“I’m still hungry. What else should I eat?”
“Stay with the frieds—fried mushrooms?”
She ordered a plate of mushrooms, a large radicchio salad, another beer, a slice of chocolate cake heavy enough to sink a ship.
I wasn’t feeling particularly sexy in those days right after my divorce, but watching Claire Stansfield eat, the question wandered my mind, if she was this voracious about food, what was she like in bed?
“What are you thinking about?” Her voice crept slowly out through the hive of bandages.
Holding her hand, I squeezed it gently. “About the first time we met—how much food you ate. I wondered if you’d be as good in bed as you were at the table.”
“But I wouldn’t let you touch me for a long time.”
“That’s right.”
The room held the silence only a hospital room knows; the silence in waiting for things to return to normal, the silence of the body’s betrayal versus secret hope.
“I was afraid you’d grow tired of me and my fears and leave.” She shifted slightly under the covers, groaning once when turning her head toward me. “But you only sort-of left, didn’t you, Harry? With Fanny.”
“Let’s not talk about it now.”
“All right. Tell me more about the first day we met. I want to hear your side of it. Keep holding my hand too, please.”
“You were wearing those big clunky shoes and that black coat you bought in Budapest. You know how much I love women in clunky shoes.”
Her hand was cool and dry in mine. Normally they were warm, often the slightest bit sweaty. She had only one hand now. What was left of the other lay hidden in a swirl of bandages and pain across the bed. When the earthquake came, Claire was riding her motorcycle down Sunset Boulevard and was thrown off, straight into the back of a truck. At the last moment she put up a hand to protect her face. It worked. But the hand caught on something.
“Harry, what do you think are the sexual fantasies of the blind?”
“Smells. Different kinds of touch. Didn’t you ever make love blindfolded?”
“No. Is it exciting?”
“Funny. Strange. We’ll do it some time.” I wondered when we would make love again. How she would feel about doing it without the hand? Without the hand.
“Why’d you ask?”
“I was looking at your nose and thinking how big and nice it is. I wondered what it’d be like to know only through touch or if you could know something as completely with only touch or sight or smell. Now my right hand’ll have to do all the touching for me.
“What are you going to do now, Harry? What’s been going on? You never tell me anything, especially since I’ve been in here. Sometimes you’re as slippery as a pack of new playing cards.”
“I’m going to wait till you get out of here, for one thing.”
“That’ll be a while. And don’t use me as an excuse not to be doing something.”
I smiled like a fool caught. Talking to Claire was often like sliding my cold feet into a warm place. She was trusting but perceptive. I had been using her misfortune, in part, as a further excuse not to make a decision I’d been avoiding: The Sultan had asked me to come to Saru and at least look at the site where he wanted to build his dog museum—no strings attached. He’d pay a handsome fee but far more important, after our earthquake together, it was nigh impossible to say no.
So I told Claire the whole story for the first time. I’d not done it before because she’d had enough to suffer through and I couldn’t imagine that hearing my tale of glorious escape was good for her in those first days without her left hand. As usual when I’d finished spouting, what she said surprised me.
“I was in Saru once.”
“What? Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I was saving it as a surprise. I stopped off there on my way to visit my sister, Slammy, in Jordan a couple of years ago.”
“What’s it like?”
“The cities are very modern. A lot of Palestinians fled there after the 1967 war with Israel and built them up. I stayed in Bazz’af, the capital. The rest of the country is desert.”
“Buzz Off? The capital of Saru is really named ‘Buzz Off’?”
She chuckled. “No, it’s pronounced bats-hof. Sort of rhymes with hats off.
“You know what I liked most about it? There are these desert castles in Saru that date back to the Crusades and before. You take a bus a couple of hours out of Bazz’af and in the middle of nowhere are these ruins that aren’t so ruined because the dry desert air has preserved them so well.”
“Are you all right, Claire? You don’t have to talk if it makes you tired.”
“I’ve been quiet for days and I like talking about that trip. Let me tell some more. There’s a major road that runs literally across all of Europe through Turkey and into the Middle East. Trucks start in Sweden or Northern Germany and drive right across the whole continent in just a few days. On Monday they’re in Rotterdam and by the end of the week they’re on the Saudi border! Isn’t that romantic? It’s like the old pony express.
“Anyway, one of these castles was right off that road, just before the Jordanian border. We were there on New Year’s Eve and decided to stay because part of the place had been converted into a rest house. Nothing ritzy, but some rooms to sleep in and a restaurant. Ours looked out onto the road about half a mile away across the flat desert. We watched the sun go down and those trailer trucks, barreling on toward the border in big flying puffs of smoke and sand. Where were they going? Jordan? Saudi Arabia? Iraq? Every one of those countries was nearby. Someone at the castle told us that when the Iran-Iraq war was on, a truck a minute passed down the road carrying supplies to Iraq. One a minute, Harry!
“About seven o’clock that night, we began to smell these delicious waves of lamb grilling out behind the restaurant. Both my sister and I had our boyfriends with us out there in the Saruvian desert … . We felt so adventurous and sexy. The rest house was comfortable, we’d seen some real wonders that day … . God, we were happy.
“Things smelled so good, we went right down to eat. There was no one else in the restaurant but us, but the interesting thing was this one big table over in the corner of the room. It was set for about twenty people, but set so that all the chairs and settings were on the same side of the table—no one would face anyone else. Odd, huh? But even odder was that at every place there was an unopened quart bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch. A whole bottle!”
“But Saru’s Muslim. Where’d the booze come from?”
She gave my hand a small squeeze. “I’ll tell you. Could I have another drink of water, please?”
I took the plastic bottle with the integrated straw off the bedside table and held it to her mouth. Her swollen, cut lips sucked hard. Pimps punish whores by slicing their lips with a knife because lips don’t heal in a smooth line; mouths are ruined by the cut. Claire’s mouth was ruined. She pulled her head back to signal she’d had enough water.
“The guy who ran the restaurant came over to our table to see if everything was okay. I asked about the bottles and he looked at his watch. ‘The drivers will be here soon. Tonight they celebrate. The whiskey is theirs.’
“That’s all he’d say, but fifteen minutes later, we heard the first truck coming. What a sound! Slammy went to the window and called us over. They were rendezvousing for their New Year’s party out there in the middle of the desert!
“The four of us stood at the window letting our dinner get cold watching them pull into the big lot in front of the place. There were real Nordic blondes, redheads, Arabs wearing kaffiyehs and thick black moustaches. But you know what they all had in common, Harry? They were the fiercest-looking bunch of men I have ever seen in my life. No matter what they were wearing or what color they were, they all looked like gladiators.”
“Wait a minute.” I started up from my seat, undoing my hand from Claire’s before she could say anything. I had to get out of the room as fast as I could. I
was afraid I’d throw up. I was scared shitless.
“Harry, what’s the matter?”
Her question raced me to the door.
Outside, a startled nurse glared accusingly as I ran for the drinking fountain down the hall. The water was so cold it stung my lips. I slurped it down as fast as I could. Then I put my hand in and smeared it across my face, neck, the back of my neck.
I was there. I climbed out of one of those trucks. I saw this woman looking at me out of a window and wondered if I’d get to fuck her that night. Why not? New Year’s Eve everybody got loose.
We’d been on the road forty hours. There’d been trouble and delays the whole trip. We were running a half day late. I remembered everything: the acid stale smell of the cigarette the Bulgarian border guard was smoking as he looked over our papers; the ratcheting of bugs by the side of the road in Turkey when we stopped to piss; the warm sun on the back of my neck there after the cool in the truck.
I was this man. I remembered everything. His name was Heinrich Mis. I’d never seen him before in my life.
This … immersion happened once before with Venasque when the shaman was still alive. We were sitting in a diner in Silver Lake having breakfast when a man came in and sat down a few stools from us at the counter. Just a guy in overalls. Venasque and I were talking about something. When I looked up and saw the man, I … went away. Went away into his life and in an instant, knew everything that he was. Completely. His name was Randy. He was a union metal worker. He was a son of a bitch.
“Come. Come on. Come back!” Venasque, a hand on my arm, was calling me like he would a naughty puppy on the other side of the room. I looked at him flat stoned. He got me up and out of there and into the parking lot. Leaning on a white car. All the energy I had in the world was gone. When I came around, I looked at the old man. He was smiling.
“What the fuck was that?”
“Sometimes you meet up with your future, Harry. Usually it’s a person, but sometimes it’s a place or a thing. What you gotta do now is figure out where that guy fits into yours. It could be very important.”
“But I was him, Venasque! I was him!”
“You are your future, Harry. It’s in you every minute you’re alive. You just saw part of it for the first time. Now figure out where that guy belongs in it.”
But I didn’t get a chance to do that because three days later Randy was dead: the first man ever killed on a Harry Radcliffe project. Fell off the top floor of the almost-completed Gröbchen Building in Pasadena.
Poor sweet Claire was very concerned when I returned to her room a few minutes later, looking ill. I said it must have been something I ate for lunch but she wasn’t fooled.
“Don’t lie, Harry. Is it because of how I look?”
“No, honey, I saw a lot worse in Vietnam. No, it was … How much energy do you have? Tell the truth.”
Her smile, what there was of it, calmed me. “It doesn’t take energy to listen. Are you finally going to reveal one of the Radcliffe secrets?”
“Sort of. Remember what you were talking about before, that rest house in Saru? I have to tell you this. It’s disturbing, but I must tell you.”
Her good hand lay palm down at her side. She turned it over and wiggled the fingers. “Hold my hand and tell me. But I want to say something first: I talk to you all the time when you’re not here. We have long conversations. I know you better than you think, Harry. We can have a happy ending if you want. I just don’t know if you want happy endings. Artists are kids—they only want to eat junk food. Candy bars of muddle and unhappiness. They give you a charge, but only for a few minutes.
“I don’t know if you love your silly confused life now or what. I haven’t been able to figure that part out yet.” She winked. “But I will—in our next conversation when you aren’t here. Now, what were you going to say?”
“Do you love me?” I asked, trying to sound naughty and cute. But our eyes locked and her answer came out serious as religion.
“More than you know. More than you deserve.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing these days. You’re right, but I can’t imagine you and I undone.”
“Well, then what about you and Fanny?”
“When I was a kid, my mother and I were walking down the street one day and saw two dogs screwing. They were really going at it. I knew what was up, but naturally asked Mom what they were doing, just to hear her answer. She said, ‘The dog underneath is hurt. The one on top is pushing it to the hospital.’”
“What does that have to do with my question?”
“‘Cause I don’t know whether you’re asking or telling me: You want the truth, or an answer to that?”
Claire was silent. “I don’t know. I keep wondering whether I love you for what you are, or what I think you could be with a little tinkering on my part. Maybe you’re simply not a monogamous person anymore. I am. What do I do then? I don’t want to hear that. Maybe you’ll want Fanny and me both for the rest of your life. Would she put up with that?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Not me. Let’s change the subject. My heart’s beginning to get a stomachache. Tell me what you were going to before. No wait a minute, there’s one last thing. I just remembered it. ‘The evil of another person can be averted: There is no escape from one’s own.’ Go on.”
“What do you mean? How does that apply? Are you saying I’m evil?”
“No. Take out the word ‘evil’ and put in ‘confusion.’ But maybe there is some evil in there too.” She closed her eyes.
CLAIRE’S REACTION TO MY story about being at the Saru rest house with her was disconcerting, to say the least: She smiled and patted her good hand on the bed as if applauding, because she’d experienced the same precognition or voodoo empathy or whateveryouwanttocallit throughout her life!
“Doesn’t it scare you?”
“It used to. Now it helps me see better. Like those people who die and come back. The one thing they have in common is, afterwards, none of them is afraid to die anymore because they’ve experienced what’s coming and it’s wonderful. When I’ve traveled out and seen myself from different perspectives, it makes me less afraid. And makes me feel better about myself generally. Compared to most people, I’m better. More thoughtful, kinder … things like that.
“I’m glad you were there, that you know what it was like. I remember that truck driver. He was so young. I could tell he was interested because he kept looking at me. But he’d never have done anything—he was so shy and unsure of himself. He sat with the drivers and drank his scotch, then put his head down on the table and passed out! He was still there when we went up to bed.”
BANANAS ARE THE ONLY democratic food: Everyone looks ridiculous eating them.
Bronze Sydney, Big Top, Dr. Bill Rosenberg from next door, and I were all standing around the ruin of my Santa Barbara house, eating bananas. I’d peeled Big Top’s for him.
“Bill, is that cologne you’re wearing or an insult?”
“You’re just pissed off because your house looks like a miniature golf course.”
“We’ve got insurance.”
Sydney looked at me surprised. “You’re not going to rebuild, are you?”
“Naah. You don’t want to live here anymore and neither do I.”
Bill ate the rest of his banana and threw the peel into what was once my garden. “But your apartment in L.A.’s screwed up too. Where are you going to live?” He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. “Are you two going to start living together again?”
As one, both Sydney and I said, “No!”
“Harry’s going to the Mideast for a few weeks.”
“I’ll decide what to do when I get back. I may not take a place at all if I accept the job. It’s a big project. They’ll need me on-site for a while.”
“What’s the deal?”
I finished my banana and threw the peel after the other. “A dog museum in Saru.”
Big Top wagged his tail slowly.
“A dog museum? You going to take the dog with you as technical advisor?” Bill snorted.
“Actually, he is going with me. They’re going to make a statue of him for the front gates.”
“How come?”
“Because he’s a verz.”
“That says a lot, Harry.”
Sydney looked at me. “Are you really going to take him?”
“Absolutely. He’s already had the necessary shots.”
“Who wants a dog museum in Saru? Isn’t that where they’re having all that trouble with the Muslim fundamentalists? There was a thing on TV the other night. I’d steer clear of that Casbah, Harry. Unless you want a rhino-horn scimitar up your ass.” Adventurous Bill took another banana from the bunch Sydney was holding and unpeeled it. We watched with interest.
It was going to be another beautiful day in Santa Barbara. The only thing marring it was the landscape immediately in front of us: the ex-Radcliffe homestead, which looked like ground zero after a slight nuclear attack.
Rosenberg called immediately after the earthquake to tell us there wasn’t much left of our house. This was the first time we’d been able to come up and survey the damage. Yet it wasn’t damage so much as total destruction and disappearance. In fact, I was shocked more by what wasn’t there than what was. Okay, sure, the earth opened its big mouth and swallowed up this and that, crunched other things in its teeth down to nothing. I could accept those rationalizations, but almost nothing was left on the site of what had once been a large and detailed house. Not that Harry Radcliffe designs were all meant to survive the full volume of God’s wrath, but this whole motherfucker was gone!
“It’s like a flying saucer came, vacuumed it up, and took it back to Saturn.”
“How do you feel, Harry?”
I looked at Sydney and squinted because the morning sun was directly over her shoulder. “Raped. It was a beautiful house. Fit perfectly on this hill and added nice human color to the landscape. I feel raped.” I wanted to say something more but my voice lost all of its appetite to talk.
Outside the Dog Museum Page 7