Something to Be Desired (12 page)

“I’ll make it easy on you. You’ve got to have it.”

“All right, Gale, goddamn it.”

On this note Lucien drifted back: Dee is on the balls of her feet, on the seat of the sedan, saying “Ow!”; Lucien administers a spray lubricant associated with outboard motors, getting nowhere. They smell of mosquito dope. A wobbling fly rod indicates galaxies in the summer night sky. She looks fixedly through the rear window. Lucien reads the odometer and wishes every mile could tell a story. A garland of luck to previous owners, and to all those who like blondes with whiskey tenors, collapsed lungs or gas problems, as they are difficult to portray romantically, even to yourself; I didn’t know at the time I was buying seamless gutters. Lucien realized he was staring at Gale only when Gale said sharply, “Don’t feel sorry for me.”

After Gale left, Lucien made a short float on the river, watching rocks become ghosts in the green clarity. The
river was consecutive loops of emerald where one could drift for hours and end up a ten-minute walk from the car. A squall stood over the first big bend, hanging within its own envelope of unearthly light. Water streamed from the blades of Lucien’s oars white as platinum. The transom of the dory lifted and fell in the choppy water as the river swept him under the thunder-head. Lucien folded the oars so that the boat drifted like a sleeping gull; he tucked his head inside his windbreaker and watched the river sweep him out of the little squall, onto the broads where trout dimpled its silky perfection and aquatic insects soared in the changed temperature. Lucien leaned back into the oars and pulled away from a great white boulder, then into a narrow channel, inches from the speeding willows, the bow of the boat a rifle sight down the eye of the current. He had another mile to float, a mile of stony water that took him almost back to the car. Now he was in a hurry to get to work.

He returned to the house and raced through his shower and ablutions, splashing on that fad of his school years, Canoe after-shave lotion. He selected his tie without the normal fuss: their stripes and colors offered the little aesthetic amusement he had of late. Then the phone rang.

He picked it up just as the caller hung up. He slumped in the chair. He knew it was Suzanne. He would have called her at the White Cottage but he felt awkward about it. Maybe James was calling. Maybe he wanted to go fishing. Maybe his sunburn wasn’t bothering him anymore. Then the phone rang again and it was Suzanne. “I just called you,” she said. “What’ve you got on for this evening?”

“Not a thing.”

“Well, I borrowed a car from your secretary and stocked up for a few days. What about if I made us a nice pork roast and a cold beet salad?”

“I haven’t had it since you last made it. I couldn’t be happier.”

“Around eight?”

“I’ll be there.”

When he hung up the phone, Lucien clenched his fists in front of him and shook them up and down, humming through his teeth loudly. Then he rubbed his hands together and clapped them once, hard.

Lucien walked in, self-infused vigor taking shape out of old habit. The sulfuric steam plumes had lost the Dantean fugal quality with the coming of summer and stood out over the buildings and against the high dry blue sky with rare gaiety. It was still early in the morning.

There was a meeting of the Deadrock Ladies’ Bridge Club. All bluebeards and George Washington look-alikes. Things were quiet.

But Antoinette, the receptionist, had a weary irritated appearance whose meaning Lucien suspected.

“There was a death in Antelope Suite early this morning,” she said. “We couldn’t reach you at home. There’s some snafu about the arrangements. I’m afraid you’ll have to sort this one out.”

“Who is it?” Lucien’s hair stood on end.

“I got your ex a car,” said Antoinette as she flipped through the register.

“Who died?”

“Mr. Kelsey.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sakes, that’s clear to some tank town on Lake Erie.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I would,” said Lucien. “He was going to have his last drink at the bar with me before signing up for the enema training table. Drank a quart of Finlandia. I know the town well.”

Lucien went through the glass doors and into the fetid steam. Certainly Antoinette thinks that I am callused, but if I fall apart, what is to become of this place, and all who depend upon me? Heads looked up from the steam, and arms waved or offered favor-currying salutations, down the wavering poolside that took the press out of his shirts before he’d even started his day. He knew many here were afflicted, if only in their thoughts. Lucien himself was no different. He too was afflicted; lately nothing could have been more trying, more purgatorial, than the activities of his poor old dick. Apart from the obvious, it had begun making two streams during urination, one for the bowl, the other filling his shoe or starting him upon an unwelcome dance; often, too, it saved a final spurt for when it had been returned to his pants: things no hot spring cured. Well, we weren’t promised an easy road.

One of the employees, a local youngster whose cowboy boots peeped out from the trousers of his hot-spring uniform, stood outside Antelope Suite in shock. “Never seen one of these before, huh?”

“No, sir.”

“They say the first mile’s hell.”

Lucien walked in, gingerly followed by the youth. Mr. Kelsey was still in bed. An unfinished plate of saltimbocca with some julienned vegetables next to it, a
nouvelle cuisine
flourish.

“How in the hell he get this?” Pointing to the food.

“I’m not sure,” the boy stammered. Henchcliff, the chef, had pocketed some change here. Kelsey had fed himself very well and expired before his first enema. Mary Celeste would have canceled him when she saw that saltimbocca going by. Then Lucien would have had her to quiet, another day without the river, without running the dog, without excursions in the saddle, nor tonight’s dinner with James and Suzanne.

Lucien leaned over; nothing to confirm here beyond the open pores, the sharkfin lips, the unhearing ears, the full mortality beneath monogrammed hot-spring sheets. Kelsey had planned a hair-dyeing experiment. At all events, we must get these leftovers to the shores of Lake Erie, to the shadow of abandoned steel towns, to the windrowed fish and bird bodies of that storied Midwest.

“We’re going to need a shipping bag and the air-conditioned station wagon. Make sure Antoinette has contacted next of kin. Have housekeeping stand by. I’ll be in my office.”

Lucien walked the long corridor. He rang Antoinette. “Antoinette,
re
Kelsey: A. Get him embalmed. B. Get him a container. C. Ship him home. And when you confirm shipment with next of kin, verify the new billing address.” Lucien hung up and sighed. He buzzed again. “Make sure Mary Celeste is not still awaiting Mr. Kelsey. Then come in here for a letter.”

Antoinette appeared in about five minutes with a spiral notebook and pen. The last ten percent of her looks were
still there to extrapolate the loss from. “This one is to the Chamber, attention of Donald Deems. ‘Dear Donald, Do you think it is right that I should be asked to offer a rate reduction for the sister-city delegation when, one, no one knows the size of that delegation, and two, no one else in town is making a similar contribution to the success of the show? See you Thursday. Write it down. All best, Lucien.’ ” He looked up at Antoinette. “Chop chop. Today’s mail.”

Lucien hated having to be this way with Antoinette. But in the first six months of work she’d gone on and on about her no-good husband, her car loan and her period. Then she left her husband, and every time she had a new boyfriend there was a renewed outbreak of cystitis and she’d whine on about the cost of antibiotics, conspiracies between the AMA and pharmaceutical manufacturers to keep the prices up, and so on. Endless bladder-infection chats had finally turned Lucien into a man who watched his topics.

When she was gone, Lucien sighed, “A cowboy’s work is never done,” and started through his papers. Lang and Hughes in New York had sent the new ads, and they reflected the greater specificity he had requested: “Sun ’n’ Sulfur” for the travel magazines, “Minerals Plain” for
The New Yorker
with a wide-angle of the sage barrens making them look like a grass court. He vetoed for the last time, he hoped, an overweight children’s wing because of the inchoate evil he felt in the presence of fat youngsters. The very young failed to see the point of a rich mineral spring; they ran around yelling Who Cut the Cheese and other zircons of new wit. Besides that, a day that began with the purchase of seamless gutters to keep from provoking a scandal left a lot to be desired.

He went through the back of the kitchen, where a refrigerator truck of fresh fruit and vegetables from Oregon was being unloaded. “Hello, Henchcliff,” he called out. “How is it by now?” Henchcliff, whose habit it was to dress on or off the job like a prison trusty, twisted his head quickly in the don’t-ask-me of the perpetually angry. But Henchcliff had the touch. He was under the brutal constraint of cooking only longevity food, like so many of the nutritionists who made the rounds of spa kitchens. Henchcliff could loosen up, pour on the cholesterol, salt and grease with the best of them. On his best behavior, however, he sent forth hundreds of dewy, steamy, identical, fructoid marvels through the double doors to the fruit bats around the spring. How they could eat in the steam was beyond Lucien; but he was entrepreneur enough to recognize that dining on row crops half invisible to one another in an ambience that anywhere else would have gagged them was part of the mystique, part of what they took home to their dense-pack satellite homes, in gratitude. Pink faces hung mysteriously over the greenery in the steam.
Satisfied
faces, thought Lucien.

The candy kitchen occupied the west side of the main cooking area: it always surprised Lucien they could sell as much of the sulfur taffy as they did. But month after month it was a list leader, solid as a good franchise. Most people kind of choked them down like medicine, despite that no one claimed they were anything but candy. They did smell just like the spring, though, and nostalgia crops up in the least expected places.

He went out the far door and knocked at Dominic’s room. This used to be a bed-sitting room for the chef. It was no longer needed, now that Henchcliff lived in town.
It was isolated from the rest of the compound and made Lucien a little more comfortable. Dominic had many grave enemies, and it was good to have him in a less populated spot in the event of a rubout. Dominic was their only permanent guest.

Dominic called for him to enter in his pure, strange soprano. Lucien thrust half his body in. “Just saying hi.”

Dominic held up a Madonna made of blue smoked glass. “A new one,” he said. “From Sainte Anne de Beaupré in Quebec.” He set it on the shelf with the others. “Go on. I see y’busy.”

Back at reception and a quick fan through the receipts. He looked up to see the station wagon cruise past on the pea rock toward the back of the building. Should have been gone by now.

“Got ahold of the next of kin?”

“No problem,” said Antoinette.

“Billing?”

“American Express. They had duplicate cards.”

“What about the autopsy?”

“They’re going to pass. They wanted him hermetically sealed rather than embalmed. The state requires one or the other. He’s in the container now.”

Lucien gazed irritatedly out to the empty parking area. “Tell Zane to get a move on,” he said. “It looks hot out there. I’m going to work in the office. No calls.” Lucien headed back off down the corridor.

Antoinette yelled out: “Someone phoned about seamless gutters. Said the price had gone up.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sakes.”

Lucien sealed himself in the office. Quick look at his watch: two hours’ light to ride home and run the dog, then dinner with Suzanne and James.

He called for current balances in the springs account, the ranch account, his personal account and wrote them into the respective books. Deadrock Plumbing. This bill can’t be real. No real bill can be this size. These drifters need a moving target.

“Tim Lake. This is Lucien Taylor.” After a little bit: “Tim, you send me this bill?”

“Yes, Lucien, I did.”

“Tim, you’ve got the balls of a brass monkey.”

“Lucien, you’re lookin’ at a lot of hours on that sheet. I had three men up there, two trucks.”

“I’ve seen that before. One truck is to make beer runs when your rummies get the DTs working on my furnace. Tim, I’m gonna give you a break. I’m gonna rip this goddamned sonofabitch up and not let you hurt my feelings. You go sit down and write me a bill you take some pride in. But this time be honest. With yourself.”

Then, while the glow was upon him, though the age of bowmen and harpers was lost for all time, he could dash off some price-control letters. He rang Antoinette. Gone home. The phone was done for the day. He felt the earth move. Lucien pulled off his tie, examining its red and silver silk stripes for the first time, rolled it and put it in his pocket. He wandered down the corridor, seeing with satisfaction the cowboy and cowgirl waiters moving in the steam. Mary Celeste table-hopped with nutritional tips in a drooping dinner gown; her Empire coif listed very slightly to the north. In a couple of hours all but the minimum lights would have been turned off; most guests would be in their quarters. A few with wooing twinkles would be back in the main pool, paddling through stench to desire. There’s a little of that in all of us.

There was time to take a shower and shave once again,
inspecting his face for missed spots. Then he put on some invigorating lotion and watched himself button a blue-and-white-striped shirt. He had slicked his hair straight back like a rich heir, and he withdrew his lips so he could pass judgment on his teeth: bright gums, no plaque; the crown doesn’t appear unless one smiles too hard, as in drunkenness or, once a year, delight. He walked to the White Cottage, a bright and romantic rental unit in the wind-trained junipers above the spring. It did well.