1985 - Stars and bars (9 page)

Henderson confined his replies to monosyllables, then she said: ‘Do you know that you have really a lot of hair growing out of your ears?’

Henderson did indeed know. It was one of the catalogue of alarming body-changes he’d been registering recently. He had rather too much hair growing out of his nostrils too, if it came to that, for his liking. He certainly didn’t care to be reminded of it.

‘These things happen, you know,’ he said. ‘As you grow older your body changes. It’ll happen to you too,’ he observed with some relish. ‘Things will happen to your body when you’re a mature woman that you won’t be too pleased about.’

‘I’ll have plastic surgery.’

‘Don’t make me laugh.’

She shrugged. ‘So how old are you, then?’

‘Thirty-nine.’

‘Is that all?’

‘What do you mean ‘Is that all?’

’

‘I don’t know. I guess I thought you were older.’ She scratched at something on the dashboard. ‘I mean, Grandpaw Wax has got hair in his ears too. You’ve ] almost got as much as him. I just figured you were, you know, older.’

Henderson felt himself colouring. The nerve, he thought. The little bitch. He tried desperately to think of some way of getting his own back.

‘We’re staying at the Jefferson-Burr tonight, aren’t we?’ Bryant asked.

The Jefferson-Burr was one of Washington’s grander hotels. If you hung out of certain bathroom windows you could glimpse the White House lawn. Melissa had booked two rooms.

‘No,’ Henderson lied, revenge inspiring him. ‘It was full up.’

‘Oh. Where are we staying, then? The Hilton?’

‘No, no. It’s a little way off yet. I’ll tell you when we get there.’

‘S
kaggsville Motor Hotel’, a tatty billboard proclaimed at the side of Highway 95, along which they now drove, ‘Next junction.’

‘Here we are,’ Henderson said.

‘You’re kidding!’

‘Best I could do at short notice.’

The motor hotel stood in an expanse of crowded carpark. It was long, three stories high and as functional as a tool box. Henderson ordered Bryant to stay in the car while he ‘checked’ their reservation.

The lobby was carpeted in worn orange sunburst pattern, with matching curtains. Underfoot it felt vaguely adhesive. It was ideal. By the reception desk was a little noticeboard.

THE SKAGGSVILLE MOTO HOT WELCOMES

THE DELAWARE FIBRE-GLASS CURTAIN

WALLI G CONVENTIO

‘Welcome to the Scaggsville Motor Hotel,’ echoed a small plump receptionist. ‘Are you with the convention, sir?’

‘Me?’ Did he look like a fibre-glass curtain-walling contractor, he wondered? ‘No, no. I just want a room for the night.’ He put down his credit card on the desk. Two! rooms.’

She looked at a chart. ‘We don’t have two rooms left, sir. The convention.’

‘Oh.’

‘I have a junior suite.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s like an extra large room with two double beds, some armchairs. Sorta like a suite but in one room.’

He thought. What should he do? Press on?

‘Your name, sir?’

‘Dores. Look, I’ll be back in a second.’

He dashed outside to the car.

‘They’ve only got one room. A junior suite.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

He realized he was getting in a bit of a flap. Calm down, he told himself. He went back in. Bryant followed at her own pace. Henderson signed his name on a card, was given his key and told where he could find the room.

‘Great,’ he said, a little worried. This wasn’t quite how the revenge was meant to function. He turned. Bryant was looking at a mildewed picture of the Capitol hung on the plastic pine panelling.

‘Enjoy your stay, Mr and Mrs Dores,’ carolled the friendly receptionist. Henderson whirled round in horrified protest, but the girl was on the phone. Good God, he thought, this is probably some sort of federal offence—crossing state lines with a minor masquerading as a wife.

Bryant looked at him through thin eyes.

The room was at the very end of a very long corridor. Outside the door was a mumbling drinks dispenser and an ice-machine. They had a good view of the car park.

The same orange sunburst pattern encountered in the lobby prevailed here too.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Not too bad.’

It looked lived-in, certainly. By keeping his eyes restlessly on the move and never allowing them to settle for a second he found it was just about possible to avoid noticing the many little rents and stains and cigarette burns, legacy of a thousand previous occupants.

There were, as promised, two double beds, and a pale green, three·piece plastic suite with the bonus of a baby’s cot in one corner. Henderson looked in vain for a shred of natural fibre or piece of wood. Perhaps that was why the curtain-wallers had their convention here—they felt at home.

‘I’ve seen worse,’ Bryant said, not nearly as put out as she should be. She turned and looked at him.

‘Let me get one thing straight,’ she said. ‘This ‘Mr and Mrs’ business. You’re not going to try and fuck me, are you?’

‘Good God,
no!
I wouldn’t dream…How dare you…A simple error on the part of—’

‘Relax,’ she said. She was beginning to sound like Teagarden. Henderson mopped his burning face, aghast at the obscenity of the notion.

Bryant threw her jacket on the bed. ‘Just checking.’

They ate in the hotel dining room at half past seven. It was full of large men rather uncomfortably and selfconsciously dressed for ‘business’ in suits and ties. Henderson ordered a steak, which overlapped his plate by a good inch on either side. Bryant had a vegetarian salad and three cigarettes.

Henderson managed about eight square inches of his steak and pushed it aside. He felt strangely depressed, which he put down to having been in Bryant’s company for most of a day. This didn’t bode well for the marriage. He sighed, and thought about tomorrow. He wondered when they would get to Atlanta. Beeby had phoned Gage to let him know Henderson was on his way. They would make an early start in the morning; get Bryant dropped off as soon as possible…He looked around the dismal dining room, suddenly missing New York. He wished he were staying at the Jefferson-Burr, instead of this anonymous hotel. Too clever by half, he considered ruefully. This was what happened when he tried to be malicious or cunning: he ended up inconveniencing himself. He was condemned to remain ineffectual, tolerant and nice.

Bryant tipped saccharine into her Sanka.

‘What exactly are you meant to be doing on this trip?’ she asked.

Henderson told her about the Gage collection, its significance, what he had to do when he saw the paintings.

‘Where does he live, this old guy?’

‘Somewhere called Luxora Beach.’

‘Are you going there?’

‘Later. I’ll get directions in Atlanta.’

‘Are you staying with him?’

‘No. I’ll probably stay in a local hotel.’

‘Could I come?’

‘
What!?
’

‘Can’t I come with you? I’ve never been to the real South.’

‘Absolutely out of the question.’

‘Come
on
, Henderson, I won’t get in your way.’

‘Completely impossible.’

‘I just can’t stand the thought of a week with Grandma and Grandpa. You don’t know what they’re like.’

Too bad.’

‘
Pke-ease
.’

‘No. No. En oh.’

‘God!’ She looked genuinely irritated. Touche, at last, he thought triumphantly, smiling to himself. She couldn’t take being denied.

After dinner Bryant went back to the junior suite complaining of a headache. Henderson walked down another quarter of a mile corridor to the bar. It was called The Barbary Coast but for the life of him he could see no thematic reflection of this motif in the place’s wholly unremarkable decor. It was filled with grim curtain-wallers who were being entertained by a haggard country and western chanteuse seated at an electric organ on a small dais at the end of the room. Two bored waitresses in very short beige satin dresses ferried drinks to and fro.

Henderson sat at the bar, sipped at a large Scotch and thought about phoning Irene in an attempt to rebuild a few of the burnt bridges. Unaccountably, as he sat and drank, he found himself getting more and more dejected and heavy hearted. He looked suspiciously at his whisky. He felt an immense weariness of spirit descend on him, as if some deity had personally and unequivocally confirmed that all the follies and inexplicable cruelties of the world were man’s lot, and that attempts to ameliorate them were utterly vain and futile.

He looked around him. The curtain-wallers’ faces were slumped with a similar bitter wisdom. Was it something to do with the Scaggsville Motor Hotel itself, he asked himself? Some curse on the hapless building? Some maverick charge in its static electricity? He wondered if he had been drugged…Then he realized what the source of the universal
tristesse
was.

The haggard chanteuse had a repertoire consisting solely of the most morose country and western numbers in the songbook. She set her Japanese electric organ (thin as an ironing-board) to plangent, and sang heartrend-ingly of suicide, abortion, adultery, desertion, mental and. physical cruelty, alcoholism and terminal illness. Her own face, pale and scored beneath dyed blue-black hair, seemed to testify to first hand experience of these various afflictions—but perhaps that was merely the side-effect of singing that type of song each evening.

The tune she was currently playing seemed vaguely familiar; a recent or current hit, Henderson thought. He listened to a verse.

Each gnat she cooked me a fan dinner,

Each gnat I throwed it on the floor,

Then I took my sailf to town,

Till the mornin’ come aroun’

Drinkin’, gamblin’ ‘n’ sleepin’ with some whore

She switched her machine to ‘soughing violins’ for the chorus (‘I was the happiest, meanest, full-time, sigried-up sinner’) but Henderson decided that he’d had as much as he could take.

He walked down the endless corridors feeling markedly more happy with every step he took away from the mournful saloon. Some convention, he thought. He had heard they were usually an excuse for a riotous booze-up. The curtain-wallers would return home to their wives shriven and repentant.

He let himself quietly into his room. The lights were out, Bryant seemed to be asleep. He went softly into the bathroom. The basin area was scattered with pots and tubes, grips and make·up;. Long fair hairs clung tenaciously to the wet enamel.

He confirmed that the door was locked and took off his clothes. His body had a yellowish whiteness under the lights. He swiftly checked out the crisis areas. His nipples, once neat buttons beneath a shading of chest hair, had grown into wide pink coarse teats. Always rather hefty, he had never worried unduly about putting on weight: he ate and drank as he wished and carried the usual penalty padding as a result. But now he had critical weight loss: his buttocks were disappearing. They were shrinking. His trouser seats, usually stretched and shiny, were now loose and flapping. He turned sideways and looked in the mirror. A good kilt-wearing arse, a Scottish girlfriend had once complimented him. If he wore a kilt now its rear hem would hang inches lower than its front—be brushing the backs of his calves. And, talking about legs, his legs were going
bald
. Normally covered in a springy furze, his legs, from the knee down, had gone smooth and shiny. And yet all this extra hair was sprouting from his ears and nostrils…He wondered if some back-street trichologist would transplant his nasal and aural growth; re-sow it on the desert slopes of his shins.

He stepped into the shower. For getting on for thirty years he’d never considered his body. It did its job; it looked fair enough; its distribution of muscle and hair was unexceptionable. But now it was saying ‘hold on a moment’, ‘hang about, friend’. It was getting tired of staying in shape, it was getting clapped out, the first signs of four decades of wear and tear were manifesting themselves. It was getting old.

He plunged his head beneath the powerful jet of the shower, trying to forget. Even in the crummiest motel you got a decent shower. He remembered the shower he had had installed in his London flat. It had a weak, two-inch spread. It pattered feebly on one shoulder when you stood beneath it; it took five minutes to dampen your hair. Getting the temperature right required meticulous hairfine adjustments of the taps—you needed the touch of a safe-cracker.

After he had dried himself he wondered what to do about getting into bed. He normally slept naked but realized that, tonight, probity demanded he make a change. He pulled on his underpants and stepped quietly into the bedroom.

Bryant sat up in bed smoking, her bedside lamp on. She was wearing pale blue cotton pyjamas, monogrammed ‘B. W: Henderson stood there, suddenly conscious of the crammed codpiece of his Y-fronts, his hairless legs, his fat nipples. He slid into his bed between the crackling nylon sheets.

‘You shouldn’t smoke in bed, you know,’ he grumbled. ‘With the static in this place we could be vaporized in a white flash.’

Bryant ignored him.

‘And you left the bathroom in a mess.’

‘Mom wants you to call her, I phoned while you were out.’

‘Oh. Right.’ He felt pleased. He prodded New York. As he was waiting for Melissa to answer, Bryant leant forward to stub out her cigarette. As she stretched for the ashtray he got a clear view down the front of her pyjama top. Her small firm breasts with small, odd, domed nipples. He felt embarrassment and shock clog his throat.

Melissa answered.

‘Melissa? It’s Henderson.’ His mind skittered about. My God, he thought, my hands are shaking.

‘Henderson, darling, thank you. It’s so kind of you. I really want you to know that I appreciate it, darling. I really do.’

‘Don’t mention it.’ So American: all this sincere gratitude for a returned call.

‘Are you sure it’s not inconvenient?’

‘No, no. Not at all. Quite the opposite.’

‘God, you are wonderful. I’d forgotten. You lovely man, you. There aren’t many men who’d do this, I know. I want you back here quickly.’