by Hob Broun
Tildy pulled free and for one small moment laid her palm on DaVita’s bruised cheek. “You can have it. I don’t want it.”
DaVita looked amazedly at the hand that had just touched her. On its third finger was a fat emerald ring that Karl had put there during breakfast.
“That’s so beautiful.”
“This?” Tildy smiled thinly and turned. “I grow them from seeds.”
Then she went up the street and drank herself into a thunderous high-noon headache.
14
DISAPPOINTMENT—SHARP, PRECISE AND direct—is a good sign of native intelligence. After the humiliating failure of his one and only big-time move, Christo had to get back to basics. A man who doesn’t know his limits is a man forever doomed to doing things the hard way.
Christo chose a doctor’s name at random from the telephone listings, checking the address to determine which banks were in the neighborhood. He called the office and, posing as a patient, told the receptionist he’d just received a check for overpayment from the doctor and wanted to make sure it was correct. They had a very cheerful conversation. The receptionist was an effusive woman. Her father was the mayor of a town in Nebraska, but the stench of the feedlot had been too much for her; she was studying the guitar at night. Christo found out where the doctor banked.
He got a haircut, put on a Milbank topcoat, went to the bank and filled out a credit card application, using the doctor’s name and estimating his income. These things were tiresomely mechanized, he understood, but would it be possible to pick up the card within twenty-four hours? He was leaving the following night for Bonn to attend an international symposium on childhood leukemia. Symposium in Bonn, the clerk repeated gratefully—it was the most unusual thing he’d heard all week. He promised to expedite matters.
Christo collected the card during the next day’s lunchtime crush. Four hours later he was back on the road again.
He spent three days at a sedate hotel in Annapolis, stuffing himself with oysters and crabs from the Chesapeake Bay. In the bar one evening he became friendly with the parents of a first-year student at the naval academy; they’d come all the way from Hartford for a weekend visit. The boy was having trouble making the adjustment. His childhood stammer had returned. Christo was invited upstairs for a nightcap. Mom kicked off her heels and turned on the color teevee. Dad put on his lounging robe. Christo checked out of the hotel a bit later with Dad’s Rolex and two hundred in cash from Mom’s alligator bag.
Smooth as cream, nothing noticed until Dad awoke and fumbled around the nightstand for his watch. By the time he sat down tight-lipped and meek to be interviewed by the police, Christo was having a liquid breakfast in a place called the Clown Town Bar with an old hound from the Racing Form who’d just finished clocking morning workouts at the Shenandoah Downs racetrack across the street.
The clocker’s name was Sanifer and he got pretty intimate after six apricot brandies. Friends? No such animal in this game, and he’d seen all there was to see since the tender age of nine when he held his first shank. But anyone who’d pick up the bar tab, a young desperado who could obviously use a boost in unfamiliar territory (here he grabbed Christo behind the neck and pinched)—with him, Bill Sanifer would share a good thing in the fifth.
“They been pulling this horse so hard he can barely straighten his neck out…. Just look here at his lines.” Sanifer spread the Form out. “Dead last against these dogmeat claimers at Latonia. Same thing here at forty to one. And here’s his last out, see where he breaks on top before the jock can get a wrap on him, then backs up to get beat thirty-six lengths. Yeah, they set this one up perfect and today they turn him loose. Go get cash for your car, kid, and bring it back here for the fifth. He’ll run away and hide today.”
Christo couldn’t move his rental car, but sold the Rolex to a leather-suited man in the clubhouse who’d just hit the daily double. Mister Tuffy opened at 60-1 and plummeted to 18-1 within a few minutes. Great. Real shrewd to dump the money in right away. Soon every pinhead on the grounds could smell the feast and they ran right to it, shoving each other to get at the windows. Mister Tuffy closed out at 9-2.
The speedball that figured broke on the lead and ran clear for the first half mile with Tuffy laboring well back. He made a move on the inside, got boxed on the turn, swung wide as they came down the stretch, and finished an even fourth, the jockey doing everything with the whip but shove it up his ass. The kid looked terrified when he came back to the scales to weigh out. Someone had to take the blame; they’d probably take him behind the stable, grab both his legs and break him like a wishbone.
Christo found a crap game in the parking lot, got rid of his last remnants of cash. He felt fine and unencumbered as he drove north toward Pittsburgh. Who needed money when you had plastic? But he slept poorly that night, his dreams full of menace, the painfully frequent spells of wakefulness laden with reminders of his hashish fiasco, Tomas Ulrich’s empty face floating like a joke balloon in the blackness of his motel room.
He dressed while it was still dark, drove more than a hundred angry miles and purposely ran out of gas. He let the air out of all four tires and started walking.
“I’ve been in again, man. Twice. Things have been rough.”
“It’s not easy to break away from those old tendencies, Milo. I know all about it.”
“I’m trying to get on disability now, but they keep putting me off.”
“So life is a shit sandwich and every day we take another bite, what else is new. But we’ll sit around and talk and we’ll both feel better, I guarantee.”
“Listen, Jim, this is a real small place. I mean I’d love for you to stay and all …”
“I’ll take care of everything, Milo, you’re not listening. What’s your shirt size?”
“I wear a sixteen collar.”
“Sixteen collar, right. And how about that waist measurement?”
Christo left his duffel bag in the telephone booth. He bought three hundred dollars worth of clothes on the plastic at a ritzy men’s store, and then panhandled carfare.
Milo, in his upper thirties now, had been a college student all of his adult life. He’d been working on a master’s thesis in Slavic languages when he and Christo had roomed together at the Greene County Hospital. Milo had theosophical hallucinations. Saintly voices addressed him from his kitchen faucet. He denounced his faculty advisor as a sulfurous agent of Moloch, a devourer of children. In the spring of 1975, God sat down next to Milo in the balcony of a suburban movie house. He wore a crackling silver cape, His breath smelled like lily of the valley, and He said, “Much too late, Milo. I’ve given up on you.” A few hours later a woman called the police to say that there was a man outside howling and bashing his head on a mailbox. The doctors at Greene County would not allow Milo to read the Bible.
The apartment was small and shabby as promised. Everywhere there were votive candles.
“Really, I’m much better about that spiritual stuff,” Milo said. “I just can’t afford the utilities.”
He was much heavier than he’d been on the ward, but it was the pale, suety look that tokened inactivity rather than improved conditions. With tiny movements in his eyes, he behaved like a dog waiting for its master to discover the turds on the carpet, cried a little when Christo opened boxes and peeled back the tissue paper.
“Things really have been awfully rough,” Milo croaked, sliding his fingers over a sea-green turtleneck.
Christo put his arm lightly around him. “And they probably won’t be getting better anytime soon. But like you always told us hardheads, if you can’t get used to suffering you’ll die before your time.”
As a young man, Milo had planned to enter the seminary. He imagined eventually joining a monastic order situated in some remote locale, perhaps a Greek island, where he would spend quiet days meditating in the garden, illuminating manuscripts or polishing censers. He would live a peaceful, seamless life and acquire wisdom naturally, like white hairs. But Milo n
ever went to the seminary and, speaking of this period now, was unable to cite any reason for his inertia.
“I don’t even remember what happened. But I believe that this sense of noncompletion has been making me crazy ever since.”
“Which doesn’t leave you much room to operate.” Christo lowered a full spoon into his coffee, watched sugar granules turn brown.
“What can one do?” Milo studied his reflection in the napkin dispenser. “Ambivalence is a disease. All Catholics have it.”
Christo had other things bothering his mind, making his molars grind. So much for the cushioning distractions of Life on the Road. The Morocco thing just wouldn’t leave him alone, or he it. Even Pierce, to his ample surprise, had advised him to forget it, to chalk it up to experience or kismet and move on. But this seemed beyond him, an infection he could not shake. The money was one thing, that he could stand to lose; but to lose—all right, yes—his honor to that simpering hippie fool was intolerable. Ulrich with all his snotty lectures on protocol and attitudes, his cushy villa on the water and wife on the make, had simply hung him out to dry.
“Hey, Milo, do you believe in a just God?”
“I’m trying not to believe in any of that crap anymore. So don’t get me all dizzy on that metaphysical ether. It’s cruel, man, like giving a reformed alcoholic a fifth of Scotch on his birthday.”
“Sure, understood. What I mean is, do you think things balance out in the end? Take care of themselves?”
Milo flicked his paper-napkin bird off the end of the table; it nosedived to the floor. “Me either, comrade. Me either.”
Helpless and unshaped as Milo was, he had, if only by example, helped Christo to reach a decision. Unfinished business could finish you. Christo didn’t want to grope through summer and fall plagued by that “sense of noncompletion.” He’d make the return trip to Tangier and prove himself. He would see the stalled process through to its orderly end.
Destructively cerebral as Milo was, he had helped Christo to give revenge a fancy name.
“What things would you like to have?”
Milo looked startled. “Should I say peace on earth? An end to hunger? Why are you quizzing me this way?”
“No, no. Things. Household objects, appliances.”
“Things, yes. Well … I think it would be healthy for me to have a radio to keep the silence away. And for my body, I don’t know. Barbells? Or maybe a juicer so I could be sure and get my daily vitamins.”
“Now you’re talking. We’ll stop at a department store on the way to the train station.”
“Faust.” Milo shook his head. “This is reminding me of Faust.”
A passport, fresh underwear, pills and a pint of brandy (preventive medicine)—the needs of a traveling man are few. The New York weather was clear and calm, perfect for takeoffs, and Christo (a.k.a. Arno Bester) was eager to go.
“Mission improbable,” Pierce observed, making a grudging withdrawal from the petty cash drawer in his office. “A waste of time and energy like this puts my back up. It must be my New England heritage.”
“Fuck you and your heritage, too. This whole damn swindle may be a tax write-off to you, but it’s what my life is all about.”
“That’s your heritage, your conditioning. Same difference.”
“What does this have to do with growing up in half a dozen mining towns in Michigan and getting high before gym class?”
“It’s not for me to say.” Behind his impeccable desk, Pierce in blue blazer and tie looked ready to have his picture taken for Business Week. “But I hope you’re not in over your head. I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but you might want to consider carrying some sort of weapon.”
Christo tapped his cranium. “This has been good enough so far.”
“Suit yourself. Just don’t forget to take the safety off.”
They had gimlets and changed the subject. Pierce had been shopping for a literary agent, with no luck up to this point.
“I want to do essays, social history, but nobody wants essays now. It’s a dead form, like chamber music or the sonnet.”
“Social history, huh? Right, you figure you can peddle your theories like you’ve been peddling dope. To a grateful public. Jesus, and you think I’m crazy for wanting to regain my self-respect?”
“I’ll match my delusions with yours any time, jazzbo.”
“Best of luck.”
“Same to you.”
They drained their glasses and parted without another word.
Christo walked round and round a small park near Casa Nocturne wondering how he could have come this far without evolving a plan. He’d wasted all his time on the plane thinking of Tomas in various states of humiliation; a series of disconnected images, coherent maybe, but like a pornographic collage, too trivial and predictable to inspire the brain. He’d left himself only one choice then: the tactic of no tactics. The hell with timing, the hell with fine points and the integrity of the performance—he’d just have to go in there and get it done. Geronimo!
But if you don’t simmer down, Christo warned himself, you’re liable to fuck up all over again. He waited a few minutes, chewing grass and tilting his face to the sun, then jogged downhill to the house.
Inge answered the bell in a rumpled bathrobe. Her hair was pinned up and she smelled of sleep.
“I couldn’t stay away.”
“Tomas is not here now.”
“So I’d hoped.”
“You lost your job?”
“It’s a long story.”
She shrugged and motioned him in. “I don’t try to understand things.”
“That’s the spirit, Inge. All men are liars. Old European proverb.”
Inge smiled and played with the dangling ends of the sash that held her robe closed. She hovered at the foot of the stairs, apparently undecided as to where to go. Her pupils were little black nailheads. She pulled the robe around herself more tightly and retied the sash. It was easy to see there was nothing underneath it. The breasts from which the entire family had drunk sagged halfway down her torso. Christo liked that; that Inge’s flesh should be as doughy as her self.
“I was sewing just now.” And she went up the stairs, leaving damp spots on the banister which Christo slid over with his own hand as he followed.
“You’re not afraid to be alone with me?” He brushed against her on the landing, drew knuckles over the soft knobs of her spine.
“You shouldn’t ask me,” she said indifferently, disappearing into a room down the hall, a cramped room with no windows.
Christo slithered through the open door, enjoying this game. Ironing board, sewing machine, bolts of fabric and cardboard boxes piled high—Inge’s little playroom. She picked up a long piece of orange velvet.
“I am just starting this. A vest for Tomas.”
“Nice color,” Christo said dryly. “Go ahead and work if you want. I won’t mind watching.”
She sighed. “No, I am interrupted now.” Laying the velvet across the ironing board, she smoothed it with her hands, picked off lint and bits of thread that weren’t there.
“You could show me the other rooms.”
“To see what?”
For a long minute they observed one another across an invisible frontier, Inge breathing through her mouth, fingers at rest now on the cloth and slightly curled. He noticed a brown speck on her upper lip, a crumb of food possibly, and this one compromising of her laundered paleness made his belly tighten. Her hands slid down the velvet, dropped at her sides. Otherwise, she was still as a mannequin and her eyes would not respond, not with scorn, desire, anticipation. She was like an ornament, a woman about whom other women would whisper.
“I can do you,” Christo said.
He crossed the frontier in two strides and came at her from the side. He pushed the loose hair back behind her ear, and his hand continued down the side of her neck, over her shoulder, followed the line of the collar down and down until he reached the knot, pulled it, and tore
the robe open. Inge did not move, but made a noise like she’d been punched in the stomach. A warm draft rose from between her legs, a flowering scent of coastal mud. He jerked the robe off her shoulders, away from her arms, and except for a pair of heavy socks, she was all white radiating skin.
Christo flicked that brown crumb away and, holding her behind the neck, very slowly explored the inside of her mouth with his fingers, gum ridges, slippery linings of lip and cheek; pushed deeper, pressed on the back of her tongue so that she gagged. But even this did not unlock her passivity.
He pulled her down the hall and into the bedroom—bare white walls, a narrow strip of sun. The bed was carefully made and littered with round pillows. Christo swept them to the floor, ripped off the covers, threw Inge onto her back. Her eyes were alive now; her hips dimpled in tempo as she flexed pelvic muscles.
“Take off your socks.”
“My feet are cold.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
He pulled her by the ankles to the edge of the bed and knelt to the salt lick, went at her roughly with teeth unshielded. Urging him deeper, she tugged at his ears, gurgled. Christo stood up and got out of his clothes. Inge was the dream of an after-midnight Weimar cabaret as she followed his snapped commands, clambering onto her knees, pulling her buttocks apart, anointing herself with her own saliva. He came to her with his erection swinging in front of him like a piece of industrial machinery. He told her he was a thief, spoke her name like a curse, fit himself to the slick, reddened knot, paused—a tense, drawn-out moment of threat with a loaded weapon—and drove to the neck of her uterus in one stroke. It was over almost instantly.
“You are a monster.” Inge touched herself gingerly. “You make me burn there.”
Christo lit a cigarette and walked out of the room. So far, so good, but it was only the beginning. He roamed through the house breaking lightbulbs and emptying drawers onto the floor. In the kitchen he smeared the walls with raw eggs and ketchup, drank a leisurely beer while he watched the mural dribble and run. He took a bowl of fruit back upstairs with him and found Inge tightly curled in a facsimile of sleep. Removing one of her socks, he tickled experimentally and she smiled without opening her eyes. The shiny skin of her sole was delicately crackled like the bed of a dry lake.