Stars and Bars: A Novel

by William Boyd

  “Follow that cab,” Henderson croaked.

  “Hey, man, no way.” The taxi driver was fat and needed a shave. He blocked Henderson’s access to the car, short stubby fingertips laid gently on Henderson’s heaving chest.

  “Look, it’s a matter of life and death, for God’s sake!”

  “Sure it is. That’s what they all say, bub. But no way you gettin’ in my cab like that, man. Soakin’ wet, only one shoe. No way.”

  “I’ll give you a hundred dollars!”

  “Let’s see your money.”

  Henderson wrestled with his sopping hip pocket and produced his wallet. He opened it up: an anthology of credit cards, two tens and three singles.

  “You don’t got no hundred bucks, man. You just better go on back inside, dry yourself off.” The taxi driver considerately helped him back up the steps to the lobby, Henderson suddenly as quiescent as a chronic invalid being ushered back to bed. “Go on now, man. You go on change your clothes. Then I’ll give you a ride.”

  A dark listless resignation had settled on Henderson as he was paddled back across the atrium lake. A large and curious crowd watched him disembark, Sereno and Cora among their number.

  “Is Dr. Dubrovnik all right?” Sereno asked.

  “That was some display, Mr. Dores. Most impressive,” Cora said. Her lips weren’t smiling, but her dark lenses obscured eyes bright with amusement, he felt sure. But he was too weak and overcome to make any riposte. He limped off toward the scenic elevators and his lonely room.

  chapter eleven

  PREDICTABLY, Henderson slept briefly and uneasily, troubled by violent dreams, that night. But in the morning found, to his surprise, that his mortification and embarrassment did not reach the zenith he might have suspected. Too many potential disasters lay ahead, with hectoring claims on his attention. And besides, there was nothing he could do about Irene now, he realized. It would have been utterly pointless to follow her to Atlanta airport and attempt to engineer a reconcilation in the departure lounge. That would have to await his return to New York, whenever that might be.

  As he lay alone in the big bed, he thought back over his manic wade through the atrium lake more with astonishment than shame or self-rebuke. He tried to recreate the thought processes that had led him to behave in such a rash and widly conspicuous manner, but in vain. It was as if the semishod, disappointed lover bellowing his anguished pleas across the crowded pond had been another person, such was the uniquely strange nature of the act. He had, he realized, for the first time in his life, given absolutely no thought to the reactions of others. He hadn’t cared, he had been totally indifferent to opinion. He frowned.

  The one meager consolation of the whole saddening business was that he was now freed to concentrate on securing the pictures for Mulholland, Melhuish. Beeby’s new offer on the Dutch pictures, some judicious hope raising on the prospective auction prices of the Sisleys … Gage needed money; money would have to be the spur. Publicity, prestige exhibitions in London—they carried no weight.

  He got out of bed. Then there was the problem of Bryant and Duane. He got dressed. He hoped desperately that a firm talking- to and reminders of Melissa’s monstrous displeasure might make the girl see sense. He couldn’t imagine what had got into her head. Duane, a thirty-four-year-old layabout with a liking for loud music and a chronic incapacity to fix cars … what could a pretty, privileged girl like Bryant see in an almost mythically disfavored human being like that?

  He ordered breakfast from room service. He felt also, if he was honest with himself, a certain amount of jealousy. If she could want to marry a lout like Duane, why was she so hostile to him? Good Lord, he thought, I’m beginning to sound like Pruitt Halfacre. But this morning, awash with self-pity and hurt, he needed to be liked by someone.

  His breakfast was wheeled in. Coffee and orange juice in a sunny chair. He was still unsettled, he realized by one of his dreams that had been unusually virulent and detailed. It was about Irene, and in the dream she had cut his head off with a small, not very sharp knife. He had felt no pain and managed to protest throughout his decapitation, seeking some explanation for this hostility. Irene—her breasts bare, as they had been the night before—had said only one thing: “Because you’re weak, weak, weak,” and then renewed her efforts with the knife to the rhythm of her words.

  As he sipped at his orange juice he squirmed anew at the phantasms of his unconscious mind. Irene’s erotic violence, her breasts swaying and hobbling as she sawed, gouts of his own blood fountaining up from his torn throat and severed windpipe. It was lucky, he thought, that he was no Freudian, otherwise he’d be in a bad way: rather a lot of guilt and self-contempt swilling around. Just as well, he reflected, that his art-historian training provided him with the reference and he didn’t need to go poking around in his id.… It was all clearly derived from Judith and Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi … or by Jakob van Hoegh.

  He wondered vaguely what to do for the rest of the day. Thinking of Jakob van Hoegh reminded him of his ostensible purpose in visiting Atlanta. He might as well spend some time in the library, going through the motions, see if there was anything that would conceivably justify revaluing the landscapes.

  The William Russell Pullen library of Georgia State University proved happily to be not far from the Monopark 5000 complex. Henderson paid off the taxi driver and wandered through a modern plaza with scattered fir trees and curious-looking lights. He entered through wide glass doors set in the blank brick facade. Nobody noticed him; nobody demanded credentials. He consulted a bright wall map, hummed up a few floors in a lift, asked a pretty coed where Fine Arts was and duly discovered the relevant well-crammed rows of bookshelves.

  After some time spent browsing through books on seventeenth-century Dutch painting, he further confirmed his belief that Gage’s dank mundane landscapes were nothing more than that. He flicked through his notes on the paintings. “Demeter and Baubo” caught his eye. “Protrepticus—Clement of Alexandria.”

  He sought out a reference librarian, a cheerful girl called, so the identity card of her lapel informed him, Ora Lee Emmet. Ora Lee, after some punching of keys on a VDU and a search through hefty catalogs, said that the only copy of Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus that they possessed was an inferior French translation on microfilm.

  Half an hour later, Henderson sat before a blue screen and twiddled up the glowing text. Old Clement, as far as Henderson could make out, was ranting on at all the base and obscene rites and rituals associated with classical mythology.

  “How can we be astonished at Barbarians,” Henderson translated slowly, “when the Athenians and the rest of Greece—I blush to talk of it!—possess in the figure of Demeter a religion which is absolutely shameful?”

  Henderson turned the wheel. Clement recounted the story. Demeter wanders around Greece searching for Persephone. In Eleusis, exhausted and toute désolée, she sits down by a well. Eleusis is inhabited by shepherds and swineherds. And Baubo. He translated on: “Baubo, having received Demeter, offers her a drink (a mixture of farine, d’eau et d’une espèce de menthe.) But Demeter refuses it because she is in mourning. Baubo, très chagrinée and deeply offended, uncovers her private parts and exhibits them to the Goddess. At this sight Demeter accepts the drink—delighted at the spectacle!”

  Outraged of Alexandria railed on at the Athenians and quoted some lines from the Songs of Orpheus: “Baubo drew aside her robes to show all that was obscene The Goddess smiled, smiled in her heart, and drank the draught from out the glancing cup.”

  Henderson switched off the machine.

  What did it all mean? A good laugh is the best medicine? Keep your sunny side up? There’s nothing worth getting that depressed about? Everything’s pointless?

  He moved floor to find the classical dictionaries. There was, predictably, vast material on Demeter, of her grief and fasting after the loss of Persephone, the breaking of her fast and the ending of her mourning at Eleusis. In every version,
however, that had been achieved by Iambe and her dirty jokes. So who was Baubo.

  Half interested, he began to leaf through other books on classical mythology looking for references on Demeter and Baubo. He found only one, in Myth, Ritual and the Primitive Mind by Max Kramer.

  “Vulgar comedy and lewdness” he read, “was common ritual practice. Its purpose seems originally to have been for the promotion of fertility, but it came later to be associated more generally with the dispelling of evil spirits and as a favoured antidote of gloom and despair. Thus Hercules released the hapless Cercopes—whom he was on the point of killing—when they had caused him to laugh over their jokes about his astonishingly hairy buttocks (Melanpygos); and the same ritual significance is found in the story of Demeter and Baubo, when Baubo made Demeter laugh by raising her skirts and exposing herself to the Goddess when Demeter was in mourning for Persephone.”

  He sat slumped at his desk. It was late afternoon. He hadn’t worked so hard in years, and although he was exhausted he felt a vague exhilaration. He chewed on the end of his pen, suddenly remembering Irene back in New York; Bryant and Duane’s impending marriage; Sereno, Gint and Freeborn. He looked around the tranquil library, the ranked booths, the earnest students—all dressed for the athletic field, it seemed—hunched over their books. He contemplated the stacks of learned volumes piled in front of him, the dull gloss of the illustrations, the crammed rows of type … He turned his head and gazed out of a window at the sunlit towers of downtown Atlanta. What shambles waited for him out there?

  He yearned suddenly for the warm security of study and research, the ostrich calm of the library, the utter pointlessness of some scholarly avenue up which he could pedantically stroll for the next decade or two. Out there, in the hot streets, in Luxora Beach, in the Gage Mansion, life lounged like a gunslinger, waiting for him—nothing but hurt, dissatisfaction and baffling twists and turns ahead.

  He remembered when, in his childhood, two brothers who lived along the road had briefly taken him up as a friend. They were slightly older than he—robust, dirty-kneed, wild little beggars, he recalled—who came around to his mother’s house on any pretext.

  “It’s Phillip and Colin,” his mother would tell him. “They want you to come out to play.”

  “But I don’t want to go out and play,” he would wail. “I want to stay inside.”

  He sympathized strongly with his younger self. That was exactly how he felt at the moment. He longed to stay indoors; he didn’t want to go out and play.

  Thinking of his home and his childhood in this way reminded him of his quest for news of his father. He thought for a moment of telephoning New York, of asking the doorman to go through his mail to see if Drew had replied. But what if there was a letter? He couldn’t have it sent down here, and he certainly didn’t want its contents read down the phone.

  He ran his fingers through his hair. Wearily he closed his books and assembled his notes and photographs. Beckman would be waiting. The time had come.

  chapter twelve

  IT was remarkable, Henderson thought, how swiftly anger and frustration could dispel calm and serenity no matter how assiduously these last two emotions were cultivated. He looked at his watch. Six o’clock. He had been waiting two hours at the corner of Peachtree and Edgewood for Beckman and his car. Two empty hours. Enough was enough.

  He walked back to Monopark 5000 to collect his case. He had managed to secure a place in the hotel car park for Beckman’s pickup, and had left his overnight bag with a receptionist in the lobby. He would simply return to Luxora with the pickup. Too bad if that idiot was waiting at another street corner.

  In the lobby he picked up his bag.

  “Hope you enjoyed your stay at Monopark 5000,” the receptionist said.

  “Well … I certainly won’t forget it.”

  “We won’t forget you either, sir. Come back and see us again.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Henderson turned. It was General Dunklebanger, checking out. He looked terrible—worn and harrowed—despite his smart uniform.

  Oh, Jesus, Henderson thought, this is all I need.

  “Look, I’m really sorry about last night,” Henderson began. “They’d already got our rooms confused; it was nothing to do with me. Just bad luck—rotten luck, that’s all.”

  “Did she say anything?” The general’s voice trembled; his dark eyes were bright with potential tears. “Anything at all? Anything she said. I’ve been looking all day. I can’t find her, you see.”

  “Well … all she said was ‘Alvin, you bastard, I never want to see you again,’ and ran off.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  “Just ‘Alvin, you bastard’?”

  “Yes. And ‘I never want to see you again.’ You’re Alvin, I take it.”

  To Henderson’s alarm he saw tears bulge at the lower lids of the general’s eyes and glide their way down the seams and fissures of his weather-beaten face.

  “I’ve got to find her,” he repeated, and took his bottom lip between his teeth.

  “All the best of luck.” Henderson thought hard, trying to help. “She was in uniform. Won’t she have to report back to base at some point?”

  The general clutched Henderson’s arm. “You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to help me find Mary.”

  “Look, I’m terribly sorry for you, I really am. But there’s no way I—”

  “Please. You’re the only one.” Now he held both of Henderson’s shoulders. Henderson tried to ease himself free. Surely they wouldn’t end up grappling on the floor again?

  “What can I do?” he said. “If it’s any consolation, my girlfriend ran out on me too about five minutes later.”

  “You see. Together we can find her!”

  Gently Henderson prized off the general’s fingers from his shoulders.

  “Really, there’s nothing I can do. I’ve got problems enough of my own. Massive problems. If only you knew—”

  “You’ve got to help me,” the general said in a loud, cracking voice, Heads turned.

  “No,” Henderson said. Poor guy, he thought. “I must go. I’m positive she’ll be back any moment.”

  “Waaah!” bawled the general, standing in the middle of the lobby, as Henderson backed away.

  “Mwah-waah-waah!” His hands hung limply at his sides, twitching as his shoulders heaved.

  “What did you do to that man?” a shocked passerby demanded.

  The general blubbered noisily on. Receptionists scurried anxiously out from behind the long desk to lead him gently away into the trees. People glared hostilely at Henderson. Astonishingly, a few women had begun crying too—in sympathy, Henderson supposed. He felt unmanned, full of worry. Everyone wore a preoccupied, troubled face. If a general in uniform can cry like a baby, they seemed to be thinking, where does that leave the rest of us?

  His mind full of this baleful, admonitory image, Henderson drove back to Luxora Beach through the gathering dusk. He drove west, into the fire of the setting sun, which rinsed the few thin bars of cloud with a salmony golden light. He could feel a murky depression settling on his brain. He switched on the radio in search of distraction. Twanging guitars heralded a familiar tune.

  She never said a single angry word to me,

  Though I cheated on her every gnat and day.

  She smiled when I come home,

  No, she never raised a moan,

  An’ I laughed when I heard her ’n’ the children pray.

  Henderson remembered the tune from the Skaggsville Motor Hotel. He listened on with horrible fascination.

  Though he’s the happiest meanest, full-time, signed-up sinner,

  Don’ forget that he’s your only paw.

  Lord, forgive him for his sins, an’—

  Henderson switched the radio off and drove to Luxora Beach in heavy doleful silence.

  When he arrived in Luxora it was late. The main street, as ever,
was devoid of traffic but there was the usual cluster of cars and pickups around the bar. The neon signs—the red bow, the blue rosette—shone cheerfully in the night. He stopped the pickup. Someone came out and he caught a glimpse of crowded figures, blurred by smoke, and the high excited voices of people having a good time. For a moment he felt like going in to join them, but he knew what a damper his presence would be to the locals, so he started up and drove on down the lane to the Gage Mansion.

  The lights were on in Freeborn’s trailer, but the main house was quite dark. Henderson parked the pickup, got out, stretched. He stopped stretching when he saw that his own car wasn’t there anymore; just one brick—a crude rebus—stood in its place. He sighed. Did this mean that Beckman was still prowling the wrong junction in Atlanta waiting for him to appear? Or had Duane decided to change cars for him?

  He clumped up the front steps and into the hall. No music, ergo, no Duane. And probably no Bryant. He felt an odd relief at having to postpone that confrontation. He switched on some lights, and the TV for company, before wandering through to the kitchen in search of some food. To his considerable disquiet he realized he was treating the Gage Mansion as though it were his home.

  In the kitchen he found a barely warm loaf-thing, dark brown, as though made of meat. On closer inspection this turned out to be nuts, beans and pulses set in some sort of spongy dumpling. The fridge yielded a plastic box full of grated carrot. He cut a slice of nut loaf and added a spoonful or two of carrot. He was beginning to wish he’d stopped for a weaselburger in Luxora, but he was really too hungry to care.

  He sat down at the frugal meal and started the long chew. He heard the sound of a car arriving, then Beckman sauntered in.

  “Hi, Henderson. See you got back OK. Sorry to miss you, but I figured you were coming back anyways so it didn’t matter none.”

  “You mean you didn’t go into Atlanta at all.”

  “You got it.” Henderson thought of his two-hour wait at Peachtree and Edgewood. “Why not?”