“He knew you were here,” said Emily. “He’s always known you were here.”
If Suzanne hadn’t been beautiful that year, she might very well have been mousy. Lucien seized upon her, in his battered state at the departure of Emily, for her prettiness. Suzanne was a brown-haired, brown-eyed beauty, one who had never traded on her looks but a girl in the last of the times when looks alone would do. This left her with the curiously easygoing nature of a twenty-year-old hectored by suitors. Lucien in those years was a combination of seersucker and tragedy, though an odd kind of tragedy: certainly at first glance not a real one, not the precipitous loss that draws every heart wheeling down, but rather one that grew in effect by never quite going away.
One sixties autumn, Suzanne’s genial survey of men ended. First to go was the Olympic gymnast, then the young ranch aristocrat majoring in classics at an eastern school. Right after that one the handsome orphan was dismissed, and finally the German racer. Left standing was Lucien, the curiously distracted, bookish sport who wouldn’t shut up about his old squeeze. “She left me,” Lucien wailed without shame. “Gone with a doctor who has hair on the back of his hands.” The beautiful Suzanne seduced him without complaint, courted him, cooked wonderful meals which he ate absently; and made his staring, vacant presence the envy of all who saw him with this peerless girl on his arm. “You’re very far away,” she said. “Aren’t you, Lucien?”
“Yup.”
In years to come, Lucien’s career, time and childbirth would tighten their grip on Suzanne’s life. She became tough and smart, and she stayed beautiful. Lucien remained distracted, effective mostly in bursts of irritation. He made dreadful paintings. Later it would not surprise her when he left. But he went on explaining by phone and by mail. He fell apart. Not unkindly, she began to refer to him as a plastered saint. For Suzanne, as for all those who start out on sound principles, life went on.
Suzanne never came to Lucien’s attention as deeply as Emily did. She was just as pretty but in a sunnier way. She took the position that this was a decent world for an honest player. And whenever she used her favorite remark, “It all comes out in the wash,” Lucien grew defensive, taking it as a reference to Emily.
Lucien and Suzanne were married on her father’s ranch on a big bend in the Shields River. Lucien’s work took him immediately to Surinam, where, napping in the afternoon on their comfortable veranda, Suzanne was bitten by a bat. Since it was unusual to be bitten in the daytime, she was subjected to a painful series of rabies shots into the lining of her stomach. She played even this down, really to keep Lucien from worrying: she was pregnant with James.
Five air-conditioned years went by in the backwater posts of Central America. One sweltering September, the three of them went on holiday to Nevis, where they lived for a week in the remodeled ruins of a slave-breeding farm. It was an extraordinary week for many reasons. They had both just learned that Emily had committed a crime so awful that neither Lucien nor Suzanne spoke of it. Anyway, Emily was the past.
In the evenings they listened to the reggae bands, consorted with the gracious local people and taught James to eat conch chowder and dig for slave beads in the beach. Lucien loved his little boy very much, but with the distraction that informed all his own young life. He took him walking the ruined English fortifications and down the dock at Charlestown, where the native shipwrights caulked the long-boomed sailing lighters with ringing hammers. One afternoon they sent James walking the beach with a Nevis girl hired for the day, a girl so black and literate and merry that she supplied Suzanne with another spell of blind optimism. Lucien and Suzanne examined the ancient barrel-roofed library, the stone municipal buildings. At length they found themselves in the small chapel that felt so ancient and English that the whole anomaly of the colonial adventure rang in the tropical afternoon. Lucien stood on the flagstone grave markers of the old planters and viewed the altar where Admiral Horatio Nelson had been married. Staring at Nelson’s disappearing signature in his rumpled seersucker, Lucien was suddenly poleaxed by what he saw as the lack of high romance in his life. It was one of the lowest and most paltry hours he would ever spend; and it nearly ruined him.
Their cottage was a stone building that the slaves had built. The sun had tired James, and he slept in an adjoining room. Each wall had a tall mullioned window that looked out over the rolling hills of Nevis and, well beyond, to the blue sea. There was a mosquito canopy for the bed, drawn out of the way, and treated coils of punk to be burned in the summer months. A bookcase contained a peculiar assortment of left-behind novels in various languages. It was a beautiful old room, and Suzanne already knew that something was wrong. Lucien wanted to put it all off; but the fact that James was sleeping constrained him to say something now. He told Suzanne he wasn’t going back to work. It made absolutely no sense for him to make any such statement, but he could not seem to do otherwise. Suzanne sat down with her hands in her lap. She was very tall, and that somehow made her isolation more clear. She was across the room and so very tall in the wooden chair.
“Why aren’t you going back to work?”
He answered her honestly. He said, “I don’t know.”
“Oh. Huh,” she said. “You can’t even try?”
“I’ve gone through that. I want to start over. It’s just about that simple. I’m not doing anybody any good. I’m going to be alone for a while. Does that make any sense?”
“No.”
“It must, Suzanne. It must make some.”
“It doesn’t, because you’re going back to see that cunt.”
“That’s not what she is.”
“You’re right. She’s something worse than that. I just can’t find the words.”
“Please, Suzanne.”
“I just thought the whores around the embassy would have gotten this out of your system by now.” She said this in a small voice.
“Suzanne.”
“I never complained about that.”
“I know.”
She sat quietly for a moment, looking pale. “It wasn’t easy for me to not complain. You see, I’m not an up-to-date girl. Your whores got on my nerves. But I saw it as a form of insurance. Evidently it was not sufficient insurance. Because you’re on the track of the queen of them all, aren’t you? A lot of good it did me. I suppose I should have fucked myself a wide swath, but my heart wasn’t in it, despite the fact that you don’t have a single friend who didn’t try. I guess that should make me feel stupid, but somehow it doesn’t. It fills me with awe to see you throw away everything you have that’s any good.”
“You’ve been storing this up, darling.”
“Will you be going straight back to Montana?”
All Lucien had for this was a long, feckless sigh, like an addict asked why he was killing himself with drugs. When Suzanne started crying, he stared at her as if across a state line. She shook and shook as she cried, sitting straight up in the wooden chair; she didn’t make a sound. She doesn’t want to wake up James, Lucien thought; but why can’t I stop myself? I have the soul of a lab rat.
Lucien was alone for one day on the slave-breeding farm. He was in a kind of shock, but he hoped that shock would be one merely of transition rather than injury. If I’m so bad, he thought, they are better off without me and I have done them a good turn. With that, his spirits began to rise minutely. Sexually speaking, he thought, haven’t I been a real success? I’ve spent thousands of hours with my ass flying and sweat spraying off me. In almost every case my partner pumped and sprayed with comparable ardor, sometimes when paid to do so. I’ve been the real article. He looked around himself with fear, confusion and dismay: God almighty!
That day too, he sat on the toilet daydreaming of Emily, when his half-erect penis aligned itself between the porcelain rim and the seat, and fired urine halfway across the room before he could clamp off his sphincter. It’s a monster, he thought, I know that much. Poor Old Dick, he called it. Me and Poor Old Dick are going home. Lucien was running absolutel
y blind. He had wanted to be in the country he loved once more. He wanted to paint, though he set only a modest store by that; he just wanted to get a few things down, like the Indians who traced the red ocher elk on the walls of the old hobo caves outside of town. He felt that his life had transformed him into a functionary. He felt lost, and he knew with absolute sincerity that Emily was certainly no cunt.
While he waited for his plane, he read the only thing he could find, a back number of a gardeners’ magazine, an October issue. Inside, and perhaps it was his mood, he discovered that nothing is more autumnal than a bad writer discussing apples. And too, there was something about wild geese mating for life that made him wish to return to waterfowling and shoot till his barrels were hot.
Things started to become more final to him as the plane flew north. There was nothing beneath it but ocean, and in a short while the sun went down. When you are drafted in wartime, he thought, it must feel like this. You are called and you will serve. No, that wasn’t quite it. The point was, he longed to feel the fatality of his action. When he had given his boy a hug, it was clear that with little more emphasis the child would fall straight into the middle of this. So their departure was without emphasis, staged as a clear fork in the road. They would be moved by forces to differing sections of the grid.
In any event, the process of stain had begun; he would not have known what to call it as it sank deeper inside him, nor been able to assess the turbulence and damage that was to come; but it was certainly shame.
3
Later he would think it was early in the morning. He was going back some, but it would have had to have been before breakfast. He remembered he could smell someone cleaning a cat box at the hired man’s, and there was an empty barbecue-chip bag, the big size, flapping away in the sage that grew to the door. Toward the house, a cat was curved over the wheel of the manure-spreader, staring for mice in the shadows under the box. And there was a sprinkler whirling on a yellow stool out in the garden; he supposed it must have run all night. It had taken Lucien nearly a month to make it from the county courthouse to here, an hour’s drive. Lucien’s unexpected appearance at Emily’s hearing had been their longest and most intimate time together in all those years.
Lucien pressed the door shut on the sedan. There were willows alongside the garden, and birds continually speared down from them into the berries. There were numerous signs she was taking care of the place. He had put all he could borrow into making her bail; so these small sedentary indications were important. Still, it would take more than that to assure her being around on trial date.
The heat wave had gone overnight into the first edge of fall; the Crazies had come out of the shimmer and stood clear and separate above the foothills. Lucien was going to be there until the trial in late fall. He had an assortment of sporting trifles and equipage: rod, rifle, shotgun and a small pointer bitch curled in the sedan, a dog perfectly trained for the silence of the high plains hotels he had frequented. Such hotels exclude the barking, ill-mannered dog, some any at all. For the latter, Lucien had prepared the dog, Sadie, by teaching her to travel short distances, silently, in the bottom of his duffel. Her reward was silent dancing behind the locked door of the room, for high-protein baby snacks from the grocer. Watching her soar amiably past the television and the cheap furniture for midair interceptions of miniature sausages always prepared Lucien for the long sleeps he required to stalk the plains by day. It consoled him as his solitude deepened.
Lucien realized the hired man was looking at him. He must have been thereabouts all along, as he came up past the log chicken house with a border collie close at heel and silent. He was a tall man in his thirties with a mustache waxed off to points, and severely undershot boots. He was what they called around there “punchy”-looking—from cow-puncher, not punch-drunk. It was pretty clear he wasn’t going to say anything. So Lucien told him who he was there to see, and he said about what. And Lucien told him that he had made Emily’s bail. The man indicated the house.
Lucien must not have been comfortable, because instead of going directly to the house, he began to pile his belongings next to the sedan, as though he were going to move things indoors by installments. Then that was done and he put one foot in front of the other, clumped across the plank porch, thankful that the slant of morning light made the windows blank, and knocked. No one came, but Sadie appeared from the sedan and burned around the porch as though it were the lobby of a crazily permissive hotel.
He decided to look in a window. He put his fingers to the glass on either side of his face. It was not so much being able to see a little into the darkness, finally, as it was the sense of her eyes coalescing somewhere in that interior. He lifted a hand to wave and the eyes moved away. He knew she was at the door. When it opened, she said, “My old flame,” in that deep voice from which laughter was never absent, even, apparently, in very hard times. At that moment Lucien was once again her suitor of all those years ago, probably as out of the question now as he was then, but as gripped as ever.
Her great dark looks had perhaps improved, especially to someone like Lucien, who liked crow’s-feet in women almost above all other features. She was wearing house-painter’s pants and a cowboy shirt with the tails out, and she was barefoot: she’d just gotten up. And how was Lucien different? He guessed he was losing a certain unreplenishable moisture. He went squirrelly after drink number 3 and resorted, in public places, to making a mark on his hand for each one; he never went out without a ballpoint pen. His craving for sport had become less a sign of buoyant youth than of crankiness and approaching middle age. In the nature documentaries that appeared on TV, he identified with the solitary and knowledgeable male, whether baboon or penguin; and this foolishness represented the same gap of wishful thinking that had plagued him all his life.
Emily’s greatest change, obviously, was that she was under indictment for murder. As she opened the door for Lucien, he had the extraordinary sense that her eyes were somehow focused on his entrance while her thoughts were entirely elsewhere. Then she stared down at the dog, who backed about looking for a spot to sit: nothing seemed quite right to her, and she stood crookedly next to the luggage. The luggage consisted of two tan bags from a broken set of smart luggage. When he’d been in foreign service, Lucien felt that luggage better identified the traveler than his own body.
“I’m, in effect, all alone here,” said Emily by way of laying down her requirements. “There is the hired fellow. He’s very nice and I don’t treat him as a servant. Beyond that, he knows his limits. However, the feeling that I am living by myself is something I absolutely have to have right now.” She was staring into Lucien’s face and he was getting uncomfortable. He’d gone unchallenged for too long.
“Are you sure it’s all right if I stay?”
“I wouldn’t have suggested it otherwise. Besides, I obviously owe you one.”
“Not at all, I—”
“Of course I owe you one. Let’s not begin with baby talk.”
Emily showed Lucien his room upstairs, and with mutual awkwardness they ferried his belongings there. He was briefed on the food, water and towel supply, and left to his own devices. Before going to the window, Lucien transferred his clothes into the dresser, stuck his Dopp kit on top and rubbed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. Then he went to the window, where the feeling of cold mountain was in the light.
Lucien could see the trail and the gate the hired man had used from up here. There was an abbreviated bench of pastureland through which a creek threaded incandescent against wild grass. Then beyond were the Crazy Mountains.
Emily was moving around downstairs. Lucien kind of tracked her at that as he tried to figure how the curiously separated range of mountains was attached to the earth. The heights of snow and light-relaying stone tied the range to sky as much as to ground. Anyway, he couldn’t see how it was done, and he set his easel up without much hope, still hearing Emily’s footfalls. At a certain age, seeing something is quite en
ough; breaking down those mysteries on another surface can be tiresome. Still, it seemed that trifling with paint was important.
Possibly Lucien’s eyes would open to the stony hills, the sage flats that sparkled in the morning, the thousand skies of a fall in the Crazies, once he learned why she had killed her husband. Lucien knew that he had to take a broader view than that she was single again.
He went down to the garden. It was a well-tended spot with leggy, hopeless corn and the broad leaves of squash making a tremendous effort to yield a few miserable babies. It was too far north.
Lucien didn’t see anyone moving around the yard, and there was no one on the porch or in the downstairs of the house. He was able to get his dog up to his room without using the suitcase technique he used at the hotels. She curled up under the bed and flattened her soft flews upon crossed paws. She understood this gambit instinctively. Lucien knew that in a pinch, she could handle the hunchback stunt with the overcoat.
Something to Be Desired Page 3