After Bathing at Baxters: Stories

by D. J. Taylor

  Of all the airport’s vagrant diversions, the sense he sometimes got of roaming along a corridor full of agreeable rest rooms, it was the hostesses’ lounge that Dorfman found most beguiling. No clue to this emerged from its decor or contents. It was a narrow, L-shaped room, staffed by a single tired barman, with a neon sign above the door saying NO PUBLIC ACCESS, though no one, Dorfman reflected, had ever questioned his presence there. The girls clustered at one end of the chromium-plated bar, chattering to each other and lighting their cigarettes off a patent cigarette lighter that the barman had left to one side of the soda pump, or occasionally sauntering over from their stools to jam dimes into the fake Wurlitzer jukebox. Hunched over his can of Budweiser in the far corner of the room, Dorfman had conducted an exhaustive survey of the hostesses. At an early stage he had divined that they weren’t local girls. They came from Eugene and San Francisco, spoke in unfamiliar West Coast accents and flicked mock insults like ‘airhead’ and ‘space cadet’. Dorfman, who had once read a disparaging newspaper article about social life in California, surmised that these were Valley girls. He regarded them warily but with fascination, like exotic migrant birds blown off course to land in some meagre downtown garden. Occasionally, in the intervals of complaining about the shortness of their shift-breaks or venturesome cabin staff, they made vague acknowledgments of Dorfman’s presence. ‘Hey Dorf!’ they would say. ‘Give us a cigarette will ya?’ Or ‘Hey Dorf! Next flight to Seattle leaves in an hour. Why don’t ya come with us hey?’ And Dorfman, conscious of the dense, ketchup-coloured stain spreading across his face, would smile his slow, mock-grimace, unsure if he was being made a fool of or not.

  There was a new girl in the hostesses’ lounge that night. Dorfman watched her out of the corner of one eye as he plundered complimentary pretzels out of the hospitality bowls or glanced out of the window at the big long-haul jets taxiing on tarmac strips near the perimeter fence: small, oriental-looking, with one of those level eyebrow-nudging fringes that made him think of The World of Suzi Wong. Hearing odd fragments of chatter skimming back over the bar, he noted her habit of sticking an interrogative ‘no?’ on the end of questions: We have time to go shopping in Dallas, no? That boyfriend of Laraine’s is bad news, no? Filipina? Thai? Dorfman couldn’t differentiate Eastern speech patterns. He surmised that she was a Filipina. Francine, who staffed affirmative action committees and stitched solidarity blankets for the street children of Third World dictatorships, disliked Asian women. ‘You’re not gonna believe this hon,’ she had told him, ‘but none of them have pussy hair. Can you imagine that?’ Dorfman, who had browsed his way around a certain school of pornography categorised by the hardcore stores as Asian Babes, wasn’t inclined to argue the point. Staring grimly down at his drink, the noise of a circling 747 suddenly drowning out the conversation and rattling the windows in their frames, Dorfman broke open a packet of Merits and started feeding them into his mouth. The Asian girl was smoking too, he registered, thin cigarettes like bird bones he had once seen on the beach at Nantucket. For a moment Dorfman thought about Mr Kopechnie and his fierce blue eyes, the stacks of inky proposal forms, the arc of Mr Kopechnie’s sprinkler which always drenched the calf of his pants however prudently he sauntered up the path. Then he dismissed the image from his mind. The barman was having a telephone conversation that could have been drugs. In fact, listening to the worried undertone, the precise situational details, Dorfman was sure it was drugs. Embarrassed, he stared stonily in front of him, the way he did when commanded to watch one of Francine’s public service channel docs on female circumcision in the Yemen or read a Newsweek article on testicular cancer. The girls were beginning to disappear now, gathering up their vanity bags and then cigarettes, peeling off in ones and twos to secret recesses in the drome where even Dorfman had never penetrated. He had a vision of himself, spectral and unseen, stalking the airport at night, prowling the deserted corridors, peeking into the empty franchise huts in the mall, listening at the door of the women’s comfort rooms where the only sound would be the noise of a dripping tap. Their leisure over, the girls grew sharp and professional once more, whipping up sagging lipsticked smiles with the aid of hand mirrors, pinning up drifts of vagrant hair. It was in this general redefinition of spirit and costume – like some medieval raiding party, he thought, easing on their hauberks and chain mail while pageboys scurried and the womenfolk gnawed their knuckles – that he got to meet the new hostess. ‘This is Dorf,’ one of the girls said, as Dorfman hovered halfway between his Jack Daniels and a three-quarters empty schooner of cashew nuts. ‘He hangs out here whenever he can get the old lady’s teeth out of his ass.’ And Dorfman smiled unreliably, not sure whether he desired this limelit introduction or whether anonymous skulking better suited a purpose about which he was still undecided. But the girl smiled back, bobbing her head so that the fringe, sweeping upward and then returning to its vantage point like a line of filings obeying the magnet’s call, assured Dorfman of the existence of about ninety dollars’ worth of designer haircare. ‘And do you work here Mr Dorfman?’ she asked. There were further gusts of merriment. ‘You wanna watch Dorf,’ her companion loudly advised. ‘Sure,’ someone else chimed in. ‘Fucks like a rattlesnake with a firehose dick.’ Head lowered, Dorfman watched them go, out through the white door, stout shoes clattering on the metal carpet (it was only in movies that hostesses got to wear high heels), not sure whether to be cheered by the intimacy of this kind of joshing or marvel at the weird, lopsided vision of himself that it conjured up. Dorfman the stud, Dorfman the terror of the boudoir. According to Francine. Dorfman had ‘a negative attitude to female sexuality’, whatever that meant. Alone in the silent room, the barman disappeared into some remote and unguessable closet, he cherished his glass while behind him the white fuselages bounced and shimmied into the darkling sky.

  Later Dorfman wandered back along passageways aflame with burning light to the car park. Around 2100 the local flights ended. The rest of the big coast-to-coast stopovers not expected until midnight, there was a lull in the drome’s activities, a fall in the pulse-rate. Deserted except for the odd scrubbing janitor, the franchise booths reared up at him, their swathes of pantsuits and denims frozen behind plate-glass security grilles. Someone had taped a sticker to the convertible’s rear window that said NUCLEAR WASTE – THIS STATE’S DISGRACE. Dorfman peeled it crossly away, sighing when the yellow paper stuck to his fingers. If there was one thing Dorfman hated more than kids it was bleeding heart Dudley Doright Democrats. He sometimes had visions of himself armed to the teeth with Uzis and Sten guns stalking the walls of a stockade housing drums of spent uranium rods and loosing off pot-shots at the seething longhairs thronging at the gate. As he swung out onto the freeway extension, the moon veered up suddenly from behind the distant control tower and he stared at it, baffled by the shafts of white, coruscating light. Book at Rockefeller Drive, the house was shrouded in darkness. Dorfman stowed the convertible carefully in the car-port and stumbled his way into the kitchen, where shiny milk cartons gleamed out of the murk and there was a smell of lavender water. Dorfman was used to these vagrant odours, by-products of Francine’s aromatherapy habit, rearing up unpredictably to confuse him: the gypsophilia on the stairwell, flurries of burnt almond wafting over the back porch. He fixed a mug of coffee and sat in a high-backed chair to drink it, thinking of the crowded runways, bright metal wings shearing through an opaque sky, the Asian hostess’s calm and welcoming smile.

  Dorfman collected model airplane kits: Wellington bombers, Messerschmidt MEI09s, Heinkel IIIs with cigar-shaped fuselages. The boxes lay piled up in the lean-to shed at the back of the house where Francine kept her stores of sourgrass pickle, discarded exercise bikes and noxious experiments of Mrs Fogelberg’s in see-thru carafes. Most evenings and nearly every weekend Dorfman spent a couple of hours in the lean-to, nostrils depressed against the overpowering reek of pickle and tiger balm lotion, streaking tiny tracks of glue onto aeliron hinges with a match head, painstakingl
y lowering into place the transparent covers of machine-gun turrets. Dried out and complete, markings and insignia patiently transferred, painted up according to approved box-lid colour schemes, they hung from ceiling wires or reposed in neat lines on Dorfman’s work table: a proud, gleaming squadron ready to scramble at a second’s notice and fly up menacingly on his behalf. There was family precedent for this hobby, and also for its historical focus. Old man Dorfman had flown Superfortresses out over Japan in the war. There was a picture of him hanging in the upstairs closet, in leather flying jacket, backed up against the hull of his plane, the Red Sox Express, next to the stencilled outline of a baseball pitcher. Staring at it, as he crouched balefully over the can, Dorfman felt only a vague, tremulous envy of the kind he experienced leafing through the mail order subscription copies of Aircrew, Windsock and Flight Monitor, the consciousness of an entire teeming universe out there beyond the horizon, distant yet beckoning, and eternally out of reach.

  Half-past seven the next morning found Dorfman in his lean-to, brooding over the construction of a Fiesler Storch, a weird kind of late-period Nazi scout plane, which for some reason had a blunt fuselage and the cockpit shifted way down near the wing-engine. Special care should be taken in the alignment of the tailplane, the instructions cautioned, and Dorfman, who had already spilled half a tube of glue over his grey handyman’s apron and lost a propellor blade somewhere in the floor’s inch-thick coating of sawdust, could believe it. Outside pale midsummer mist dispersed airily off the backyard lots and gardens. From the kitchen Dorfman could hear the brisk, purposeful sounds of Francine fixing herself a cup of acorn coffee or a bowl of hi-fibre wheaties. Dorfman, who had breakfasted an hour earlier, felt the three bratwurst sausages and their attendant garnish of mustard and corn-bread hang heavy on his stomach. From further away, but not that far, he could hear the ticka-ticka-ticka-thump of Enzo Manzoni, eldest son of the neighbouring Manzoni household – globular wops who ran a restaurant in town – listening to rap music. Dorfman’s brow creased over. Frowning at the twin sections of the Storch’s fuselage, gleaming up at him like the two halves of the cod steaks Francine sometimes grilled on Sunday nights, he used his free hand to stir the pile of proposal forms that lay on the chair. Not much of a harvest for a week’s hard calling, Dorfman had to admit. A woman out in the corn country wanting to insure her vacation. A gay couple in Sioux City enquiring about health insurance (it wasn’t even worth processing the forms, Dorfman knew). A few premium top-ups from previous clients who’d bought their wives jewellery or splashed out on a new car-port. That left Mr Kopechnie. Sometimes Dorfman wondered why he carried on visiting Mr Kopechnie, who at eighty-one must have been the worst risk for a life policy any ABO salesman had ever encountered, knowing all the while that the explanation had nothing to do with insurance. Like Dorfman’s old man, Mr Kopechnie was an airforce vet. Hell, the guy had flown Wildcats in the South Pacific, idled on the carrier foredecks waiting for the Kamikazes to come blazing out of the sun. Together they embarked on long, serious conversations about the way a B-25’s undercarriage retracted or the exact shade of paint you might colour the underside of a Mustang bent on a night mission. Dorfman had tried asking Mr Kopechnie about the Kamikaze attacks. ‘You mean they just … blew themselves away?’ ‘That’s right,’ Mr Kopechnie would nod. ‘Only took enough fuel for a one-way trip. This weren’t no baseball game.’ And Dorfman would bow his head, uncertain whether the figure of speech was a rebuke to one who had not experienced the tumult of the South Pacific or simply Mr Kopechme’s own awe at his spangled youth.

  Outside in the yard there was an anguished, turbulent commotion that sounded like someone who weighed a hundred and eighty pounds falling over a stack of empty kerosene cans. A bit later Francine’s mild, innocuous – but not for that reason any less infuriating – voice came quavering through the door. ‘You in there, hon?’ By way of an answer Dorfman shifted the alignment of his feet, the better to peer down at the tiny plastic homuncule wedged between his fingers, and stuck out his tongue. ‘Come on, hon.’ Francine’s voice came again, the half-coaxing, half-exasperated tone reminiscent, Dorfman realised with bitter disgust, of other, more intimate encounters. ‘What you doing in there?’ ‘Beating off,’ Dorfman mouthed noiselessly. Straightening up, he flicked the doorcatch with his thumb. ‘Heck is going on here?’ he enquired with what was meant to sound like belligerence but in fact ended up way down on the scale of craven timidity. Staring at Francine’s plump, guttering face, the features even at this hour giving the impression of melting away into her Eco-Freak sweatshirt, Dorfman was struck by how many times in their six-year relationship she had confronted him in this way, looming menacingly before him as he drowsed over late-night TV, pawing him awake from the airy valleys and deltas of the night to recount dreams about Charlie Manson and Sharon Tate. ‘Hey look,’ Francine said seriously. I have to talk to you OK?’ Bridling instinctively at the blank, serial killer’s stare, she went on: ‘About tonight, yeah? Only Mrs Fogelberg figured I might like to have supper after the class. Is that OK or do you want to think it over?’ Bending to dab a tiny fleck of flesh-coloured paint onto the homuncule’s upturned face, Dorfman thought about it. Francine having supper with fat klutz Fogelberg meant an extra-curricular trip to Mr Kopechnie. Or a visit to the airport. Or, if he kept himself to a pretty tight schedule during the rest of the day, a trip to Mr Kopechnie and a visit to the airport. Dorfman straightened up. The day was looking good. The day was looking shit-hot. ‘Could take in a burger at the drive-by,’ he said doubtfully. Francine gazed back, intent and solicitous. ‘Well if that’s what you want, hon. Else I could leave you something. You fancy some of Mrs Fogelberg’s home-made pastrami we had the other night? Or maybe I fix you some bean chowder?’ Dorfman shook his head. Looking down at the body of the German airman, thirty seconds later, he was alarmed to find that in his annoyance he had somehow managed to wrench the head clean away from the torso. Guilt flaring in his eyes, the gabble of Enzo Manzoni’s rap music pounding in his head, he bent reverently to repair the damage.

  Eleven hours later found Dorfman goading his convertible up the sharp incline that led to Mr Kopechnie’s bungalow, one among a plateau of retirement homes populated by potbellied ex-insurance salesmen and their loaf-haired wives. Weak early evening sun catching on the wing mirror flashed into his eye and made him jam the visor down hurriedly with his hand. It had been a bitch of a day. No, Dorfman corrected himself, a motherfucker of a day. First there’d been a flat tyre two miles outside of Hudsonville. The vacationing farmer’s wife had disappeared someplace leaving an idiot son who declined the pink proposal form Dorfman had tried to press upon him. The meeting with the gay couple in Sioux City – two leathery forty-year-olds with peg teeth and beaten-in faces, had turned into a funeral parlour nightmare of blood counts and haemoglobin deficiencies. Finally, something he’d had for lunch had disagreed with him and he’d spent twenty minutes with his pants round his ankles in a layby outside of Tidewater squirting ochre shit into a drainage ditch. As ever the sight of Mr Kopechnie’s front porch, gained after the usual clenched-teeth clanging of gears, had a sedative effect. There were times, Dorfman thought, when Mr Kopechnie’s bungalow, like the airport, had assumed the status of a fixed point in his, Dorfman’s, life. Other things might alter, as indeed they had continued to alter during the five and a half years Dorfman had paid calls in this part of town, but Mr Kopechnie’s front porch with its single parking space next to Mr Kopechnie’s venerable chevy, remained the same: sprinklers drenching the lush, virid lawn, the line of motionless cypresses, Mr Kopechnie’s dog comatose under a tree. Mr Kopechnie himself cross-legged in his garden chair with a copy of the Iowa Free Citizen stretched out over his lap. Watching the old guy lever himself out of his chair and come hastening lopsidedly over the grass – Mr Kopechnie had had a hip replacement three years back which imparted a queer circularity to his gait – Dorfman bent his head in what he supposed was a kind of respect. Mr Kopechnie, eight-two next
Fall, had seen it all: Capone, Prohibition, Hoover, the Old Deal, the New Deal, the Japs strafing Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt dying, and on into the monochrome hinterlands of e fifties: Monroe, ‘Nam, the Moon landings, Nixon, Reagan and the barbarities of the startling present. Jesus, the guy was a walking almanac of American history, a man who always remembered what he was doing at those significant moments in time, the day the big bomber headed east into the Nippon sun, the afternoon the presidential motorcade sped into Dallas. To Dorfman, who had tried self-laceratingly to determine what he had been doing when he heard the news about Lennon getting shot and narrowed it down to getting fired from a travelling salesman’s job in Albany or failing to make out with a girl called Cissie Matupelah, these were stern credentials. Still more awesome was the fact that, indubitably, Mr Kopechnie looked the part. Six foot tall and ramrod-straight, with white, side-styled hair, facial skin still holding up, and none of your Reagan-era vanity tucks and creases, he looked how Dorfman imagined an ageing rancher in a Gary Cooper movie ought to look: invincible, ironical, tough.