“I don’t understand it,” Albert had told Dr. Rossetti.
“No one does,” the doctor admitted, shaking his dark, mournful head slowly. “Christ, Albert, we don’t even understand aspirin. How can we be expected to grasp acetophenazine maleate?”
“Her breasts have gotten larger.”
“A possible side effect.”
Albert smiled; the doctor misunderstood it and winked.
“No,” Albert said. “I was just thinking. In a sales meeting the other day... I sort of went blank. Then someone was tugging at my sleeve. They said that I repeated the words ‘motherboard of the mainframe’ a couple of dozen times, like a broken record.”
“That isn’t funny, Albert. It sounds like a symptom, if you want an off-the-cuff opinion.”
“Symptom of what?”
“I don’t know. Could be a form of Gilles de la Tourette’s syndrome. Who can say? It keeps up, you might be a candidate for haloperidol.”
“Well, sure, of course,” Albert said, his mind elsewhere.
“A sea of troubles,” Dr. Rossetti said, sighing massively. He slung his heavy arm around Albert’s shoulder. “Look, Albert. Why don’t you get Sylvia a nice little dog?”
“Dog?”
“Well, hell! Why not? Do you both good. You never know. A little thing like that might be the missing factor. A lapdog, cuddlesome. A cockapoo, say. One of those little crappy yappers who give you all their love.”
Albert stood bewildered before the big, jovial doctor.
Reading Albert’s confusion as skepticism, Dr. Rossetti said, “Jesus, Albert, chemistry isn’t everything. We’re flesh and blood, after all. We’re only human. The next logical step is commitment. That’s why I brought up the dog. A goddamned dog might just be the ticket. I’ve heard of stranger things.”
“No dog,” Albert said. “Sylvia hates dogs.”
The desk clerk was smiling and he wasn’t smiling. The smile was in the darkness behind his neutral eyes, not in his face. It was an unassailable smile. Albert, even so, was enraged by it, wherever it was. It was in the clerk’s shoulders, his hands, his fastidious movements behind the hotel desk. Albert felt stung by the clerk’s abstract smile. He thinks I’m a forty-nine-year-old man shacking up with a girl young enough to be my daughter, Albert thought.
In their room, Barbara took her clothes off immediately and went out on the private balcony that overlooked the desert. Albert sat on the bed, watching her move. She was doing a little dance step, a half-unconscious movement generated by a distant radio playing rock. Albert was still mad at the desk clerk. Impudence. As he approached fifty, he saw it everywhere. Barbara stopped her little hip-hiking movement and held her arms up to the black desert sky in a gesture that looked like both indecent exposure and worship.
“Is it a starry dynamo,” she said, “or just a pretty nonsense?”
“What?” Albert said.
She came back into the room, dancing again. The nipples of her breasts were stiff with chill. She stood in front of him, legs apart, hands on the bony shelves of her hips. “Ginsberg,” she said. She quoted, ‘“...hundreds of suitcases full of tragedy rocking back and forth waiting to be opened.’”
Albert gave her a wincing smile. “I’m sorry... who?"
“The old beatnik. Your generation, Albert. You ought to remember.”
She straddled his lap and forced him backward down on the bed. “Interface ports,” he said.
“You got it, handsome,” she said.
Later, Albert went into the bathroom and poured Scotch into two plastic cups. Barbara ran down the hall for ice, wrapped in a bed sheet. They sat together on the balcony and sipped their drinks. The stars in the jet-black sky were bright and steady. They made Albert think of a matrix of solder joints on the underside of a circuit board. He laughed a little, then said, “I’ve been thinking about eloping.”
“Eloping?”
“You know. Mexico. We talked about it.”
“Quaint,” she said, smiling into her drink.
“You’re making fun of me,” he said.
“No. It is quaint. Quaint things turn me on. Like going to a priest and saying padre. Or honeymoons. Words like spellbound and womanize. Gravy is quaint. Pizza. Sock hops and slumber parties. Athletic sweaters. Extramarital affairs. Communists. Vasectomies. The Sears catalog, the Royal Couple, a liberal education. I could go on and on.”
“You are really something,” Albert said.
Sometime before dawn Barbara whispered into Albert’s ear, “How do you think Tommy is going to take this? You and me, I mean.”
“Don’t make these cruel jokes, Barbara,” Albert said.
“Who says I’m joking? I think he should know all about us. I hate deception. It’s tacky.”
“I said. I said don’t.”
“Have it your way, Daddy,” she said. “But you should know something. Papa’s got a bigger crank than his bouncing baby boy, although the kid’s got more staying power. It evens out, I guess.”
He realized, then, that she was just teasing him. “You little brat,” he said, slapping her thigh gently.
Albert couldn’t sleep. He went into the bathroom and made himself another drink. He turned on the ceiling vent. He sat on the edge of the tub and listened to the fan’s weak hum. Then he went back into the bedroom.
Barbara was asleep. A shaft of light from the bathroom fell across her neck. Albert knelt beside the bed to kiss her and saw the quick pulse define the artery that ran along her narrow throat. It moved him, and he said her name. Her eyes opened wide. Her face looked very young and frightened. “I’ll go anywhere with you, Albert,” she said, her voice high and childlike. “I’ll do anything you want me to do.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe you will.”
A mass of hot, dry air had moved in from the desert. Tommy couldn’t sleep. He got out of bed and loaded Gaslight into the disk drive of his Mac. He began the interactive fiction after the fifth unsolved murder. Things were going badly for Scotland Yard. The press was relentlessly critical, and the Queen had called for an internal investigation. Jack the Ripper, whoever he was, had mocked the Yard by sending contemptuous letters to the Times. The letters were articulate, witty, and seemed to hold clues that tipped off his future plans. The story switched then, at Tommy’s bidding, to a rundown hotel room in Soho. A man and a woman were sitting on a rickety bed. “I knew the instant I saw you that you were not the commonplace slattern,” the man said, kissing the woman’s hand. While the man’s head was bent for the kiss, the woman looked at the ceiling and smiled. Tommy typed in the command for “pause” and asked the program to insert Jack the Ripper’s third identity, and to substitute him for the man on the bed. Jack the Ripper’s third identity was Dr. Florian Foxglove, respected surgeon. The man on the bed, tubby now and bald, reached into his coat pocket and removed a scalpel.
Sylvia came in carrying a glass of milk. “Oh, good,” she said. “I thought you were awake. This heat is terrible.” She was in her nightgown. “I couldn’t sleep, either.”
Tommy watched the Ripper cut a neat red smile in the woman’s throat, then switched off the machine. “Could I have some of that, Sylvia?” he asked.
Sylvia gave him the glass of milk and Tommy drained it. He wiped his mouth on his pajama sleeve and handed the glass back to his mother.
Sylvia touched his shoulder and squeezed. “I’m so glad you’re out of that hospital,” she said.
“So am I, Mom,” Tommy said. “Did I tell you about the fat guy in the bed next to mine?”
“Do you want some more milk, honey?” she said.
“Sure. But this humongous guy next to me, he died. He was a big fat slobbo, always working a crossword puzzle. He died while he was working on one, in fact.”
“Oh, no, Tommy, how awful for you,” she said, leaning down to kiss his hair.
“More like weird than awful. He was stuck on a word meaning ‘sudden reversal of polarity.’ I knew the answer but figured that
I’d already spoiled enough of his dumb puzzles by giving him answers. He died straining for the word. I heard his heart explode, Sylvia. It sounded like a wet fart, muffled under his blanket and all. It must have lasted about thirty seconds, fwuup. I mean, it was totally weird.”
Sylvia shuddered. “I wish you hadn’t seen such things, honey,” she said. Though she was pale, and there were dark hollows under her eyes, she was feeling much better. Dr. Rossetti’s latest prescription had worked wonders. Her sense of well-being was nearly constant now and could be depended on. The side effects were hardly noticeable. She didn’t care at all about the side effects. She was back on her feet and feeling good about things in general, and that was all that mattered. It didn’t even bother her that Albert had apparently left home for good. In fact, his unannounced departure made her feel lighthearted and giddy. This reaction puzzled her, but Dr. Rossetti’s wonderful chemicals wouldn’t let her puzzlement become unmanageable. The future looked bright.
She kissed Tommy’s hair again, loving its clean smell and springy strength. She had a wonderful son, a fine, intelligent, handsome son. “I’ll get us some more milk,” she whispered.
Tommy switched on his computer again. The surgeon, having completed his lethal stroke, held the scalpel gracefully out to one side, at arm’s length, the way a conductor of an orchestra would hold his baton to draw out and savor the last sweet outswelling of a symphony.
Romance : A Prose Villanelle
If this was not meant to be, then nothing was meant to be. Sometimes when two strangers meet they feel they’ve known each other forever. The tall man in cowboy regalia was such a person to Marianna. She quivered involuntarily, like the delicate needle of a compass, before the quiet magnetism of his masculine presence. A sleeping passion stirred restlessly in her neglected loins. Was he the man she’d envisioned years ago in the hazy longing of adolescent day-dreams—a vision dismissed a few years later as the pubescent fantasy of an imaginative child? More to the point, was he her type? But what was one’s “type”? Of this she had no idea. Years of carefully managed emotions had dulled her judgment in these matters. For to know one’s type is to know one’s needs. Marianna Kensington was a desert of unknown needs that any random flood might violate into bloom.
After years of indifferent love from a man she’d lost all respect for, Marianna had ventured west to begin her life anew. As she deplaned at the Albuquerque airport and entered the terminal, a chill of anticipation had made her shiver despite the horizon-warping heat of the southwestern desert. Though she was forty now, she had lost nothing of her superbly svelte yet roundly voluptuous figure, which her husband, Kenneth, had nagged her to conceal, even though he no longer responded to it. And conceal it she did—in bulky knit sweaters with high necks, in voluminous stretch pants designed to hide matronly thighs and backsides, and in unfashionable but “sensible” shoes with good supports. Kenneth wanted, above all, for Marianna to project the image of the efficient housewife, the dedicated mother, the resourceful community volunteer. It was important to his self-image that she be regarded as a paragon of domestic reliability and propriety. For her part, Marianna was compliant as potter’s clay. She had allowed Kenneth to mold her with his hectoring demands, making her fit each image he believed enhanced his career as deputy advisory to the assistant mayor.
She’d walked away from a twenty-year marriage without regret. The children were grown and gone. She still had time, she felt, to find out who Marianna Kensington was. Perhaps she was no one. How frightening! But how much more frightening to deceive yourself into thinking you were complete when in fact you were nothing but a blank page waiting to be filled in! The suburbs were crowded with safe and comfortable women who were essentially blank pages waiting for a violating pen. Silence was their chief enemy. For silence could let the inner emptiness rise to the surface, like a submerged but featureless continent. And so they filled each waking hour with gossip and chat, with shopping, and with the tedium of domestic chores. The resented demands of children were, in fact, a necessary barrier reef that prevented the intrusion of that dangerous silence. The famous “empty-nest syndrome” was but a high-toned euphemism that denoted the terrifying enemy, Silence, who, given a small opportunity, would enter the house and sit down like a bold intruder. The intruder smiles with his superior knowledge of the little dark mechanisms of your heart. Ignoring him, you pick up the latest Silhouette or Harlequin Romance and try to read, but the words blur together, passion links arms with despair—jealousy, anger, spite, kink up like a bicycle chain that throws itself loose from its sprocket and the whole enterprise coasts to a dismal stop halfway to nowhere. You skip ahead to the forlorn sobs of the heroine as the handsome but brutal horseman rips her blouse to the waist, or takes her roughly in an autumn copse, or more gently but with degrading insouciance in the elegantly appointed drawing room of his antebellum mansion. It doesn’t help. The silence you have contrived successfully all your life to hold at bay slips in between the lines of bloated prose, it invades each preposterous scene or trumped-up emotion, it collects in the gaps between chapters. And it is there, waiting for you at the end, in the gritty dead-white paper, rustling patiently with the last word.
“My name is Jeff Granger,” the tall cowboy said. “I’m foreman out at the Y Bar Y. You’ll be cooking for my crew.” She put down her valise and extended her hand. He took it in his and something like an electrical current passed between them in a hard, shocking vibration. She wondered if he felt it. It embarrassed her, and when he released her hand, a wave of dizziness almost overcame her. His hand had been hard and callused, its great strength had been apparent, and yet it had been gentle and warm. “Jorge Mendez here will be your assistant,” he continued, his voice edged now with a wariness and Marianna knew that he, too, had felt the vibrant current pass between them. A short heavyset man of mixed blood who had been standing behind Jeff and off to one side stepped forward holding his wide-brim straw hat in his brown hands. “Buenos dias, senora,” he said, with an almost courtly deference, but in his Indian-black eyes Marianna thought she saw a flicker of icy resentment.
Marianna had answered an ad that for some reason had been placed in the Boston Globe: “Wanted, Ranch Cook. Hard work. Fair pay. Some benefits. Healthiest life-style going.” Her marriage to Kenneth was finished as far as she was concerned. Kenneth had raged and threatened, but she had met this display with unruffled calm, and all his fury came to nothing, like a dry summer storm that begins with the promise of deluge but offers only a few strokes of lightning and an afternoon of darkened skies. When his rage turned to abject pleading, her cold resolve became colder and more resolute. She realized then that there had never been anything to love in this man. What she’d once believed was strength she now saw as headstrong infantile petulance. What she’d taken as love was only his bottomless need for constant reassurance and praise. What she once saw as his intelligent commitment to honorable ideals she now saw as commonplace ambition. In midlife she had been given the ability to see things for what they were. Her two children, Annie and Ken Junior, were away at college. There was no reason to stay and every reason to go. A ranch in New Mexico seemed as good a place as any to start a brand-new life. She climbed into Jeff Granger’s beat-up Ford Bronco with a clear sense of leaving her old life and starting her new one. Jeff knocked his dusty Stetson back on his head, revealing a rich shock of wavy chestnut hair, a few strands of which were pressed to his forehead with honest sweat. He smiled at her as she settled into the seat beside him, and Marianna’s heart suddenly felt too big for her chest.
If this was not meant to be, then nothing was meant to be. Sometimes when two strangers meet they feel they’ve known each other forever. Jeff Granger was such a man to Marianna. She quivered before the quiet magnetism of his masculine presence. A sleeping passion stirred restlessly in her neglected loins. Was he the man she’d envisioned years ago? More to the point, was he her type? What was one’s type? She had no idea. Years of careful emotions ha
d dulled her judgment. For to know one’s type is to know one’s needs. Marianna was a desert of unknown needs that any random flood might violate into bloom.
The ride out to the Y Bar Y was bone-jolting rough. Jeff drove with one careless hand on the wheel at high speed, heedless of the rutted road. Marianna held on to the door handle and more than once had to steady herself by grabbing his shoulder. “What’s the hurry?” she’d wanted to say, but didn’t. She was now an employee of a large cattle ranch and not in a position to criticize the foreman. In the back of the Bronco, Jorge Mendez dozed. Jeff played country and western tunes on the tape deck at high volume. It occurred to Marianna that this was a rude thing to do since it preempted any attempt at civil conversation. It was as if Jeff were saying, I don’t want to talk to you, what you have to say doesn’t interest me. She tried to shout a question about the countryside, but either he didn’t hear her or he pretended not to. He doesn’t approve of me, she thought. She concluded it had not been his idea to run the ad for a ranch cook in the Boston Globe. But if it hadn’t been Jeff’s idea, whose had it been? The question burned in her mind as the truck plummeted toward a mirage of outbuildings that seemed to float in a lake of heat.
When Jeff pulled the Bronco into the circular driveway in front of a huge ranch house—a magnificent structure of rough-hewn logs and fieldstone—he said, “Mrs. Kensington, I have to ask you something. Have you ever cooked for forty workingmen before?” She answered that she had, in fact, cooked for large groups of people on various occasions—church camp once and several times for her daughter’s Girl Scout troop. Then there were the political dinners Kenneth hosted.... Jeff Granger laughed abruptly. “This is not suburban Massachusetts, Mrs. Kensington,” he said. She didn’t care for his tone. Surely she had been mistaken about the “magnetic” attraction she had experienced back at the airport. It must have been the heat, the unfamiliar surroundings, the strain of travel, and her exaggerated sense of high expectations no doubt induced by fatigue. What a fool she’d been! A sudden deflation of spirit overwhelmed her. Perhaps she’d made a terrible mistake in coming here to this godforsaken place. What had made her think, after all, that her life as the accommodating wife of a minor political functionary was something to scorn? What had made her think that she was unusual, that she deserved something better than ninety percent of the women she knew? Why had she aspired to some lofty goal that even now she could not fully define? Jeff Granger had laughed at her, and now she laughed at herself. What had made her believe she had been given the ability to see things for what they were? She wanted to tell Jeff to turn the Bronco around, take her back to the airport. But then, where could she go? She’d burned her bridges rather thoroughly. Even if she had the capacity to humble herself before Kenneth, why should he take her back after the devastating things she’d said to him? In a cold, analytical way, she’d told him how she’d come to scorn him as a man, in his public life and in his private life as husband, father, and lover. “Christ, you even take an opinion poll in bed!” she’d told him. No, there was no way she could return to Kenneth. She’d take this job at the Y Bar Y and she’d succeed. If there was one virtue she possessed, it was determination. Even though Jeff Granger evidently thought very little of her, cooking for forty workingmen could not be all that different from cooking for a Girl Scout troop or for a house full of greedy politicos. It would be hard at first, even scary, but everything worthwhile in life required risk. Safety and comfort were highly overrated as far as Marianna was concerned.
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