The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  After we unloaded my things, Verl left us for the night. Leila woke Sabby, told her that she had talked to Mittie about the second lead, and he had said okay, we’ll give her a try, received from Sabby for this news a look melted as that of a Magus at the manger, gave Sabby the armful of spangled shreds, and sent her off to bed beside the silent Seymour.

  Then Leila poured Chablis into a coffee mug and a Chinese tea cup. She soon seemed to me rather flushed from the wine. I guess because she was unusually fair, her face, to her chagrin, always translated the immediate state of her soul, mind, or body into various shades of rose. She blushed more quickly than anyone I’d ever known.

  “God, I’m tired,” she yawned. Those were not the opening words in private I had heard in my head while driving across the Midwest. But then she said, “This is so nice, Devin. Like old times. Like family.”

  However, the connection “family” started her on more questions about Mama, Maeve, and the others—about whose current lives she seemed to know more than I did anyhow. Nothing at all was asked, and therefore nothing offered, on the more relevant tragedy of myself, J. Dexter. and Jardin. Assuming she wished to respect the solitude of my grief, I reciprocated with bland inquiries as to the well-being of Mittie (who was the same as ever—depressed) and her mother, Mrs. Thurston (who was, for Christ’s sake, not to be talked about).

  After that, she talked of Maisie and Davy. I took the gauge of my importance from her willingness to share with me (and I felt certain, intimately with no other) the closest secrets of how she felt—love, anger, pride, fear, and frustration—about her children. Then in the midst of describing her breathing exercises for natural childbirth, she yawned herself into sleep, leaving me holding the past, the mug, and the cup of wine. I sat still for a while, but as she showed no signs of reviving, I tried to accidentally shift my place on the couch in order to move her out of her comfortable slump against my arm, and thereby wake her up. However, I succeeded only in sliding her further down my side onto my thigh, which she nuzzled into smoothness as though it were sand beneath her beach blanket. The thought that she had done it deliberately excited me, adding to the discomfort of my position.

  The screen door slammed. I scurried out from under Leila’s head and to my feet, leaving the cups on the couch behind me. But even this abrupt displacement failed to rouse her.

  “Hello there, cracker.”

  It was the gun-twirling desperado from the street show. A chunky young man about my height with firetruck-red hair pointing outward all around his head like on the Statue of Liberty. Behind his round, rimless glasses, he shined at me eyes as brown and glossy as two M&M’s.

  “Hello, I’m Devin Donahue,” I whispered.

  “Hi. Joely Finn. How you doing? Just get in?”

  “About six hours ago.” It surprised me to realize I was such a comparative newcomer to the Red Lagoon world; I also felt that it put me at a disadvantage. “Why do you call me ‘cracker’?” I asked him.

  “Oh, somebody said you were from the South, from Leila’s hometown, right?”

  “Yeah, but we’re Tarheels. Aren’t crackers from Georgia?”

  “That so?” He considered this a moment and then grinned at me. “I didn’t know it was so specific down there. I’m from Chicago. South side.”

  “Leila’s asleep,” I pointed out, in case he wondered why I was whispering.

  He leaned over the back of the couch to look at her. “Yep. Conked out again. One of the few Americans alive who feel zero guilt about sleeping. You must be ready for the sack too. I guess you’ll be staying in my room. Glad to have you. Doesn’t look like much, but it’s okay downstairs. Especially since you’re usually so wiped out anyway when you hit the mattress, you don’t give a damn where you are. And other times, nobody’s ever in their rooms. My bunk’s the one by the window. Grab whatever you need. That’s the john down the hall there.”

  “I know,” I told him.

  “Well, I gotta get back. Drove over. Mittie forgot his soldering kit. Lights are acting up again. See yuh.”

  I had thought of asking him what we should do with Leila, but had decided against sharing the decision with him. His proprietorial tone annoyed me. After he left, I soothingly shook Leila by the shoulders.

  “Leila, you want to get up and go to bed?”

  “No. Please,” she murmured. “Just let me sleep here a little longer. It’s so peaceful.”

  I was aggravated. If I was going to be treated as a stranger and have the location of the bathroom pointed out to me by strangers, then at least I should be given the benefits traditional to guests. As things were, I was dispossessed of both a sense of belonging and of hospitality.

  So, somewhat testily, I found my toothbrush in the corner of my suitcase where Mama had packed it wrapped in a paper towel, used the alien bathroom with deliberate carefulness, and then noisily carted down to the basement my summer’s worth of clothes and talismans.

  My room was the one with the door open. I could immediately tell that Joely Finn cared little for personalizing possessions. There was nothing on his dresser top but change, screws and bolts, matches, a copy of Catch 22, and a pair of grayish boxer shorts. On the other bureau I lined up my miniature busts of Shakespeare and J.F.K., my daily journal bound in leather, six felt-tip pens, my picture of Jardin, my paperbacks (I brought with me fourteen books I had always intended to read at Harvard), and my loose collection of foreign coins.

  Newly pajamaed and in an inappropriate bed, I fervently wished I had never left North Carolina, and consoled myself with a rhythmically sonorous speech I heard myself making to Jardin in the Charleston church vestibule over the muted strains of the fugue from Beethoven’s Third, which James Dexter had funereally chosen in place of the traditional Wedding March.

  The timeless time I gave to this reverie ended when a raised voice from upstairs intruded on my climax. The voice was Mittie’s. “And don’t think I’m such a schmuck I don’t know what you’re doing, you bitch! The stud’s back, right? Right? No more finger stuff with the little boys in the dressing room now. So nobody wanted his lousy play? So he’s back to pushing that lousy art-fart jewelry on the streets? What did you do, buy out his stock for the day so you could jerk him into the nearest alley before lunch? Bitch! Bitch!”

  Leila’s voice was quiet, almost bored. “Just go to bed, Mittie. You’re drunk.”

  Mittie kept on talking. After a while, I thought maybe he had started crying. Then he sounded as though he were trying to apologize, but I couldn’t hear distinct words anymore. That gave me time to let my share in their shame subside until it was quiet and I could think about what this revelation meant. Obviously there were things going on in the Red Lagoon Theatre of more immediate moment than my arrival.

  Leila was having an affair. With Spurgeon Debson. How rotten to Mittie. But on the other hand, it implied that their marriage was already in trouble. Collapsed even. And though I’d seen Mittie for perhaps a total of six hours, I felt ready to agree with him that in a lot of ways he was a schmuck. But Leila and Spurgeon? Spur was insane. What was the matter with Leila anyhow? Of course, maybe Mittie was mistaken. Paranoiac jealousy.

  Who were these boys in the dressing room? Joely Finn? Seymour Mink? She had rubbed Seymour’s back. I decided I disliked them both, and when, shortly after the Starks quieted down, Joely came into my room, I pretended to be asleep so he wouldn’t speak to me. But he just stripped and flopped into his bed without turning on the light anyway. The noise of his turning and breathing was an irritating intrusion that made me want to choke him. It was a personal affront.

  Finally I grew drowsy. As I slid toward sleep, I determined to take charge of Leila’s honor against the misplaced desires of others, or her own indiscreet disregard, or the delusions of her husband’s fears. Having so pledged myself, I felt a lot better. In which state I fell asleep, saying good-bye to Mama and Maeve and Colu
m, and hello to the rich flat fields of middle America, and then to the mountains, and Fitzgerald boarding the bus, as my body drove along the wide highway west until it climbed to a stop in the sudden red jostle and noise of Floren Park.

  Chapter 4

  Some Old Scenes and Some New People

  The next morning was Tuesday, June 4th, the second day of my tenure as scenic designer to Mittie Stark; with it, I was brought fully into all the new people and things going on in the Red Lagoon world I had been joined to. And so they and not Leila, who had gathered me into that world and who mattered more than the other people and things, were what made up my time, the way we let new things do.

  I was awakened by subterranean knowledge of an appraising stare. It was Leila’s daughter, Maisie. She stood silently across the room from my bed, watching me, when I opened my eyes, puzzled to find myself in the wrong bedroom, in the wrong state.

  Maisie had her father Mittie’s black curly hair and thick eyelashes and her mother’s blue eyes, and she knew at four that she was beautiful. She wore a long purple negligee, which probably belonged to Leila, for it hung off her shoulders and circled the floor around her small, bare feet—the toenails of which I was startled to see painted red.

  “You sleep a lot,” she said, twisting a strand of big, red glass beads into loops on her wrist.

  “No, I don’t,” I told her. “I went to bed late.”

  This justification did not impress her. She pursed her mouth in apparent disapproval of my lethargy. I noticed that Joely Finn had already left.

  “I go to bed when I like,” she told me, “and I don’t ever have to go to sleep.”

  “Do you stay up all night?” I asked her.

  “Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.” With that, she changed the subject. “I’ll be five soon. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.” I felt younger.

  “My mother’s twenty-four. You used to know her when you were little. My father’s twenty-eight. Some people get gray hair before they’re even old, but I’m glad they didn’t. You didn’t either. I hope I don’t.”

  “You have awfully long hair for someone your age,” I threw out. I was trying to keep up my end of the conversation, but had the feeling that I was being inane. I was distracted by a strong urge to relieve myself. It was my habit to head for the bathroom immediately upon waking, and I was discovering through these recent disruptions that I was a creature of habit.

  She walked over to the bed. “Yes,” she agreed. “It’s never been cut. I won’t cut it. Ever. See? It’s down this far.”

  She turned her back so I could see it. Then she stopped talking and continued her thoughtful examination of my suitcase, my bureau top, and me. I was curiously embarrassed. There didn’t seem to be anything definably childish about her eyes; they were, in fact, disconcertingly conscious and seemed to imply that she knew a great deal more about herself and about me than I would ever know about either.

  Suddenly I remembered the fight I had overheard the night before between Leila and Mittie about Spurgeon Debson. The whole Stark family ambiance was beginning to make me uneasy.

  “It’s time to eat,” Maisie broke our silence, delivering the message she had presumably been sent to deliver. “Breakfast is ready. Can I have one of these pens?” She picked it up from the bureau top.

  “Sure, okay, just one. You go tell them I’ll be right up.” Though I reminded myself that she was only four, I wanted her to leave, even at the price of a pen, before I changed into my clothes. Gathering up her long gown, she ran over to the door, paused, swirled around, and said, “I’m pretty tricky, you know.”

  “I believe it,” I assured her.

  Upstairs, people at a big wooden picnic table in the kitchen were finishing up the morning meal. It consisted of strange runny food, tacos, and beans. Mama had accustomed me to eggs and bacon, pancakes and sausage, ham and biscuits, corn flakes and orange juice, and I was unprepared to accept so radical a divergence from my expectations. Here was yet another instance of Leila’s reluctance to nurture my needs, a reluctance that I was becoming unpleasantly used to. I might as well have stayed at home.

  So, politely, I refused nourishment other than a cup of coffee and sat down. Seymour, Sabby, and Joely Finn were just finishing their tacos and preparing to leave for the theater. There was another person at the table. A pale, emaciated man, elongated as an El Greco saint. He was in his late sixties, with a tuft of speckled graybrown hair high swept off his high forehead, with a narrow beaked nose on a long thin face, and with long thin arms and legs like a crane’s. Leila introduced him as Nathan Wolfstein—the director she had mentioned the night before, the one who slept in the private room.

  Mr. Wolfstein wore a brown suit, a western string tie, and high-heeled cowboy boots that made him even taller than he already should have been. He was pouring bourbon into a cup of coffee and smoking an unfiltered cigarette; these two morning rituals required his entire concentration. His hands trembled spasmodically, his head jerked in a persistent tic, and it seemed inevitable that he should sooner or later spill the coffee and swallow his Camel. A calamity made more predictable by his being also periodically shaken by abrupt spasms of coughing. Since Leila had told me that Mr. Wolfstein was the victim of a number of diseases, I speculated on whether tuberculosis or cerebral palsy were among them.

  But despite his obvious discomforts, Mr. Wolfstein was very courteous to me and spoke with a quiet and steady intelligence. He seemed to me a dissipated distortion of Mr. Aubrey, my teacher at Harvard. At his request, I brought him quickly up to date on my history, education, tastes, and futures. I didn’t want him to classify me with the other apprentices. Then he turned back to a conversation with Leila about a trip he had once taken to Australia with a repertory company. It was clear to me from his eyes that he was infatuated with Leila, for reasons undefined (and probably undefinable) to himself. He seemed, in fact, not even to know that he was infatuated at all. The realization saddened me for him. The Blue Angel ailment, on top of all the others.

  Mittie, they told me, had gotten up early and driven to Denver, where he bought our theatrical supplies and where he would be staying that evening to see a road company production of Damn Yankees, a favorite show of his. The Red Lagoon Theatre was always, as they put it, “dark” on Tuesdays, so his presence would not be required in Floren Park, at least for professional reasons, until the next morning’s rehearsals, and he wouldn’t be home until after midnight. I noticed I was glad to hear it.

  But Wolfstein had called a reading of the following week’s musical, and as Leila was playing the lead, her attendance was required there. She wondered if, during that time, I would mind keeping an eye on Maisie and Davy. I did in a way, but said I wouldn’t mind at all. Serving as a day care center seemed rather far removed, however, from the function I had been hired to perform. I was supposed to be a scenic designer, and the ease of this functional substitution was a little humiliating.

  We left the leftovers for lunch, helped Wolfstein up, and all piled into “the Red Bus,” as the Starks called their school van. Davy sat on my lap and was, in comparison with his sister, refreshingly childlike. As we drove to town, Joely teased Seymour and Sabby about pretended noises he had heard coming from their room until the early hours of the morning. Sabby blushed, and Seymour told him he wasn’t funny. In the right front seat, Wolfstein was effortlessly bounced around by Leila’s acceleration on the curves, and I began to think there were no actual bones beneath the long, flapping brown suit he wore—and little flesh. I still felt as if I were in North Carolina, and all this was happening to someone else.

  As everyone tumbled out at the theater parking lot, Leila mined a battered copy of The Fantastiks, our next play, from her mammoth pocketbook. She advised me to read it, since the rehearsal sets would be needed within the next few days.

  Then all of them went inside the theater and left M
aisie, Davy, and me behind. So the three of us sat down on the bank of the creek that ran beside the building and talked for a long time, largely about their interests, and on my part, in reply to their endless questions about miscellaneous phenomena, such as Why doesn’t the water stand still? and What’s a hophead? Davy “meowed” quite a bit and licked my face. I told them about Huckleberry Finn and his raft trip. Maisie said she did not believe that somebody could go the wrong way on a river and not even know it. She said it sounded like a story.

  As we talked, it became very important to me to win them to my side. From whose side other than mine, I did not specify to myself, nor could I have articulated for what purpose they were to be won. So we spent the next hour constructing wooden boats with paper sails to be floated down the creek’s maze of currents, which eventually, I promised, would take our boats all the way to the sea, though I couldn’t answer Maisie’s question, “Atlantic or Pacific?” We were right in the middle.

  A little before noon, the wind got to be unignorably chilly, especially for Maisie, who had on only a thin shawl over the purple negligee which she had insisted on wearing as a party dress. Finally Leila came out of the theater to retrieve us. The plump and pimply piano player was with her; she kissed him on the cheek, and he went back inside.

  Despite the cold cloudiness of the weather, she was wearing very short lederhosen that day; she also had on the large round sunglasses with one stem loosely rewired to the frame that she wore throughout the summer.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I sat with a strong sense of purpose in the supplies storeroom, which I was calling my office, and designed sets for The Fantastiks in my new sketchbook—minutely elaborate edifices on revolving platforms with flyable walls. I wasn’t sure they could be built. Around me, the theater was quiet. Everyone else seemed to have somewhere to go.