Other Plans (14 page)

He took Emma's suitcase from her and led the way. “I'm not accustomed to such service,” she said, following him into the guest room. She had put on dark glasses and taken off her jacket, he saw, and underneath it had on striped overalls over a thick white sweater that matched her hat. He laid her suitcase on the luggage rack and twitched at the Venetian blinds, straightened the curtains, the way he'd seen the bellhop do the only time he'd ever stayed in a hotel. His parents had taken him to Montreal after dropping Leslie off at college her freshman year. He'd had his own room, his own TV, and had carefully made his bed before going down to breakfast. When he'd told them that on the way home, his mother and father had had a good laugh. The maid must've thought he'd slept in the bathtub.

Emma sat on the side of the bed and took off her boots. She wiggled her toes. “Did you know that feet are an erogenous zone?” she said. And because he hadn't any idea what “erogenous zone” meant, he said, “Where'd you get those?” pointing to her boots, which were made of snakeskin the color of red wine. He would gladly have given a year's growth to possess such a pair.

“Oklahoma City. My hometown. They're custom-made. If you want,” she rubbed one foot against the side of her leg, her eyes laughing at him, “I can get you a pair when I go home. All you have to do is trace the outline of your foot on a piece of paper, and they can make them for you from that. They turn out really well. A couple of my friends have ordered them that way.”

He ran his hands over the rough skin, reveling in the smell of them. “My budget can't stand that kind of outlay right now.”

“Try them on, why don't you?” She leaned back on the bed, supporting herself on her elbows. Her breasts stood up small and neat under the overalls. He flushed as she caught his eye and laughed.

“They wouldn't fit me anyway,” he said.

“You never know,” she said. “I have big feet. What size are yours?”

“Ten.”

“Oh well, I guess you're right. Mine are eight.” She pulled her elbows out from under her and lay flat, gazing at the ceiling. “I think I'll take a bath. How would that be?”

“Sure,” he said, feeling slightly light-headed. “I'll turn on the light so you don't fall in the can,” he said, thinking he should have said “toilet.”

She laughed. “You're funny,” she said.

Wait'll I really take off, he thought. I'm not even trying.

Emma went to her suitcase. “Are you expecting people for dinner or anything?” she said, holding up an extraordinary garment against herself for inspection. “I mean, is this all right to wear, do you think?” It looked to him like a jumpsuit made of variegated-colored suede patches.

“Far out,” he said. “Is that custom-made, too?”

“I can't bear cheap things,” she said.

“Anything goes around here,” he told her in a too-hearty voice. He edged toward the door. “If you want, I'll show you where the bathroom is.”

“Where's your room?” she asked, right behind him. He pointed. “Down at the end of the hall. I keep the door closed so my mother won't freak out when she gets a load of the mess.”

“Let's see,” she coaxed. He took her down the hall and opened her door a crack so she could look in. “The pits,” she said, nodding. “The absolute pits.” Fired up by her approval, he took her on a tour.

“This is the master bedroom where the master sleeps,” he said with a theatrical flourish. If his mother came up now and caught him showing her bedroom to Emma, she'd skin him alive.

“When I was little,” Emma said, “I used to bounce up and down on my parents' bed and imagine them making love there. I used to listen at their door, too. Did you ever do that?” She cocked her head, looking at him, waiting for an answer.

He cleared his throat. “Not since I reached puberty.”

She grinned. “How old are you, John?”

He considered lying. He'd lied to young Grace. Why not Emma? “Sixteen,” he said, knowing that Leslie would have told her how old he was. “How old are you?”

“Twenty,” she said. His heart sank. Why couldn't she be nineteen, like Leslie. Nineteen he could cope with. “I've been twenty, emotionally and psychologically, ever since I was about twelve,” she said. “I better take that bath, John.”

“Sure.” He led her to the bathroom, said, “This is the hot, this is the cold. And here's the soap and I guess these are your towels. The guest always gets the clean towels. If you want anything, just yell.”

“Thanks, sweetie,” she said. “I will, don't worry.”

“Just yell,” he repeated, heading for the stairs. Halfway down, he stopped and listened. He thought he heard her laughing. At him, no doubt. What did he care. Leslie had called it. She
was
outrageous. He liked having new people around, in the house. It was exhilarating.
She
was exhilarating. Wait'll he told Keith.

Dinner was very festive. His father was laid back under the influence of Leslie's presence, also Emma, also two martinis. Emma sat across from him at the table, shimmering in the candlelight, eating her lamb with mint sauce and roast potatoes and carrots. He caught her pushing most of the carrots off to one side, hiding them under some bits of lamb, and that endeared her to him further.

His mother sipped her wine and watched his father showing off for the girls from behind her thick black eyelashes, smiling faintly. She wore a lavender dress he'd never seen before.

“You look nice, Ma,” he told her.

His father leaned toward him. “Your mother always looks nice, John. Always. This lamb is perfectly cooked, Ceil, perfectly.” He said everything twice to make sure he'd been understood. Les and Emma told a story involving a red Volvo and an ardent suitor of one of them, which caused a lot of laughter and didn't make any sense to him at all. His mother tucked her hair behind her ears and put her chin in her hand, smiling, enjoying herself. He got up and cleared away the plates, anxious to get at the blueberry pie he knew was for dessert. While he scraped the plates, the telephone rang.

“Get that, please, John, and tell whoever it is to call back.” His father had a thing about telephone calls at dinner time.

He held his nose and picked up the receiver.

“Yeth?” he said.

“Is John there?” a girl's voice said.

“Who ith thith?”

“Grace Smith from Seattle.” In his mind he hyphenated her name. Grace-Smith-from-Seattle.

“He ithn't home. He'th out. Gone to the picthure show.” He hung up and loaded the plates into the dishwasher. The phone rang again. When he picked it up, a voice said, “Ith John there? If he ithn't, tell him hith wallet ith over at Lerners'. Ith empty, but thath where it ith.” Bang. She had slammed down the receiver so hard it made his ear drums sing. Reluctantly, he decided maybe she did have a sense of humor after all. He hadn't even missed his wallet. It must've fallen out during the orgy.

“Who was that?” his mother asked when he went back to the dining room.

“Grace Lerner's niece. I left my wallet there. She called to tell me.” Absentmindedly, he fingered his hickey.

“God, John, you'd think you invented that thing,” Leslie said. “Grace Lerner's niece must think you're pretty cute.” She and Emma went off into gales of laughter, which he ignored. His father, zeroing in on the liquor closet, squinted over his shoulder to see what he was missing.

“What are you doing, Henry?” his mother inquired. She knew darn good and well what he was doing.

“Just getting out the calvados, my love.”

“Not tonight, Henry.” She always said, “Not tonight, Henry” when his father headed for the calvados, and his father always proceeded on course.

“This is an occasion, Ceil. We're going to celebrate with some fine old calvados.”

“But tomorrow's a work day, Henry.”

“It's Leslie's first night home, and we have a charming visitor. That's cause for celebration.” And his father poured some calvados into each of the glasses with a practiced hand.

“None for me, thanks,” he said facetiously, watching them drink. He had never been as sick as when he and Jimmy Howard had nipped some of that stuff back in the fourth grade.

“I didn't think you wanted any, John,” his father said. “You'll have to wait a few more years.” He and Leslie exchanged glances. She had never told, even though he'd barfed on her when he thought there was no barf left in him. And she'd held his head and said, over and over in unconscious imitation of their mother, “Just let it come up, John. Let it come up.” And he had.

“I love calvados,” Emma said, sniffing at her glass. “It smells so earthy. I had some when we went to Normandy and it hooked me for life.” She smiled around at them. In this light, her eyes looked green, although this afternoon he could've sworn they were gray.

His father beamed. “See, Ceil, this is a girl after my own heart.” His mother smiled thinly. Spots of color rode high and bright in her face, a sure sign of danger.

“It's very hard to find good calvados in Oklahoma City,” Emma said.

“Emma.” His father leaned toward her. “Everything is hard to find in Oklahoma City, I understand.”

“This is good, Daddy,” Leslie said. “The best we've ever had.”

His father took a big sip of his calvados and rolled it around in his mouth, making a show, imitating a wine taster.

Emma giggled. “Now you have to spit it out and eat a cracker to dry your palate.”

“Ceil, have we any dry crackers?” His father poured out more calvados into his own glass. Theeothers still had some.

Bunching her napkin beside her plate, his mother rose, lips pursed, and laid a firm and significant hand on his father's arm and said, “Come on, Henry. Let's go to bed.”

“It's too early,” his father protested. “We have guests, Ceil. We have guests.” But he went, complaining all the way.

“Way to go, Dad,” he said under his breath.

“Your father is adorable, Les,” he heard Emma say as he carried out the remains of the roast. “Just adorable.” He was so struck by her comment that he stood for a moment, platter in hand, trying to see his father as adorable, and failing.

“Your mother is very protective of your father, isn't she?” Emma then said. He turned, thinking her behind him, that she'd been speaking to him. But she was in the dining room still, talking to Leslie.

“Yes,” he heard Les say. “I guess she is. My mother is very protective of us all. When I'm a mother, when and if, I'm not going to be as protective of my children as she is of us. I'm going to train mine to be independent when they're young so they'll know how to operate on their own. “Well,” she gave a little laugh, “that's what I say now. You never know what you're going to do with your kids until you have them. But I'm going to try. I think you do kids a favor when you teach them early on to be independent.”

When he returned to the dining room, Emma sat, one elbow resting on the table, watching the remains of her brandy she was swirling around in its glass.

“Yes,” she said, agreeing with Leslie, “in the end, the only person you have to rely on is yourself. So you better make damn good and sure you don't lean on, count on, anyone else.”

“That's sort of cold-blooded,” Leslie said. “I didn't mean that exactly. You can be independent and still count on other people. Usually, I think, if you can count on someone, you can love him, too.”

“You sound just like Ollie,” Emma said.

Who was Ollie? Her steady?

“Who's Ollie?” he said.

“He's my stepfather. My most recent stepfather. And the nicest one, so far. And,” Emma picked up a spoon and leveled it at him as if it were a gun, “the richest. By far the richest.”

“How many stepfathers have you had?” He may have sounded like a twit, but he had to know.

“Four. Each one cuter than the last.” She was teasing him now. He knew she was teasing him.

Thinking of Keith, he said, “Sometimes parents have to count on their kids, too, even though that's not the way it's supposed to be, not the way it's planned.”

“What I meant was,” Leslie's eyes looked very dark in the candlelight, “it's easier to love someone if you can count on him than if you can't.”

“Oh well, love.” Emma tossed the word across the table as if it were weightless and not worthy of her concern. “I wasn't talking about love. Love makes people vulnerable. If you train yourself to be totally self-sufficient, you're better off. In the long run, you're better off if you count only on yourself. Love doesn't enter into it.”

Later, lying on his sofa bed, trying to concentrate on the dumb poem he was supposed to have memorized for English tomorrow, he thought about what Emma had said. What does she know? She's only twenty. Twenty isn't so old. Only four years older than he was. I suppose she thinks she's never going to fall in love. I'm only four years younger than she is. That's nothing. Older women went bonkers over younger men and, in fact, were doing it more and more these days. Four years is nothing. He felt very sophisticated at the moment, very worldly. Very horny. It's a good thing Emma wasn't around right now. Boy, watch out. Just watch out. A man's in his prime at sixteen. When he'd read that, he'd thought, man, is that true. Is that ever true. The only trouble with being in your prime at sixteen was that the rest of the way is a downhill trip. By the time you're twenty-five, you're over the hill. Sexually speaking, that is.

There wasn't a moment to lose.

If she thinks Dad's adorable, what does she think about me?

13

He overslept. Last night he'd got into
Catcher in the Rye
for about the fifteenth time. Once in, he couldn't get out. That old Holden Caulfield was a smartass, but you couldn't help liking the guy. If only Salinger would pull himself together and move out of his hermit's hideaway and write a sequel to
Catcher
, he might find out what had happened to old Holden, find out how he'd turned out. Christ, he must be about forty-four by now. Almost as old as his father. He tried to imagine Holden as a middle-aged man. Would he be duded up in a three-piece suit, talk about the stock market and where the Dow had closed for the day? Play golf, sit behind a shiny desk, go to his club for lunch. Or would he still be hacking around New York City, getting drunk, calling up prostitutes in the middle of the night, sneaking into old Phoebe's room, snuffling around until she woke up, stuff like that.