I almost laughed, and for the first time I wondered whether Tom Younger was much of a salesman.
The last property for sale belonged to Curtis Black who, coincidentally, lived year-round eight blocks west of ArtWorks. He was a man close to my age. He seldom used his house in the Handle. Unlike the other three, his place had been on the market for six months.
In Younger’s view, he was asking way too much.
It had been his father’s summer home until his father had died. The local people had liked the late Mel Black. These same local people clearly thought Curt was a faggot dickhead yuppie asshole. Younger never quite said that. He just very delicately inferred it.
Curt Black traded in grain options in the city and Tom reckoned he was less successful than he pretended to be. Either that, or he spooned most of his profits up his prissy little faggot dickhead yuppie asshole nose. Again this was hinted at with sledgehammer sensibility.
I was more than a little surprised that Younger made me privy to all this information and speculation.
But we men of the world like to stick together.
The photo of the Black interior showed a few pieces of very good but old and very neglected furniture. Younger hoped that eventually Curt would get smart, or else go broke, and the house would then sell for a fairer price.
I closed the folder and started the car.
Two miles beyond the last house in the Handle I passed yet another jet-ski sales and rental store. Just beyond that, the road separated from the lakefront and I turned left down an unmarked road, away from the lake.
Two miles beyond that turn, on a empty road that had dissolved into dirt track without my noticing, I found Sandy Weller’s huge, ugly, gone-to-seed but undeniably impressive Victorian house, an ornate example of bygone architecture, all the more striking for being miles from anything else manmade.
I parked the car outside and sat for a moment.
On a porch swing, on a porch that needed painting, an athletically short-haired woman in a loose white T-shirt and black spandex leggings swung listlessly, pushing herself with one black Reebok-clad foot.
A ground floor window was open and music was playing.
Lyle Lovett had been to Memphis.
I had been there also.
In my car, Emmylou Harris was singing, and I waited politely until she was finished.
She was going back to the Crescent City.
I hadn’t been there.
But I still thought Emmylou was perhaps luckier than Lyle.
Everyone was getting to travel nowadays.
* * *
Sandy Weller was a beautiful woman from a distance and equally striking up close. Her legs were shaped and tan where her leggings ended and her eyes were a dark brown. Her watch was a man’s antique model, self-winding, and hanging loosely on her thin dark wrist. There was a small tattoo of a winged horse on the inside of her other wrist.
She waved a tall drink at me as I approached her.
“Hi,” she said, “you have to be the guy that fat, slimy fuck Tom Younger said was coming.”
“I am that very guy.”
“Did Tom call me a bitch?”
“I’m afraid he did.”
“If I had a dollar for every time his pudgy hand landed on my ass, I’d never need to rent rooms in this place.”
“He seems all right,” I remarked mildly.
“If I let him actually do what he keeps on pretending he’d like to do he’d probably shit himself.”
“You know his wife.” I was feeling a little lost.
“Yup. Mar’s a real nice lady. She’s a very good realtor too. Easily the brains of the team. Tom couldn’t get himself a fuck in a whorehouse.”
I had to laugh.
She smiled back. “You’re laughing at me, aren’t you, you citified prick? Oh I know. I’m one of these rural characters you hear about. You swear there’s just no way we can really exist. The one-time homecoming queen, whose life got weird, and she ends up living in the ass end of nowheresville, drinking gin and renting out rooms in her big stupid empty house to people who have to be truly fucking lost to be here in the first place, and all the time being foul-mouthed and quaint and too fucking colorful for words.” She took a deep breath.
I thought that she believed in everything she said, but that she also saw the funny side of everything she said. She had hoped to shock me a little. Now she saw she wasn’t going to.
I liked her a lot already.
“You do look like you could have been a homecoming queen.”
“Spare me,” she said. “So. Will you be joining me in an aperitif on the ver-annn-duh?” With the last word her voice turned all Southern and teasing.
“That would be nice.” I spoke politely, a little overwhelmed.
“For a moment I thought you’d say something coy about it being a little early in the day for you.”
“No. A drink sounds fine,” I said. “Do you like Lyle Lovett?”
“I do,” she smiled wickedly. “Very much.”
“He’s no longer a married man, I understand.”
“She was damn lucky to have him. If he came near here, he’d never get away.”
I surely believed her.
I followed Sandy Weller through the main floor of the house to the kitchen. The rooms were white and sparsely furnished. Her windows were all wide open behind ivory lace curtains that shimmered, filtering the fading light into white layers formed through a prism of summer dust.
The memory of a breeze caught tree branches hanging close to the house, grass grown long in the back yard, and wind chimes shaped like jumping horses that tinkled above the back porch.
In the kitchen, she pulled open the door of the oven and looked dubiously in. Slightly reassured, she added two thick fingers of Gordon’s gin to her glass and a splash of diet tonic.
I asked for red wine. She didn’t have any. She produced a tall bottle of Stroh’s beer from the back of the fridge and I said that would be fine.
She spoke as she twisted open the top. “Don’t even think about saying you don’t like lasagna.”
“I won’t,” I said, “I do like lasagna.”
“This is the best thing I make.” She admitted. “I can’t really cook for shit.”
“Tom Younger didn’t tell me too much about the arrangements.”
“I rent out rooms. If I feel like it you get dinner, but you get a greasy cooked breakfast either way. There is a hotel in town but it’s a boring place where they have non-smoking rooms and an all-you-can-eat salad bar and neat stuff like that. You get a dry muffin that’ll block your anal sphincter and a cup of truly shitty coffee for breakfast there. I charge a lot less than they do, but you drive a fancy car so you probably don’t give a fuck about that part, and I do exude a lot more class and charm. They have big TVs in the rooms there. But I’ve rented a movie, and after dinner you can sit in your room and be an unsociable prick, or you can stay down here and watch it with me. I might even let you cuddle up if you’re especially good.”
“What’s the movie?”
“Short Cuts.”
“With Lyle Lovett.”
“You’ve got it. I was just getting myself in the mood when you got here. If I start drooling, for fuck’s sake wipe me up.”
“That’s a lovely image. Please tell me why I’m staying here.”
“Shitloads of ambiance,” she answered me quickly. “And I’m much better looking than the girl at the front desk of the hotel, even if she is younger. Did I mention fresh ground Starbucks coffee at breakfast time?”
“Ah,” I said, “that must be it.”
We sipped our drinks on the porch as Lyle sang, doubtless unaware of the effect he was having on Sandy.
She talked about herself. She was single. She always had been. For some reason that surp
rised me. She noted my surprise.
“You pictured me in the gold digger mold I bet?” She smiled. “Jumping from worn out husband to husband? Gathering all them big divorce settlements?” She laughed out loud. “Nope. Sorry to disappoint. It never happened that way. I’ve lived here for a while now. This was my family’s place. My dad left us when I was young. I went to a big college in the east after graduating high school. I was a real star in high school, track star, wiggling my little ass in a short skirt at football games, and then I went on to become pretty much a nobody at college. It took me a long while to adjust to that. I came home soon after college. Right after that my mom died. That was a horrible time. I was young, only four, when my Dad left. Losing Mom was much harder. It’s twelve years now but it still feels like her place to me sometimes. Like she’s waiting round a corner for me. Picking up after me. I’ve been hammered sometimes. Real late at night. Can’t find a bra I swear I left on the floor. I swear she’s there. And she picked it up and threw it in the hamper behind the bathroom door just like she always did when I was a kid. That’s a really strange feeling. Haunted by a neatnik ghost for Christ’s sake. Your folks still alive?”
I told her my mother was still alive, that my father was dead. She nodded sympathetically at that. I told her that I seldom saw my mother, that I went home only rarely, and she seemed to understand all about love and distance.
We stood in the kitchen and talked for a while. She would interrupt to look in the oven, answer the phone just once, and add some diet tonic to her glass.
When dinner was ready, we took our plates out to the front porch and ate lasagna and garlic bread and chocolate flavored frozen yogurt in big plastic bowls and watched the sun sink behind the woods on the other side of the dirt track that was her private road. She hadn’t played anything after Lyle Lovett. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to break the mood.
She made a nasty face as she dug into her frozen yogurt.
“Only a moron could confuse this shit for ice cream,” she said, “but it’s tolerable and you don’t get fat eating it.”
She didn’t look in eminent danger of getting fat. I told her so.
She snorted. “I eat like a goddam bird most of the time, and teach aerobics classes in town five days a week,” she said. “And with any luck I might just get to be rich and famous any day now.”
She explained. “I got the aerobics job after the first teacher, who was a purebred cunt ten years younger than me, and too thin for fucking words, got herself married and pregnant and left to be the, now how the fuck did she put it, the ‘primary childcare provider’ for the fat little porker she and her asswipe husband created.” I tried not to smile. “I sound like a real shit, don’t I? She really didn’t want me to get her job. She wanted it held open for a year or so until young Tristan, I kid you not, got older and she could return. But I wanted that job and I got it.” She grew reflective. “The first thing I wanted real badly for a while. Even though I had no goddam experience, beyond attending the silly bitch’s class, which I hate to admit was a pretty good class. So anyway.” She took a deep breath. She clearly loved to shock and talk. “I started to teach. And I liked it a lot. And I got to be pretty good. I do mostly step stuff, and the ladies, we get a few guys but not many, they like me. I think they do. They better. The fat slugs. Maybe. Maybe not. Where was I? So anyway, more ladies sign up, including this one ginormous blimp of a chick who shows up, sweats like a pregnant sow, gets herself into Weight Watchers at the same time, and transforms herself into a fucking stick insect in nine short months. And her delighted husband, who’s now porking her again, and saving himself a fortune on hookers, is a video director, and he rewards me with a video shoot for an aerobics video. So it’s shot, and edited, and all that technical and financial stuff and he’s right now off looking for whatever you’re supposed to look for, backers or something, to make us both a veritable shitload of money. And if everything goes right I’ll be the next Kathy Smith, and you won’t be able to turn around in Blockbuster without seeing my skinny well-toned ass staring you in the face.”
Kathy Smith? I must have looked blank.
“Oh never mind,” she said. “It’s a good thing. Trust me.”
After we had eaten, the rural night had pulled itself across the house and the road and the yard and the woods like a blanket. The last of the summer’s insects finally drove us indoors. I had offered to help with the dishes.
“Don’t be a cretin,” she said. “You’re being charged for this. You’re a guest here, remember?”
I asked her, “Well? Which parts am I paying for, exactly?”
She replied, “Does it really matter?”
I said no, it truthfully didn’t.
After that exchange, we settled down to watch Lyle and the rest of a large cast in a very good if very long movie. We ate popcorn and didn’t cuddle, after which I said goodnight, and from the couch she too said goodnight and offered hazy directions to my room and the bathroom, which was next to my room, and which were both on the second floor.
I walked out to the car to get my bag and the laptop from the trunk. On an impulse I speed-dialed Patricia at home. The phone rang twice before the machine kicked in. Two rings meant there were other messages. I could have retrieved them. But I didn’t.
When the recording stopped I spoke. I said hi. I said I would call in a few days. I said I was okay. I said I missed her. I said goodbye.
In the enveloping blackness I lay on my bed and struggled to fall asleep. I generally sleep very well. It isn’t usually a problem.
Waiting for my eyes to find a shape to focus on, I began to question the sense of this trip. Was I wasting my time following a near stranger who didn’t want to be followed? It wasn’t any kind of great mystery. He was stone-dead in a ditch somewhere. I had no authorization. If I found him, then what? I could call his family and tell them something that, in their hearts, they must surely already know. I could call a woman at the British Consulate and she could close a minor file, complete some piece of insubstantial paperwork, and move quietly on.
I could stop pretending that this was all because of Keith Pringle.
Because it wasn’t for Keith.
It was for me.
It began the day I read about him.
No it didn’t. That too was a lie.
My sad essence: I was a hapless straight man in a pampered, compartmentalized joke of an existence that skirted the norms of everyday life. I made little jokes and displayed impeccable manners and looked earnestly concerned when I had to. I generated a paper trail of words and money and investments and business dealings. But that was all. There was little of flesh and blood and mind and matter behind these superficially impressive numbers at the bottom of corporate columns, in business reports, a mention occasionally to be found near the foot of the city society pages.
I had never killed. I had never knowingly cheated anyone. I had never told a woman that I loved her. Or a man. I had never said the things I truly believed because I had never believed enough in anything of any importance, believed enough in it to shout it out impetuously, and to then be damned and ridiculed in the aftermath.
I had tinkered and fine-tuned and finessed my way into a gray-hued demimonde of conformity and compliance dressed up as mobility and a modest competence. I had taken no chances. Except with money, but it was money I had never honestly earned.
And that was me in my sad essence.
My only possible gift was the ability to assess my flaws perfectly.
So now I was taking a little leave from the ease and the smug innocence. Coming up for air. Seeking after some purpose. And if I couldn’t quite summon the gusto to grab it with both hands, I could at least view it from a safe distance.
It wasn’t to be a purpose especially romantic or dangerous. I wasn’t a lover or a detective. You would have to care a great deal more deeply about life than I clearly d
id for that kind of sacrificial derring-do to be possible.
It would be, at best, a narrow victory, a marginal yearning, a brief respite. A barely perceptible thaw in the emotional permafrost.
I did eventually fall asleep.
And I woke much later. Slightly confused. The dark was impenetrable, defying the usual modes of time-place calculation. I fumbled for my watch before I felt Sandy’s hand take mine. And I sensed rather than saw her, that she was naked, standing over me, and smiling. I felt sure she was smiling.
“Don’t you dare say a single word,” she whispered in my ear.
I didn’t.
She pulled the sheet back and climbed in beside me. She smelt a little of soap and gin and garlic.
Her hand slid between my legs, and in an unbelievably short time I was snugly encased in a condom.
“I might be a craven slut but I’m not suicidal,” she said, as she climbed on top of me.
I lay there afterward as she kissed me once and got up to leave.
“You won’t get all romantic on me will you?” She asked in a girlish voice.
I promised her I wouldn’t.
She bent over me. “I’m a damn fine lay,” she said with a laugh. Then she found a piece of flesh on the inside of my thigh and squeezed it between two fingernails. “Admit it.”
I admitted it between yelps.
“It was that goddam Lyle. He made me do it,” she said. As she opened the bedroom door a dim light from the hallway showed the lithe outline of her body.
“In the future, I’m only going to fuck men with bakers’ hats on,” she said.
The door closed gently and her feet padded softly across the bare wood floor outside my room.
Then it was quiet and I slept once again. This time until the early morning.
NINE
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