The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  What was Leila’s life like now? What did she care about? Who? I realized I didn’t know; she could be anything at all, and I thought, Why the hell did I do a stupid thing like coming out here? Why did I let Verl and Mama talk me into it? I was angry at both of them.

  Then a strong proprietorial feeling flashed inside me. Why was I being forced to stand about with a vacant smile while strangers gabbled at Leila as though she belonged to them? I’d known her practically all our lives. Longevity had rights.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Verl asked when we finally sat down in a red oyster-shell booth and ordered our drinks.

  “I’m just thinking,” I told him.

  “Well, Devin, for Christ’s sake, talk,” Leila said as she took the cigarette out of my mouth to light hers. “I’ve missed listening to you talk.”

  “I thought you were going to give up smoking three years ago,” I talked.

  “I did, but I’m really incredibly oral, and last week I broke off the stem of my pipe prying open a paint can. As a matter of fact, guess what? I won a prize in a pipe-smoking contest at the Memorial Day Street Festival. I smoked forty-seven minutes on one match.” She offered this information as a child a first poem, with the shy, tentative smile with which she always called attention to her private successes, uncertain they would be believed, much less praised.

  “Are you kidding? Almost an hour?” I was deliberately impressed. In secret, anyhow, I did envy Leila the multiplicity of achievement with which she renewed herself, for, personally, I felt the loss, which I attributed to the James-Jardin debacle, of any capacity to juvenate myself with fresh talents, however inane.

  Leila ordered more drinks. “So, Devin,” she said, “when are you going to write realms and realms of scholarly books and become a famous professor and tutor Maisie and Davy?”

  Leila had enormous respect for education, a nineteenthcentury German merchant’s awe of Herr Professor. To my continued surprise, she also had two children, and in an imagined future, I was to lead them both ceremoniously to the fountain of knowledge. Now Maisie (Madeline) was four and David was two. I had briefly encountered Maisie three times, and Davy once—only, however, as an alteration in Leila’s figure. I remembered now that seeing her thus maternalized had provoked an unsettling excitement in me. I had forgotten that.

  “Who knows?” I answered, and ordered another drink. “I don’t really know what I want to do. Why don’t you choose for me? One thing’s as good as another, considering it’s all irrelevant, right?” I wasn’t sure I believed this, but it was my style with Verl and Leila. They were both so sure and serious.

  “Christ,” she laughed, as I expected, “are you still waiting around to get focused?”

  Verl said, “Devin’s just a little ole blotter. Just soaks it all up. Hell, ma’am, haven’t you noticed the western walk he’s developed since he’s been in Colorado two whole hours? Pure Alan Ladd. Shane.”

  “Pure negative capability. Keats,” I told them happily; few things pleased me more than having people criticize me affectionately while I was there. Verl and Leila did this a lot.

  He shook his head. “You don’t want to bother figuring out who you are.”

  “That’s why I say I’ll never trust you again as far as I can throw you,” Leila said. “You’re emotionally fickle.”

  “How can you say that?” I looked hurt. “I’m here, aren’t I? I met you when we were fourteen. Nine years later, and here I sit. What counts for fidelity?”

  “Being faithful,” she said.

  “Oh, God, we were practically prepuberty; that doesn’t count.” Leila had often razzed me, rather obsessively, about Judy Field and her father’s car. She rarely missed an opportunity to remind me of this sliver of ancient history.

  ‘You think you aren’t ‘real’ when you’re fourteen? You think you aren’t capable of love? You think you can’t get hurt?” Verl asked in that Quakerish style that had led him to consider divinity school and which really irritated me. I turned to Leila.

  “I hope you’re not still hanging on to that grudge, Leila. How long are you going to keep on blasting me for something that happened in the eleventh grade, for Christ’s sake? I’m not even the same person.”

  “I am” she said quietly.

  Somebody said, “Oh, here you are. Hello.”

  We all looked up. Leila’s husband, Mittie, was standing there, beaming at us with a trained smile that slipped back toward his natural diffidence before he could lock it in securely. I almost didn’t recognize him. The last, which was the third, time I had seen Mittie he had been very heavy—I think Leila said he had tried to eat his way into character parts—and his weight gave him the impression of a kindly stability. Now that he was thin, all his mannerisms had speeded up into a cluttered nervousness. Only his thick black mustache still had solidity. Leila introduced Verl; everyone said hello.

  Mittie Stark, as he often explained himself, was a scared and sad person. Only one thing sustained him above the pit he saw gaping open beneath his feet—and that one thing was his love of acting. He was not especially good at it, but not suspecting that fact at all, he was never troubled by the realization. His stock company at the Red Lagoon Theatre was therefore the perfect setting for Mittie’s affair with his craft. Since he (or more precisely his father) paid for the playhouse, he was spared the vagaries of casting directors and the disappointments of not being preferred to others. Any part in any play was his for the choosing at the Red Lagoon.

  “How did Mittie get this place?” I had asked Leila when she pointed out the building to us as we were going into the bar.

  “The Big Man gave it to him,” she said. She did not like Bruno Stark. “He’s some kind of lousy steel millionaire.” Money was suspect to Leila.

  Mittie sat down with us and ordered everyone more drinks. Then he asked us politely about our trip, and talked to me enthusiastically about the theater. I quoted him everything I could remember from the one book I had ever read on the subject of set designs, the one that had won me the South Pacific prize. For that apparently was what I had been brought there to do. All the while, he watched Leila tentatively. I thought her knee was brushing against my leg under the seat of the oyster shell; it was so crowded I couldn’t be certain, but in case it was, I tried to keep casually still. After a while, my leg went to sleep from the effort and I had to jiggle my foot, which I tried to do in time to the music on the jukebox.

  For some reason Mittie gave me an impatient feeling, and I was relieved when he announced that he had to go next door to get made up for the show. Verl said he was sorry he wouldn’t be able to see the play. He had to drive to Troy, sixteen miles south, where he had his cabin, but he promised to bring a new friend over to meet me the next day. Mittie left, and the three of us had another drink. Leila wasn’t in this opening play, a holdover from the previous summer; she had been in Oregon visiting the Starks with Maisie and Davy then.

  As we drank, she told us a little more about the father, and thereby a lot more about Mittie. Bruno Stark had once been Boris Elijah Strovokov, born in Kiev, from which he had fled with his mother across several continents to his uncle’s junk shop in Portland, Oregon. Mrs. Strovokov brought her brother two assets, neither of which he had an opportunity to appreciate, since he died four months after their arrival when he suffered a heart attack while trying to deliver a secondhand safe to a new customer. Those assets were (1) her own indomitable insistence on life, and (2) her will genetically growing inside her son, Boris.

  When Boris was twelve, he drove the junk wagon and peddled its goods. When he was sixteen, he traded it for a large lot of wrecked automobiles. When he was nineteen, Boris Strovokov bought a small foundry and changed his name to Bruno Stark. At twenty-one, he was a decorated hero in the Second World War. At thirty-five, Bruno Stark owned a large factory. The Pacific Valley Country Club nonetheless declined his request for
membership. The following year, Stark married the only daughter of Oregon Metal Works, and his application was reconsidered. Mrs. Stark, having fulfilled her immediate function of insuring her husband’s applicability, spent the remaining long years of her life attending civic club meetings, tending her flowers, reading tales of romantic espionage, and being intimidated by Mrs. Strovokov’s domestic authority. She was also a little frightened of Mr. Stark, to whom she puzzledly presented one child, which was followed by a hysterectomy.

  Stark named his son Mitchell for his father-in-law and Lionel for his heirdom. When Mitchell (our Mittie) was eighteen, he knew he wanted to be an actor. He changed his name, following a family tradition in reverse, to Isaac Strovokov. He sold his graduation present, a Corvette, and went to work in a theater company in Israel. Half a year later, Israeli authorities advised Isaac to go home to Oregon, where he could get help with his drinking problem. Back home, he changed his named to Misha, which was what his grandmother Strovokov had always called him anyhow. Everyone who knew him after that called him Mittie.

  While Mittie was getting help after his Israeli deportation, Mr. Stark sent away for the application forms to several colleges. Subsequently, he drove his sole son and asset down to Palo Alto, where Misha Mitchell Lionel Isaac Strovokov Stark sat through four years of standard courses at Stanford. He brought the diploma back and set it down on his father’s glass desk. He brought back the new trunks of new clothes.

  “I still want to be an actor,” he said.

  Stark flew him to New York, where several of Mittie’s friends, whom he pretty much supported, eventually became successful. Mittie did not. After a year and three months of failure, his father stopped the checks and wired his son a plane ticket to Portland. He took him into his office at the factory. The Stanford diploma was framed on the wall.

  “Mitchell,” he said, “you want to be an actor? Okay. I bought you a theater. It’s in Floren Park, Colorado. It’s a good place there, a summer resort. So go be an actor.”

  “I was planning on trying Hollywood.”

  “Okay. Try Hollywood in the winters,” the father replied, and turned his attention back to the papers on his glass desk.

  Bruno Stark knew how to be patient. He endured the acting; he endured its failure. The next assault was Leila; he endured her as well. Mittie had met and married Leila the first summer he went to Floren Park. She was eighteen, and not at all what Mr. Stark had planned. But their son, David, might be. David Beaumont Stark, now two years old, had Leila’s blond hair and blue eyes. Bruno Stark set aside a college fund for his grandheir and waited.

  In the Red Lagoon Bar, people left and came. My tiredness went away, and I waxed eloquent under the influence of exhaustion and drink about a Professor Aubrey at Harvard, who had saved me from suspension in a dark hour. His admiration for me grew as I spoke, until Leila abruptly said we should go. On the way out, she told the manager to charge our drinks; it was the younger Starks’ arrangement to have them added to the rent bill, which went to the elder Stark. The manager’s attitude toward Leila combined obsequiousness and lechery in what I considered an unattractive balance. I elaborately ignored him.

  Next door, on the stage, the Belle of Black Bottom Gulch was already considerably fatigued when we looked in on her from the lobby doors. From later performances, I learned why. In the first act, she was robbed, seduced, foreclosed upon, abandoned, nearly raped, practically frozen, and almost bifurcated by a cardboard buzz saw—all to the rapid tempo of a red upright piano energetically pounded in the pit by a plump and pimply young man who wore flowered armbands and a bowler hat. The Belle, however, continued to hold up, being youthful and sturdy, remarkably resembling, in fact, the sheriff we had seen on the street earlier in the evening.

  Mittie had decorated his lobby to resemble a nineteenth-century western saloon, with a row of gaslights hung above the red felt concession stand. Later on in the week, I suggested that we paint Leila’s face in the middle of the barroom floor, and Mittie thought it a fine idea, though I had meant it as a joke, so we oiled her in and covered her with varnish to keep the customers from leaving heel marks on her.

  That night the house was packed full. Half of this audience was “under-twelves” who, being encouraged by the actors to join in, screamed and hissed enthusiastically when the villain, played with an endless sneer by Mittie, was chased off the stage and then around the aisles by the hero and the local law officials. Mittie gave us a sweaty wink when he galloped past us and turned the far corner on one foot to head back to the stage.

  Leila had gone backstage to check on someone who wasn’t feeling well. While we were waiting for her, Verl and I watched a little of the play, and then studied the photographs of the company hanging across one felt wall of the lobby. One girl reminded me a lot of Jardin; her name was Suzanne Steinitz. There was a huge picture of Mittie in the center of the group; it was surrounded by eight-by-tens of everyone else, including Maisie and Davy and myself (a blow-up of my high school graduation picture, which I was grateful to learn Leila had kept).

  Eventually she came back out with an armful of spangled rags on her arm. These I saw the next week stitched onto the chorus line of the musical we were then putting on. Gradually I came to see, and then to experience, the complex connections of this world I’d come into, but for a while yet, I noticed only colored bits unrelated to each other, isolated from their functions. Spangles, a bag of nails, a soprano, a paid-for ad.

  Leila went into the box office, where a taciturn, frail young man was twisting his wiry hair into a Dairy Queen cone on top of his head as he added up columns of figures on the back of a playbill. I recognized him from one of the photographs.

  “How was the house, Seymour?” she asked him, rubbing his back.

  “Two hundred seven dollars and fifty cents,” he announced, as though he had personally arranged it, and done so only to please her.

  Ceremoniously, he handed Leila a gray tin box, which she dropped down into the recessed cavern of her huge pocketbook. I had difficulty thinking of real money in relation to all this playing. Two hundred dollars in a night?

  “Devin Donahue, Verl Biddeford—Seymour Mink. He’s got the best voice here,” Leila told us, referring, I assumed, to the stock company at large, rather than the four of us. She had no succinct definitions of Verl and me to offer Seymour in return, so we talked a bit about his singing. He was just doing it because he liked to. He was going to be a doctor.

  Seymour was to be driven home with us, for he lived in Leila’s basement with several other members of the company. The rest, I learned, barracked in arbitrary coupledom on one whole floor of a downtown boarding house. We got into Leila’s car outside the bar; it had once been a small school bus, now it was painted red and labeled RED LAGOON THEATRE. She did pretty well with the gears and steering, although she was simultaneously smoking, drinking Chablis from a half-gallon bottle she kept under the driver’s seat, and turning around to talk to us over the volume of the radio, which she had up as high as it would go. It came at us full blast as soon as she turned on the ignition. She was hoping, she said, to hear a favorite song of hers by Aretha Franklin that sounded like religion in her mind.

  For most of the drive she talked about “the plight of the Mexican and Indian migrant farm workers” with Verl, who also seemed to know a lot of statistics about their situation. Leila said she hoped I was not buying any nonunion lettuce. I told her I had never bought any lettuce.

  She drove Verl and me to the Triumph, and then we followed her bus through the still-carnivaling main street over to a quieter area of town, and finally up a gravel road. Leila’s house was large and sprawled among spruce and pine clusters. A steep path of loose bricks led up to a full porch, half screened in, the other half walled up to make a room, Mittie and Leila’s. Behind the porch was a living room of miscellaneous resort furniture and a wide stone fireplace, over which there was a large photograph
of Leila holding Maisie and Davy in her lap, with candles in front of it like an altarpiece. Four doors led off to the rest of the house.

  To the left were the kitchen and the children’s room. She opened their door so that we could see them. They were sleeping on two small mattresses on the floor; stuffed animals, books, baby bottles, wooden farms, schoolhouses, airplanes, merry-go-rounds lying beside them. For some reason, I took a secret and personal pride in their beauty, a perfection of form I had never before realized, almost as though I were their unacknowledged father. Leila kissed them while I stood back in the doorway and watched her.

  On the right were a bathroom and the bedroom of a Nathan Wolfstein, a man who had once taught drama at an excellent eastern academy, who had once been well-known in his field, who had met Leila at a Los Angeles community theater production, and who had soon afterward agreed, just for fun, to come to Floren Park as a consultant and guest director. He went to bed early and was not to be disturbed, for, Leila said unspecifically, he had a number of diseases, and overstimulation aggravated them.

  We discovered a pallid young girl asleep on the couch before a dead fire, her glasses slipping down her nose and her mouth open in a sputtering sniffle. A paperback copy of The Prophet lay open across her Red Lagoon sweatshirt. She was Sabby Norah, baby-sitter as well as company apprentice, whose love of the theater was such, Leila told us, that she had to be forcibly kept from scrubbing the Starks’ toilet bowl daily, simply out of the fullness of her adoration. She also lived in the basement, sleeping there celibately across the boundary of a table from Seymour Mink, whose room she shared, and deriving from the situation a stimulating, though entirely theoretical, sense of decadence.

  Leila informed me that I as well was assigned to half a basement room. I responded with confused indignation to this discovery. For while I had not previously thought about where I would be bedded, to be boarded thus among alien and adolescent apprentices had not been a possibility even subconsciously considered. In retrospect, I suppose I imagined myself in the master bedroom.