Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  Of course, everybody bought everything through the mail now. You could furnish a house in three days if you spent enough time on the phone. And that's what she'd done, weeks and weeks ago, she'd said the previous night, after confessing that she'd closed on the house way back in July, when he was away on business, actually signed a mortgage agreement. When she was worried that she was getting sicker, but before things really started to get worse. And that was when he told her that he'd paid off the house, that Ted Fullman had taken care of everything. By five o'clock that same afternoon, she could consider the Vista del Muerte house and property paid for, forever and ever. She had actually clapped her hands and kissed him. "Oh, Charlie!" The only caveat, according to Ted, was that the property could not be transferred after the death of the surviving spouse to children or any other heirs, and your executors had to sell the property to a buyer previously approved by the Vista del Mar Admissions Committee. A nice little controlled-supply scam, but Ellie and Charlie were ahead on the demographics, Julia had pointed out. The great boomer bulge followed them; there'd be no shortage of potential buyers when the time came. Ellie had hugged him tearfully, pleased that he accepted the place, her decision, this course of action. "I knew this would be fine," she'd said in relief, "I knew."

  She was also, he knew, not saying anything about what she thought she remembered reading in their apartment, and the reason was simple. It was gone. As asked, Lionel had dropped Towers's report down the trash chute, telling no one, not even Mrs. Ravich when she returned the next day after her humiliating lipstick-and-nightgown episode, and so, when she could not find the document anywhere, not in the kitchen or the bedroom or Charlie's office, she'd begun to wonder if she'd made it up—fevered it into her pillsy imagination. This he'd surmised upon his return, because not only did she not say anything about the document, but she'd thrown away all her lovely sleeping aids. "I had a bit of drop-off while you were gone" was all that Ellie would tell him, adding only that Dr. Berger was surprised at the mixing and matching of medications to which she'd confessed. "I did get a bit confused about things, but Julia picked me up and took me to Dr. Berger's and I feel really rather good now."

  She looked good, too, sitting in the leather seat of the Lexus, her hair pulled back, a kiss of color on her mouth, eyes bright as she inspected the old maple trees. But a lot is going on in there, he told himself, not just happy excitement, but fear and self-doubt. "Perhaps dementia, certainly rising anxiety," Julia had reported to him when he called her from the plane. "What about that piece of paper she thinks she read?" Charlie had asked slyly. "Oh, I don't know, Dad," Julia had answered. "I was over there and looked for it but never found anything. The doctor says that if she was so anxious and possibly a little addicted to the sleeping pills and also perhaps having the first touch of Alzheimer's, then she might have been in a highly suggestible state. He's had patients see things on television and then swear it happened to them that same day." At age fifty-seven? Wasn't that just too young? "I asked him the same thing, Daddy." Julia had sighed bravely, the weight of daughterly responsibility all too clear. "The test results will be back in a few more days. She'll be okay for the short term. She just needs a great deal of reassurance." Reassurance. Yes. Hence the payoff by Ted Fullman, hence Charlie's willingness to be driven in a company car straight from JFK the afternoon before to the new house, where Ellie had been waiting.

  "Canada geese." Ellie pointed again as Charlie eased the car around the community lake. "They actually expanded what was a farmer's pond. They said that it used to get cold enough to skate over every winter. The farmer would measure the ice, and if it was three inches thick, then everybody could skate on it."

  She wants to be here, he told himself. She knows that if she becomes sicker they will take care of her—because he would not. Not really. Not with a full and easy heart, not with a company to run. She knows I'm just a selfish bastard, Charlie thought, so she's planned accordingly. Very wise, his wife. They'd seen the long-term-care facility, which appeared rather well staffed, and which included not just the acute-care ward, the beds and dining rooms and physical-therapy facilities, but an operating room. Why? he'd asked their guide, the Director of Admissions, a grayster with the soft, soap-clean pleasantness of a retired minister. The man had smiled euphemistically over his half-frames. Why an operating room? Why not? To nip out all the things old people sprouted, the moldy malignancies and ferny polyps and porridge lumps. To perform the colonoscopic cauterizations and Goodyear blimp angioplasties, to reset hips broken on winter ice, to yank up guts falling through hernias into the scrotum, to saw off the bunions of old ladies, to section bowels rotten with cancer, to spoon out the bacon grease clogging the carotid arteries. To keep the Vista del Muerte population alive, their annual fees rolling in.

  The entire development spread over some nine hundred acres, and Ellie was eager for him to see all of it. Already they'd inspected the Vista del Mar Community Hall, the business services center, the travel/insurance/brokerage/real-estate agency, the game room, the outdoor pool, the indoor pool, the basketball court, the twenty tennis courts, the three automatic bank machines, the homeowners' association offices. The common buildings, linked by useless picket fences, all smelled like new hotels. The staff wore green uniforms with VdM gold-monogrammed on the shirt breast, and they smiled easily and often, which suggested that they were well paid or terrorized by their superiors or both. The grounds crew seemed to number in the dozens, and everywhere was raking leaves, pruning trees, mulching garden beds. He let the car nose along softly. They passed from the golf course into one of the five residential clusters, and in this one, the oldest, or rather the first one sold out, the trees had started to fill in and the houses already were weathered. It occurred to him that the VdM executives probably tracked the geographical demographics of the place, making sure that not too many of the oldest residents clustered in one neighborhood or block, thus spreading the die-out rate through the whole facility. The elderly expired more often in the colder six months, the common flu knocking off a regular percentage, and so, he surmised, each spring the VdM management could look forward to new selling opportunities spread across their facility. Clever, he thought, somebody very clever put this whole place together.

  And how much would all of this cleverness cost him? The night before, he'd inspected the paperwork. He estimated two million dollars, when it was said and done. Two million, yes, sir. Thank you, Sir Henry, for you know not what you have done for me. The membership fee was two hundred and fifty thousand, the house was a million, the landscaping fifty thousand, the furniture—no antiques, either—would top out around two hundred thousand, the in-ground heated forty-foot pool ("Our own," Ellie said, "otherwise you won't do it.") would run about one hundred and fifty, including the decking, cabana, and below-ground pool-machinery room. She was already talking about a guest cottage and a tennis court. Julia loved tennis, played at Yale. He hadn't even asked yet about the property taxes, but figured forty or fifty thousand a year. Real money. But easy money, thanks to Sir Henry Lai and his mouthful of red vomit. Blessings on you, Chinky billionaire-sir. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for Vista del Muerte. I am a true bastard, he thought. Good for me.

  Was he free, then? Yes, almost. Depended on how you figured it. There was the question of Melissa Williams and the question of the company. In Shanghai, after bribing Mr. Lo, he'd returned the unused cash to the hotel manager, then spent an hour on the phone to New York, trying to chat up the price of Teknetrix. The scaffolding materials and an army of laborers had reappeared at the factory's construction site the next morning as he was about to leave, Tom Anderson had reported, amazed admiration in his voice, and with Charlie's permission, he'd bring on more men. The construction boom in Shanghai had slowed considerably, and you could pick up welders and electricians willing to work by the day. Perhaps feeling the strange tea, Charlie had approved the extra expense and told Anderson there was a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus coming from him
, Charlie, personally, if Anderson got the factory on-line on time. Marvin Noff remained unconvinced, but the company's price had lifted off its three-month low. Volume a bit heavier than average. Some good institutional contrarian buying. And Ming had called, pleased, he said, by the press release on the Q4. The company was not out of trouble, not yet anyway, but it was going in the right direction. Companies struggled, that was the truth. They struggled with competitors and the market and with themselves, and so far, Teknetrix had always come out of it, always survived the sudden altitude drop, the unsynched vibration, the low-fuel, one-chance landing.

  As for Melissa Williams? Was she an aberration or a trend? A celebration of life or an early shovelful of dirt on his marriage? More R&D needed. He couldn't pull out of this particular dive just yet. Not close enough to disaster yet, Charlie-boy; when it gets close you'll pull out, in more ways than one, ha-ha, not so funny, and get yourself on home. Just one more time, he thought. I'll do a better job this time; I can tell. Like going from the T-37 trainer to the F-101 in 1963. You couldn't get it right the first time. You didn't understand the plane's speed, the way it moved. Second time, better. He'd had Karen reserve Suite 840 at the Pierre, the one Teknetrix used regularly. They were due to see each other that night. Ellie had wanted to have sex the night before, but he had begged off, said he was exhausted from the plane, in order to save his shot. Conserve ordnance. He'd be completely hard; he could just tell. His back felt so good that he had not minded, had not been existentially insulted, when, after Karen mentioned a message from the fertility clinic doctor, he'd returned the call and been told that his sperm sample was no good. "Motility average, sperm count insufficient," the doctor told him. "Which means not that you couldn't get someone pregnant, but that we need a better deposit if we are going to use technology to avoid a poor outcome."

  But perhaps a poor outcome was good news, of a sort. Perhaps he had an easy chance to forget the whole hire-a-mom thing, no harm done. A little money and time wasted, nothing more. You could look at it that way. Or you could say you still wanted a child, Charlie-boy. Maybe more so, now that Ellie would be packed away in Vista del Muerte. The logistics might be easier. Maybe visit a child from time to time. Just stop by for an hour. Don't need to be involved, just pop in, say, Hi—gee, he's getting heavy. A warm bottle. Fingers and toes. Goodnight moon. And maybe this was where Melissa Williams came in. He'd thought about her, he'd thought about her all too much. In the baby way and in the other kind of way. She'd been so sweet, so generous. He could tell that for a young woman she had a lot of sexual experience, which presented itself as kindness and patience. Women always talked about men being considerate lovers, expecting that men didn't really care how the woman acted, so long as she opened her legs and didn't watch television at the same time, but that was not the case. Certain women put men at ease; they had the gift of sexual generosity, and this you could say about Melissa Williams. He'd had his doubts and anxieties just afterward, but the more he'd thought about her, sitting in the Peace Hotel on his last morning in Shanghai and watching the coal barges move along the muddy flat river outside, the more he'd remembered their night in the Pierre and wanted to repeat it. Clearly he could not get anyone pregnant easily, and clearly she was the kind of girl who didn't pick up diseases and viruses and all the other things running through the population. Towers had told him as much, with the report on her blood donation. So that minor anxiety, that flicker of doubt, had eased, too. She wanted to see him, he wanted to see her. Maybe they'd meet a few more times and he'd raise the question of a baby. Or maybe they would have a sad little talk that night and then go their separate ways forever. He'd apologize for whatever confusion or hurt he'd caused. He didn't know and he didn't mind not knowing. He'd simply leave about four, take the New Jersey Turnpike into the city, park the car, take a shower, call Ellie to say he'd arrived safely, then walk over to the Pierre at seven. There's a Miss Williams staying here, has she arrived? He really did want to see her again. Certainly all that Towers had told him suggested she was the right sort of young woman. Good background, good values.

  "What're you thinking?" Ellie asked suddenly, her voice perky, eyes bright. "You've been quiet for five minutes."

  "Values," Charlie said. "Good values."

  "You think this place has it?"

  "Yes. Absolutely."

  She looked at him sweetly. "It is the right thing, Charlie."

  "Again, absolutely."

  "I wish you could stay a second night."

  "I do, too."

  "Couldn't Karen send down all the papers and stuff?"

  "I need to meet with people, get some things started," Charlie said, watching the road ahead of him even though he was going eleven miles an hour. "Tomorrow is a long day, too."

  "These new pills knock me out around nine."

  "I'll call when I get in, and then in the morning," he told Ellie.

  "That's fine. You're leaving around four?"

  "I thought I might."

  "There's just one more thing I want to show you," she said happily, "and I'm pretty sure you'll indulge me."

  "What is it?"

  "The bird feeder in the backyard. I'm surprised you didn't notice it. Up on a big pole near the spruce? Has room for thirty-six purple martins." She smiled at him. "Like a sweet little hotel for birds."

  "Yes." He stretched out his arm and took her hand—palm and fingers and wedding ring. "This is all good. We're going to spend a lot of nice time here," he said.

  "Oh, Charlie." Ellie beamed, blinking wetly in happiness, cheeks flushed, her eyes clear and large and in love with him all over again, father of her children, her old fly-boy.

  HE KNOCKED SOFTLY at the door of Suite 840, his hair moist, fingernails trimmed, underwear fresh.

  The door opened and there was Melissa, in a rather lovely black dress, looking up at him, looking young, and she took his hand and pulled him inside. "I've been waiting," she complained, smiling devilishly. "Just so you know."

  "Hey, I came halfway around the world to see you."

  She put her cheek against his chest, and seemed to sigh or catch her breath. He felt the warmth of her along his body, her hand in the small of his back, her head touching his chin. She patted the side of his jacket. "You have a phone in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"

  "You okay?" he asked, realizing she'd had a drink.

  "I'm fine. I was just waiting, that's all."

  She seemed preoccupied. Her eyes looked a little bloodshot, her face tired. But it was a twenty-seven-year-old face—how tired could it be? "Anything you want to talk about?" he asked gently.

  She shook her head. "Not now."

  "Okay." He held her the way he used to hold Julia when she was a girl and upset about something, his hand behind her neck.

  "I've been lonely. Missed my mother a lot."

  The comment made him feel old, but he realized that she hadn't meant it that way. "Do you want to call your parents?"

  "No, I—" She stopped. "I will later."

  "If you want to, just call from here," he said.

  She hugged him. "No, no, it's fine."

  He ran a finger down her spine. "Do you ever go out there?"

  "Out where?"

  "Seattle."

  "Oh," she said distractedly, "no."

  He rubbed her neck at the hairline and felt her melt against him. "You talk to your father much?"

  "No, not really," she said into his chest, nibbling at his tie.

  "Is he very busy?"

  She considered the question. "No."

  "Not busy?"

  She looked up again, her face vulnerable, wanting to forget something. "Charlie?"

  "Mmm?"

  "You know."

  He did. She turned off the lights and pulled down the blanket. He adjusted the air conditioner, and when he turned, she was naked. Her breasts looked larger when she was naked. Some women were like that. He started to unknot his tie.

  "No," she insisted. "I'
m doing all of it."

  Again she undressed him, her hands moving familiarly, and she knelt on the floor and pulled his underwear off last, and as soon as he had stepped out of them, she looked up at him from her kneeling position and took him into her mouth, eyes staying on his. I may be a fool, he thought, but I am a pleasured fool.

  She pulled back, keeping her hand moving affectionately. "You're more . . ." she said.

  "Yeah."

  "Eager?"

  Chinese medicine. "My back's been feeling pretty good."

  She followed him into bed and he held her, sensing she wanted this. "Okay," she whispered after a time.

  "Uptown or downtown?" he asked. "If you know what I mean."

  "I do," she sighed, but held him by the ears when he started to move downward.

  "No?"

  "Just insert the tab in the slot like the directions specify."

  "You got it."

  "No, I think you do, Charlie."

  It was all flattery, but he'd take it. He set himself above her and she spit into her hands and helped him. She was rather wet, and he went in quickly. So young, he thought, looking into her face. I'm going to count strokes. I don't think she quite came the last time; I was too fast, both of us too nervous. Her eyes were closed and she was biting her upper lip. He took a breath, watching her go into herself. She was in a peaceful, private place. I'm going to concentrate, he thought. He made it to fifty and past it, then, at sixty-two, she convulsed beneath him, her stomach a mound of muscle that rippled and gathered up. He continued, holding her hands loosely above her head. He felt good. Ninety-six. Then she suddenly rose up again, convulsing and whimpering sweetly, the alcohol perfuming her sighs. Then again. One twenty-one. Such fast orgasms, he thought, sort of amazing. She caught her breath easily and glared up at him, eyes fierce now, sweetness gone, ready again, desire merely unfolding. One thirty-two, he counted. She wants more, I can feel it, I'm a fucking old man. Old man fucking. He stopped, breathed deeply, then resumed. His lungs burned a little. I'm so out of shape, he thought. But here we are. He kept on and she kept on, shaking and shuddering every half minute or so, her arms around his neck, five orgasms, six . . . seven, and he had to pause to keep himself back, holding his breath and squeezing his asshole, and as he slowed she sighed and caressed his cheeks and ears and eyes, and then he started again and she started again, too, right away. Ten more strokes, hard, and she came again, shivering violently. His neck was hot, back sweaty, but none of it hurt anymore, as if the adhesions and cross-stitched nerves had melted away. Twenty more fast strokes and she almost came, but he held off to save himself, and then eighteen more, with a bit of side-to-side grinding—Ellie used to love that before she started to get too dry in her late forties—and she came again, digging her nails into his shoulders, right into the knotty scar tissue, but he barely felt it. He was aware of her great sexual hunger opening up beneath him, taking him in, the tense expectancy of her breathing. She was beginning. He'd barely touched her so far. A few handfuls of rainwater scooped from a full barrel. They'd been at it maybe ten minutes—almost no time at all. She could go on and on, he knew, and he could not. She licked his neck from below, waiting for more. Never seen anything like this, Charlie thought, not with any of the girls before Ellie, not with Ellie when she was young.