Roscoe (15 page)

When they woke into the third day of the honeymoon, Pamela was revisited by her old pain. She ate sparsely and said she would not give in to it. They fished off the dock by the
Trophy House, and Roscoe was reeling in a small trout when they saw the steamer coming across the lake. He threw the trout back and stowed the fishing rods in the house, and they walked to the pier
to meet the invaders. Ariel was first off the steamer.

“Ah, my little ones,” he said to Roscoe and Pamela, “I didn’t expect to find anyone waiting for us.”

“We’re three days into our honeymoon,” Roscoe said.

“What a pity to disturb you.”

“But we’re disturbing you in your own house, Ariel,” Roscoe said. “Elisha did know we were coming. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you.”

“Elisha and I aren’t talking,” Ariel said.

Ariel on the pier was a handsome, salient figure in blue blazer and white slacks, pencil-line mustache, a preposterously large ruby on his left ring finger, and a full head of pure white hair.
He did not look his sixty-eight years, and he exuded a sense of mature dignity that was wholly unearned. Ever since Elisha relieved him of power at the steel mill, he had been in perpetual motion
between Albany, Manhattan, Miami, Saratoga, and the pleasure domes of Europe, never alone, devoting all his days to the hedonistic carnival his life, in late years, had become. Now, as his servants
unloaded everyone’s luggage, Ariel introduced Roscoe and Pamela to his traveling companions as they came down the ramp: Lamar Kensington, the insurance executive who backed the Broadway
musical with him,
Encore, Maestro,
a hit that renewed Ariel’s exchequer after he left the mill; three Broadway dancers, Billie, Lillie, and Dolly, from another Ariel-Lamar show that had
just flopped; two judges from downstate whom Ariel introduced only as Jerry and Ted; Ariel’s chauffeur, Griggs; his personal chef, Philippe; and, last off the boat, his physician, Roy
Warner, and Warner’s bosomy wife, Estelle. Ariel saw or talked with Warner every day of his life to combat the shifting pains, maladies, and other multifarious disguises that death assumed in
its never-ending pursuit of Ariel’s ailing soul and body.

“Oh, Dr. Warner,” Pamela said when she saw him, “thank heaven you’re here. You don’t know the pain I’ve been in.”

“She’s been suffering since yesterday,” Roscoe said to Warner.

Dr. Warner, an affable, jowly man in his forties, with large ears and a perfect bedside smile, shook hands with Pamela. “Your stomach acting up again?” he asked.

“It gets better, then it comes back.”

“Do you have the pills I gave you?”

“Gone. But I haven’t needed them for weeks.”

“I’ll get you some when we settle in and I find my bags.”

“You’ll join us for lunch, and late dinner,” Ariel said. “We have a continuing feast, you know.”

“Of course,” said Roscoe, who was already making plans to leave.

Half an hour later, Roscoe had escorted Pamela to the Warners’ cottage and was walking with Ariel, both of them coatless under the ardent July sun. They were nearing the
Swiss cottage, the most elegant of the secondary buildings, built to match the main lodge, with twisted cedar and shaggy spruce. On the sloping lawn in front of it, Billie, Lillie, and Dolly were
sunbathing on the grass, all supine and naked under small lap-towels.

“Excessively lush, the scenery at Tristano,” Ariel said, and he waved to the women. They all waved back and Billie removed her towel.

“And it changes radically from minute to minute,” Roscoe said.

“You hardly need anything along these lines at the moment, Roscoe, but you should know that these young women are very friendly.”

“But I have a very friendly bride.”

“You also have a reputation for diversity, and it’s a comfort to have excess on hand for emergencies.”

“I can’t imagine one arising,” Roscoe said. “Which of those excessive creatures belongs to you?”

“Oh, that’s not how it’s done. We have no ownership here.”

“Sweet land of liberty.
E pluribus unum
?”

“There you have it.”

Ariel’s sexual excesses distanced many, but they amused Roscoe. Since childhood he had developed a friendship with Ariel that was familial. It had been painful to watch him squander his
money and weaken the steel mill as he became a full-time satyr. But the dream assumes curious shapes.

“I suppose you miss the mill,” Roscoe said.

“Not at all,” said Ariel. “I gave it all I had. Now I’m doing the same for myself.”

“I grieve over the trouble between you and Elisha,” Roscoe said. “The war between fathers and sons is unwinnable and usually a self-mutilating pursuit. And Tivoli isn’t
the same without you around.”

“Ah, you grew up well, Roscoe, and you have the gift of talk. I thought you’d rise in political office like your father.”

“I wasn’t cut out for public life.”

“We never know what we’re cut out for. Who could have predicted I’d swap my stable of horses for a stable of women?”

“Some might consider that an improvement.”

“As do I, on those days when I don’t think I’m dying.”

“Psychic sex as an antidote to psychic illness. Are you dying now?”

“Not at the moment. But the day is young.”

“We won’t clutter your demise,” Roscoe said. “We’ll get out of your way by morning.”

“Don’t be in a hurry. There’s always room for two more at Tristano. Too many is just enough. And the time allotted for frolic runs out, Roscoe. Take my word.”

Estelle Warner was alone on the porch of the main lodge, drinking what looked like gin, when Ariel and Roscoe settled into green rocking chairs. Lee, an Oriental servant,
appeared at their elbows as they arrived, asking whether he might bring drinks. Whiskey and whiskey, the two men said, and Lee vanished into the lodge.

“Did you have a nice walk, Ari?” Estelle asked.

“We did. The girls are taking the sun.”

“I thought of doing that myself,” Estelle said, “but it’s a bit too high in the sky for me. I’ll get the freckles in odd places.”

“Nothing wrong with freckles in odd places,” Ariel said.

“You like the odd places,” Estelle said.

Estelle smiled at Roscoe, revealing a set of teeth so egregiously false they neutralized all meaning in her smile. Her manner, like her bosom, was ebullient.

“Are you waiting for the doctor?” Roscoe asked her.

“He’s having a session with his patient.”

“Pamela, you mean.”

“Oh yes, Pamela. They do drag it out.”

“I know,” Roscoe said. “I’ve taken her to his office.”

“She takes you with her, does she? He’s had her in hand since she was fifteen. He’s brought her along.”

“Oh yes? How do you mean that?”

“He’s taught her how it’s done. Roy does love the little chickadees.”

“Estelle, Roscoe and Pamela are married.”

“Married, are you? How cozy! You and I should have a matching consultation. We could have it right now, right here on facing chairs. The servants would never intrude, and Ari could cheer
us on. You know, I’d wager that Roy is re adjusting her pelvis even as we speak.”

“They’re on their
honeymoon,
Estelle.”

“Honeymoon! Oh, that is
very
spicy, and the doctor having a house call from the bride.”

Roscoe remembered Pamela’s face that day when she walked up the steps of the porch with Dr. Warner. It was a half-smile, a mask of relief at the presumable banishing of pain, the
restoration of light to her dark condition, but also, in her cheeks and lips, the flush of gratification that Roscoe knew well. The force of the doctor’s jaw, his parsimonious grin, expressed
quiet triumph.

“Walk me back to the room, Roscoe,” Pamela said. “I still feel lightheaded. I need to lie down.”

As they left the porch, Roscoe decided that none of what Estelle had suggested was true, that it was Tristano imposing its aura of fantasia. In their room Pamela opened her body to Roscoe with
such fervid immediacy that he understood, even if he could not confirm, that it was not Tristano’s fantasia but the experience of receiving a second lover within a quarter-hour of the first
that was driving Pamela’s ecstasy; that this arose not from either act of love but from their whor ish succession. Roscoe then realized this had been the pattern of their love since he first
came to know it, that hers was no more related to him than his was to her, that they were both artful stylists enacting a loveless ritual that had no meaning beyond the orgasmic. Meaning would
destroy the ecstasy. Roscoe now thought of it as loathsome pleasure, consummated by mutual traitors. Life without betrayal is not life.

He finished her off, then left her to sleep away her loathing. He walked out the back door of the main lodge and into the woods, took a circuitous path to the boathouse, and when he looked back
at the city of Tristano he could not see any aura of fantasia, nor could he believe there ever was such a thing. Your only fantasia, Roscoe, is your gullibility.

He untethered the outboard motorboat and rode it almost across the lake, where it sputtered and stopped, out of gas. He dropped anchor, dove into the water, swam the last hundred yards to the
steamer dock, then walked to the railroad station at North Creek. With damp money he bought a ticket back to Albany, where ecstasy was the impossible love of Veronica, plus two dozen oysters at
Keeler’s.

“You were always a malicious bitch,” Veronica was saying to Pamela in the courtroom, “but this is an evil act.”

“I only want what is mine,” Pamela said.

“Gilby is not yours and never was.” Veronica turned to see if the boy was still at the table, and lowered her voice. “Do you even know who his father is?”

“Oh, I do indeed.”

“Your dead Russian never accepted him.”

“What is your point, Veronica? Do you have secret information about his father? By all means, let me in on it.” Pamela was smiling.

“You won’t get this boy.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

“Veronica,” said Roscoe, “there’s nothing to be gained by this. She’ll do what she’ll do, and we’ll overthrow it.”

“Still slobbering after her,” Pamela said, “like the fat little Roscoe you always were. And still so insufferably smart. But you know better than anyone what you’ll
never have and never be. I love how that must torture you.”

“My torture ends, Pamela,” Roscoe said, “when you leave the room.”

Gilby stood up from his chair and Pamela walked to him.

“We
will
be together, my darling one,” she said for all to hear, and she embraced him. “I love you and I’ll take care of you forever.”

“I don’t even like you,” Gilby said.

Pamela stood away from him.

“You will,” she said, “you’ll love your mother. Remember that I love you.”

“You’re not my mother,” Gilby said.

“Cut your losses,” Roscoe said to Pamela. “Go home and put a dagger in what’s left of your heart.”

In Pamela’s face Roscoe saw raw malice, malignant need. Elisha was right: she was desperate, would do anything to attain her goal. But despite this lawsuit, her goal wasn’t
necessarily Gilby’s custody. She confirmed that when she whispered to Veronica, “It’s a wise child that knows its father.”

Roscoe sat alone in Keeler’s Sadler Room, beneath a W. Dendy Sadler print of twelve happy and fat old monks being served a sumptuous supper by six sullen and thin young
monks. When he ate, Roscoe identified with the fat monks. On the room’s walls were dozens of other Sadler prints of eighteenth-century English men, and now and then women, always celebrating
or ritualizing, or pensive or bereaved, amid food and drink. Roscoe dipped an oyster cracker into his cocktail sauce, well into his second splendid bottle of Cheval Blanc, and five oysters into his
second dozen of bluepoints. Would he go for a third dozen? He would consider it, for this might be his last meal in the civilized world. Now he stopped dwelling on oysters to consider the news just
given to him by O.B., who was sitting across the table with Mac, the odor of witch hazel, O.B.’s aftershave lotion, mixing with the aroma of cocktail sauce, not a happy fusion. The news also
was not happy: the Dutchman, proper name Vernon Van Epps, a pimp with a nightclub, had been found murdered in his flat upstairs over his Hudson Avenue club, the Double Dutch.

“Two dozen stab wounds, back and chest,” O.B. said.

“I’m cheering,” Mac said.

“Don’t cheer too loud,” O.B. said.

“He was a worthless bag of chicken guts,” Mac said. “They should bury him in pig shit.”

“You didn’t care for him,” Roscoe said.

“He was a no-good fat fuck,” Mac said.

“Keep this up,” O.B. said, “they’ll lock
you
up for it.”

“What’d he do to you, Mac?”

“He took Mac’s girlfriend off the street and put her to work in his bar,” O.B. said. “Then she wasn’t Mac’s girl anymore.”

“Are you talking about Pina?” Roscoe asked. “Giuseppina?”

“Pina,” Mac said.

“She’s a working girl,” Roscoe said. “She’s been on the street ever since I know her.”

“Right,” Mac said, “but she came home to me.”

“Touching,” said O.B. “The Dutchman was informing for the Governor’s people. He probably told them about the Division Street payoffs. The troopers found him
dead.”

“Who said he was informing?”

“A plainclothes trooper, Dory Dixon. He’s an inspector and was making it his investigation. Our beat cop, Eddie Miller, saw trooper cars and called the desk. I went down and they got
guards at the Dutchman’s door. ‘Wait a minute,’ I say, ‘this is still Albany. Who the hell are you to set up guards without us?’ Dixon says somebody killed their
informant. ‘Maybe so,’ I say, ‘but they killed him in my town, and this is my investigation from this minute on, and my coroner is in charge, and the coroner, as you goddamn well
know, can arrest
you
if he’s in the right mood, so get your troops the fuck out of here and if you’re nice I’ll let you sit in on the autopsy.’ He was boiling, but he
pulled off his guards. I called Nolan and he came down and took the body over to Keegan’s.”

“They probably think we did it,” Roscoe said.