Willing

by Scott Spencer

  Please stay here, I said. This guy’s pretty tightly wound. Magdalena finally had her clothes on, which was a relief. I could not bear her nakedness anymore. It was simply too sad, the whole thing was, these women, the tour, the world.

  Tony followed me into the hotel corridor. It was empty and strangely silent. Maybe on the other side, Tony said. There was something priestly in his personal scent: incense, candle wax, angry little secrets. We could walk around. I nodded and then asked Do you want to stop in your room and get some pants? Tony looked down at his terry cloth shorts, shrugged. I got these at Saks Fifth Avenue, in New York, and I chose them for their versatility. You can sleep in them, but you can also go out in public. You really can’t, I wanted to say.

  By now Jordan and Len were out in the corridor. Maybe he brought her back to his room, Jordan said. We should call Castle, Len said. If Webb’s flipped his shit, it’s up to Castle. Right? It’s his baby; he’s got to rock it. But even as Cobb spoke, we could see Doleack coming around the far corner near the service elevators, strolling in a relaxed way with Enir, who was nodding agreeably while Doleack held forth on some subject, counting off conversational points on his fingers.

  At first Webb didn’t notice the four of us standing outside Len’s room, but when he did his expression changed from a kind of snarl to one of ostentatious forbearance, as if he was going to give us a moment to explain ourselves and then attack us with everything he had. He took Enir’s arm and quickened his pace, until he was standing before us, at which point a smile crossed his face like a scratch mark across glass, and he said I presume you gentlemen are looking for me. His eyes went from face to face, ending at Jordan, where they fixed and hardened. He had not allowed himself to be drawn into the collective pity and protectiveness the others felt toward the injured boy, that much could be said for him. He treated everyone equally.

  You know what I never heard about, he said to Jordan, putting his hand on his shoulder. What the hell happened to you. The U.S. Army happened to me, Jordan said, glancing at Doleack’s hand, but doing nothing to dislodge it. I was trying not to look at Enir. There was a quality in her face that touched some chord of pity in me, and I was reminding myself that pity was one of those things we were no longer meant to feel, pity had somehow undergone a transformation from what decent people were meant to feel when others suffered into a form of condescension, and a rather convenient transformation, at that, for those who were not suffering or not exactly decent.

  So you were a soldier, Doleack was saying. Mind if I ask you what a nice…Doleack paused, made something of a show of looking Jordan up and down. Oh, let’s say upper-middle-class boy like you was doing in the military? Just trying to do the right thing, Jordan said. Then as now, then as now. Really? That’s very admirable. Judging from your father, I’d guess it doesn’t exactly run in the family, military service. Dad served, Jordan said. We all do our part. He just had better luck than me. So what happened to you? Doleack asked—his tone practically demanded an answer. But Jordan just shook his head. Bad luck, he said. Pure and simple. Doleack nodded. The answer seemed to satisfy him.

  So? he said. What are you guys doing out in the hall? Some kind of powwow? We all traded glances. I think you know, Jordan finally said. No, I don’t. Bring me up to speed. We were wondering if you were having some kind of trouble, I said. Trouble? Webb looked at Enir, whose eyes were lowered. What kind of trouble? Well, I said, if you’re not having trouble, then it doesn’t really matter. We don’t need to spend time talking about nothing. No, I’m interested, Doleack persisted. What kind of trouble did you think I was having?

  You had your girl by the back of the neck, Jordan said, and you were running her around. Really? Was I? Is that what you saw? Doleack moved his face close to Jordan’s. But Jordan did not back away, nor did his voice betray the slightest fear. Fuck you, Webb, he said. You can’t scare me. I’m a suicide bomber. You think I care what happens to me? Then Len Cobb did that thing men do for each other when they are trying to save a guy from being beaten: he put his arms around Jordan and held him fast, as if Jordan, even missing an arm, was a wild man who must be somehow prevented from doing Doleack grievous harm. Jordan struggled against Cobb’s grip, but Len was too strong. I felt something ought to be done about Doleack, but I didn’t want to try and pin his arms down. Instead, I inserted myself between Jordan and Doleack and thrust out my arms, as if I were directing traffic and the two men were trucks on a collision course.

  Doleack looked at me appraisingly. His eyes were like antifreeze. He seemed to have something in mind, a response to my efforts at peace-making, a few choice words to send my way, or perhaps something a little more forceful, but before Doleack made his move something caught my eye, a glimpse, an image as sudden and piercing as a dart. I lowered my arms, put one hand on top of my head, and stumbled backward a step, another. I was so manifestly stunned, so visibly poleaxed, so violently and vertiginously thrust into a world that made even less sense than the one I had been inhabiting since stepping inside the Fleming waiting room back in Westchester, that all of them, Doleack, Jordan, Cobb, Tony, Sigrid, Enir, and Magdalena, were aware that something strange had just happened, though none of them would have guessed that I had just seen, turning the corner and heading toward the east wing of the hotel, my one and only mother, followed by a wild-haired bellboy wheeling her sky blue valise.

  13

  IT TOOK MORE than riding the minivan to the airport, more than being whisked through immigration, more than reboarding the Fleming jet, more, even, than watching the tarmac speed past the oval window while the pilot taxied onto the runway for me to feel safe in the knowledge that I had, indeed, eluded my mother and was, at least for the time being, safe from her. I wasn’t sure what I was so afraid of—it was more of an instinct, really—but it took being fully airborne for me to even begin recovering from the shock of seeing Naomi in the hallway of the Royal, and even as the plane, which seemed like a thing gone wild, climbing at an unusually fast speed, with something frantic in its acceleration, even as the plane was airborne, I could not help but worry that she had somehow managed to find her way on board and was sitting a few rows behind me.

  Never in my life had I wanted so desperately to avoid someone. Surely there were men alive who upon being surprised by their mother, no matter how decontextualized she might be, no matter how long it had been since last they had last seen each other, and no matter how long a list of grievances against her they carried with them at all times, would feel, as their primary emotion, something in the general category of joy, men who would not press themselves as close to the wall as possible and hardly dare to take a breath, men who would not place their finger on their lips and widen their eyes with panic, in the hopes that those around them would also fall silent, but, of course, men like these were not on the first leg of a sex tour when the unexpected meeting took place.

  That was half of my problem as the plane strained and shook its way toward our cruising altitude, its wings dipping left and right, the turbines revved to a high whistle. The other half was that Webb Doleack was sitting near me. Boarding had been a hurried affair, and Webb might have taken that seat without anything in mind more complicated than efficiency, but it did not strain the boundaries of probability for me to imagine that Webb wanted to finish what had begun ninety minutes ago in the hallway, and so, for the first several minutes of the flight, part of my mind groped for possible reasons why my mother had appeared in Iceland, while the other part prepared for some kind of assault from Doleack, though the more I thought about this possibility the more confident I became that I could hold my own against whatever Doleack might try. After all, we were both in a seated position, and, astonishingly enough, I was beginning to see something in myself of which I had had, heretofore, no inkling: a ferocious animal nature, an ability to defend myself with something rather more potent than avoidance, sarcasm, or dark thoughts.

  That the woman I had glimpsed at the Royal was not my mother but mere
ly someone who looked like Naomi was a hope I couldn’t completely abandon. I had made no more than two seconds of visual contact, and even those hadn’t been under optimal conditions—not only was she, whoever she was, at least a hundred feet away, but she was turning the corner and was partially obscured by the bellboy, while I was in the middle of a thicket of people, one of them unraveling. Any defense lawyer can tell you there’s nothing quite so unreliable as an eyewitness; the image the eye captures is printed on stock permeated with prejudice, fear, fantasy. What we see is not reality but light beamed into our brains, which is then interpreted in accordance with what we already know of the world. That woman in a fringed jacket, suntanned or dark skinned, with wiry, graying hair, could have been any American tourist of a certain age; she might have been Israeli; she might not even have been a female. In a world of billions, you’d have to say the odds were that who I had seen back in Reykjavik was not my mother.

  But if it was—then what? With Webb Doleack near me, fussing with the seat, tilting it far back, bringing it up again, toeing off his shoes, violently rubbing his eyes while letting out a low ruminative rumble, I tried to force myself to think in an orderly fashion, something I hadn’t been really able to do since Iceland, if not before. Actually, it was before Iceland when logic abandoned me. I was hardly being rational in the departures lounge when I started thinking Castle cast no reflection. I was hardly being rational when I was screaming at Deirdre on the phone with that poor driver five feet away from me. When was the last time I had thought clearly? Peeking at Deirdre’s diary, the aborted rendezvous with Chelsea, even sneaking out of the emergency room before I could be properly looked after…All right, that was then and this was now. Now, I needed to be logical and I needed to be sensible. Someone—Uncle Ezra, Andrew Post, someone—must have given my mother enough information to piece together my itinerary, and if that were so, it would not strain credulity to think I hadn’t seen the last of her. In fact it strained it rather less than believing that I had seen her in the first place. All right then. I needed to act. Because if Naomi were to catch up to me, the grudge she carried over my article in Esquire would seem a mere pittance of animosity next to the revulsion she would surely feel upon seeing me on a sex tour. (I could not possibly be alone in this. None of these guys, no matter what they might say, would want their mothers to know what they were doing.) But the avalanche of embarrassment would be next to nothing compared to the trouble her presence would cause me. She might very well get me bounced off the tour. Surely Castle would choose to protect the rest of the tour members, the paying clients, from the psychological saltpeter of having someone’s mom on their trail. Life was too hard and too short for that kind of thing, and even though the $135,000 each of them had paid was not a fortune for the likes of Piedmont, Cobb, or Linwood, and really a trifle compared to the quarter of a million dollars a middle-aged CEO, about whom I had recently read in one of the tabloids, had dropped in five hours in a strip club, getting nothing more for his money than three bottles of bogus champagne, a dozen lap dances, and a spoonful of semen in his shorts. Nevertheless, Castle might, in light of the investment the others had made, feel duty-bound to cut me loose. And if that were to happen, my book would never get written, my contract would not be fulfilled, and the apartment on Perry Street would not be bought, the thought of which derailed that particular line of deliberation, and sent me careening into the memory of the demented e-mail I’d sent Isabelle, in which I offered to put my tongue inside her.

  It wasn’t as if I had never thought such a thing; in fact it wasn’t as if I hadn’t thought similar things about a great many women, wondered about their bodies, made educated guesses about the lay of the land, how they would smell, how they would taste, would they be wild or mild, focused or loosey-goosey, but all speculations were harmless. Admittedly, they were mine, and they were, I suppose, to some extent, me, but I had always remained blameless, because they were merely in my mind. Maybe some women could see evidence of these thoughts in my eyes, or detect it in the little slur of my voice, and maybe there were women who just assumed I, along with most other men, was thinking these things, or was, at least, capable of thinking these things. But, nevertheless, I had never said anything like that before, at least not so it could be heard by another person. The shame of it, the wreckage. I felt myself sinking into despair, and I tried to buoy myself up by imagining I could still repair the situation, undo the harm, if I appeared at Isabelle’s office with a sufficiently large check. At least a sufficiently large check offered some hope. Getting bounced off the tour, coming home with two pages of notes, and resuming my life on the sofa on West Fifty-fourth Street would ensure that Isabelle would never forgive me.

  I needed to get as much on paper as I possibly could, while I was still on the tour. And this new sense of urgency immediately directed itself toward Doleack, if for no other reason than I was seated an arm’s length from him. First, however, I would have to decrease the level of animosity between us, which turned out to be easier than I imagined. Doleack might have had a foul temper, but he was as quick to calm down as he was to explode, and when I leaned toward him and said I’m sorry about that craziness back at the hotel, he shrugged and said I wasn’t hurting Enir, or running her around, or doing anything like that. He spoke in a mild, bemused voice, as if we were discussing a misunderstanding that had taken place months in the past. Well, I said, the whole thing about this trip is that what we do is our own business, which I immediately regretted because it seemed to imply that I didn’t really believe Doleack’s story. Did you see that beat-up blue BMW following behind the bus taking us to the airport? Doleack asked. That was Enir, she followed me out there, for a final good-bye. I nodded, hoping to conceal every trace of my skepticism—it was too much like hearing about hookers who are so transported by the john’s sexual prowess that they refuse to take the money.

  I decided to talk a little about myself, hoping a few moments of confessional candor would elicit a similar response from Doleack. I was living with a younger girl, and she told me she met someone and she was having sex with him. I never saw it coming. I think she was fucking him for a couple of weeks without my having the slightest idea. Doleack nodded, not with any particular sympathy, but with a kind of forensic comprehension. Women are very good secret keepers, he said. Their sex organs are internal. I never thought of that, I said, with entirely too much enthusiasm. I reached into my jacket pocket, pressed my thumb on the RECORD button of my tape recorder.

  I was pretty torn up, I said, hoping to stress my own vulnerability—though it did occur to me that Doleack might be repelled by the thump of excessive breast-beating. Doleack almost certainly subscribed to the masculine credo of not letting what women do or don’t do count for too much in the general scheme of things, though even in hypermasculine subcultures such as maximum security prisons a sizable percentage of men react powerfully to the infidelity of a wife or a girlfriend. So for me, I continued, this is really about trying to blot out that bad experience with a lot of good experiences. And then, for good measure, I added My sausage has been in the deep freeze for a while. There’s pills for that, Doleack said, tilting his chair far back, lifting his hips and smoothing out the front of his trousers. He looked as if he were getting ready to disengage.

  So how about you? I asked, rushing things. Doleack, with a furtive glance over his shoulder, a quick check up and down the aisle, reached into his zipper jacket and pulled out an ampoule, snapped it easily in half, and swallowed its clear contents. Just what he fucking needs, more testosterone. Doleack swallowed, made a face, and then chased the testosterone with a couple of Tic-Tacs. I had to press for some answers before the juice kicked in.

  What made you decide to fly Fleming? I asked Webb. What do you mean? Doleack asked. I don’t know what you’re driving at. What’s to decide? You’re offered a chance to have sex with some truly spectacular individuals, who’s going to say no to that? Do you know anyone who could have that and say no? I knew
from experience this was going in the wrong direction; Doleack was asking me questions. Well, Webb, there’s a lot of men in America. I think it’s safe to say most of them aren’t on this plane. Something had to put you in the mood to do this. You want to know my life story, is that it? Webb asked. The whole sad story? That would be great, I said, and then, before he could object, I asked him if he had ever been married.

  I was married to Marie Lois Simmons Doleack. She was a flight attendant on the Delta shuttle I used to take between Washington and New York, a trip I made with some regularity in the old DOD days. She was a big girl, not fat, not an ounce of fat on her, but tall, with broad shoulders, and wide hips, and strong legs. She took excellent care of herself, diet, grooming, manners, she was the whole package. She was from a military family, raised up in Alaska, she was very methodical in everything she did: first you did this, then you did that, then the next thing, all by the book. By the book, it was one of the things she said. You had faith it was in the book for a reason, people had figured it out, they’d tried it and it worked. Me, I always sort of suspected if it was in the book it was already out of date. Everyone figures with my Defense background I was a military man, but no, that wasn’t for me, that wasn’t how I chose to serve my country. My area of expertise was business, handling multiple bids. People in the press love to scream about how we overpay for everything, armor, toilet seats, hammers, but that’s bull-crap. We always got the best price.