“Lucien, sell me this hot spring, please.”
“You’ve got a nice room, Dom. That’s enough. This place is my pride and joy.”
Lucien realized that Dominic wished to pass his declining days among vaguely genteel people, defending his Madonnas against the occasional drunk who got the wrong door. Dominic’s laughter displayed his long teeth, and on Saturday night he always sent down a hundred dollars to buy a round of drinks for “the nice cowboys in the bar. And their gals.” Dominic had first drawn Lucien into conversation by explaining to him that he had spent many years in the horse business. When Lucien asked him where, he said, “The fifty-dollar window.”
Dominic’s phone rang. “Yeah, he’s here.” He reached it to Lucien.
“I’ll take it in my office,” Lucien said to Antoinette. “Gotta go, Dom.” He chugged the red wine.
“I could help you.” Dominic smiled. “Keep the headache.”
Lucien walked toward his office, imagining the solid squeeze the pale hold button had on the caller. He was not in a hurry. It seemed he alternated regularly between a placid acceptance of the need to be normal, to get, spend and lay waste; and the sense that his time was the only true coinage and he was misspending it and death was creeping at him on little cat feet.
“Darling?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Emily.”
“Emily!”
His nerve net became a skein of heated platinum wire. How different this terror and desire seemed in the face of a platitudinous day barely saved by the epiglottal clamp of Freddy. Lucien stretched the coiled telephone cord to get the door open and admit Sadie, a fine bird dog who had become a poolside whore in Lucien’s newest life. Sadie jumped repeatedly over Lucien’s desk while he talked.
“Are you doing all right?” Emily asked through clouds of Caribbean static.
“Maybe too well,” Lucien shouted nervously. “I’ve overstabilized the risk factor.” Suddenly he was uneasy for having said that. What did she want? What did she want of him?
“Well, I’m only calling to say thanks. You’ve been terribly generous. And I’m fine, I’m going to be okay. Don’t worry about me, Lucien, okay?” The static arose, making palpable all that distance, all that southerliness and ocean distance. And finally it swallowed Emily.
“Where are you?” Lucien asked in an excited voice as Sadie sized up the filing cabinet. “Emily, where are you?”
Lucien buzzed Antoinette.
“Antoinette, did you get a call-back number on that last one?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Because you came to the phone, Mr. Taylor.”
“Ah, so I did.”
“Are you all right?”
“That’s what the lady who called just asked. Is there something wrong with my voice?”
“No, I—”
“Would you like me to intone something in a lower register in order to prevent these inquiries as to my well-being?”
Monday and Tuesday were spent with the accountant. The spring was at a kind of financial income limit. The question was toward the write-offs now, or an outright sale. All the little things, raising the rates, improving the dining room and its revenues, adding services, were fairly well used up. And besides that, the concessionaires, if you could call them that, noting the stability of the business through advance bookings and other sensors, wanted raises. Mary Celeste was particularly bad about that: she viewed Workmen’s Compensation as a neglected gold mine. Lucien was afraid to tell her that for every person who was drawn to her therapy there were two who were appalled at sending feces across the wall in glass tubes; so he gave her a raise and she sulked off in her caftan. The accountant, Dan Janoff, stared at his sheets and made itchy traceries on his bald spot with the point of his pencil.
“I’d say—let me look at this now—I’d say you’re either going to have to sell it or just view it as an ongoing money machine, which won’t change and which—I know you—won’t be that exciting as a business qua life passion.”
“You’re wrong about that. It’s very exciting. I’m happier than you think.”
“So long as you emphasize your losses, losses are valuable things. Sell them to yourself before they are captured by someone less worthy. Everyone is trying to buy losses. These days it’s the sizzle, not the steak.”
A short time later Janoff gathered his paperwork to his chest and went out. When Lucien heard his BMW grind off through the deep gravel, he got up, thinking what a nice place he had created for himself and for others. It would be hard to give up. He got to his feet and walked out into the evening air, feeling a warm inversion come down the mountain and across his face.
But then, by force of will, Lucien behaved as usual for his dinner guests. Scrubbed and cologned, he made his way through the dining room, circled the old spring twice, made thoughtful moues to his concessionaires and returned to his office with its pictures of his parents and his child. He worked there and fell asleep at the desk on purpose. Some hours later, awakened by his alarm watch, Lucien rose and made his rounds of the spring. He went over the books in front and the bar receipts when the last celebrant had gone to his room. He’d usually exchange a few convivial words with the night watchman, light a cigar and stroll the flagstone shore of the spring. But tonight, late tonight, with the prospect of Kelsey emerging again and again, he sat down beside the empty spring and watched the phantoms drift toward the skylights and walls. He remembered when he and his father had first seen the spring under a mantle of circling crows. But he remembered too being there with Emily. And he felt his throat ache. He didn’t know if it was from remembering his father, from remembering Emily, or because the spring had become a bit of a madhouse. If it was the latter, he’d get over it; for, despite his adoration of the natural world, he despised the quiet life. It was better for the spring to draw the successful, those in need, the hungry, the full, the kings and queens of boogie, the mindless and desperate, than just lie there. Lucien was not ashamed; he just wasn’t sure why he was so blue.
Wick called Lucien at the spring. Lucien was out at pool-side fielding complaints. One man demanded to go “downstairs” and adjust the mixing valve, as it was too hot in the pool. Lucien explained that it came straight out of the ground at one hundred fifteen degrees. “And after you adjust the mixing valve,” the man replied, “add chlorine.” Lucien advised him that it was considered a marvel that the state found the water so clean that additives were not required. “The chlorine’ll get after those bugs,” the man said conclusively and left.
“Saw Suzanne,” said Wick.
“And?”
“I strongly advise you to throw yourself at her feet and beg for another chance.”
“She’s something, isn’t she.”
“Why don’t you stop by my Chinese restaurant and share a quiet litchi. I can go over the QED on that topic and spare you from endlessly shooting yourself in the foot.”
“Fuck you, I’m a millionaire.”
“Today I’m having tea-smoked duck and some nice Mexican welterweights via the satellite dish to help pass the time. Too, there is a pleasant view of the Deadrock skyline and the music of our nearby switching yard.”
“I can’t make it. I’m going to try to pick up on stuff here.”
“Incidentally, by way of deepening your debt to me, I handled your Kelsey problem. I donated him to a college in North Dakota. I had him tagged and shipped. I’m going to let the college deal directly with the family on any complications there might be involved, and I billed them for the freight, the embalming and that snazzy container. The wife called and got snarky with me. So if there’s any problem on collecting, I’ll garnishee their damn television set. I know how to hate too.”
“I can’t thank you enough for handling that. I never thought I’d see the last of him. Not that he wasn’t a nice guy. However, this thing went on and on.”
“But remember, if you ever need a liver transp
lant or anything, we’ve got an inside line at the college.”
“Goodbye, Wick.”
Life and death, thought Lucien. That’s all I have to say. One minute you’re shipping a body, the next you’re beating your brains out trying to get into some housewife’s shorts. During Lucien’s bad winter he had pulled his friend Dee into the unlocked foyer, a kind of anteroom in front of the locked plate-glass doors, of the Deadrock First Security Bank; whereupon like two rumpled suits they made long and boisterous love. The next day the large staff of the bank reviewed the activity on their video surveillance system. The time ran on the right-hand side of the screen, grimly factoring Lucien’s performance. Once again, Lucien’s dick had dragged him someplace the rest of him would never have gone alone, and caused him shame.
At two the mayor, Donald Deems, came in with his secretary and tossed down a hollow-sounding briefcase. His secretary was lean and large-boned as Don Quixote, and she worked hyperkinetically in her steno book and stared out of the window to the hot spring. There were three or four local schoolteachers in the pool, bobbing and chatting amiably. Sometimes Lucien’s former math teacher, Mrs. Hunt, came and glowered in the shallow end, looking for her old victims. I ought to pound that geek, thought Lucien.
“What’ve you got going today, Donald?”
“We’ve got the sister-city deal, Lucien. You remember.”
“I do remember but I don’t know what to do different. We’re ready for them. It’s what, half a dozen people?”
“No, more than that. I don’t even know what country they’re from, but it’s Deadrock’s sister city. Someplace out in the Pacific with one syllable. Zook, Plock, something, I don’t know. Don’t write that down, for Christ’s sakes!” he said to the scribbling secretary. He fingered the skip-stitching in his lapel.
“Do they speak any English?”
“I don’t know, Lucien. Foreign aid and papaya is their main deal, I guess.”
“Well, we’ll sure try to make them feel at home. If we only knew what home was—”
“I just thought, you being in the State Department …”
“Do you know what letter it starts with?”
“I’ll find out, I’ll find out.”
“Maybe you could go through some back issues of the National Geographic.”
The mayor bobbed his chin and looked off pensively. “I know it’s somewheres out there in the Pacific somewheres.”
Suzanne appeared briefly in the window, her brown eyes bright against a new tan. She gave Lucien a small wave in which he was more than a little suspicious there was flirting. He raised his arm toward the mayor in a kind of stiff-arm gesture and darted for the door. By the time he got out to the pool, Suzanne had gone past the far end, wearing a cotton wrap over her bathing suit. By now she was strolling with a tall young man, a college student possibly; and the two of them turned into the open bar. Lucien would have raced after them and spoken to her, but he knew he had almost no chance of appearing self-possessed; and he had perfect capability for imagining himself looking very awkward indeed in front of … the two of them. He went back into the office.
“Is something the matter?” the mayor asked, his secretary standing by to write down the answer.
“No, someone I know.”
“You look sick.”
Lucien cut through this. “Where were we?” he asked.
“We were through. Don’t let us hold you.”
“I’ve got it all down,” said the secretary. The two of them were ready to go now, but they still seemed to want to watch Lucien. There was something about Lucien they couldn’t keep their eyes off.
When the mayor had gone, Lucien stretched out on the couch. He thought back upon happy times with Suzanne. There had been the fall before James was born when they had the cruising sloop. Lucien worked then in the Dominican Republic, distributing leaflets to Latinos. They spent all their free time sailing, and Lucien took a mail-order course in celestial navigation. He remembered a successful night landing with pride to this day. There was enough moon when they reached St. Barthélemy that they could make Baie de St. Jean by putting the stern on Isle Bonhomme and running for the grove of palms, one of which had been striped white as a monument. Soon they heard the reef pass behind the white of the mainsail. Lucien rounded up and they anchored. Suddenly it was still. The lights from shore caught the curl going down the reef, but the surf could no longer be heard. Suzanne furled the sails carefully and Lucien secured the wheel so the rudder wouldn’t knock in the night. They went below and made love while the VHF radio crackled with island conversations. The riding light appeared and disappeared over one porthole with the slight running swell. Lucien awoke in the morning to see Suzanne making coffee in the small galley wearing only the bottom of her bathing suit. A warm, fragrant breath of the island came down the companionway; from a distance he could hear the small French motorcars. That night they stayed up late in one of the local bars and ended by renting a room in a cottage that faced an old compound of houses. There was a wooden water tower surmounted by a salvaged ship’s water tank, strangely shaped on this support, as it had been made to fit in the bow of a vessel. Water was pumped up to it from a cistern and allowed to fall by gravity into the cottage’s water system. Lucien propped the door shut with a chunk of porous local rock. Trumpet vines lay up against the panes of blueing window glass, and the palm trees moved slowly in the oceanic wind. Suzanne and Lucien lay in each other’s arms.
Lucien was asleep on the couch.
17
Suzanne sent James over to have breakfast with his father. There was an alcove next to the spring, where they sat together and listened in on conversations at the nearby tables. An older lady talked in a high voice. “It was either this place or the QE II. But there had been talk in the press about the stabilizers failing and tummy upset at the captain’s table. So we came here. I like it. I think I like it. Do you like it?” Her companion, another woman her own age, flicked her eyes in Lucien’s direction to signal that he was listening, and things murmured to a stop.
Little James had his head tilted back as though he needed bifocals; he was holding a piece of toast that looked half the size of his head, and he was just smiling at his father without fear for the first time since his arrival. His shirt was one button out of line and Lucien leaned across and made it right. Lucien wondered how in God’s name he could ever leave the boy unguarded even for a moment, much less for the duration of his recent hegira. “Self-discovery,” he thought with loathing, for he was losing interest in himself. He wished now he could install his wasted years as unused time in his little boy’s life. It was a kind of regret.
“I hope we’ll fish a little.”
“That’d be great,” said James anxiously.
“You like sport, though …?”
“Not athletics!”
“This is different. You can go off and be to yourself. When I was your age, people used to hang out gone-fishing signs and they never had to explain anything. Just go look at the air or find out what’s out past the trees. You can still do that.”
“I can?”
“Sure you can.”
From another table came an implacable voice: “When that Ford tipped over, it took a Jaws of Life to set me free. I’m a lucky man to be here to tell about it.”
“If we fish,” said James, knitting his fingers in his lap, “I don’t care if we get one.”
“I don’t either.”
“But I hope we get one.”
“Me too.”
Lucien ate the same thing he’d eaten for thousands of mornings: bacon and eggs and hash browns, with hot sauce on the eggs. He looked at them and wondered if they were the only continuity he had. As he stared down, there was a moment of complete suspension in which the sound of silverware and morning voices poured through eternity like a river. I want an island, he thought; I want an island.
The year Lucien and Suzanne parted, they had gone up to the States for the usual minor supplies
: paperbacks, a cordless electric razor, Suzanne’s contacts, ten or twenty movies, a pump for the saltwater aquarium. It was the year they had both come out of the mall with things that seemed to bode ill for the future: Suzanne with a pair of crotchless panties, Lucien with his first corncob pipe. It proved to be a very bad sign indeed, especially since Lucien was in an epoch when it seemed to him there actually were signs, an era in which he could join the rest of the populace in the wonderful ongoing melodrama of inanimate objects. He thrilled to clothes and cars; he sat at an old tropical wicker desk which seemed to guarantee character in his work. It was also the time he began to feel that his dick had rights of its own. He viewed it the way Vasco da Gama viewed the needle of his compass. Wherever he went, he believed it to be one of the leading dicks in the area. He never wanted to be accused of standing in its way. It was an up-market dick even when it spotted his clothes, made a crude lump or pissed through the top of his shoes. Still, the real story lay in his sense of getting nowhere, the functionary blues.
The voice at the other end said, “I’m told you can put me in touch with Suzanne Taylor.” It was a man.
“I think I can. What’s it about?”
“It’s about when she’s coming back to work.”
“Isn’t this kind of a vacation for her?” Lucien asked. He was racking his brain to recall what the job was: something about life-insurance money and land investment in the Sunbelt. His part of the office did Houston to Memphis, and she worked in his division.
“It’d just be real nice to hear when she is planning to pop up.”
“I think she’s trying for a couple of weeks holiday with her little boy.”
“It won’t do. You tell her to get hold of Lawton Hudson. That’s me. Tell her I said now is the hour.”
Lawton Hudson clicked off. Lucien had felt unable to put in his two cents’ worth fearing he’d jeopardize something he knew nothing about. But he was furious.
He spoke to no one as he made his rounds. In the kitchen, they looked at him from the steam of breakfast dishes. Henchcliff was receiving meats, checking them off as they were transferred to the trolley in cold storage. There were the usual newspaper readers at the pastry table who jumped up when Lucien came in. Along the poolside, three or four men made notes in their half-glasses, looking up with that peculiar air of dubiety which those glasses produce. One of the nannies was backed up tight to the water intake, absolutely oblivious to Lucien or anything else. The bar was still locked, and the morning light was just making it to the high windows and beaming down on the continually changing pool of thermal water. Once when they were first open, a local rancher had galloped his horse into the pool and gone to the bar for a drink. There had been something of a struggle to prevent the horse from drowning. Afterward Lucien took a chair to the rancher. The rancher had not come back since, though his lawyer made two or three sheepish calls.
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