There was no applause. Just a circle of smiles. After a long, almost audible silence, Karen said, “Oh, for God’s sake. Lighten up. No big deal. I just figured if Casey could stop smoking it, I could stop growing it.”
“So what’s the bad news?” Nellie asked.
“I hope everybody here loves zucchini,” Karen said. “I didn’t want my garden to go to waste. Come summer, we’ll be eating a lot of zucchini.”
———
When they had finished doing the dishes, Casey and Diana walked hand-in-hand out to the lounge. Karen and Nellie were seated at the piano keys, banging out, repeatedly, the first eight bars of “Heart and Soul.” Casey held out his left hand and Diana took it with her right. They glided gracefully over the parquet, ducking and spinning and old-soft-shoeing through chorus after chorus after chorus.
“Let’s go back to the kitchen,” Diana whispered in Casey’s ear. “I made us a treat.”
Casey followed her back to the walk-in pantry behind the kitchen. Diana leaned over the counter to light a lamp, and Casey, standing behind her, slid his hands around her waist and then forward under her yellow sweatshirt, to give her unbound breasts a squeeze. His fingers pressed in as he lifted, and he made lazy circles over her nipples. Soft lamplight filled the room, the piano chorus from the lounge was soft and distant, and Diana hummed as she straightened up and leaned back against his chest. He hummed to the back of her head, breathing her hair like the freshest of fields. Heart and soul. Heart and soul.
“I’m so in love with you,” he told her, in time with the music.
“Casey?”
“Hmmm?”
“Close your eyes.”
He obeyed. She gently withdrew from his arms and he could feel her turning to face him, thigh to thigh to thigh.
“Open your mouth. Keep those eyes closed.”
Obeyed. He would do anything for this woman.
Pleasure landed on his tongue. Warm chocolate. Grainy, soft, melting, the flavor growing in his mouth like a bubbling spring, like the source of a river.
“You can close your mouth now.
“Mmmm. Can I open my eyes?”
“Yup.”
She grinned back at him in the yellow lamplight, brown fudge frosting her lips. “Like?” she said. She reached out and shut the pantry door, muting the music.
“Love,” he answered.
“I love you,” she told him.
“I know you do. I am the world’s luckiest man.”
She nodded. “Want some more?”
“I want to taste your face,” he said.
She presented her face, and he licked and sucked the fudge from her lips.
She reached back to the counter and brought back a hand covered with brown, which he lifted to his face. He sucked finger after sweet finger, then licked her palm with a pointed tongue.
More.
She bent three fingers and scooped into the pan of fudge like a steam shovel, then rubbed her hands together, as if she were washing them in reverse. She slid her gooey hands under her sweatshirt and grinned while he watched her sculpt his dessert. When she was finished he lifted the yellow sweatshirt and gazed at the beautiful brown mud pies that rose and fell with Diana’s eager breathing.
“And that,” she said softly, bringing her smudged hands to his face, his ears, his hair, the back of his neck, “that,” she continued, drawing his head down to her chest, “and this, and this,” she murmured, pulling him to her until his face rested in the middle of Eden, “is only the beginning. I made lots.”
“Lots,” Casey answered, his mouth full.
“Lots.”
———
“Casey, are you in there?” Nellie’s voice.
“Shoot,” Casey murmured. He was standing on the pantry footstool, being a Fudgsickle.
Diana giggled with her mouth full, which got him laughing, and he nearly lost his balance, dizzy with pleasure, with sugar, with the hilarity of life itself.
“Casey?”
“Yo,” Casey answered. “Be right with you, Nellie. Give me an hour or so.”
Diana stifled a laugh, and Casey stepped down from the stool and into her arms, humming.
“You have a phone call,” Nellie called. “What are you two up to?”
“Take a message, will you?” Casey asked. “I’ll call them in the morning.”
“It’s from Australia,” Nellie said. “Professor somebody, sounds cranky as hell.”
“Oh Jesus. Okay. Great. Uh. Tell him I’ll be right there. Right,” he said, zipping up.
He kissed Diana on her smiling lips and said, “I’m off to work, you sweet thing.”
He opened the pantry door and weaved into the dark kitchen, glided across the linoleum, out into the dining room, and on through the lounge, silent and dark now, but still warm from the evening’s woodstove fire, and on through the hallway to the lamp-lit lobby of the hotel.
Tell me again. Why am I here?
Telephone. Right.
He lifted the receiver to his ear and said, “Doctor Livingston, I presume.”
“Now you see here,” a feminine-sounding voice replied. “You’ve made me hold for a long time, and this is an expensive telephone call. Don’t go wasting my time making jokes about my Christian name. I’ve had to put up with that all my life, you know. Moreover, I don’t believe we’ve been introduced, Mr. Casey, and the way I was brought up, one doesn’t go calling a stranger by his or her Christian name until invited to do so. Now then. What do you want from me.”
“Well, to start with,” Casey said, “I want to beg your pardon.”
“Granted.”
“I didn’t mean to offend.”
“Mr. Casey, would you get to the point? This call is costing quite a lot of money, you know.”
“Sorry. The point. Yes. The point. The point is we’ve got to save Mathilda. We have to save Hope Springs. The forces of doom are gathering against us, Doctor, and you’re the only one who can save us. Only you know the truth about Mathilda, and maybe the world will pay attention if it comes from you, and not just some goofball musician who doesn’t know how to dress for the occasion, whatever the occasion might be.”
“You really do have a case of logorrhea, don’t you. Are you always like this?”
“Yes. No. I mean usually I come closer to saying what I mean and knowing what I’m talking about. Yes. I have logorrhea. But that’s just now, not always. Must have been something I ate. Oh wow, as we used to say in the sixties.” That fudge!
“Well, Mr. Casey, this has been interesting talking to you. You’re the first Californian I’ve talked to in fifty years, and I must say the Golden State doesn’t appear to have grown any wiser in my absence. Now, if you don’t mind—”
“Wait! I remember now what this is all about! The yellow bugs. You remember the yellow bugs?”
“Ah yes, the sulfur beetle,” Doctor Pomeroy replied. “Pleasant little buggers. Utterly useless.”
“They’re endangered,” Casey said. “As in ‘endangered species’?”
Pomeroy responded with a laugh. “Endangered species, endangered species. You Americans are so endearingly daft about endangered species. Half of you are hell-bent on killing them off for fun and profit, the other half determined to save them whether they want saving or not.”
“But if we don’t help, if you don’t help, Mathilda might disappear from the planet forever! Surely—”
“Surely what?” Doctor Pomeroy responded. “Species go extinct every day. Death is part of life, and extinction is part of existence. I adore extinction. It’s my life’s work, extinction. I won a Nobel Prize for helping to stamp out two species of mosquito that carried a disease that ravaged Indonesia. The Indonesians don’t miss that disease one bit, nor do they miss the mosquitoes. I daresay you slap mosquitoes yourself. Good riddance.”
“Doctor Pomeroy, listen to me, please.” Casey forced his brain to hold onto itself with both hands. “It’s the yellow beetles we’re talking
about. The sulfur beetle. Coleoptera hydrophilidae mathilda. Doesn’t that mean something to you? I thought you were obsessed with this bug. That pamphlet you wrote, Organism of My Delight. I’ve read it over and over, cover to cover. The Remarkable Sulfur Beetle of Mathilda Springs. Surely you haven’t forgotten!”
Doctor Pomeroy laughed aloud, a cackle that rattled Casey’s ear. “That silly little pamphlet! My godfreys! You think I’m the author of that silly little tract! Oh dear, this is really too much, too much indeed.”
“So I’ve got the wrong number?” Casey said. “I’ve got to start all over? Is there anybody down there who’s willing to issue a statement that the yellow bug is endangered? It means a lot to me, and to my friends, my home. Sorry to have bothered you, Professor. This is, this has not been an easy conversation for me, for a number of reasons. Uh—”
“Now hold on, dear boy. Just hold on. Let me explain a bit. The author of that pamphlet was my father, known to the few people who knew him as ‘Bugs’ Pomeroy. A laughingstock, really, but a harmless man. I’ve had to live with his reputation as well as his name my whole life, which is probably what has made me so successful. But there it is, you see. Yes, he was a bit daft, mind. And that silly bug, the only thing he cared about. How is Hope Springs, by the way?”
“No wonder. Your father. You’re his son.”
“His daughter.”
“I see. I suppose your father has died?”
“Donkey’s years ago. Is Hope Springs still as lovely as ever? I remember it as gorgeous in the spring. It must be spring there now. Is it gorgeous?”
“Gorgeous.”
“Of course I was quite the romantic back then. I was only fifteen years old when we left. Cast out of paradise, is how I felt.”
“That’s how we feel about it now,” Casey said. “They’re going to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.”
“Pity. But then that’s happening all over, isn’t it.”
“You won’t help us stop it?”
“Mr. Casey, I do wish you the best of luck, but I’m quite busy trying to make more species go extinct. No, I’m afraid you’re on your own. Tell me, does anybody there remember, or have you heard stories, of a young Aborigine boy who once lived at Hope Springs, a lad named Nqong?”
“Nqong?”
“No, I didn’t suppose so.”
“Nqong lives here,” Casey said. “Must be the same Nqong. Can’t be more than one.”
“Good God. Good God! Nqong’s there? Put him on, man, put him on!”
“Well, he doesn’t live exactly here,” Casey explained. “He’s up in the hills. In the forest. A long hike to a place I’ve never been. But we see him from time to time.”
“Nqong lives there!” Pomeroy said, with a voice soft and full of wonder. “It must be gorgeous there right now, Hope Springs in the springtime and all that. How’s the weather?”
“Perfect.”
“Beastly here in Hobart. Winter coming on, you see.”
“Must be dreadful. I suggest you come back to Hope Springs, where it’s spring and glorious.” Casey’s ears were humming with sentences he wanted to add, but he kept his mouth shut during the long silence.
“Tell Nqong I’m on my way,” Professor Pomeroy said at last. “Before I leave I’ll prepare a statement about your precious Coleoptera hydrophilidae mathilda. Why not? It’s a hoax, of course, but what harm could it do? Now if you don’t mind, I’ll ring off. Goodbye then. See you soon.”
Casey hung up, shook his head, and wandered back through the hotel, hoping to find Diana still in the pantry so she could help him sort out the thoughts that buzzed in his brain like so many flying insects. Instead, he found her on one of the sofas in the lounge, snoring gently. He checked the woodstove and found it still warm, but cool enough to hold his hand against. He picked up the afghan from the other sofa and draped it over Diana’s body. Then he knelt beside her and, twirling a tress of her fine golden hair, kissed her cheek goodnight.
She stirred. “How’d it go?”
“Wonderful,” Casey said. “She’s going to do it.”
“Do what? Who’s she?”
“Professor Livingston Pomeroy. She’s the old bug nut’s daughter. She’s a big-time entomologist, and she’s on our side. She’s going to write something that says the yellow bugs must be saved. Oh, and she’s coming here.”
“Here? When? Why?”
“Right away.”
“To see the beetles?”
“No,” Casey said. He stroked her arm. “To see Nqong.”
“Casey, are you making this up? What’s gotten into you? You sound high.”
He kissed her. “Thanks to you,” he said. “You and the fudge and the marijuana. Not to mention one of the goofiest conversations I’ve ever had. Yes, Diana. You and the fudge and Karen’s pot—”
“Pot? You didn’t go out to the smoking bridge, did you?”
“Of course not. I’m talking about the marijuana fudge. Heavenly!”
“It was tasty, Casey, but I didn’t put any marijuana in that fudge. I threw Karen’s dope away. It’s compost. Sorry.”
“You mean I got that high just of chocolate and love?”
“’Fraid so,” Diana said. She smiled. “Me, too.”
———
Nellie and Baxter were the last ones in the bathhouse that night. They sat in bath two, where the temperature of the water was warmer than that of their blood, for what felt like over an hour before either of them spoke.
At last, when Nellie was feeling thoroughly water-logged, halfway angry, and halfway fearful of how Baxter might respond, she said, “Baxter, we need to talk.”
“Talk,” he said, his fingers laced behind his head. “That’s something you’re good at.”
“And we’re going to have a real conversation, you and I. That means we both talk and we both listen, okay? Baxter, are you listening to me?”
“You bet. This water feels great. It always feels great, this time of night. Don’t you think?”
“Not small talk, Baxter.”
“I don’t know any big talk.”
Nellie stood up and stepped out of the bath. She reached for her towel and said, “Come on, kid. Let’s go to the carriage house. I do want a conversation, but I’ll settle for a good screw.”
As they walked along the driveway, wrapped in their robes, they could feel the chilly night air on their faces, but their long soak in the hot bath had warmed their blood and kept them comfortable.
Nellie took Baxter’s hand. “The thing is, I love you Baxter. It’s mostly physical, I guess, but it’s love.”
Baxter said, “Okay.”
“Would you be kind enough to say you love me, too?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Okay, then. Say it.”
“Sure, why not?”
“You’re impossible. And the thing is, I’d just hate it if this relationship didn’t mean anything to you. You’re the reason I moved here. You’re the reason I gave up Malibu to come live in a hippie commune. Do you think I’d be here if it weren’t for you?”
“Hmmm.”
“Do you think I actually want to work in a hotel? Make beds? Clean toilets? I came here to be with you. I want you to move all your stuff into the carriage house and sleep with me every night.”
“I hear you,” Baxter said.
“And I don’t want you fucking Emily, or anybody else on the staff, and especially I don’t want you romancing the guests. Are we clear on that?”
“All clear.”
“Okay, then.”
“Okay then.”
“Baxter, look at me.”
Baxter looked at Nellie, nodded, and winked.
“You’re impossible. Hopeless and impossible.”
He nodded again. Winked the other eye.
“And infuriating! You know what, Baxter? You’re not a caring person at all. You’re not even a human being. You’re a human vibrator.”
Baxter did the twist.
“Okay, forget it,” Nellie said. “You’re not worth the effort. Go ahead and do it with Emily. I could give a shit. You give me a royal pain in the ass.”
“Shall we go inside?” Baxter offered. “Still want that good screw?”
“Forget it, pal. We’re through. Cold turkey for me, tough shit for you.” She turned her back on him and opened the carriage house door.
He shrugged. “Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, whoever you are.”
She stopped, turned around, and corrected him. “Wherever.”
“Whatever,” he replied.
She stepped inside and shut the door in his face.
11. Saving Mathilda
Sipping gin and quinine in her study, Doctor Livingston Pomeroy, the world-famous Tasmanian entomologist, jotted down all she could remember about Coleoptera hydrophilidae mathilda. It was a rather endearing beetle, she had to admit. The size of a thumbnail, with the luster of a topaz. In the early spring, just after they left their cocoons, they’d swarm like a dancing yellow cloud over the landscape. Then they’d relax and poke about individually for the rest of the spring and summer.
Liv remembered being thoroughly jealous of the little beasts. They were all her father cared about, really. There were times in her pouty adolescence when Liv would gladly have chased them all down with Flit.
It was a pity that there was no description of the sulfur beetle anywhere in the literature, unless you count that ridiculous pamphlet her father wrote and published in Anacapa, California, near the end of his life. By which time he had gone seriously ’round the bend. So as far as the scientific community was concerned, the sulfur beetle did not exist. In fact, Liv’s only copy of that pamphlet was not shelved among her beetle books or even in her scientific collection at all, but was buried in a rarely opened drawer containing family business. She knew of its existence chiefly because it was almost always in the way when she was looking for something else, and it was faded yellow.
She pulled it out of the drawer and set it on her desk. Poured herself more gin. Now then. The cover had a line drawing of a beetle and the title Organism of My Delight. The subtitle was “The Remarkable Sulfur Beetle of Mathilda Springs.” The author was one Livingston Pomeroy, R.A.E.S., Ph.S., Sc.E.B. Professor Emeritus of Entomology, Hobart University, Tasmania, Aus.
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