Fresh Complaint

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  When my father got to him, Buddy was resting comfortably on his back, his eyes closed and the air-conditioner coil in his mouth. “I guess that coolant’s got alcohol in it,” my father said. All Buddy had to do was disconnect the coil, bend it with a pair of pliers, and take a drink. This last time he’d sipped too long, however, and had passed out. “I should have known something was up,” my father says. “For the past week all he’s been doing is fixing the air conditioners.”

  After calling an ambulance (Buddy remained unconscious as he was carried away), my father called the nursery. They wouldn’t refund his money or replace the palm tree. What was more, it had rained during the night and no one had to tell him about leaks. His own roof had leaked in the bathroom. The new roof, which had cost a considerable sum, hadn’t been installed properly. At a minimum, someone was going to have to retar it. “I need a guy to go up there and lay down some tar along the edges. It’s the edges, see, where the water gets in. That way, maybe I can save a couple of bucks.” While my father tells me all this, we drive out along A1A. It’s about ten in the morning by this point and the drifters are scattered along the shoulder, looking for day work. You can spot them by their dark tans. My father passes the first few, his reasons for rejecting them unclear to me at first. Then he spots a white man in his early thirties, wearing green pants and a Disney World T-shirt. He’s standing in the sun, eating a raw cauliflower. My father pulls the Cadillac up alongside him. He touches his electronic console and the passenger window hums open. Outside, the man blinks, trying to adjust his eyes to see into the car’s dark, cool interior.

  * * *

  At night, after my parents go to sleep, I drive along the strip into town. Unlike most of the places my parents have wound up, Daytona Beach has a working-class feel. Fewer old people, more bikers. In the bar I’ve been going to, they have a real live shark. Three feet long, it swims in an aquarium above the stacked bottles. The shark has just enough room in its tank to turn around and swim back the other way. I don’t know what effect the lights have on the animal. The dancers wear bikinis, some of which sparkle like fish scales. They circulate through the gloom like mermaids, as the shark butts its head against the glass.

  I’ve been in here three times already, long enough to know that I look, to the girls, like an art student, that under state law the girls cannot show their breasts and so must glue wing-shaped appliqués over them. I’ve asked what kind of glue they use (“Elmer’s”), how they get it off (“just a little warm water”), and what their boyfriends think of it (they don’t mind the money). For $10, a girl will take you by the hand, past the other tables where men sit mostly alone, into the back where it’s even darker. She’ll sit you down on a padded bench and rub against you for the duration of two whole songs. Sometimes, she’ll take your hands and will ask, “Don’t you know how to dance?”

  “I’m dancing,” you’ll say, even though you’re sitting down.

  At three in the morning, I drive back, listening to a country-and-western station to remind myself that I’m far from home. I’m usually drunk by this point but the trip isn’t long, a mile at most, an easy cruise past the other waterfront real estate, the big hotels and the smaller ones, the motor lodges with their various themes. One’s called Viking Lodge. To check in, you drive under a Norse galley, which serves as a carport.

  Spring break’s more than a month away. Most of the hotels are less than half full. Many have gone out of business, especially those farther out from town. The motel next to ours is still open. It has a Polynesian theme. There’s a bar under a grass hut by the swimming pool. Our place has a fancier feel. Out front, a white gravel walkway leads up to two miniature orange trees flanking the front door. My father thought it was worth it to spend money on the entrance, seeing as that was people’s first impression. Right inside, to the left of the plushly carpeted lobby, is the sales office. Bob McHugh, the salesman, has a blueprint of the resort on the wall, showing available units and timeshare weeks. Right now, though, most people coming in are just looking for a place to spend the night. Generally, they drive into the parking lot at the side of the building and talk to Judy in the business office.

  It rained again while I was in the bar. When I drive into our parking lot and get out, I can hear water dripping off the roof of the motel. There’s a light burning in Judy’s room. I consider going up to knock on her door. Hi, it’s the boss’s son! While I’m standing there, though, listening to the dripping water and plotting my next move, her light goes off. And with it, it seems, every light around. My father’s timeshare resort plunges into darkness. I reach out to put my hand on the hood of the Cadillac, to reassure myself with its warmth, and, for a moment, try to picture in my mind the way up, where the stairs begin, how many floors to climb, how many doors to pass before I get to my room.

  * * *

  “Come on,” my father says. “I want to show you something.”

  He’s wearing tennis shorts and has a racquetball racquet in his hand. Last week, Jerry, the current handyman (the one who replaced Buddy didn’t show up one morning), finally moved the extra beds and draperies out of the racquetball court. My father had the floor painted and challenged me to a game. But, with the bad ventilation, the humidity made the floor slippery, and we had to quit after four points. My father didn’t want to break his hip.

  He had Jerry drag an old dehumidifier in from the office and this morning they played a few games.

  “How’s the floor?” I ask.

  “Still a little slippy. That dehumidifier isn’t worth a toot.”

  So it isn’t to show me the new, dry racquetball court that my father has come to get me. It’s something, his expression tells me, more significant. Leaning to one side (the exercise hasn’t helped his back any), he leads me up to the third floor, then up another, smaller stairway that I haven’t noticed before. This one leads straight to the roof. When we get to the top, I see that there’s another building up here. It’s pretty big, like a bunker, but with windows all around.

  “You didn’t know about this, did you?” my father says. “This is the penthouse. Your mother and I are going to move in up here soon as it’s ready.”

  The penthouse has a red front door and a welcome mat. It sits in the middle of the tarred roof, which extends in every direction. From up here, all the neighboring buildings disappear, leaving only sky and ocean. Beside the penthouse, my father has set up a small hibachi. “We can have a cookout tonight,” he says.

  Inside, my mother is cleaning the windows. She wears the same yellow rubber gloves as when she used to clean the windows of our house back in the Detroit suburbs. Only two rooms in the penthouse are habitable at present. The third has been used as a storeroom and still contains a puzzle of chairs and tables stacked on top of one another. In the main room, a telephone has been installed beside a green vinyl chair. One of the warehouse paintings has been hung on the wall, a still life with seashells and coral.

  The sun sets. We have our cookout, sitting in folding chairs on the roof.

  “This is going to be nice up here,” my mother says. “It’s like being right in the middle of the sky.”

  “What I like,” my father says, “is you can’t see anybody. Private ocean view, right on the premises. A house this big on the water’d cost you an arm and a leg.

  “Soon as we get this place paid off,” he continues, “this penthouse will be ours. We can keep it in the family, down through the generations. Whenever you want to come and stay in your very own Florida penthouse, you can.”

  “Great,” I say, and mean it. For the first time, the motel exerts an attraction for me. The unexpected liberation of the roof, the salty decay of the oceanfront, the pleasant absurdity of America, all come together so that I can imagine myself bringing friends and women up to this roof in years to come.

  When it’s finally dark, we go inside. My parents aren’t sleeping up here yet but we don’t want to leave. My mother turns on the lamps.

  I go ov
er to her and put my hands on her shoulders.

  “What did you dream last night?” I ask.

  She looks at me, into my eyes. While she does this, she’s not so much my mother as just a fellow human being, with troubles and a sense of humor. “You don’t want to know,” she says.

  I go into the bedroom to check it out. The furniture has that motel look but, on the bureau, my mother has set up a photograph of me and my brothers. There’s a mirror on the back of the bathroom door, which is open. In the mirror, I see my father. He’s urinating. Or trying to. He’s standing in front of the toilet, staring down with a blank look. He’s concentrating on some problem I’ve never had to concentrate on, something I know is coming my way, but I can’t imagine what it is. He raises his hand in the air and makes a fist. Then, as though he’s been doing it for years, he begins to pound on his stomach, over where his bladder is. He doesn’t see me watching. He keeps pounding, his hand making a dull thud. Finally, as though he’s heard a signal, he stops. There’s a moment of silence before his stream hits the water.

  My mother is still in the living room when I come out. Over her head, the seashell painting is crooked, I notice. I think about fixing it, then think the hell with it. I go out onto the roof. It’s dark now, but I can hear the ocean. I look down the beach, at the other high-rises lit up, the Hilton, the Ramada. When I go to the roof’s edge, I can see the motel next door. Red lights glow in the tropical grass-hut bar. Beneath me, and to the side, though, the windows of our own motel are black. I squint down at the patio but can’t see anything. The roof still has puddles from last night’s storm and, when I step, I feel water gush up my shoe. The hole is getting bigger. I don’t stay out long, just long enough to feel the world. When I turn back, I see that my father has come out into the living room again. He’s on the phone, arguing with someone, or laughing, and working on my inheritance.

  1997

  FIND THE BAD GUY

  We’ve owned this house for—what—twelve years now, I reckon. Bought it from an elderly couple, the De Rougemonts, whose aroma you can still detect around the place, in the master especially, and in the home office, where the old buzzard napped on summer days, and a little bit in the kitchen, still.

  I remember going into people’s houses as a kid and thinking, Can’t they smell how they smell? Some houses were worse than others. The Pruitts next door had a greasy, chuck-wagon odor, tolerable enough. The Willots, who ran that fencing academy in their rec room, smelled like skunk cabbage. You could never mention the smells to your friends, because they were part of it, too. Was it hygiene? Or was it, you know, glandular, and the way each family smelled had to do with bodily functions deep inside their bodies? The whole thing sort of turned your stomach, the more you thought about it.

  Now I live in an old house that probably smells funny to outsiders.

  Or used to live. At the present time, I’m in my front yard, hiding out between the stucco wall and the traveler palms.

  There’s a light burning up in Meg’s room. She’s my sugar pie. She’s thirteen. From my vantage point I can’t make out Lucas’s bedroom, but as a rule Lucas prefers to do his homework downstairs, in the great room. If I were to sidle up to the house, I’d more than likely spy Lucas in his school V-neck and necktie, armed for success: graphing calculator (check), St. Boniface iPad (check), Latin Quizlet (check), bowl of Goldfish (check). But I can’t go up there now on account of it would violate the restraining order.

  I’m not supposed to come any closer than fifty feet to my lovely wife, Johanna. It’s an emergency TRO (meaning temporary), issued at night, with a judge presiding. My lawyer, Mike Peekskill, is in the process of having it revoked. In the meantime, guess what? Yours truly, Charlie D., still has the landscape architect’s plans from when Johanna and I were thinking of replacing these palms with something less jungly and prone to pests. So I happen to know for certain that the distance from the house to the stucco wall is sixty-three feet. Right now, I reckon I’m about sixty or sixty-one, here in the vegetation. And, anyway, nobody can see me, because it’s February and already dark in these parts.

  It’s Thursday, so where’s Bryce? Right. Trumpet lessons with Mr. Talawatamy. Johanna’ll be going to pick him up soon. Can’t stay here long.

  If I were to leave my hideout and mosey around the side of the house, I’d see the guest room, where I used to retreat when Johanna and I were fighting real bad, and where, last spring, after Johanna got promoted at Hyundai, I commenced to putting the blocks to the babysitter, Cheyenne.

  And if I kept going all the way into the backyard I’d come face-to-face with the glass door I shattered when I threw that lawn gnome through it. Drunk at the time, of course.

  Yessir. Plenty of ammunition for Johanna to play Find the Bad Guy at couples counseling.

  It’s not cold cold out, but it is for Houston. When I reach down to take my phone out of my boot, my hip twinges. Touch of arthritis.

  I’m getting my phone to play Words with Friends. I started playing it over at the station, just to pass the time, but then I found out Meg was playing it, too, so I sent her a game invite.

  In mrsbieber vs. radiocowboy I see that mrsbieber has just played poop. (She’s trying to get my goat.) Meg’s got the first p on a double-word space and the second on a double-letter space, for a total score of twenty-eight. Not bad. Now I play an easy word, pall, for a measly score of nine. I’m up fifty-one points. Don’t want her to get discouraged and quit on me.

  I can see her shadow moving around up there. But she doesn’t play another word. Probably Skypeing or blogging, painting her nails.

  Johanna and me—you say it “Yo-hanna,” by the way, she’s particular about that—we’ve been married twenty-one years. When we met I was living up in Dallas with my girlfriend at the time, Jenny Braggs. Back then I was consulting for only three stations, spread out over the state, so I spent most of every week on the road. Then one day I was up in San Antonio, at WWWR, and there she was. Johanna. Shelving CDs. She was a tall drink of water.

  “How’s the weather up there?” I said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Nothing. Hi, I’m Charlie D. That an accent I hear?”

  “Yes. I’m German.”

  “Didn’t know they liked country music in Germany.”

  “They don’t.”

  “Maybe I should consult over there. Spread the gospel. Who’s your favorite country recording artist?”

  “I am more into opera,” Johanna said.

  “I getcha. Just here for the job.”

  After that, every time I was down San Antone way, I made a point of stopping by Johanna’s desk. It was less nerve-racking if she was sitting.

  “You ever play basketball, Johanna?”

  “No.”

  “Do they have girls’ basketball over there in Germany?”

  “In Germany I am not that tall,” Johanna said.

  That was about how it went. Then one day I come up to her desk and she looks at me with those big blue eyes of hers, and she says, “Charlie, how good an actor are you?”

  “Actor or liar?”

  “Liar.”

  “Pretty decent,” I said. “But I might be lying.”

  “I need a green card,” Johanna said.

  Roll the film: me emptying my water bed into the bathtub so I can move out, while Jenny Braggs weeps copious tears. Johanna and me cramming into a photo booth to take cute “early relationship” photos for our “scrapbook.” Bringing that scrapbook to our immigration hearing, six months later.

  “Now, Ms. Lubbock—do I have that right?”

  “Lübeck,” Johanna told the officer. “There’s an umlaut over the u.”

  “Not in Texas there ain’t,” the officer said. “Now, Ms. Lubbock, I’m sure you can understand that the United States has to make certain that those individuals who we admit to a path of citizenship by virtue of their marrying U.S. citizens are really and truly married to those citizens. And so I’m going to have to
ask you some personal questions that might seem a little intrusive. Do you agree to me doing that?”

  Johanna nodded.

  “When was the first time you and Mr. D.—” He stopped short and looked at me. “Hey, you aren’t the Charlie Daniels, are you?”

  “Nuh-uh. That’s why I just go by the D. To avoid confusion.”

  “Because you sort of look like him.”

  “I’m a big fan,” I said. “I take that as a compliment.”

  He turned back to Johanna, smooth as butter. “When was the first time you and Mr. D. had intimate sexual relations?”

  “You won’t tell my mother, will you?” Johanna said, trying to joke.

  But he was all business. “Before you were married or after?”

  “Before.”

  “And how would you rate Mr. D.’s sexual performance?”

  “What do you think? Wonderful. I married him, didn’t I?”

  “Any distinguishing marks on his sex organ?”

  “It says ‘In God We Trust.’ Like on all Americans.”

  The officer turned to me, grinning. “You got yourself a real spitfire here,” he said.

  “Don’t I know it,” I said.

  * * *

  Back then, though, we weren’t sleeping together. That didn’t happen till later. In order to pretend to be my fiancée, and then my bride, Johanna had to spend time with me, getting to know me. She’s from Bavaria, Johanna is. She had herself a theory that Bavaria is the Texas of Germany. People in Bavaria are more conservative than your normal European leftist. They’re Catholic, if not exactly God-fearing. Plus, they like to wear leather jackets and such. Johanna wanted to know everything about Texas, and I was just the man to teach her. I took her to SXSW, which wasn’t the cattle call it is today. And oh my Lord if Johanna didn’t look good in a pair of blue jeans and cowboy boots.