Cobalt (2 page)

“The ferry was the most horrible experience of my entire life,” said Clarisse evenly. “It was insult, torture, and degradation.” In three long swallows, she had finished her drink. She hadn't put the glass down before another took its place. Valentine drew a pack of Luckys from the back pocket of his jeans, lit two, and handed one to Clarisse.

“I've never ridden the ferry,” he remarked. “I thought it was supposed to be quaint or something.” He glanced at her sailor's outfit. “Did you keep getting mistaken for crew?”

“There was a Dixie Cup jazz band,” said Clarisse. “It was amplified. And it played polkas. For three hours. A great number of people danced. They danced the polka. The people who didn't dance the polka got drunk and sang sentimental Irish songs. The people who didn't dance
or
sing, threw up. Oh yes, and on the upper deck, where I got to sunbathe for half an hour before the sun went behind a cloud, there was an eighty-one-year-old man who stood on his head and delivered a lecture on the dangers of tobacco.”

“Did you meet anybody cute?”

“Well, there were approximately nine hundred persons on board the ship. I counted three attractive persons. Two women—very sweet and doing a duet of ‘I Only Have Eyes for You.' And one man—who wanted me to put him up for the weekend.”

“Sounds promising.”

“He was gay—but I don't think he knew
I
knew that.”

“Still sounds promising. Did you make an offer for me?”

“Valentine, I am very unhappy. My new sunglasses were torn off my head and smashed. A little boy
sat
on the costume that I had planned to wear tonight. I have a blister on my heel and a headache that only death will cure. I'm in no condition to pick up tricks for you.”

“Well, you're here. That's something.”

Outside, in the street, cars moved haltingly, trying to make headway through the milling throngs of pedestrians. A disgruntled driver blasted his horn at three women on roller skates who banged his trunk as they went by. A child shrieked when its ice cream cone was gobbled up by a passing mastiff. Someone wearing a large felt hat fashioned in the likeness of a goose peered in the window. The sun was suddenly obscured by a thick cloud, and there was a low bellow of thunder. Clarisse looked around the dark, hot, empty bar. “For this I quit my job, and sublet my rent-controlled apartment? Where's the sun?” she demanded. “Where's the fun? Where's the romance?”

F
OR A SUM HE COULD not bear to mention aloud, Daniel Valentine had rented for the summer one-third of the house that belonged to Clarisse's uncle. Four years before, Noah Lovelace had bought the low, rambling, U-shaped house on Kiley Court as an investment. He had broken it up into three fair-sized apartments that opened onto a central court with a swimming pool. In one of the apartments Noah lived with his companion of many years, a man called Victor, but more commonly known—especially in Provincetown—as the White Prince. In the apartment directly across the pool from Noah and the White Prince lived Valentine, and now with him, Clarisse. The third apartment, between Valentine's and Noah's, was rented out by the week.

Valentine sat in the twilit courtyard relaxing with a gin and tonic after his noon to eight o'clock shift at the Throne and Scepter. The storm that had threatened earlier swept out to sea, taking with it the humidity that had oppressed Clarisse on the ferry. The evening was clear and temperate. The sun had set and the sky was a luminous azure.

Valentine made a decent wage at the bar and consistently received generous tips—not just because he was efficient, which he was, nor simply because he was congenial and a good listener when the occasion warranted, which it often did, nor only because he was handsome and hot, but because of a smoothly balanced combination of all three of these elements. In Boston, Valentine had worked at a small bar in Bay Village, but he had considered that job as temporary as the one he had now taken for the duration of the Provincetown summer. Though he wouldn't admit it even in the most drunken confessional, Daniel Valentine was at heart a social worker. He had lost his job in the Suffolk County prison system, working with inmates shortly to be released, when he uncovered a scandal in the Sheriff's Department. The sheriff still held his job despite Valentine's revelation, in the pages of
The Real Paper
, that he had, with state funds, purchased ten thousand dollars' worth of crushed velvet draperies for his living room. Now, however, the sheriff was ailing, and his ailment looked to be terminal—this privileged information had been obtained from a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who lusted for Valentine's embrace. Valentine hoped to regain his position at the Charles Street Jail by the autumn or early winter at the latest. He took a long swallow of his drink to toast the destruction of the sheriff's remaining leukocytes.

Valentine looked around with satisfaction. Twice before he had spent summers in Provincetown, but never had he lived in such congenial surroundings. The pool took up almost half the courtyard's area, and the house, covered in cedar shingling weathered a uniform gray, hugged close around it. Ivy rampaged over the walls, and multiflora roses of yellow and vermilion competed with the ivy in all the corners and around the doors. An enormous Kentucky coffee tree—the only one in Provincetown—stood just beside the latticed gate and its broad flat leaves sheltered the entire courtyard. The low flower beds were thick with lavender and nicotiana, plants that could take the shade and which made the whole place fragrant at night. Just beyond the latticed fence was Kiley Court, high-hedged, narrow and graveled. The only traffic here was the occasional provisions truck that scrunched its way down to the restaurant that was situated directly opposite Noah's compound.

While Valentine sat with his drink, windows had one by one lighted up in the three apartments opening onto the courtyard. If he looked to his left, he could see Clarisse wandering from room to room, looking for something she could not find, and waving her hands in frustration. Her cursing was a pleasant murmur, like the wind through the coffee tree. To his right, he could see into the bedroom of the White Prince. Directly beneath a harsh sunlamp sat Victor, his perfect vacuous face smeared over with gray cream and his proud white hair carefully protected by a skullcap made of crushed aluminum foil. While Valentine was peering into the lighted living room of the rented apartment in between, trying to glimpse the new tenant, Noah Lovelace's screen door slammed and Noah came out with a drink for himself and a freshened gin and tonic for Valentine.

“Have you seen the new ones yet?” he said in a low voice, nodding toward the rental apartment. Clarisse's uncle scraped a chair up next to Valentine. Noah Lovelace was in his late forties, though he looked no more than a weathered thirty-eight; he had short gray hair, a close-cut beard that was fast going to gray, and a body that was Valentine's good-natured envy. He was the only brother of Clarisse's father, and though rather a black sheep in the family, had managed to make more money than anyone else, having invested his niggardly inheritance in real estate and over-the-counter stocks with spectacular results. His disinclination to have any regular profession, his sexual orientation, his insufferable financial luck, and his insane decision to live year-round in a tourist-trap resort infuriated all the Lovelaces but Clarisse.

“No,” said Valentine, “but I suppose anybody would be better than Terry.”

Noah laughed, and raised his glass. “To the departure of Mr. O'Sullivan. I suppose he got on your nerves, always hanging about the way he did.”

Valentine shrugged. “He's sweet, and he means well, but—”

“I know,” replied Noah. “He's very—what should I say?—
sincere
. But he's left a representative.”

“What?” asked Valentine apprehensively.

“His administrative assistant has the apartment this week. Her name is Ann, and her girlfriend's name is Margaret. They're high-tech lesbians, and they're in the first heat of love.”

“How do you know that?”

“They've been going at it all afternoon. The Prince stood with his ear against their bedroom wall for forty-five minutes, ticking off the orgasms on an abacus.”

To their left a window suddenly shot up in its frame, and Clarisse's towel-turbaned head leaned out into the gathering night. “It's the end of the world!”

“What's wrong?” asked Valentine calmly.

“I forgot to bring my hair dryer! And I can't find yours!” Valentine ran his hand over his head: his hair wasn't more than an eighth of an inch long. “I scrapped mine,” he said.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Try the oven.”

“Victor has at least three dryers,” said Noah. “Come on over, Clarisse, I'm almost certain he doesn't use more than one at a time.”

The window shot down again, and a moment later Clarisse flung herself out the door. When she passed Valentine she grabbed the drink from his hand and guzzled half of it. “Thank you,” she breathed. Over the rim she peered at him in the obscurity of twilight. “Oh, God,” she said, “why aren't you getting ready? The only reason I came to Provincetown at all was to go to this party, and you're just sitting there!”

“Oh,” said Valentine, “I'm all dressed now.”

“This is Garden of Evil night,” she reminded him. “So who are you supposed to be?”

“Can't you tell? I'm the Man Who Raped Connie Francis.”

Clarisse swallowed the remainder of his drink and ran into her uncle's house.

“I'm glad you brought her down,” said Noah. “Clarisse is the only one in the family I still speak to. I'm just surprised you could get her away from that real estate office.”

“So was I, in fact. I think she must have been really fed up.”

“Why?”

“Low commissions, the owners skimming, the bums making faces at her through the windows—and worse. Besides, she was going to quit in the fall anyway.”

“I don't have much to do with family,” said Noah after a moment. “Except for her. That's a choice of course, but sometimes you wish you could have things both ways. You know her parents—my brother and his wife?”

Valentine didn't answer at once. “I've met them,” he said.

Noah nodded agreement to what Valentine did not speak aloud. “And Clarisse's brother is just as bad—worse, in fact, because he's so much younger and he's just the same. Oh well, I—” He broke off suddenly. “Sorry, Daniel, I'm an invariable victim of twilight melancholy.”

“Me too,” said Valentine. “Listen, I guess I better go in and get ready. Who are you going as?”

“Herod. I'd better get ready too—I think Victor wants to gild my nipples.”

An hour later Valentine was again seated by the pool, sipping a third gin and tonic. On the cedar table next to him was a small candle set in a deep glass; the night was black. The candle glow was glossily reflected on his polished brown leather riding boots. His light gray pants were loosely cut; his bloused white linen shirt was collarless and opened to his waist.

He had been amusing himself by watching the White Prince struggle into his Salome costume, when he was disturbed by a noise behind him at the latticed gate. He looked over his shoulder at three middle-aged women who were peering hopefully into the courtyard.

Valentine smiled to himself and rose slowly from the chair. From the cedar table he picked up his coiled bullwhip, jerked suddenly around and cracked the whip violently in the air above the pool. “No!” he shouted. “This is not Poor Richard's Buttery!”

The three women beat a hasty retreat.

Valentine eased back into the chair, but once again there were footsteps on the gravel. He stood poised to repeat the performance, when to his intense surprise, from behind the lattice and hedge emerged a tall, elegantly dressed Oriental woman. She bowed her head slightly, and with the same motion she delicately flicked the tinkling glass wind chimes that were suspended from one of the gateposts. On each of her fingers was a three-inch gold lacquered nail. Her hair was fashioned in a tight chignon and secured at the nape of her neck by large ornamental pins. Her gown was full-length, with red and gold dragons on a field of blue silk. She came a step closer and he saw that she held a small cream-colored envelope.

“I…” stammered Valentine.

The Oriental woman broke into sudden laughter. “Fooled you!” she cried. “Fooled you!”

“Damn! How did you get out there without my seeing you?”

“I climbed out the back window,” replied Clarisse, coming to his side.

“In
that
?”

“Anything for an entrance. I fooled you!”

“All right, you fooled me. But I've still got to guess who you're supposed to be.”

“What do you mean,
guess
?”