Asquith came to call it the Insect Tour, his last days as a working actor. One critic had blamed his dead end as an actor with the trite dismissal, “too many drugs.” Fair enough, perhaps. But the bugs were real, not hallucinations with little legs. As he lost touch with who and what he was, he experienced most acutely the various venues—one peculiar theater after another. There was the county fairground in Paso Robles before a one-third house, the audience waving their programs against an onslaught of June bugs, “flying tanks” the director called them. There was that little theater in Needles during a plague of darkling beetles, the black carapaces underfoot everywhere, the mildest scent of iodine released with each footfall so it hardly disgusted after a while. The beetles thrived only at night, a flashlight spying the slow insects moving with no sense of impending danger. Hamlet sought a man who was not passion’s slave in a land that crawled.
The exoskeleton masters the earth. Everyone knows that. This seemingly endless tour of Hamlet, though, taught him everything worth knowing. He starred—it was not too grand to be true—in the Avalon Ensemble financed by the estate of a Hollywood widow who needed to lose money for tax reasons. The tour did lose money, bleeding cash even as Hamlet learned the trick of the sword fight, the little prick of the poisoned foil that even at a touch must draw blood. You could buy the same Gorepak at the magician’s shop in Disneyland, but somehow the glint of the steel, the flowing white sleeve just-blossoming with scarlet, did not look like art. It looked real. One touch, and the mirror was held to a fairly sanguine nature. People took in their breath. The front row winced. It was all in Hamlet’s own surprise, not knowing at first what has happened, that flare of disbelief, replaced by realization, replaced by further disbelief. A wound is like a word, it can be misunderstood, mastered, forgotten. Remembered again. Pain is the silence that carries our egos forward, lilylike on black water. Memory is a constellation of microscopic cuts.
Ophelia had to die. That was something Asquith had always known, and that was something Hamilton had never quite understood. Ham would have said “Oh, sure, we have to live with bad things happening,” meaning that we have to learn to accept it, endure. But Asquith meant that it had to happen, was required as food is, and water, and defecation, because without it there was no life.
So the best copulation is somehow homicide. Forget rape, that ugly trespass, that assault. Rape was never erotic enough the few times Asquith had accomplished it, knees on the muddy asphalt, trussing and stuffing the grocery shopper, half the time not even achieving the necessary penetration because it was all so obvious. Rape lost its appeal. It was a political act, the vigorously and stupidly male over the supposedly weaker sex. It could in no way be considered an act of love.
Sex with men had its virtues. There had been a few male lovers, most notably that ex-Marine in the hotel in Santa Barbara, and then that truck driver in Jersey City, of all places, the one who rear-ended the just-purchased used car, his sister’s, and had to go back to his walkup for the insurance papers. That was fun, the nose breathing and nearly gagging while someone else’s bell got rung. And that boy—well, boyish—tennis player from Iceland, he had claimed, but then later Asquith had heard the same voice in Lincoln Center, just after the opera singers sang gospel music and everyone was feeling lighthearted. It was on the way out, and the voice had asked someone nearby, “What is that French phrase that means ‘Dazzle the bourgeoisie’?” in a High Midwest accent, Chicago, perhaps.
Men were worthy of that special sort of love, too. At some point he had realized, with the same turn of self-acceptance everyone must reach, or should, regarding their sexual natures, that only one thing provided the release, the sweet burst, the consummation which was more nearly the chief nourisher in life’s feast than anything else in bed or out.
He used to wonder as a little boy: why do they do it? Murderers who kill a dozen nurses, one after another. Why do they bother?
The first was that thin, nearly emaciated, would-be model who had fled the photographers lights for a little quiet in the small town Asquith had chosen, one so much like another, each a sheet of paper with the same watermark, the abandoned mill, the reopened mill, the mill going on reduced hours, the men on their coffee breaks huddled, drinking coffee too hot to sip because time was running out and it was January.
She had arched, like a gymnast, and he had read about such pleasure before, in a study of Hindu sexual practices, the man who can have an orgasm while merely glancing at the departing figures of women, hurrying under the open arms of trees.
He cut her. Even the void of her bowels, and the fluid, neither water nor mucus, that flooded from her nostrils, gave him great fulfillment. They were rude details in themselves, but they were like the lingering evidence of a great passion just consummated. And he believed what someone told him that Jung himself had come to understand: that dying is itself a keenest pleasure.
So it was fair. He was a lover. He gave pleasure. It was by killing that this pleasure was given, but this was honorable, as an act of love. If it was kind to put a sick beast “out of its misery,” how much finer it was to put a woman into ecstasy and out of this diurnal plod.
No doubt Hamlet regretted missing the scene of Ophelia’s death. But then, Hamlet was, as Asquith had discovered, a limited man, caught in both court intrigue and his own responsibility to the dead. Asquith suffered no such limiting text. Like Goethe, his field was time. His faith was illumination. He loved. He took life.
But Speke. It had all been so easy for Speke. Women responded at once to his laugh. His laugh! Who would have thought the laugh was a feature of a man’s desirability, but Speke had laughed and women had loved him, easily. He was one of those men who stride into a restaurant followed by gazes, not only the glances of women. Men liked him, too, as one might like a prancing horse or a winging hawk. Speke had color, hue, tone.
And Asquith was one of those on whom gazes never fall, one of those figures humans glance away from. Babysitters tightened their grips on toddlers’ wrists when he made his way from the bus stop.
He had wanted Speke’s praise, Speke’s attention. Why wouldn’t Speke laugh at his jokes? He would, to be kind, or out of the cheerfulness of his own nature, enjoying Asquith’s imitation of this famous dictator, of someone afflicted with that famous disease. But Asquith knew that even his humor was flat. Speke was alive, and gave life, and Asquith was a shadow, one of those people no one can like. He sensed it in himself, as one can sense the thinness of one’s singing voice: he was quick, smart, eager, and impossible to love.
Only Speke had enjoyed his company—Speke, whose eye would brighten at the first syllable of one of his plans, because Asquith had always schemed, he had no shortage of ideas.
He listened, trying to discern through the splash of the spring, that little leak of water, whether or not Maria was coming.
There was no one. He sank back, comforted by his reflections.
They had lived in a duplex, he and his sister and their mother, a woman who was at last too weary to drink and simply gazed at the television, a permanent lipsticked smirk on her face. It had been, at one time, a sneer of rebellion, the expression of a woman who could handle everything.
It became the tic of a woman who knew what she had lost, and saw the house she lived in, the housing development around her, and even the sky as a place that had abandoned her. She asked her children to leave quietly and come home quietly, and peered outside from time to time, growing more and more anxious at the end of every week until the check from home arrived, in the jagged marching scrawl of her father, just enough to live on, punitively meager sums of cash intended to encourage her to get a job and marry and quit these one-night interludes with her social inferiors, men with blurred tattoos and gold outlining their canines, men whose favorite stories were of brawls and drinking, and women who hungered after them unfulfilled.
Asquith knew how these men toyed with her, and how little they loved her. Once in a while, the sofa springs done sq
uealing, the last of the bourbon measured out, Asquith as a boy, with his boy’s sense of propriety, knowing when to leave the grownups to their rough play, would toddle forth. One of the men would be there smoking, watching television, a cop show or boxing, or an old movie, Gary Cooper mouthing words with the sound off while Asquith’s mother slept hard, each exhalation a groan as though even oblivion was a form of boredom.
Some of these men were kind in a distant way, knowing the trespass they had committed against a son’s feelings toward his mother. Some of them tousled his head, or gave him a quarter. One of them gave him a Tootsie Roll, one of the big kind, one end just opened. And one of them, a man with dark eyebrows, tugged down his pajama bottoms and gazed at his boy’s parts, critically, until his hand slid up his boy’s legs and found brief, not unfriendly, play.
Asquith had liked these men, even the ones who touched him, even the ones who hit him with big knuckled hands. Joy, he learned, often meant pain. As a young man he had sought this affection with one or two other men, men just a little older than himself, as an act of nostalgia, hoping in the embrace of half-drunk pickups to find that old household satisfaction, the sticky coffee table, the squashed unfiltered cigarette and the erection all intermingled in his head.
So sometimes just turning on the television, just watching the news, endowed a certain arousal, because he associated sex with the television on in the background, as a man might like the sight of black panties or a jockstrap, or find the rumble of a bus or a plane arousing in a drowsy sort of way.
His mother had bleached out, and vanished, like the old painted face of the giant cheerful Eskimo that had, long ago, advertised Eskimo Pies, only to be one day so faded to a Last Supper illegibility that it was a relief when the fence was torn down.
She was discovered by Asquith himself, folded over into that position people called fetal. But she resembled nothing infant, nothing promising. She was, in death, a doll, carved and knitted wickedly to resemble a caricature Mom, a woman smiling with the g-forces she’d ascended through to reach what she had always wanted, the same status as the empty can, the crumpled wrapper, the package both marvelous and trash.
His sister had wanted the traditional funeral. Maria had always played the beads of a normal psyche—however frightened, however pathetic she had become. So they called ministers, Lutheran, Methodist, stabbing at one Protestant denomination after another, until they found a Presbyterian minister with a tan and a linebacker’s shoulders who conducted a service in the suburban cemetery that was all sun glare, and made Asquith believe in, if not God, certainly the importance of a well-kept lawn. The first time he kept down enough peyote to kill the cerebral anthill he saw that this was an insight, not ironic at all. God, he saw, was a lawn, well-kept because nourished by its own water, a fertility that was green growing out of green under a sunless sky.
Asquith knew that he and Speke had wanted the same thing. They wanted to be more than their backgrounds intended. Speke’s childhood had been more comfortable, but the bland ordinariness of their daily lives as youths was what weighed upon them both. They wanted to be alive twice, alive in the vitality of their craft, and alive in the minds and the loving fantasies of strangers. They had both wanted to be people of greater dimension, men who could be, if not immortal, certainly spread far across the horizon during their lives. But Speke had succeeded, and Asquith knew too late that only Speke had the ability, the instinct, to endure this 3-D life and not be dissipated by it. Asquith had bled inwardly from the very start, from Speke’s first review, from the first glance of the first groupie outside the recording studio in San Francisco.
Her step could not be mistaken. Maria was here. Leaves whispered, and he stepped forth to meet her.
“I brought you some cookies,” she said.
He accepted the plate from her hands.
He sensed her watching him, hesitating. She added, “Are you all right?”
“I have never felt better in my life.”
“You look flushed,” she said, and he drew back from her touch.
It was true that there was a transformation at work in him, a simmering in his skin. “The phones don’t work, do they?” said Asquith, sampling a chocolate chip cookie.
“You know they don’t. And the cars won’t start.”
“Are you angry at me?”
“I’m afraid.”
The cookie was delicious. “Thank you for bringing me these treats. They will help to sustain me, I think, during this long day. This is going to be such a busy afternoon.” He paused, and then added, “I know that you’ve told him all about your marriage—that it was not exactly arranged in Heaven.”
Would she lie, he wondered. Would she look him in the eye and do what he had so long expected? She was tempted to tell the truth, and disappoint his sense of knowing exactly what would happen, and when.
“I don’t want him hurt. I don’t want any of them hurt, Timothy. Not Sarah, or Clara, or Mr. Brothers.”
She had been in all things so obedient. She had even worked on the distraction of Bell, an attempt to deceive that thoughtful biographer.
She was so worthy of his love. Soon, he promised himself. Soon he would let her partake of that great bliss, as so many others had before her.
But for the moment he delayed, savoring the cookies, admiring them, at the same time recognizing that the hand which had prepared them had experienced its last, greatest pleasure.
And she was waiting for his response. “What sort of person,” he said at last, “do you think I am?”
She had the grace, or the sweetness of habit, to smile, and he was weak with his love for her, his sister, the only person in the world with any loyalty to him.
Dear girl, he thought, you cannot imagine the rapture that will be yours.
31
Christopher Bell had always thought of himself, with pride, as a man who could get things done. His favorite daydream as a teenager had been of a newspaper reporter in a ditch of possibly poisonous and certainly giant leeches, hammering out a dispatch on a battered—always “battered”—Royal portable, while bullets screamed and whined overhead.
He had become just such a reporter, more or less. But then there were days like this. Some days things went smoothly, and some days you ran into one wall after another. He felt doubly foolish, because he had really hoped to impress Sarah with his many connections. After all, Christopher Bell was a name that made people run to their faxes at CNN. He could call London day or night and find people willing to swim raging rivers to help him. But not today. Today he was a mere mortal. So much, he thought, for teenage daydreams, and for adult hubris.
Again, he hung up the phone and tore through his book for another number. “Just a couple more calls. Won’t be a minute.” He sounded lame to himself, pathetic.
Sarah folded her hands with a patient expression, trying to make him feel better, he supposed. He could see, however, the tension behind her smile. He wanted to be dramatic. He wanted to say: I’m getting to the heart of things. Watch me: I’m lopping the very head off of this mystery, and with one stroke. I have powerful friends, friends with mega-connections, friends with databanks in Kiev and Tehran. I have friends with secure telephones in Langley, Virginia, just itching to help me out of any kind of trouble. I’m more than a biographer. I’m a journalist.
“You’ll have to get your facts the old-fashioned way,” she was suggesting.
“Torture captured prisoners?”
“You’ll have to ask Maria.” A hint: please hurry.
She was right. Sarah was being patient, trying to appear calm, and he was going absolutely nowhere at the speed of light.
She had those eyes that seemed to look at him from far away. She made him nervous, actually caused him to fumble, made his lips stiff.
I wish she wasn’t lingering there, watching me.
Bell endured yet more robot operators, and when someone human answered he spoke. But no one was “in.” No one was “at his desk.” His f
riends at the Chronicle, his librarian friend at the university in Berkeley, everyone in the East Bay with a computer and a modem was out to lunch or off to get a haircut. L.A. was a desert, New York a black hole. These were workaholics. These were people who got red-eye from staring at the computer twenty hours a day. These were facts freaks, people who lived on instant coffee. Nobody was in the office.
All he wanted was facts. Simple information. That’s all he wanted. He wanted to confirm Erika Spyri’s industrial-grade gossip. That’s all it had been—simple gossip. Just because some giddy gallery owner thought someone’s brother was a lunatic …
He turned to Sarah and gave her what he hoped was an encouraging smile. “Just another minute.”
She smiled, nodded. He could not take his eyes off her for several heartbeats. He had never known a more seductive woman, and she was all the more attractive because she seemed partly unaware of her power over him. He had a vivid splash of memory: her breast, the dark triangle of hair, her quiet cry.
He would do anything to help this woman, climb mountains to rescue her, battle rabid grizzlies—anything. And the one thing he did well, gather information, make calls and take notes, he could not manage at all.
She made him nervous. Why didn’t she go sit down?
Bell had trained himself to wait, and people who did not know him well thought him a very patient man. He was not patient at all. He seethed, nearly always, with energy, but, like a bottle of champagne shaken hard, unless the cork is loosened no one will know how much pressure is really there. After awhile the gas is reabsorbed. Sarah, it was clear, could soothe him with a touch, a glance. He needed a little soothing right about now.
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