The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

The tone in her voice puzzled him. She was talking about Max as if he were an invalid. It was the kind of tone you used when you were referring to somebody bedridden in the next room, confidential in a wary, hushed kind of way.

  Louise said, “I think he needs this break more than he even knows.”

  Dennis moved his head. Was his father sick or something? He glanced at the menu. His stomach rumbled briefly. Because he felt his mother was waiting for his agreement, he said, “I guess he does.”

  “We all need it, Denny.”

  “Yeah.”

  Louise, who had been frowning seriously, threw back her head and laughed. Dennis wondered if he had missed a small joke somewhere. She was vigorously rubbing the back of his hand now.

  “We’re going to have a good summer, Denny.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “No, I take that back,” Louise said. “We’re going to have a terrific summer.”

  Dennis said, “The best.”

  Louise picked up her menu again. “The very best,” she said.

  4

  The man, who wore his hair back in a ponytail with a rubber band, and whose navy-blue T-shirt had the faded emblem EVERYTHING IS ROTTEN across its chest, beat on the back of a skillet with a wooden spoon in time to Bad Moon Rising issuing from the Sanyo tape deck of his old VW van.

  The man used the spoon now to stir the mixture that was brewing on his Coleman stove. Beef, red peppers, mint leaves, teriyaki sauce and onions. The fragrance of the food activated his tastebuds so much that he had to move away from the hissing stove.

  He went toward his van, which contained everything he owned in the world. Apart from the stereo, there was a pile of T-shirts, several pairs of blue jeans, some cutoffs, sneakers, sandals, books, and an old clay bong that he kept as a kind of souvenir of his past—his hippy past—even though he didn’t indulge in weed these days.

  Some things, after all, you had to set aside. He lay down on the foam pad at the back of the van. The VW was equipped with a small skylight, and the man stared at the darkening sky through the opening. Already pale stars were visible. He sipped a little lukewarm California red and pondered the great expanse of forest that lay all around him. It was twenty-one miles to the nearest town and, unless you counted the old couple who lived two miles away, there were no neighbors. He didn’t include the weekend hunters, those parties of good old boys who came up into the forest to shoot such menacing creatures as quail and deer with all the ferocity of people intent on endangering as many species as they could.

  He had seen the old folks from time to time on their slow strolls through the trees. Clutching each other, they hobbled patiently along, imparting the impression that they were not two separate individuals but rather one, almost as if they were joined at the hip.

  Sometimes he had noticed them standing in the distance, half hidden by pines, and they seemed to be observing him with a kind of curiosity. At first this awareness of being assessed by silent strangers had spooked him, but then he’d accepted the fact that he played some kind of role in their sheltered lives. He had spoken to them on only one occasion, to ask whether they needed any odd jobs done. They had been extremely polite in their refusal, as if they were sorry they had no work for him. Looking around their yard, which had the appearance of a dump, he could see a hundred things that needed to be done.

  What the hell. You couldn’t deny other people their eccentricities. Maybe they liked the way their property looked. Maybe they enjoyed being surrounded by an assortment of discarded objects, the way some people felt uneasy unless they had a white picket fence around their home.

  He crawled out of the van and went to the Coleman stove, where he stirred his food. He sat cross-legged beside the flame, his skinny body bent forward from his hips like a half-broken stick. All around him the spaces between the pine trees were filling up with darkness.

  The cassette stopped and the silence around him was profound.

  This last year, winter and summer alike, he had spent here in these woods. He went into town only when he had to, mostly to buy groceries or use the public swimming pool.

  He spooned some food from the skillet onto a metal plate and ate quickly. Then he gathered the utensils together and went down a grassy bank toward a narrow, sluggish stream. He cleaned the plate, skillet and spoon, squirting a glob of Dove over each item before plunging it into the dark water.

  He climbed back toward his van, where he removed the rubber band from his ponytail and shook his hair out. The hair was thick and full, perhaps a consequence of the Zen macrobiotic diet he had followed so religiously in the late sixties, those heady years of pretension and optimism, faddism and naïveté—how weird that trip seemed to him now.

  He went inside the VW and opened his glove compartment. He groped around with his fingers, found what he was looking for, and started to count his money under the absurdly thin light that fell from the dashboard stereo.

  He was down to nine bucks and twenty-nine cents, and his provisions were dwindling. Which meant Odd Job Time. He sat behind the wheel, his face tilted back, and finished the bottle of wine.

  He remembered three days ago he had seen a van parked outside the empty redwood house located three miles down the dirt road that led to the Ace of Spades. The van had a logo painted on its side: CARNARVON CLEANING SERVICES. This presumably meant that the house was about to be rented, which in turn suggested that he might offer his services to the tenants when they arrived. Weeding, clipping, trimming, chopping, cleaning—he did it all.

  Turning, he crawled into the back of the VW.

  He thought about the forest that stretched away on all sides and in his mind’s eye he traveled the terrain, floating from the crusty little log house where the old couple lived to the sleek empty redwood and then all the way up the dirt road to the Ace of Spades, where there was a jukebox filled with country music and sullen types played eight ball.

  He did not go to the Ace of Spades often, except on those rare occasions when he felt like picking up a girl. His success ratio wasn’t very high, partly because few of the female patrons of the Ace of Spades wanted to ride into the forest in a beat-up old VW. But mainly it was on account of himself and how he looked, like he was a relic of a time most of the young girls had never experienced. And the name he was known by—Frog—was an echo of a suspect hippy past when even a plain John Smith could turn into something like Shenandoah Goldenghost.

  He lay with his eyes open and listened to the impressive silences of the forest, a great wall of quiet that was broken only intermittently by the cry of a bird or the paw fall of a foraging animal or the sly whisper of the breeze as it stroked black branches.

  It was the kind of vast starry night on which, several centuries ago, he would have dropped a tab of acid and sat up waiting for the sunrise while his brain self-destructed in the laboratory of the skull. He smiled at the thought.

  5

  It was almost dark when they reached Carnarvon and rolled along the narrow main street.

  Louise looked at the lit storefronts. The stores were small and trendy, the sidewalks done in cobblestone, the lamps on every corner facsimiles of Victorian gaslights. She glanced at the names of the shops. The Coffee Beanery. A restaurant called La Chaumière. A place called Crafty Things, its window stuffed with scrubbed wood artifacts. An art gallery named Framed.

  And then suddenly the town was gone and the road ahead was dark and all Louise could see in the rearview mirror was the afterglow of the lamps, which spread across the reflective surface like a faded decal.

  “Boy, that was quick,” she said.

  Max said, “It’s amazing—you think you’re out in the middle of nowhere and suddenly there’s a small trendy town, all bare pine and macramé and Italian cheeses and Scandinavian furniture.”

  Louise leaned forward, peering at the way her headlights sliced the darkness and touched the trees that pressed in from either side of the road. She had the sensation she’d just left civilization behin
d, that there was no going back.

  “I assume this is woodsy enough for you,” Max said.

  Just ahead there was an incongruous slash of neon in the darkness. A big electric card, an Ace of Spades, blinked on and off like a lascivious eye. Then a roadhouse loomed up and through an open doorway Louise could see a large room filled with tobacco smoke and the shadows of people clustered around a bar. A sound of country music filtered out.

  Max touched the back of her hand. He slouched in his seat and closed his eyes, enjoying the darkness; a sense of relief coursed through him suddenly. Here in these dark woods he could hide himself away, insulated from the world outside. He felt a calmness, a quieting of nerves, pulses still. It was more than just the medication he’d taken back at the restaurant in Red Bluff, more than twenty milligrams of Valium, could make him feel. Maybe up here in the green security of the forest he could make himself whole again.

  Turning, he looked at the darkened face of Denny, who was asleep. Neon slinked over the boy’s closed eyes as the road-house slipped past. It was another world here, Max thought. What he had left behind were messy fragments of himself, like the fingerprints of an amateur burglar at the scene of a botched crime. He wanted to hold his wife and tell her how sorry he was. He wanted to make—if he could—a fresh beginning. And then he was thinking about the various pills and capsules he’d stashed inside his suitcase under his shirts—he’d dump them. He’d throw them away. It wouldn’t be difficult.

  He put his head out the window and inhaled the dark air. Fresh and sweet, it filled his lungs with the sharpness of pure water. It was the clearest air he could remember ever having breathed. You could only be whole in a place like this—how could you be anything else? He felt the breeze push through his hair as the Volvo turned down a twisting dirt road. There was the sound of loose pebbles drumming on the undercarriage with the ferocity of hailstones.

  “Here we go,” Louise said. “Good-bye, San Francisco.”

  She turned the full beams on. All around the car the trees grew thicker, their trunks closer together now. She had the impression of great expanses of pine reaching away forever on either side into an impenetrable secrecy.

  “Look for a house with a sundial,” she said to Max.

  He laughed quietly. In the dark you could see hardly anything. Night and forest combined to impose blindness on you. He moved one hand, resting it against Louise’s knee.

  Louise leaned forward over the wheel. The Volvo rattled and shook in the ruts. She thought she saw a dark shape ahead, a shadowy structure barely visible between the trees. She braked gently as the structure assumed form, taking substance from the forest around it.

  “Could it be?” she said.

  Max said, “It’s the only house we’ve seen since the tavern.”

  She swung the Volvo carefully into a narrow driveway and the headlights picked out details of the redwood house. A porch. Downstairs windows. A glass-fronted door. An impression of first-floor windows melting into the dark beyond the reach of the car’s beams. Louise jumped out of the Volvo and stared at the house.

  She had seen the photographs, of course. And she had liked what she saw. But it was a different experience to stand outside the house, confronted by the reality of it. She folded her arms in front of her chest and she thought, I like it. I really like it. It welcomes us. Somehow it welcomes us.

  Max was coming around the front of the car. He stood beside her, clearing his throat. She pushed her arm through his and they moved up the steps on to the porch. Max had taken the key out and was trying to fit it into the lock. But there was no need for the key.

  “It isn’t locked,” he said.

  “Why would anyone need a lock out here?” Louise asked, laughing with nervous excitement, pushing the door, stepping inside.

  “I wonder why it wasn’t locked,” Max said, more to himself than to Louise. Why was he letting such a small thing trouble him? A key in one’s hand was a form of expectation—you anticipated turning it in a lock, after all. And when you found you didn’t need the key in the first place, there was a sense of slight disorientation. Fatigue, he thought. That was all. Suddenly he was tired.

  Across dark spaces a feeble bulb burned. A stove light in the kitchen.

  “Why was that left on?” Max asked. He had found a switch and suddenly the room in which they stood was white with electricity. Louise moved toward the kitchen and Max followed her.

  She said, “To welcome us. So that we wouldn’t stumble into a house that was totally dark.” She touched the edges of the stove, which was more modern than the one she had in San Francisco. Self-cleaning. Touch-control buttons. A digital timer.

  Max shrugged. An unlocked door. A light burning. These were incidental things. They weren’t important. This wasn’t San Francisco, where such occurrences would have had you calling the cops in a flash. He had to relax—the pressures were all behind him.

  “I guess the realtor had somebody come out and clean the place up, Max. And they left this light on for us.” She turned to face him, aware of the white kitchen gleaming all around her like an island of light afloat in the dark center of a pine forest. Stainless-steel sink. Dishwasher. Lots of counter space. Ceramic tiles across the floor. “I love it, Max. I really love it.”

  Max was opening the big refrigerator. He peered inside, then said, “Look at this.”

  She moved toward the appliance.

  There were two apple pies sitting on the center shelf. Freshly baked. Crusts golden. Two apple pies in old-fashioned glazed stoneware dishes, antique pieces inscribed with a pale blue floral pattern of a kind Louise hadn’t seen in years.

  “Isn’t that nice, Max?” she said. “Doesn’t that make you feel at home already?”

  Max shut the refrigerator and smiled. “I better wake Denny.”

  She watched him go across the kitchen floor, heard him cross the porch, and then there was the reassuring sound of car doors opening and closing. She opened the refrigerator again and she thought, Whoever has left these antique dishes here will surely come back for them pretty soon.

  She would thank them for their thoughtfulness.

  6

  Professor Pyotr Zmia, who had degrees from several institutions of higher learning around the world, flexed and unflexed his hands slowly. He stood in the center of the living room with his eyes shut, concentrating hard on a patch of color that existed only in his mind. After a time, when the rate of his pulse had been slowed and his body felt completely loose, he opened his eyes.

  He looked around the living room. He had a sense of ownership. He could feel the house all around him—its rooms, its spaces, its dark corners. Before too long he would come to know this house intimately. He moved slowly, crossing the living room and stepping inside a smaller room, which contained a large piano. The instrument, which sat in the center of the floor like some huge bat with an upraised wing, was black and glossy. The professor went toward it. He laid his hands over the keys but didn’t strike them. He tilted his head back a little in the fashion of a man listening to a purer kind of music than any piano might ever produce—an inner symphony of some kind.

  He moved away from the piano. He gazed from the window out across the street. Houses similar to the one he stood in faced him, glowing in the last light of day. The professor smiled. Although the houses were exact copies of one another, there were striking differences in their colors, their wood trims, their front doorways. Americans, he thought. They were a race of people running after an elusive individuality. They wanted to leave little marks to tell you that they had existed—I painted this house yellow, I had a racing stripe put on my Dodge Colt, those are my initials carved in this tree. They wanted a kind of immortality, so they wrote their names or left signs of themselves wherever they could.

  He shrugged very slightly as he turned from the window. It was twelve years since he had last been in the United States and he found it little changed. There were the usual excesses of energy to be seen everywhere—
new freeways, new shopping malls, high-rise buildings going up at an impossible rate while older structures, with many years of use still ahead of them, were being torn down. Americans were a restless crew. In their urgent quest for their destiny, they had never learned how to sit still. They had never mastered the art of silence.

  The professor stepped toward the kitchen, a big gleaming room hung with copper pans. A window looked over a narrow backyard. He imagined the woman, Louise Untermeyer, standing at the sink, perhaps peeling an onion.

  He sat at the kitchen table, his small hands stretched on the surface. He tried to see the man, Max, standing in the kitchen doorway. But Max was blurry to him because Max carried a disturbance around with him. He always had a slightly tortured look, the professor thought.

  He moved on to the boy.

  Dennis was easy to envisage. He was open and good-hearted, despite his adolescence—a time in his young life which would push him toward secrecy, which would bring him furtive qualities and awkwardness of emotion.

  The professor stood up. He would go upstairs now. Bedrooms were very informative places in which to prowl. In the narrow hallway, where his delicate bare feet slapped against the shiny wood floors, he paused beneath a little gallery of family photographs. There was one that depicted all three Untermeyers sitting under a red parasol on a beach, grinning. The boy had a Popsicle in one hand and his lips were purple from the stain of artificial grape. Louise wore a silly straw hat.

  The next photograph showed Dennis alone. It was obviously a studio portrait because it captured none of the boy’s inner self. It was staged, deliberate, and bland. The professor stared at it for a moment. Then his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the doorbell ringing. Westminster chimes: bing-bong, bong-bing.

  Everett Banyon was standing outside. Although the night was dry and the skies clear, the realtor carried a rolled-up umbrella. Professor Zmia held the front door open and Banyon stepped inside.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” the realtor said. “It occurred to me I might drop in. See how you’re settling. Nice house, don’t you think?”