by John Domini
In Garbeau’s room, however, things hadn’t been nearly so cut and dried. At the first snort of her cocaine Hartley had thought he’d turn inside out. He’d made fists in his pants pockets. Watching her undress, with every button and snap he’d suffered another nightmare about how he might perform and what it might do to him. When she’d turned and seen the bulges in his pockets, she’d made a funny moue. And his guts had gone blank. If she hadn’t knelt to unlace his boots, unbuckle his belt, they wouldn’t have come off. Meantime Hartley had heard himself saying the most childish things. He’d told her that this past April he’d run the Marathon in under three hours. He’d told her how many situps he could do. Never in his life had he sounded like such a fake. And so, soon, even the delicious slippery movement of Garbeau’s pelvis, even the lecherous wisdom of her small features—so all of it had become for Hartley a trial. He’d thought: Hey, I was just kidding around.
Nonetheless he’d performed. And after calling his wife he’d gone through it again this morning, with more zip and cocaine. Then they’d set off on this tourist ramble along the coast, ending up here, where he sat and itched while Garbeau ate like a fiend and then ran into the surf. Now she was waving her arms at him, oddly. Hartley shifted and felt his scars irritate him in different places. Yes oddly. Garbeau seemed just able to keep her head above water, though it couldn’t have been more than hip-deep where she was. Hartley squinted and saw her panicky eyes, the forced and painful shape of her mouth.
The lifeguard had started clambering down from his high seat. But Hartley beat him easily. The soldier was at the water’s edge while the lifeguard was still getting his board. Hartley got Garbeau around the breasts. She had her knees tucked up tight and he cradled her in two arms, carrying her well above the waterline.
“In my life,” he said a few minutes later, “I’ve been in three places. I’ve been in Vermont, I’ve been in Vietnam, and I’ve been in the Army.”
An old joke. She didn’t smile.
“But to see someone actually get a stomach cramp,” he said, “I had to come to Florida.”
Now she smiled. Faintly. She lay on her side with her hands on her stomach.
“You owe me one, Ronnie.” The point came out just right, dealt from strength. Handed down like an order. “Take me and show me what you’re doing with my life.”
The shooting site was lit up incredibly. The brightness of the lamps and reflectors seemed that much more ferocious against the Everglades swamp growth and the heavy sundown colors, a spectacular purple gloom. Hartley, looking at the sky reflected in the swamp water, was reminded of the pads on animal paws. They’d set up practically at the water’s edge. Then Hartley saw the actor playing Hartley, a lean kid he recognized from a TV series set in the 1950’s. He remembered once getting upset at a reference to underground papers on the program. That was a lie; they didn’t have underground papers in the 1950’s. Hartley stared at the actor. The kid’s face—he was staring back—had been so painted up that in the spotlights it glimmered like the surface of the swamp. Hartley studied the fatigues, the P HARTLEY tag over the chest pocket. He envied the actor his paratrooper boots, muddied and scuffed all day to get the proper effect.
But something was very wrong, something absolutely off. The smell of the place. Hartley started to move away from the lights, filling his nose with a falseness that would never show on television. This scene they were shooting now was supposed to take place in the prison camp, but it smelled like jungle. The air here gave the impression of continual ripening, the heady effect of violent blossoms. Whereas in the prison camp it had reeked without end of decay, of clotted water and smoke. Hartley still became edgy whenever someone doused his barbecue coals at the end of a summer party. And here, in the Everglades, a man at least could find that odor from the marrow of a carcass. Hartley moved farther from the lights, towards the purple shimmer of the pool. The ground sank beneath his beach sandals; he felt mud between his toes. Yes here at least a man found the genuine shit. Uprooted tendrils of ancient trees stank as they died. Reptiles prowled the muck.
Garbeau called him back to the shooting site. In one hand she held a clipboard and despite her bikini she looked all business again. Hartley returned slowly, savoring the atmosphere. He stopped as soon as he saw what they were doing. The actor who played Hartley sat wrapped in a blanket. He held a guitar. Around him settled three other actors: a muscular black, an urban Hispanic type, and a Midwestern-looking blonde. The four were huddled around a small campfire.
“This is the Christmas scene,” Garbeau said. “I thought it would give you a good idea what we’re up to.”
The actor who played Hartley called for some help with his makeup. He said the blanket and the fire were making him sweat too much.
“What about the fan?” Garbeau shouted.
“A campfire?” Hartley was asking quietly, beside her. “No way we could ever have a campfire.”
“If we use the fan,” a man with another clipboard shouted, “we’ll have to boost the footage back at the shop.”
“It wasn’t that kind of camp,” Hartley almost whispered.
“Well so?” Garbeau shouted. “So what’s the hangup? We got the montage to patch in anyway. Let’s get it.”
A fan came on, making Hartley’s shirt billow.
“It was windy back there in wintertime, right?” She spoke to Hartley now, her voice back to normal.
“Are you kidding me?” Right away he felt ashamed of his weak tone. He tried for something harsher: “You might as well have these guys roasting marshmallows.”
Garbeau looked at him a while, her suggestive eyes level. She drew herself up so the lines of her body were emphasized. Hartley suffered an asexual pang, a cramp in his chest.
“This particular scene,” Garbeau said carefully, “may not be perfect in terms of actual experience. We may not get an exact one-to-one correlation with the facts. But the scene will echo the feelings of real people in trouble, everywhere.”
Nobody else looked Hartley’s way. They made a big, unnecessary production of riffling through the notes on their clipboards.
“This is just not, not right,” Hartley managed finally over his chest cramp. “Camp was freaky, it was hard.”
“We know that. We understand.”
“Understand? Understand? Look, you think those drugs you have are anything?”
“Easy, Hartley—”
“Camp made those drugs look like the Sunday funnies. Camp was—every minute you realized there were more terrible things inside you!”
“I’ll play it that way,” the actor playing Hartley called from beside the fire. “Don’t worry man, I’ll do it right.”
“Hey, pretty boy, I’ll do it right!” Hartley shouted. “I’ll do it right on your face!”
“Easy Hartley” Garbeau put her hand under his shirt. “Easy, easy.”
“Check out that anger,” the actor was saying to the group round the fire. “That anger is great. That’s what I’ve got to have.”
“Quiet,” Garbeau said. “I’ll handle this.”
“I understand,” the actor said.
An odd sound moved through the shooting crew, a kind of chuckle.
“Hartley, please,” Garbeau said in another voice, “think of the story. A man, alone, far from his loved ones. Think of it. He’s forced to take whatever help, whatever small comfort he can get, from others as lost and miserable as himself.”
Her hand continued to hold him at bay.
“You really believe this garbage, don’t you?” he said at last. “This whole pack of lies—you set it up.”
Garbeau just laughed. “Hartley, come on. We’ve had some fun, these last couple days. All right.” She spoke so mildly, like a lover. “We’ve had some good times. But this is serious business. Think of it, please. A man, alone and lost and miserable. He huddles together with others like him, seeking protection from the winter wind. And then that man lifts his head and sings the true feelings. He sings what
we all share.”
Hartley had to look away. He cast his eyes over the metal angles of the cameras, the whiteness of cue cards and notes on clipboards, the gloomy backdrop of a swamp that now seemed miles and miles distant. He saw two other women he hadn’t noticed earlier. He saw a cherry-red van and a driver smelling what looked like an orchid. There were so many in the shooting crew, so many watching him. Finally Hartley looked at the actor playing Hartley. With a start, a flinch he couldn’t suppress, he saw that the kid was grinning. Grinning. In fact the glimmery tones of the actor’s face were stretched so wide and lewdly that all at once there was no room left for doubt. Everyone here knew what Hartley and Garbeau had been doing.
In a moment the evidence fell into place. “I understand;” and that low-bore chuckle; and Garbeau’s soft, soft tone of voice. Garbeau and Hartley had been the only ones to stay behind at the hotel this morning. They’d been the only ones to visit the bar last night. Everyone here knew.
Now Hartley couldn’t free himself from that grinning, painted mirror. He tried to straighten up, be a soldier, but instead stumbled backwards on the heels of his unfamiliar sandals. He thought how he must look, in his colored beach shirt, his swim trunks that showed off skinny legs white from a New England spring. He felt utterly freakish. The wrinkled member between his legs seemed without warning to hang down enormously, heavy and prominent, as if Hartley was dragging around some kind of dinosaur whose tail was roped to his waist.
“You never wanted me to come here.” He spoke to Garbeau but kept his eyes on the actor. “You did everything you could to keep me from seeing this.”
“Just let them sing,” Garbeau said. “Just let them start. You’ll see.”
Hartley’s chin dropped to his chest.
It seemed that the actor playing him had already struck the opening chords. There was some dialogue Hartley didn’t catch, as the kid strummed. Then they were into it, “Silent Night” of course. They sang with a wonderful shivering raggedness. Hartley found he could lift his head, they sounded so good. He saw a man by one camera holding up a cue card with the lyrics printed on it. He saw that the actor who played Hartley sang looking just enraged. The kid sang with a look as if he were ready to tear somebody’s guts out. And by “holy infant, so tender and mild,” Garbeau had pressed up close to Hartley, pinning one of his arms against his side.
“Now tell me,” she murmured in his ear, “doesn’t this feel right?”
All he could feel was the uneven gentleness of her body against his arm. His knuckles dangled in the cushioned opening at the top of her thighs. He thought: I must be in love. Only if he were in love, he reasoned, could he have let her play him so easily for a sap.
“Hartley, you’re such a natural,” she whispered. “You’re such an apeman. You must see this is true to life.”
And to hide his feelings, to pretend another explanation for the tears that had started to stream down his cheeks, Hartley opened his mouth and crowded it with song.
The next morning he made an honest effort to get resecured. He’d been unable to resist spending the night with Garbeau again, unable to resist yet another bout of roughhousing come morning. But when she went out to swim he drank coffee at the coffee bar. He wore his fatigues, long sleeves and all. After his second cup he knew what he’d do. Yes, really get resecured. He climbed the stairs back to Garbeau’s room. Her company had set up a couple business lines, so a person could talk as long as they wanted. He double-checked the DO NOT DISTURB sign. Then Hartley let down his pants and settled himself once more in the bed. He didn’t bother with his boots, only pulled his pants and shorts down round his knees. He and Claire had done this before. Took so much concentration, so much give and take, it always wound up clearing his head. He dialled the number and then held the phone in one hand.
No answer. Hartley tried twice more. He had the switchboard operator try a third time.
“Afraid no one’s home, sir.”
Hartley tried to think. He’d thrown the pillow on the floor and lay at ramrod attention.
“Operator. Ah, could you tell me. I was wondering what day it was?”
“The 15th, sir. Father’s Day.”
“Good, good.” What? What was good about that? “But I mean, operator? Ah, I’m from out of state. What day of the week is it?”
“Friday, sir.” Obviously the woman handled this kind of question all the time. “Friday, June 15th, 10:06 A.M.”
Suddenly Hartley was furious. His insides were going on spin-dry for the third day in a row and this headphone jockey downstairs was showing off her watch.
“Operator? Hey, operator, I’m in love. I came down here to see my life story and now I’m in love.”
“Very good, sir. Would you like a newspaper?”
“Huh? Hey, operator, never mind that. You know what Willy Peter is? Willy Peter, Make you a buh liever. You know what Willy Peter’ll do to a dink in a cave?”
“I’m sorry, sir. It is the policy of the hotel to stay out of our patrons’ personal affairs whenever possible.”
Her formality had iced over about two questions back; by this time nothing would crack it. And Hartley knew that he wasn’t being straight either. This bragging on love, bragging on violence—it wasn’t him. He slammed down the phone. He was still lying there, frowning and with his hands where his belt would be normally, when Garbeau came in.
Wet, her short hair had grown longer. Rivulets wandered slowly into the bottom of her bikini. Hartley was so disturbed he spoke up first.
“I tried to call home.”
Garbeau had been standing looking startled. Now, again, he’d made her laugh.
“Hartley, God.” She shook her head. “You are such a natural.” She sat, picked up the other phone, gave him a different look. “But I guess you didn’t get through. Poor boy. It’s still all wrinkled up like Mr. Froggy.”
She turned away from him and started making calls. More TV shorthand. So far as Hartley could tell, it was something about when he’d get his first check. Then, the phone still over one shoulder, Garbeau picked up a clipboard from the hotel desk and began making notes on the attached pad. The noise of the pages riffling back and forth grated on Hartley.
“It’s Friday,” he said finally. “Friday is when the wife does the errands. Plus Bobby and Janey are at school.”
Garbeau turned a couple more pages.
“The wife,” Hartley almost shouted, “is doing the errands.”
“All right.” She left the clipboard and phone where they were but met his gaze. “All right, let’s hear it.”
Hartley could only blink.
“I’ve sat through this riff a hundred times. You just go right ahead.”
A hundred times. So, Hartley thought. Men fell in love with her right and left. So he was Sap of the Week.
“Oh, come on, Slim,” she said. “It’s the real people like you against the TV people like me, right? All TV people are artificial. All TV people are parasites. They don’t have feelings of their own so they suck off everyone else. Right?”
Hartley felt his ideas going inside out and looking foolish. Suddenly he wanted just to hide in a hole somewhere.
“I mean, you married your high-school sweetheart. You have Bobby and Janey and they go to school. But a person like me, I’m hardly human. All a TV person like me wants is money and a good fuck. Well fuck you, Captain Hartley.”
Her face was wrecked. She whipped the phone off her shoulder and shook it at him.
“Maybe some of us didn’t go for that quaint-little-New-England crap! Maybe some of us thought a little more of ourselves than just, ‘the wife’! The truth is, Hartley, if I’d stayed in St. J. I’d be so godawful beaten-down by now you wouldn’t give me a second look.”
He lay there bewildered. He was hurt by the crack about wives, thrown by how far off base his own ideas had been, deeply embarrassed about his nakedness. He’d knotted his fingers over his stomach tight. Yet at the same time Hartley felt—and this was th
e bewildering part—honestly good. He felt as if he’d just got some bit of what he needed, this morning. There was an honest satisfaction in finding out another terrible thing about himself. Hartley began to think of wisecracks, and of how he might take off the rest of his clothes without insulting her.
But nothing came to him quickly enough. Almost at once, like putting the period with a sledgehammer, Garbeau went back to her phone calls. She looked a little thrown and embarrassed herself. Hartley had to watch her sit there stiffly, had to listen through two more conversations in that maddening shorthand code. The pages on her clipboard riffled again. So the more satisfied part of his mind dropped away as mysteriously as it had arrived. He couldn’t even decide whether or not to pull up his pants. Garbeau meantime went through a lot of gimmicks, ignoring him. She touched the stems and petals on the flowers he’d bought her last night. She wrapped the phone wire round her index finger. Somehow she found time for a cigarette too. Hartley understood the lines of battle had been drawn, that much he could trust, but he couldn’t be sure if a man in love was supposed to cross those lines or back away.
“Hey?” he said finally.
Another surprise: Garbeau smiled at him. She untangled her finger and lay the phone on her shoulder again.
“Okay, Hartley, okay.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “I guess I—okay, I apologize.”
“No,” Hartley began. “No, don’t.”
“Let’s just say I brought a lot of stuff down on you that other people put on me.”
He wouldn’t nod, wouldn’t give any sign. He didn’t want those clear lines of force dissolving.
“But look, now, we’ve had a lot of fun these last couple days but, I do have work here—”