And please, excuse my disturbing you in the middle of the night, but I'm glad to hear Otto's worries weren't warranted. Good-bye, then, Mrs. Haig."
"Good-bye. Thank you."
"That feels nice."
"Ummmmm."
"Your neck's a mess, Sid, you know that? Nothing but knots.
You're too sedentary."
"I'm a librarian; what do you expect, Lance Abernathy?"
"He's sedentary from the neck up."
"Where'd you learn how to give massage? Never mind, don't tell me."
"My roommate taught me. You feel for the heat."
"Feel away."
"Here, take these off."
"Hey. Kate! Hey, cut it out."
"Hold still."
"Stop, stop, okay, yours too, then."
"You win, you win, wait, wait. Sid!"
"Oh, Kate."
"Here, move, wait, here, okay, now, yes, there."
"All right?"
"Yes, yes. Sid, I love fucking you."
"Well, that's a start."
In shadows the chariot waited, stars caught in the dew on its crimson leather seats. Stars caught in the spray of the waterfall. She should have been home long ago, but she saw herself caught in Lance's eyes, and he was caught in hers for as long as she didn't move.
He should have never brought her here where her fears could seize him with a terrible tenderness he was unaccustomed to feeling.
Beside her, his cheek pressed against a blanket that he had often before spread beneath the stars in the lot near the Falls, he did not know suddenly if he wished to take the gift or not. Frowning, he touched her breast with his hand. Her eyes never left him, they were open. And he was in them as she moved nearer. She kissed him. And he, who had never noticed such things, saw that desire was new and frightening to her, and so her moving nearer, placing herself in his hands, made her braver than he was. And he surrendered his desire to her newness, he felt it fade away. He did not know which held him in check, the undefendable courage of her innocence or the troubling tenderness it made him feel. He took his hand away.
"I'll take you home, Joy," he said.
He took Joy home, drove to Madder, picked up the hostess at Fred's Fries, took her to the Round-Up Motel and Restaurant near the airport (she was a divorcée with two children and a mother asleep in a four-room apartment), had her perform fellatio on him, brought her to orgasm, brought himself to a second orgasm, then dropped her at her door with a wave and a wink.
chapter 32
Prudence Lattice had never meant to own a tribal meeting place for the aimless assignations of teenagers who baited and dated one another while slouched in her white wicker chairs. She had meant the Tea Shoppe to serve afternoon teas to professional gentlemen and shopping ladies. But then, it seemed to require so surprisingly many of them eating for her to be able to eat, and in a buyer's market one must live with the buyers who come. But Miss Lattice had not meant it to be this way.
She had meant to marry Sloan Highwick in 1928, when he was at Princeton and she was almost the most popular girl at Miss Whitely's in New York, and almost the most daring madcap of all her flapper friends. She had not intended to turn down two marriage proposals only to discover that Sloan Highwick planned to ordain himself a bachelor forever. And she had meant to travel through the south of France in a racer and to be a stage star on Broadway and to have a thousand acquaintances. She had meant to write poetry and to give birth to beautiful laughing children. She had meant to have romance, to be swept into mystery and adventure. She had dreamed of herself at sunrise flinging armfuls of roses out of an airplane down on ancient Delos in the blue Mediterranean sea.
Pru had never thought life would be cruel to her, would send a telegram to say a German grenade had killed her older brother, whose games and books, half a century old, still sat on the shelves in his bedroom upstairs. She had never meant for her mother to die so slowly and with such embittered complaint that pity died before she did. Never meant for her father to lose everything they had in 1929 so that she was called home from London before she had crossed the Channel for the first time. Called home to supervise his funeral after he blew a ragged hole through his head. She had not planned to watch helplessly as her own life lived itself out here in Dingley Falls, where all her father had left her (after the wealth had disappeared—like her father, her mother, and brother), all he had left her was the house on Cromwell Hill Road and the little building on the green which she had made into the Tea Shoppe in order to pay its taxes.
All the rest was gone somewhere, or nowhere, without leaving behind explanation or excuse—like her father.
How had it happened? Somehow lives and time and chances sneaked away from her behind her back, when she had always intended to be brave and beautiful. How could she have dared so much in her dreams, but asked so pitifully little of life? She who had never meant to stop looking like Norma Shearer? She who had once, once, intoxicated, danced atop a captain's table, and had lived at that height in no other moment, and was now sixty-six years old?
"I really think you are the silliest old creature," Miss Lattice told herself, and sighed as she tied up the last box of marzipan she'd made that night. She felt sorry for herself, and sorrier because there was no one but herself to pity her, and sorrier still because self-pity was such an unattractive quality, revealing, as it did, that very weakness of character for which she pitied herself. "I'm just overtired. I ought to go to bed. I'm just upset about Scheherazade."
Although Miss Lattice had gathered up all the possessions of the dead Siamese, she had found herself unable throughout the evening to throw away even her cat's food dish, which was now beginning to smell. Finally, with a sigh, she picked it up, washed it, packed the dish in a box with pillows, collars, and bells, and put them all on a closet shelf. It's all right to be a little low, losing someone close for such a long time, she told herself. Someone to talk to, that's all. The truth is, there was more: that Scheherazade's self-satisfied independence, her courage, and indeed her greed and foul temper had been the sole source for her mistress not only of admiration and envy, but of vicarious pleasures. Through this loud, demanding, smug, excitable Siamese, Prudence Lattice had indulged herself for years in motherhood, gluttony, promiscuity, bullying, torture, and murder.
Now she would never wail seduction into the night again, or fasten her teeth in the throat of life.
"Oh, Pru, Pru, you really have no excuse," Miss Lattice sighed while checking locks and shutting off lights. Then on tiptoe she walked up to the room where her visitor, Chin Lam, slept. "I'll just see if she needs a blanket." From the foot of the bed where the Vietnamese girl lay curled on her side in motionless sleep, Night, the black German shepherd, raised his head from his paws. "Shhhh,"
Miss Lattice told him. "Let her sleep. Want something to eat? Food, Night? Come on." The dog stood, stretched, jumped to the floor.
Chin Lam drew herself into a tighter circle.
No, no excuse for me, thought Miss Lattice. When I think of that child. The things she told me! The things that she has seen and gone through, and still going through now. Padding down the stairs behind her, Night followed the small woman into her kitchen, where she fed him the ground beef she'd planned to cook for dinner tomorrow. He devoured it in seconds. When he whined for more, she gave him a pork chop.
Her arms crossed over her bathrobe, her hands resting on her shoulders, she watched the dog snap a bone in two. Then all at once he tensed to sounds she couldn't hear but which she instantly assumed were those of another dog come to dig up the grave of Scheherazade. Unable to see anything from the window, she took back out of the closet a red leather leash that her cat had refused to wear, and having attached it to the dog's collar, she opened the kitchen door. With a single sharp bark, the shepherd lunged, dragging her down the porch steps before she could pull against him. A shadow, but a human one, seemed to be running through the pine trees into Elizabeth Circle, toward the back of Mrs. Blanchard Tr
oyes's house. It disappeared before she had seen it clearly. Nor could she think who it might be out there at 1:00 A.M. Certainly not Evelyn Troyes, whom Prudence envied for her European love affairs, and for her daughter, and for the wealth that allowed her to take trips into the bright carnival of Manhattan theater and operas and fascinating artistic people, but whom Prudence did not suspect of nocturnal assignations at this stage of her life.
It must be, she thought, some young lover returning home to Astor Heights, happy to walk miles in the star-sparkling grass, happy with the kiss still flush on his lips and the future as infinite and shiny as stars.
"Never mind, Night," Miss Lattice sighed. "Let's go back in." On her way up to bed, she picked up the new historical romance she had bought from Sammy Smalter's pharmacy. She would take to bed with her the latest of her Lotharios or Lovelaces or Rhett Butlers. She would spend the night with this virile bachelor, and in her dreams life would be passionate and she would look like Norma Shearer.
chapter 33
When Benedick crowed, "I will live a bachelor," it is assumed that the groundlings cheered, for it has long been the whimsical fantasy of civilization that male bachelorhood is a blessed state, nobly sacrificed, like female virginity, to that necessary institution, the family.
A paradise lost, and regained only at court costs. Not so, as Kate Ransom told Sidney Blossom. "Polls have proved that the happiest people in America are married men, and the most unhappy, married women." This forecast was protested by the bachelor Blossom, proposing yet once more in vain to Kate, who could not yet agree, with Millimant, to "dwindle into a wife."
Among Dingley Falls's other bachelors, imminent marriage loomed only for Arthur Abernathy, who had no objection to wedding Emerald, and for the ophthalmologist, Carl Marco, Jr., who had no way to avoid wedding his receptionist other than flight. Luke Packer had never given the question any thought, and neither (at almost twice his age) had Lance Abernathy, though the question had certainly been posed to him by a variety of individuals, some of them extremely indignant. It was apparent by now even to Prudence Lattice that Sloan Highwick would never go to the altar with a lady.
It was not apparent to anyone but themselves that Walter Saar and Jonathan Fields would never do so either. Walter's mother still saved hand-knitted caps and blankets to pass along to his bride upon her happy pregnancy, and Evelyn Troyes (reconciled to her own ineligibility) was ever on the search for that perfect girl whom Jonathan had not yet chanced to meet.
Bachelorhood is a disposition, not a condition. The truest bachelor in town was old William Bredforet, who had been parenthetically married for more than sixty years and during that time (despite the military reconnaissance, stake-outs, and spy system of his wife, Mary, and of Bill Deeds—maneuvers they might have forgone had they realized what spice they added to Bredforet's game) had enjoyed innumerable brief affairs among the general delights of being a knight on the town. So much a bachelor at heart was Bredforet that he had no notion of fatherhood, despite the fact that he had parenthetically fathered three illegitimate children: one son in Paris, another in Singapore, and one daughter, now forty-two years old, right here in Dingley Falls.
A judge had divorced Mr. and Mrs. Limus Barnum, at Mrs. Barnum's request, on the grounds of her husband's mental cruelty and physical abuse. Lime had had to pay the bitch alimony and figured that broken nose he'd given her had cost him a good $15,000 (at $400 a month for three years, plus legal fees) before she got tired of milking him and married some other stupid sucker. He'd never be sap enough to marry another one, that was for sure.
Limus Barnum lived alone in the smallest and newest house in Glover's Lane. He had bought it in 1961 at the same time he'd bought the antiques store with all its stock from a New York divorcée who had decided in two years that she did not, after all, wish to retire from the world to sell horse collars to weekending couples. As Barnum often boasted to the realtor Cecil Hedgerow, he had not by a long shot given the woman what she'd asked for the store. "No way, I jewed her right down. She was so hot to trot she never knew what hit her. Come on, Cecil, what would you guess I got the store and every damn thing in it for? Come on, take a stab."
"Ten thousand in cash and a roll in the sack."
"Ha, ha. Come on now, seriously. But if you really want to know, sure, I could have had her. Easy as that!" And Lime snapped his fingers with a grin. Whether he had had her or not, he indisputably had the store and the house.
"I mean I was just passing through this dump and I saw how the land lay. Sure, I'd never thought about the antique line, but what's to know? And, pal, who turns it down when they're giving it away? Not this cookie. Everybody's getting into antiques. Then I add on the games and hobbies. Everybody's got hobbies. Then I get into the big appliances. Everybody wants a TV. Now, if you'd been on the ball, old buddy, you could have had that store."
"I don't have your feel for the market," said Hedgerow.
"You can sell anything to anybody; they don't have to need it, or be able to afford it, or even want it, you know that?"
"I've heard it said."
That was a long time ago. Everyone had assumed then that Barnum would be gone in a few years—like the divorcée. But fifteen had passed by, and now Limus Barnum's feverish face leered at Dingleyans like an old nightmare at least twice in the middle of movies on "Midnight Cinema." Tyrone Power would kiss Loretta Young, and then Barnum would yell at every insomniac in town, "Spend time with Lime, and spend less!" They were used to him.
Still, they had no idea why he stayed, though they suspected he made a great deal of money by selling fake Tiffany lamps and oak-veneered pine ice chests to innocent New Yorkers on vacation, and by opening charge accounts for model airplanes and eight-track tapes and other amusements, chargeable to the parents of young gentlemen at Alexander Hamilton Academy. They assumed he had friends, he must do something besides buy and sell, but as to what he did, and with whom he did it, they hadn't a clue. They didn't like him.
Occasionally Lime gave way to the suspicion that they didn't like him. It made him hate them all. He spent some evenings at the Old Towne Inn (which thought it was better than he was), and some evenings at Fred's Fries (which was beneath him), and in both these barrooms he tried to strike up conversations with people who seemed to have it easier than he did at getting along. It was naturally difficult for Barnum to acknowledge that he had no talent for friendship, but he acknowledged that something was wrong, though he couldn't figure out what it could be: neither shyness nor physical impediment nor peculiarity of style or dress hampered him. It must be the people of Dingley Falls, then, who conspired against his happiness. All of Limus Barnum's life (a life that had taken him from Detroit to Cincinnati to Pittsburgh to Worcester to Dingley Falls) things had stood in his way, blocking his reach: Socialist teachers, Communist Jews, welfare blacks, and the female sex. Politicians, journalists, labor unions, the Supreme Court, and women strove to deceive and impede him. If he could only one evening turn Fred's Fries into a Burgerbräukeller to start that putsch that would set America right, then he would show them. But nobody in Fred's Fries wanted to listen. Something was wrong.
At 1:30 A.M., Barnum stood in his upstairs room. The night had gotten hot and sticky, and his window was open, though covered with curtains. Now from across the street he heard laughter. Onethirty lousy A.M., and they were still at it. Hedgerow's poker party.
It made him hate them all. Especially that snot A.A. Hayes who hung out not only with his neighbors on Glover's Lane, but with the lawyer Abernathy and the rest of the big snots over on Elizabeth Circle, people whom Barnum had invited into his store for fifteen years, but who had never invited him anywhere. He bet he could count on his fingers the times he'd been in Hayes's house, and Hayes lived right next door to him.
The upstairs room was the room where Barnum kept things.
Things like his weight-lifting equipment. Things like his political literature and his pictures. Stacked in the corners with his weig
hts were hundreds of muscle magazines and magazines of men with guns, and men being attacked by grizzly bears, and men fording rapids, killing Viet Cong, and having other adventures. All jumbled together with them were Nazi magazines and hobbies-merchandising magazines and hard- porn magazines and catalogs of antiques. Randomly taped all over the walls were photographs torn from magazines: women being subjected to sexual assault, body builders demonstrating particular exercises. On some of the latter, arrows pointed to the relevant anatomy to be improved; other muscle men posed in contorted stasis like Laocoons of inflated flesh, their sinews twisted, their faces glossy, narcissistic blanks. Among the pictures of women chained to walls, roped to beds, gagged by pasty, black-masked men, was one of a handsome, sky-eyed Luftwaffe commander who was neither flexing his biceps nor brutalizing a woman, but was only staring indomitably at Limus Barnum. This upstairs room was, needless to say, a private retreat of its owner, locked against the conspiracy of the outside world to ignore him.
A barbell in each hand, Barnum stood in his jockey shorts before a full-length mirror. Thrown in the corner were pants and jacket and tasseled loafers to which blades of wet grass from his night walk through Elizabeth Circle still clung. His face was red from his exercising, and the veins on his neck puffed out. Raising first one arm, then the other, Barnum sped up his rhythm and wordlessly talked to the straining image. One-lousy-thirty A.M. Listen to them. Bigshot poker players! Penny-ante! Fat lot they know about the game. Boy, I could take them all for a ride. Like that big shot in Pittsburgh that night. Two hundred big ones. Bluffed him right out. He never knew what hit him. What the hell they got against me? I've been right here on this crummy block for fifteen crummy years. Isn't that long enough for the snots? Bet I'm in a lot better shape than Hayes, make a hell of a lot more, too. That boozed-up Commie; rather go out drinking with a dwarf than a man. Brushing me off about the letters like that. So what if a killer drags his wife out of bed one night. "I wouldn't let the FBI in on this. They'll arrest you!" Sure, pal, sure.
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