Bliss (28 page)

'This is my father,' Lucy said to a young man with broken teeth and a wizened face, wearing greasy overalls. 'Kenneth McLaren, this is my father Harry.'

'Mr Joy,' said Ken.

'Out,' said Bettina, gathering up her precious advertisements and removing them from this contamination. 'Outside.'

Joel sat on his mattress in his underpants and rubbed antiseptic cream on his burns. It was getting cold. He gave his suit to Lucy.

'Use it for rags,' he said. 'It's no good any more.'

'Thanks, Joel,' Lucy said.

'You bring that suit back here.' Bettina dropped a pile of comped-up ads on the floor and ran across the room to grab the dark woollen bundle from her daughter's greasy hands. She stood in the middle of the room smoothing the suit out against her body. She lay the trousers carefully across the back of one chair and hung the coat on another.

She walked across to Joel and sat down beside him on his mattress. 'Now,' she said, 'let's see what you've done with yourself.'

Harry didn't know what to feel. It was like the aftermath of a war: everything shattered but people going about their lives with a certain optimism. He went up to his room and found his suits and shirts. He changed without showering and came down to find his wife sitting on the living room floor rubbing analgesic cream into the naked, shining, battery-fed body of his partner, well – not quite naked – his joke underpants were down around his pudgy hips and his burnt body gleamed in oil.

Harry stroked the collar of his silk shirt and marvelled at the richness and variety of life in Hell.

Bettina, as she explained to Harry later, no longer found Joel sexually desirable. (Harry didn't listen. He found it painful that she ever had.)

Joel was no longer admirable and it was admiration (she called it love) that made her want to fuck people. It was a cold brilliant sort of emotion, this admiration, and was backed up, invariably, with the unpalatable tastes of self-doubt and inferiority. She had worried all her life that she was cold. She had never felt for her children what a mother is meant to feel. She had despaired at this coldness and criticized herself for it while at the same time she hated (literally) mothers who dis-played their maternal qualities in too obvious a way.

But now, although she would never have used the word, and would have denied it vigorously if anyone had dared to suggest it, she loved Joel. She had not begun to love him until he had begun to fail and then, she believed, he became automatically sexually uninteresting to her. But it was only after he crashed, after he began to do these stupid, dangerous bizarre things to gain her respect, that she actually began to love him.

He was her responsibility. She had pushed him too far and now she would have to look after him. She rubbed the analgesic cream across his back. The burns were not too bad:

'Ah, Betty, you think I'm a schmuck.'

'You try too hard, baby.' Physically they were alike, stocky people from peasant stock.

'You didn't have to say it was bullshit.'

'No, no, I know. I'm sorry.'

'Fucking suit. My best suit too.'

'Never mind, never mind.'

Harry watched this and felt jealous. It was the sort of jeal-ousy a man can feel towards a child at a woman's breast. Sitting at the table by himself he was able to see the emotion clearly and know exactly what it was.

When David Joy arrived home with his two Big Macs at eight o'clock, his father was sitting by the fire. The sight of Joel's blubbery body stretched out at Harry's feet was as disgusting and terrible a reproach as any he had encountered in his nightmares. It was David's fault that Palm Avenue was like this. It was because he had paid money to have his father committed.

Yet he was struck with contradictory desires about his crime, for although he was remorseful he was also proud. He wanted to confess, be forgiven, chastized, admired, under-stood, sympathized with, everything at once. He-wanted his father to see how grown-up he was but also to forgive him as only a father could.

He was hurt, immediately, by Harry's lack of effusion in the greeting.

'Which one is mine?' his father asked, leading the way to the kitchen table.

'Both,' he said, although he had bought one for himself. He was starving.

David imagined his father looked at him suspiciously. Certainly he was opening the Big Mac box distrustfully. But now he lifted the hamburger to his mouth, bit it, and, 'Oh, Christ!' spat half-masticated food all over the table.

He was madder than when he went. There he was, his mouth half-full of old food, trying to smile at him.

'It's poisoned. I nearly ate it.' Harry tried to explain. How could he tell his son that he had thought of Honey Barbara.

'I didn't.'

'It's not your fault.'

'I didn't poison it,' David yelled, that dark hurt look all over his face.

'I didn't say you did,' Harry yelled back and started laughing.

'But I wouldn't do it to you,' David screamed. 'Don't you understand? I'll never do anything to you again. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'

Joel shut the door.

It was after the war. It was a strange time. People's nerves were all shot to pieces. Harry stood and embraced his son who wept ecstatically on his chest.

'Oh God,' he said. This was not an Actor. This was his son, in pain. He could feel the pain as keenly as any he had felt in Mrs Dalton's hospital. And he knew something like jagged glass was slicing at his son and hurting him, not some little boy's cut finger, but some great gaping wound. 'I didn't think you were poisoning me,' he said.

'I didn't. I didn't.'

'No, no, I know.'

Everywhere the world seemed full of wounded.

'I had you put away. I had you committed. It was me.'

Harry heard him and believed him but it no longer mattered. It was the nature of Hell that Captives were made to hurt each other.

'It doesn't matter,' he said, 'I don't mind. I forgive you.'

Somehow the forgiveness seemed too off-hand to David who had yearned for something stronger. His father under-estimated him. He would not imagine, for a second, that his son had spent five thousand dollars of his own money, had taken risks, been more businesslike than Joel. His father did not know him.

'So tell me,' Harry was saying, 'about this job.'

'You're disappointed?'

'No, not at all.' And it was true. He was even pleased that his son would not be a doctor. Doctors in Hell did evil work. He was pleased that his son wore a well-cut suit and that he could choose a maroon tie like that and wear it with a soft blue shirt. He liked the way his son held a wine glass and when he poured wine, as he did now, that he turned the bottle in his hand as he finished pouring so that it would not drip. His son was emotional, too full of pain, but that was probably a good thing too and it seemed more honourable to be like Nurse than to be like Mrs Dalton.

David did not know how to tell him about the job. Looked at in one way the job did not sound very splendid at all. The idea of a Sales Representative for the Hughes Poker Machine Company did not exactly glitter in anybody's mind. It involved driving around the suburbs in a car and learning how to drink and not get drunk. But it was also a foot in the door of the da Silva organization. They had marked him, they hinted, for something big and it did not occur to him that what they had in mind was training for management in the organization's legitimate businesses. It still hadn't.

It was the bigness he wanted to talk about, the ill-defined promised land of his future where he would not be afraid any more and where there was South America, New York, wide rivers, a future as dazzling and complicated as a Persian rug. And in its magical pattern there was now a new element, a new glow, a cast of a golden colour which suffused everything, the source of which was a character in a book he had read half of and would never finish. He was not interested in what happened to Jay Gatsby. He was only interested that Jay Gatsby should exist. And in all his dreams about the future he had added this element of Gatsby with his big house, alone, looking across the bay at night to the island of East Egg and the woman he loved. Yet in his dream, in its pinkest most sensitive comer, there was not a woman across the water at all: it was Harry Joy.

'So tell me,' Harry said again, 'tell me about the great job. Do they give you a car?'

To his eternal chagrin David told his father all about the car. He told him all the boring, predictable everyday details about the car. He even described the damned upholstery. And he talked about his salary, his boss, the machines he sold.

'Wonderful,' Harry said, 'wonderful.'

It was difficult not to be cross with him for being so excited at all the most banal things. This was nothing to be proud of. This was a car. A fucking Ford. These were things to be dis-gusted with, reasons to throw him out of the house. These were not reasons to be sitting there smiling and nodding.

This was dross, dreck, brown paper camouflage.

Yet they talked about this damned job for two hours, through two bottles of wine and now, as the second bottle finished, David teetered on the brink of telling him.

'Well,' Harry said. He yawned and leaned back.

It was not yet too late.

'I think I'll go to bed.'

'O.K.,' David said clenching his fist, 'Goodnight.'

And sat alone with all those old dreams of Vance Joy's which have become such tawdry baubles that you might expect him, shortly, to abandon them completely. Yet he isn't going to give them up (these eyeless teddy bears) and they will finally lead him on to the Espreso de Sol and up to Bogotá, to a job as a waiter, to a wife called Anna, to his wife's brother's red Dodge truck, to the unlikely occupation of truck driver, which he will accept disdainfully, acting out his disdain by driving the muddy mountain roads from Bogota dressed in an immaculate white suit.

Unknown to himself he became the romantic figure he had always wished to be, someone to swagger through one of Vance's stories with a cane beneath his arm.

On the road of crippled trucks and miserable towns, his perfect cleanliness seemed almost magical.

'What will happen,' they asked, 'if he has a flat tyre?'

'He never has one.'

There were no saints' medallions inside his truck. They looked to see. Perhaps he was a Communist. One day in the town of Armenia two nuns, coming upon him suddenly, crossed themselves.

Then one night in the wet time of the year the long chain of stories he had so innocently begun brought a visitor to his door. His wife, now six months pregnant, was in bed asleep and he received the visitor alone.

The man at his door was short and dark, a man with such a dark beard shadow that David felt immediately sorry for him and, had he been receiving him in a restaurant, would have put him in a back table with his back to the window. The man had a long droll-looking jaw, small wire-framed spectacles on an almost Semitic nose, and very short hair. He had broad shoulders but he shrugged them humbly.

He would not conduct his business in the doorway and forced, with a curious mixture of will and humility, David to invite him in. They sat in the kitchen. He refused a beer but accepted a coffee, holding his square hands around the tiny cup and speaking with a thin voice.

David Joy found himself being asked to smuggle arms into the mountains. It was not put so clearly. It was circled around, prodded at, kicked, and in the end there was no doubt that the bulky wrapped unnamed thing their conversation kept brushing against was that.

He began by adopting a superior air with the man but could not, for some reason, maintain it. Even the shrugging humility of his visitor seemed, at the same time, arrogant.

Was he a spy? A provocateur.

'Why do you come to me?'

'That is your truck downstairs? You wear a white suit?'

'Yes.'

'We have no money,' the man said it softly as if this might be a compliment, an inducement, an advantage. It was ludicrous.

'I'm a businessman. I only work for monei'

The man smiled and shrugged. 'We have no money.'

'I work for money.'

He dipped his head. 'We have none.' And smiled.

'You wish me to work for nothing?'

'We did not think you would let us down.'

'But who am I? Why do you ask me?'

'You are
el Hombre en el Traje Blanco
-the man with the white suit.'

'I am a businessman,' he said hopelessly. 'I am only inter-ested in money.'

'But we have no money, you see,' the man said.

'But it is dangerous. It is illegal.'

'Of course,' he smiled as if he were making fun of himself, ducking his head and raising his eyebrows.

'You have no money?'

'We have no money.'

'You could be a spy. A policeman.'

'If I were a spy I would have offered you money. A spy would not expect a man to do it for nothing. They don't understand such things.'

'And I do?'

'Yes. Of course.'

'But I am a businessman,' he said for the last time.

When he had accepted the offer the man left and he realized he did not even know his name.

That night he could not sleep. He tossed and turned and Anna became bad tempered and swore at him in a language he did not understand. He went and stood in the living room and looked at himself in the mirror. He was aware of the striking contrast between his appearance and the reality of his life. He looked dashing, interesting, even exotic, yet faced with local gangsters he had lacked the courage for anything more dangerous than being a waiter. There had been no rivers to cross and when the lightning played around the hills it brought only dampness and a nasty fungus which grew down the long back of his beautiful wife.

Now he was thrilled to think that someone, through a misunderstanding, might think him brave.

Standing in Bogotá, on the edge of his story, he composed one more letter to Harry Joy. Dear Daddy, he began.

It was not the walk of city women, who, even when released from the hobble of high heels, still walk with invisible silk sashes tied between their ankles.