really didn’t have anything special in mind—it was just a notion he was entertaining and how did she feel about it and wouldn’t it do them a whole world of good to get away from San Francisco for a time?
From this innocent beginning a whole series of decisions had been spawned in an accelerated way. A house in the country had been located. A replacement physician found for Max. Three months set aside for the purpose of “retreating,” as his mother had once phrased it.
What Dennis noticed in the course of these decisions was how little they seemed to involve him. He hadn’t exactly expected to be consulted, but it was as if in their weird haste to flee San Francisco—and it did seem a little weird to him because they’d always struck him as stable people and now here they were rushing out of the city to a house they’d never seen—his parents had somehow overlooked his existence. Not once had he been asked whether he had his own plans for the summer. Not once had his parents asked him how he felt about this vacation. Of course glowing little attractions had been held out in front of him. There’s bound to be good fishing, Denny. Maybe we can camp out some nights. Stuff like that. And maybe it was going to be an okay summer finally.
He gazed out the window again. A sign said PARADISE. Dennis thought of angels on Main Street. People sitting on little clouds. The lady in the Baskin-Robbins store would have a cash register that sounded like a harp and maybe God himself was the manager of the Alpha Beta.
He shifted in his seat restlessly. He picked up his portable radio and placed the lightweight speakers against his ears. There was a blast of rock music from some distant station—Motley Crüe—and then static. He fiddled with the tuner for a time but didn’t manage to find any music again. He hoped the reception might be better wherever it was they were going—the end of the world, he thought. Twenty-one miles from Carnarvon, which itself was a million miles from nowhere.
A few nights ago he’d checked the place out on a road atlas. There were some peculiar names in the region. Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness, for one. Shasta and Yreka and Whiskeytown and Hooker. Carnarvon itself was situated on the edge of the Rogue River National Forest, which stretched on up into Oregon, where it faded out around a place called Ruch.
Ruch, the boy thought. It sounded like an old man coughing up phlegm. He took the earphones from his head and leaned forward against the driver’s seat, tapping his mother lightly on the shoulder.
“How much longer?” he asked, aware of his mother’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Two hours. Maybe three,” Louise said.
Dennis slumped back in his seat, playing with the Sony, turning it over and over in his hand. The conversation of his parents had subsided somewhat. Now they weren’t talking about people they knew. Now it was I thought the traffic might be heavier and We should be at Redding pretty soon. Polite chitchat, the kind of talk that did nothing more than fill a vacuum of silence. Dennis sighed. He gazed at his father in the passenger seat; you could see Max’s scalp under the thin strands of brown hair. Sometimes, when he looked at his father, Dennis had the feeling he was peering into his own future. He was going to be like Max—long and thin and balding, with serious eyes that burned behind spectacles and hands that shook almost imperceptibly. God, he thought. Please let me be more like my mother, the good-looking one. Don’t let me lose my hair and have to wear glasses.
He glanced at Louise in the rearview mirror. She had vaguely sad eyes and high cheekbones and a firm little nose above a mouth that was full and generous. Small lines ran from the edge of her nostrils to the corners of her lips, and her hair, which was mostly glossy black, sparkled here and there with small flecks of gray. Once, Bobby Pinkerton had told Dennis that Louise was a real nice-looking broad and Dennis hadn’t known whether to be pissed or pleased. Bobby was generally well-disposed toward Louise. Dennis remembered the time he’d shown his friend a book with Louise’s illustrations in it and her name on the title page. Bobby had been impressed to the point of speechlessness and from that day on had acted like a kid with an impossible crush whenever he was around Louise.
Dennis turned his eyes away from his mother’s reflection. Sometimes he caught in his mother’s face a certain nervousness; as if she lived in fear of something terrible happening. She had a hyperactive imagination. She could take a distant event and somehow make it close and personal. The Strangler, for instance. There were times when Louise talked about the Strangler as if she saw him every day at the supermarket. She had taken the horror of newspaper headlines and made them real in her own mind; now the Strangler was like an old family acquaintance.
It was the same with the book illustrations she did: she devoured the text and pulled vivid pictures from it, trapping them brightly in watercolors. They were kiddie books and kiddie illustrations, but somehow Louise managed to give another dimension to the simple words. Whenever Dennis glanced over her shoulder while she was working he’d invariably see a cheerful yellow sun in a turquoise sky or a small train chugging bravely across a landscape or a couple of rascally gnomes peering from behind a toadstool. Even though these were painted with small kids in mind, the look on Louise’s face was always one of immense concentration and belief, as if she were a passenger on that little train or she knew the gnomes personally. She was always inside her paintings.
Dennis looked out of the window. He was thinking how there were some jokers at school who’d hide in clumps of shrubbery and suddenly leap out at you with their hands upraised and their fingers stretched, pretending to be the Strangler. He wasn’t one of them because he’d decided that that kind of behavior was more than a little undignified. If you were going to pretend to be somebody, why waste your energy on a scumbag like the Strangler? Why not pretend to be somebody good?
A place called Red Bluff was coming up. Dennis saw a sign that said HIGHWAY 99, which apparently led—beyond Red Bluff—to a town named Los Molinos.
“Is anybody hungry?” Louise asked, smiling at Dennis in the rearview mirror.
> “I could manage a few bites, I guess,” the boy said. It was a standard routine with them. Louise would always ask Is anybody hungry? knowing what the answer would be. And Dennis would always respond in the same way. These little rituals of family, insignificant as they seemed, made him feel good. They filled him with a soft warmth. They reminded him of the beat-up old security blanket he’d always fallen asleep with until about two years ago, when he’d reluctantly decided to give it up as a sign of immaturity. At the age of twelve, he needed reminders like this. It was a shifting world, things kept changing, and sometimes you couldn’t keep up with them.
Louise turned to Max. “What about you?”
Max nodded. He passed the palm of one hand across his forehead. “You want to stop here?” he said.
“It looks as good a place as any.”
Louise drove around until she found a steak house called The Pits. It had the skull of a long-dead steer hanging above the entranceway. Hollow sockets, a spidery crack along the jawbone, teeth that appeared to be smiling about some black secret. As he stepped out of the Volvo Dennis gazed up at the skull. Lit by the pale yellow light of a late afternoon sun, the great skeletal head was filled with pools of shadow.
“Poor thing,” Louise said. “Remind me to become a vegetarian, Denny.” She gave a little shiver.
Dennis smiled. He passed under the skull, following his parents into the restaurant, which was made up of large, gloomy interconnecting rooms. A hostess showed them to a table by a window. Dennis noticed there was a good view of the parking lot. Before they sat down Max excused himself and went off in search of the men’s room.
Louise examined the menu briefly, then she set it down and reached out across the table to grab Dennis’s hand. “He’s been working too hard. He hasn’t really had a break in seven years,” she said. “He needs this time, Denny.”
The Wanting Page 3