by Farris, John
"Both cheekbones, a couple of subcondylar fractures. The chin is shattered, and the bone between the eye sockets is fractured. I'll probably want to remove the back wall of the frontal sinus. That'll allow the brain to fill the cavity and prevent mucoceles formation. What that is—"
"Potentially fatal abscess. I've read Grabb and Smith."
"Oh, you have an M.D.? I didn't know."
"Never finished school. What about the nose?"
Langford was a large, ungainly man with a bass voice so low it tended to rumble. When he wasn't piecing bones back together he sang with a well-known barbershop quartet.
"Not much to work with, I'm afraid. We're looking at three to four months. I'll do a cantilevered nasal-dorsal rib graft with an expanded forehead flap. Silicone bag, hundred-cc device, say about ten fills altogether. You follow?"
"Yes."
"It'll be a work of art. But we don't know exactly what you looked like before. If you could think of an old girlfriend who might have a snapshot or two—"
"Everything went down with the Dragonfly. Addresses, phone numbers."
"Damn shame. You still don't remember how it happened?"
"Maybe it'll come back to me, one day. I'd at least like to know—"
Langford respected his silence for a few moments, then murmured, "About the girl? What a tragedy."
Joe opened his suppurating eyes, looking up from the examination table. His mourning contained, his depression intact. "Her body came in with the tide, right… to the mouth of the harbor at Bourg. I didn't know what to say... to her family. I don't know if Yvonne was with me on the Dragonfly. But it wasn't... like that. I mean, she was a kid. I was sending her to university in Paris."
"Joe, I'm going to crank up the team and we'll get started in an hour. Once we've got the microcompression plates screwed in you should be able to see an oral surgeon. Like I said, four months, you'll be as good as new."
The patients at McCarter Langford usually didn't socialize. A good many of them were celebrities who didn't want it known they were there, jacking up their faces to prolong careers before the unforgiving cameras. Joe passed the time while his nose was being rebuilt speed-reading by day on his balcony when the light was good, exercising in the well-equipped gym, and watching television at night, suffering from insomnia as he was weaned from medication. Late-night channel-surfing, trying to find something that would engage the mind, if not his blunted emotions.
Quick flicks of the remote control: antique movies with leading men in the style of their day, trim little mustaches, hair glossed hard as a turtle's shell. Then pale, beefy Mae West—if sex were food, she'd be a bowl of three-alarm chili. Blink. A preacher with a full head of glittery paralyzed hair, kissing ass for Jesus, and blink—a stand-up comedienne complaining about her bad sex life. He'd been better entertained by Rorschach blots. Blink-blink, semi-porn women wrestlers who looked like the photos in every truck driver's wallet were softening each other up with body slams. Commercial. They were selling kitchen knives that would cut through the Koh-i-noor diamond. A rerun game show featuring heavily tanned bimbos of both sexes. Larry King, and an actor who used to be big in the movies. He was on TV now, his show probably not doing so good in the ratings. He was heftier, with sober gray in his mustache, wisecracking as if his heart could break, wearing the albatross of waning celebrity like a farm dog wearing the chicken it killed on a string around its neck. Knowing—as they all must know, sooner or later—how easily they could be banished: they were all lighter than air, thinner than ghosts, no more substantial than figments of the public's imagination. It was what killed them all, in the end. The public was fickle, and easily bored.
"Do you know what TELEVISION is?" the frail but still imperious voice asked him. "Television is MOTHER, with electronic tits."
Joe turned his head toward the partially opened door of his suite. He would have smiled, but his face still felt stiff from the shrinkage of a scar on his upper lip and another at one corner of his mouth.
"So I guess you need mothering tonight," Lark Worship said. "Turn that damn thing OFF and invite me in."
Joe muted the sound on the TV instead and got up from the sofa in the suite's sitting room. "How are you tonight, Lark?"
"Perishing for a cigarette," she complained, coming across the Aubusson carpet with her four-footed walker, gold slippers on her child-sized feet. They matched the gold cloth of her turban and the pendant on the gold chain she wore on the outside of her batik sari. "Of course that isn't ALLOWED around here. You have to be devious as hell to cop a smoke. Your AMARYLLIS are wilting."
"Sorry about that," Joe said, glancing at the vase of flowers on the round library table in the center of the room. "How about a drink?"
"Suds, if you've got any."
"Carlsberg?"
"Dandy." She abandoned her walker and lowered herself with suspenseful slowness to one of the matched pair of Regency sofas. Joe went behind the bar to open the refrigerator. He poured beer for both of them. Lark Worship took her stemmed glass with a little grateful nod. Her bones were osteoporetic and without the walker to lean on she would bend almost double in no time. But her hands, with a fine, nearly translucent pallor like porcelain, didn't tremble. She was past eighty years of age, so the wrinkles were there, but looking at her in the soft cream light of a single lamp behind her right shoulder, he was reminded of that lovely, eerie face from the early thirties that he'd seen from time to time in the late hours on AMC and TNT: the narcotic tenderness of eye and the understated stoicism of a waif, the pale but still luminous tone of a slightly suffocated jonquil.
She watched him as he watered the amaryllis with what was left in a bottle of Evian.
"You could use a haircut."
"I know."
"But your Z-plasty has been a real success. I'm DYING to know how you turn out. You a rich kid, Joe? Have to be, to afford this place week after week. I'm doing all right, myself. My third, and thank God my LAST husband, was a banker. One of his ruling passions was telephone bonds. The other, I belatedly learned, was pederasty." She gave it two beats, then said, "Unfortunately my UNERRING artistic judgment never carried over into my personal life. Love, Joe. By the time we're smart enough to figure out what love is all about, we're too feeble to protest what it's DONE to us."
Joe nodded appreciatively.
Lark Worship looked at the books piled on the floor beside his sofa. Most of them were medical texts. "Do you actually READ all these?"
"I'm afraid so"
"Not a doctor yourself, are you?"
"I had two years of medical school at UCLA. Didn't stay the course."
"Oh. Why NOT?"
"I found something else that interested me more."
"Boats?" she said, looking across the room at the drafting table he'd set up, the sketches that were the bare beginning of a new Dragonfly.
"And the women who bought the boats for me." He didn't mind talking this way to Lark Worship. He felt safe from her, from everyone, behind the healing, tightening skin of his not quite familiar face-inprogress. And he enjoyed her reactions as she played to him like a debutante.
"You're a gigolo!" She paused to savor the revelation.Joe knew a few things about the acting game, and he especially liked her pauses. Her timing was still impeccable, although she probably hadn't acted professionally for twenty years. "I suppose you don't go in for older women," she said, with a little hopeful smile that was delicious malarkey.
"They're usually the ones who have the money."
"God, but you remind me of Kyle! You wouldn't know about Kyle. He's not EVEN in my autobiography. Kyle belonged to the Soloflex generation of young men: Day-Glo deltoids, HAIR too blond for his eyebrows. He was gorgeous, semitalented, fun to fuck, and as shallow as the cat's saucer."
Lark Worship laughed, mildly at first, then with enough bawdy energy to cause some beer to slop from her glass onto her sari. She didn't notice.
"Come sit here beside me, Joe. I promise I WON'T fibrillate. Tell me how you
hook the big ones."
During the weeks before his recovery was completed, Joe spent a good part of his free time in the evenings with the actress, who, like many in her profession, talked a lot about herself. Lark Worship was as salty as old pork, and her vanity had more miles on it than a Sunday-school bus. But she also was good at listening, analyzing, absorbing character and exploring, often with great accuracy, the labyrinth of a complicated psyche.
"What happened after your mother abandoned you, darling?"
"I was a ward of Maricopa County, Arizona. They put me in a foster home until they could find—her. But they never did. She left the car by the side of the road in a place called Buckeye, which was forty miles north of Gila Bend. Nobody ever knew where she went from there. Probably she caught a ride. I had pictures of her, of course, snapshots, in my footlocker. They weren't any help."
"Did you EVER think of locking for her yourself?"
"No. She got good and lost, and she wanted to stay lost."
"MY mother was a real stinker. Religious to a fault. She would NOT allow me to tap-dance. I bluffed my way onto the Lot and lied about my age, and signed with Metro when I was sixteen. The Lot became my home. I made THIRTEEN pictures in three years. That's how you learned. But your fate was decided by the fan mail you received. I wore my fingers down to the second knuckles writing fan letters to myself, hired other girls at fifteen cents an hour to write MORE letters, sent them off in cartons to be mailed from different parts of the country. I was given better parts in bigger pictures. Occasionally a director would be assigned who gave a damn. The first one who gave a damn about me, I MARRIED him. Directors had such panache in those days. Marty was a great philanderer, of course, but he told wonderful lies. I love an inventive lie. But stubborn lies, pathetic lies, pointless lies, all are little rotten toadstools of the mind."
Joe thought it was probably a line from one of her movies, like The Ushery Women. Nevertheless she had a point to make.
"I couldn't—I didn't—talk for a year after she left me. Obviously I was a mental case, but some people named Pachek took me in regardless. They'd never had children, but they were good parents. Vance Pachek had eighty-five acres of lettuce and made a good living most years. Vance believed in the therapy of hard work, and that's how I grew up, working hard on the ranch, going to Sunday school. Vance taught me to ride and read the greens at the public golf courses in Phoenix. Until I was almost thirteen not a day went by that I didn't think it was a mistake, that she was going to come back for me. Then I discovered girls. I mean, they discovered me. An Arizona State cheerleader seduced me when I was in the ninth grade, behind a pile of irrigation pipe way out in one of the fields. She was blond, a little bucktoothed, and I remember how red her face got, inches away from mine as she was going up and down on me like a monkey on a flagpole, how the sweat ran down her cheeks, how she dug into my shoulders when she came. I'd been scared silly when she took my pants down, almost paralyzed, but by the time it was over—I—it was a revelation. What's the buzzword nowadays? Epiphany. Around that time I stopped thinking about my mother. Completely. Just stopped. Until—"
"Until what, darling?" Lark Worship said, after he'd stared and flexed his hands and stalled.
"I was working on a project in northern California. This was right after I'd made my biggest—" He stalled again.
"Score?" she suggested. "Darling. I am far too old and have led MUCH too sinful a life to be judgmental."
Joe nodded. "Anyway, I was—going with a woman named Adrian. The family was old-money shipping in San Francisco, and she was a year or two away from menopause. Bored with her husband, disliked her children; she was hot for an adventure."
"I know too well."
"I had a treasure-hunt scenario worked out. Honduras. While I was getting Adrian interested in gold and emeralds off the Bahian Islands, she was trying to interest me in consciousness expansion. She'd been through Freudian analysis and flirted with wacko LSD and peyote-based cults, but—"
"There ought to be a penalty box for faddish people," Lark observed, blowing a cloud of smoke from her illicit cigarette toward the ceiling.
"When I met her, Adrian's latest thing was holotropic breathwork—therapy that utilized Eastern breathing techniques, percussive music and hypnosis. It was supposed to realize the benefits of LSD without the risk of frying your neural circuits."
"Rather dangerous for you to be hypnotized, given the circumstances."
"I knew that. I had . . . a lot of confidence in myself then. I felt in control of every situation, even group sessions like the ones Adrian talked me into attending. I was going along with the gag, you know, feeling... untouchable. I didn't realize what breathwork and even mild group hypnosis can accomplish in the right setting. You're mostly naked, body lightly oiled, and you're sitting in a circle with the other oiled bodies on a redwood deck under a starry sky with the eucalyptus swaying in an offshore breeze, waves crashing on the rocks, vapors from the hot tub keeping everybody warm and cozy. I know a lot more about the power of groups than I knew then, since I was, out of necessity, a dedicated loner. The group took over; all the constraints of consciousness faded. The screaming started. It seemed a natural, primitive, necessary thing. Others were screaming, screams of terror and guilt and grief. I screamed too. Such terrible things about my mother. All the little rotten toadstools of the subconscious were popping up and exploding. See, I never had the chance to know. Her. What she wanted. From me. What she expected. I felt like a raw, just-born thing, writhing on the deck, screaming pitifully but getting no answer."
After a long time Lark Worship put out her hand in a way that suggested she was breaking a bad spell.
"Later. . . Adrian took me to bed and fucked me like the cheerleader from Arizona State, pounding away as if she were doing CPR, desperate to bring me back to life, or something. I wasn't performing at all, and she couldn't—bring me back to the life I had lied about. I told her what I was up to. I'm not sure she was surprised, or shocked. She said she wanted to marry me anyway."
"I would've assumed that, had you not told me. Poor Adrian. She JUST didn't get it, did she?"
"No. She didn't get it."
"Well. I hear it's almost TIME for the champagne. You're clearing out of this place soon."
"Couple of days."
"What are you going to do then, Joe?"
He smiled; the unfamiliar stretching of the smile muscles hurt.
"You know. It's what they say about acting. Not enough to want it—you've got to need it."
"God bless," Lark Worship said.
Chapter Eight
Flora Birdsall was late leaving the office; after she stepped at the Tysons Corner shopping center to pick up a prescription and some dry cleaning, she pulled her Camry into the town-house driveway at seven-twenty. One of the Lillis twins from next door had left a pink Big Wheel on her flagstone walk. End of summer in northern Virginia. The sun was setting but the temperature had hit a muggy 94 and the heat of the day lingered: she could feel the hot slate flagstones through the thin soles of her office shoes as she walked up to the sentry-box-size porch.
The shoes came off first thing inside the door; Pumpkin, her declawed Himalayan, made passes at her toes as she hung up the dry cleaning in the entranceway closet. She took off her dark blue skirt and jacket and draped them over a ladder-back chair in the breakfast nook, paused to undo her bra and slipped it off under her blouse, took a seven-ounce Silver Bullet from the fridge and drank most of it while leaning against the counter between nook and kitchen. Pumpkin leaped up from the seat of a chair and posed beside the telephone console for the nightly replay. That got the Congo Greys going in their twin cages. Flora unbuttoned her blouse partway and went through the largely unconscious ritual of checking for lumps while she chatted with her birds. She belched mildly, feeling frumpy but contented, happy to be out of the pressure cooker on a Friday evening.
Then she checked her messages. Miller had called, from the Senate cloakroom and
not his office; they were putting in late hours on the bill he and Hamrick of Minnesota were trying to get through the Senate Finance Committee. He had, he confided, news about the divorce. Flora couldn't be sure from his harried tone of voice if it was good news or bad. Why bother to say anything until he was able to see her? I'm forty-nine, she thought. Fifty coming up—oh God—a week from Sunday, and I'm going to go crazy if this thing drags on much longer.
Mikki at the travel agency, confirming reservations to Bermuda for her birthday weekend. The cottage near the Elbow Beach Club belonged to a friend. Miller had never visited Bermuda. They traveled separately, they met in out-of-the-way, off-season places for a couple of days, sometimes for just a few hours.
Gabrielle at Cuts 'n' Curls, confirming tomorrow's appointment with Giles.
Would they be able to meet this weekend? Flora wondered. Eight days tomorrow since they'd last been together.
In her half-unbuttoned blouse and panty hose, Flora went to the fridge again for another Silver Bullet, ignoring the Weight Watchers' calorie chart magnetized to the door. Miller didn't mind if she was a little full-figured. He loved her eyes, her intellect. She knew how to take good care of him. He was a Bridge widower: Alicia was a slave to Master Points. The marriage had been over for years; all five children were grown. Why couldn't Alicia just let go? Southern women were so damned clinging and manipulative. It was bred in the bone.
A caller who hung up without comment.
Flora nursed her second and last beer of the evening, while watering her African violets in the greenhouse window over the kitchen sink. Pumpkin lazed against an ankle, then paused for a couple of bites of cat chow on his food-and-water caddy next to the laundry alcove.
Flora had no illusions about the secrecy quotient of her affair with Miller Harkness. She'd grown up with the Company. The Office of Security had had a year to pick up something: fact, rumor, it didn't matter to them. Her position with DS and T required the highest security clearance. The scrutiny of her behavior, her private life, didn't stop with fitness reviews, a yearly polygraphing, informal but de rigueur conversations with company shrinks. Her town house was swept every few months for bugs. In Pops's day the OS didn't bug Company personnel, but now she could never be sure. And how much of Official Washington knew about her love affair with a married senator? Probably, through mutual tact and watchfulness, they'd had better luck there.