The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  “Very nice,” said the professor. His “V” sounds always came out as “Ws.” Wery nice.

  Both men went into the living room. Professor Zmia sat down and was silent. He watched the realtor move to the window, where he glanced out a moment before he lowered himself onto the sofa.

  Banyon moved the tip of his umbrella on the floorboards, inscribing a loose circle. “Do you have everything you need, Professor?”

  “Indeed.”

  Banyon sighed quietly. Professor Zmia could read the uneasiness on the realtor’s face. A single sliver of perspiration slinked down across Banyon’s brow from his greased hair.

  “What makes you so nervous?” the professor asked.

  “Am I nervous?” Banyon smiled.

  “It shows.”

  “Then I should try to relax.”

  “If you want a long and healthy life, yes,” said the professor.

  Banyon breathed deeply for a time. Then he leaned forward, adjusting the cuffs of his jacket, pulling them back so that one-quarter inch of shirt showed at his wrists. “Has it changed in twelve years, Professor?”

  Professor Zmia was silent. He tended to regard all questions carefully, no matter how trivial they seemed. And the English language made him more wary than usual—it was so full of land mines and pockmarks and words with many meanings that you had to take your time. He said, “All change is relative, Mr. Banyon. Some things change only to remain as they were. Other things change because they have to make way for what is new. Two objects cannot occupy the same space simultaneously.”

  Banyon sometimes felt he was talking to a fortune cookie. He poked the floor with his umbrella. He had the feeling that the professor had misunderstood his question. He would ask it again, this time with a different emphasis. “Has it changed in twelve years? That’s what I wanted to know.”

  Professor Zmia smiled. It was a bright expression, a benign white sun crossing the brown face. He sparkled whenever he smiled. Over the years many people had been hypnotized and charmed by that same expression.

  “Has it changed?” the professor mused. He shook his head very slowly. “I hardly think so. It remains the same as it always was, Mr. Banyon. Always the same. Why should it ever change?

  Mr. Banyon wiped the sliver of perspiration from his forehead and for a long time studied the greasy spot it left on the tip of a finger.

  7

  “Banyon’s photographs didn’t do this place any justice,” Louise said. She was sitting on the redwood deck with Max, drinking coffee, chewing on a slice of apple pie. The early morning light that sneaked through the pines was the color of soft pearl. “They didn’t quite capture the space here. They didn’t get the feel of things, did they?”

  Max shook his head. He was only half listening to his wife. A hawk had drawn his attention and he was watching the great bird create graceful patterns in the sky. He drained his coffee cup and looked over the rim at Louise, whose expression was one of satisfaction.

  From the lower part of the house there was the sound of music from Dennis’s portable radio. Reception was poor and the music came in short bursts before it was obscured by throaty static.

  “You sleep okay?” Louise asked.

  “Fine. Did you?”

  “It took me a few minutes,” she answered. More than a few, she thought. She’d lain awake for perhaps a half hour, hearing noises to which she was quite unaccustomed—the rustling of trees, the querulous sound of an unfamiliar bird, the stealthy whisper of something moving around the house.

  An animal, she had thought—a badger, a skunk, some dark furry thing wandering in circles. Sometimes its body brushed against the outside wall, and once she thought she heard it grunt directly beneath the deck.

  She looked at her husband a moment before she spread her hands in her lap and studied her wedding band. “The air up here seems to have a positively horny effect on you,” she said, and there was a mysterious knowing look in her eyes.

  “Does it?” He knew what she was talking about. He glanced at the hawk again, which had flown close to the house.

  “Forgotten already, Max?” She feigned disappointment.

  “I haven’t forgotten a thing,” he said. Which was true enough. He remember how, after they had explored the house last night, after Denny had crawled into bed in the downstairs bedroom, he had drawn her out here on this deck and pulled her down to the boards and made love to her with an urgency he hadn’t felt in years, as if something inside himself had become rejuvenated. Afterward, he had been unable to sleep. Somewhere in the middle of the night, after he was sure Louise had finally dropped off, he’d located his pills in his suitcase and swallowed three capsules of Dalmane—gazing with mild disgust at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror, telling himself, I don’t need these things.

  “You astonished me,” Louise said. “Took me quite by surprise.”

  I surprised myself, he thought. He rose and moved to the handrail that ran around the deck. He studied the patient movements of the hawk until it was gone. And then Louise was standing behind him, pressing her body against his spine.

  “You think the air up here is an aphrodisiac, mmm?” she asked.

  Max smiled. He turned and faced her, placing his hands on her hips and drawing her toward him. “I think I should bottle the stuff if it is,” he said.

  She pressed her face against his shoulder, thinking how he had acted like a young kid who couldn’t wait to get laid. The way his hands fumbled at her and how unashamedly noisy he’d been—positively adolescent. It had reminded her of the first time they’d ever gone to bed together, when she’d been an art student at UCLA and Max was in his third year at medical school. What had drawn her to Max back then was an endearingly clumsy quality he had. If he gave you a rose, its stem was bound to be broken. If he gave you chocolates, they were certain to have been crushed in transit somehow. A quality of awkward bewilderment—his fingers seemed too large for his hands, he was awful at undoing buttons, and he handled the hooks of a bra like a man reading braille. For some reason too obscure to explore, she had loved him for these inadequacies. Back then, too, he had carried a certain excitement about him—he was forever describing his studies, amazed by each new wonder he’d discovered, astonished by what he had still to learn.

  One time, she remembered now, they had made love in her small apartment in Westwood and afterward Max started to talk about the pancreas and what this gland did inside the human body, and although she hadn’t really listened to what he was saying—what did she know of enzymes and hormones?—she hadn’t been able to take her eyes away from his face, which was flushed and excited, as if he were telling her something that nobody else in all the world knew. The pancreas wasn’t the most romantic subject on earth, God knows, but when Max talked about it he was like a small boy on Christmas morning. How could she resist that infectious quality?

  The years since had buffed the edges of his wonder. The grind of a general practice had worn him down. But last night, right here on this deck, she had listened to old echoes of the Max she’d first loved and she’d been enchanted by his lovemaking, by the silences of forest and the starry arch of sky.

  She caught his face in the palms of her hands. And then she turned toward the trees, the thickets of greenery that covered the landscape like fur.

  “I love it here,” she said. “I love it. The view. The house. The whole thing. Who remembers San Francisco anyhow?”

  She sighed quietly, happily. Last night’s exploration of the house had provided one pleasant surprise after another. The living room had seduced her, with its brick fireplace that covered an entire wall, the comfortable furniture, the woven oval rug that lay across floorboards whose glossy surfaces suggested deep brown mirrors. The downstairs bedroom was perfect for Denny. It had its own bathroom, which impressed him, pale blue ceramic tile with matching fixtures.

  The upper part of the house consisted of a large master bedroom and a small adjoining room she could use as a study. T
here was enough space for her easel and brushes and paints. Work seemed so incredibly distant from her all at once.

  From the bedroom, sliding glass doors led to the deck. Space and light, glass and redwood and pine. She had caught herself thinking in the breathlessly abbreviated jargon of a realtor: 2 bds, 2 bths, dk, frplc.

  Now, as the forest absorbed her, she held her breath—she hadn’t expected an encounter with perfection, hadn’t anticipated anything like this. And what she felt, with the pines reaching toward the sky and Max standing beside her, was a curious sense of freedom, a quiet soaring inside, as if what filled her lungs was not oxygen but helium, something that rushed to her brain and made her light-headed and dizzy in the most pleasant way she could imagine.

  And then her attention was taken by a faint shadow out there among the trees. For a second she wasn’t sure what it could possibly be that drifted up so lazily into the gray sky. Of course—it was smoke, a thin spiral of smoke that rose almost imperceptibly before it disintegrated.

  “Look,” she said to Max and pointed. It was hard to estimate distances out here, but she judged the source of the smoke to be a quarter of a mile away.

  “Maybe it’s a campfire,” Max said.

  “Or a chimney.” She narrowed her eyes. She hadn’t considered the possibility of neighbors. Now a slight breeze tugged at the smoke, twisting it, blowing it haphazardly.

  “A chimney.” Max appeared to turn the word around in his mouth. “Who’d want to build a fire on a humid day like this?”

  Humid? All she had felt was the weight of a comfortable warmth in the air, but no moisture, no clamminess. She glanced at Max. He was lifting a piece of apple pie to his lips. He chewed a moment, then made a face. He parted his lips and spat crumbs out into the palm of his hand.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s bitter—”

  Louise watched as he placed the remains of the slice back on the table. “I thought it was sweet.”

  Max sat down, put his feet up on the table. “Whoever was kind enough to bake those pies for us must have used crab apples. Or left the sugar out.”

  Dennis thought it was strange about the radio. At times he could tune in a station clear as he wanted, and then, quite suddenly, it would become silent. He positioned the antenna this way and that, with no measurable success, then he took the portable GE outside and tried it there. He was determined, with an inquiring mind, and he was not about to be cheated out of his music because of some atmospheric freak.

  Behind the house, not far from the shadows thrown by the sun deck, he twisted the antenna with grave concentration. He was rewarded by a sudden burst of rock music, followed by silence. He stared down through the trees a moment, then decided he needed a higher position, above the tree line if possible. Pines, he knew, were not the best climbing trees in the world because of the scratchy branches.

  He made his way some distance from the house, looking for a likely candidate to scale. When he found one he tucked the portable radio against his side and shinnied up the trunk to the lower branches.

  Clinging to a branch, he caught his breath. He turned the radio on and jiggled the antenna and, distantly, he heard the voice of a deejay saying, “Hey hey hey out there fellow travelers in realms of rock, it’s approaching the hour of eight ai emmmmm right here at good ole KBBC in the capital city of sweet Sacra-Mmmmento!”

  The voice sounded as if it came from a distance too far to measure. But then it died, and Dennis, tucking the radio beneath his arm again, clambered higher into the tree. When he stopped he realized he had a good view of the sun deck—overlooking it, in fact, seeing empty coffee cups and a slab of pie on the round table. That mysterious pie which had turned up out of nowhere. Deee-licious.

  Branches slapped at his cheeks and needles pricked his hands. When he stopped again he realized that this position was precarious. He pressed himself as close to the trunk as he could, wrapped his legs around it, and watched a colony of ants excavate a long thin crack in the wood in front of him.

  It would be a drag, he thought, if he found out he could really get good reception only at a height of thirty feet. What was he supposed to do then? Scale a tree every time he wanted to listen to a few tunes?

  He turned the ON switch.

  He fiddled with the tuner. Damn, there was nothing.

  He shut the radio off, conscious of a thin smell, an aroma blown by a faint breeze through the trees, something he knew was familiar but couldn’t quite put a name on it. It was sweet and alluring and he turned his face this way and that to see if he could detect its source. Maybe it was coming from the kitchen, maybe his mother was making something—no, she was busy unloading suitcases and boxes.

  He looked upward through the branches. He was close to the top of the pine. And he wasn’t confident of scaling it any farther because the trunk had begun to quiver each time he moved. The scent hit him again. It was like toffee, sweet and almost unbearable. His mouth watered and he could almost feel the stuff sticking to his teeth.

  Perching awkwardly, he shut his eyes.

  He suddenly thought about the time when he’d gone to the Santa Monica boardwalk with his parents and the air had been rich with the scents of cotton candy. Mouth-watering, almost painful in intensity. It was like that now, only more so. His stomach made a noise. He opened his eyes and flattened his body against the trunk of the tree. The front of his SAVE THE WHALE T-shirt was pierced by tiny pine needles. It was time to get out of this flakey tree.

  He made his way down, catching his clothes against the rough bark. When he was on the ground again the scent had disappeared entirely. He turned and looked through the trees, his body motionless, as if he were waiting for the aroma to come back so that this time he might track it down and find its origin. But it had disappeared.

  He went inside the house. His mother was standing at the kitchen sink, rinsing out a coffeepot. She turned her face toward him and smiled. “Been exploring?”

  Exploring, the kid thought. Sometimes there was a tone in his mother’s voice he didn’t appreciate. Like the way she’d used the word “exploring”—she still spoke to him as if he were five years old. Maybe mothers couldn’t help that creeping condescension. Maybe they didn’t like their babies to grow up. It reminded them of their own mortality, he figured.

  “I climbed a tree,” he said.

  “You see anything?”

  More trees, he wanted to say. “Somebody’s baking something out there,” he remarked. “There was this wonderful smell.”

  His mother was quiet a moment. “I saw some smoke before.”

  “You think somebody lives nearby?”

  Louise shrugged. “I guess.”

  Dennis sat down at the table. He put his portable radio down and gazed at it. “I wonder who.”

  Louise was drying her hands in the folds of a paper towel. “I imagine we’ll find out soon enough.”

  8

  Frog opened one eye, aware of a metallic dryness in his mouth. He raised his head and the muscles in his neck creaked and he peered at the youthful puffy face of the girl who lay alongside him in the back of the VW.

  You got lucky, you sly old fart, Frog.

  The girl was still asleep.

  The beauty he thought she possessed just before the Ace of Spades shut was an illusion that faded in the pale light of morning. Puffy from alcohol, her nose a little too large for her face, she was plain—but she was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, and her body was firm and her ass (ah, sweet Christ, her ass) hadn’t yet fallen down her legs.

  Just the same, as he rose from the sleeping girl, he wasn’t very happy with himself. He didn’t know the first thing about her, couldn’t remember anything she’d said except for her name, Roxanne, and—the real kicker—he couldn’t remember much that had happened after he’d brought her back here to his spot in the woods.

  He shoved the cover aside and tried to get up before the girl stirred because he wan
ted to go down to the stream and wash himself. He moved very slightly. You, old Frog, have turned into a chauvinist pig. Using a young girl like this. Is there no shame in you? Moreover, he had squandered his last few bucks, which meant that he’d have to go down to the redwood house and look for work as soon as he could get himself together.

  The girl’s eyes sprang open and it took a moment to focus on her surroundings. She pushed black hair from her eyes and looked at him and said, “Oh, shit. Shit shit shit.”

  Frog said nothing. He caught his hair in a tail and slid a rubber band around it. Now comes the moment of painful recognition. How drunk had they both been last night?

  “I’m up shit creek,” the girl said.

  “That bad?” Frog asked.

  “You don’t understand.” She examined her arm, as if she expected to find a wristwatch there. “What time is it?”

  “I don’t have clocks out here,” he said.

  “Is it nine? Do you think it’s after nine?” Her voice filled with panic.

  Frog glanced through the window of the VW and pretended to take the measure of the sun. “Relax, it’s only eight. What’s the big deal about nine anyhow?”

  The girl smiled for the first time. “Nine is when Robbie comes home.”

  “And who’s Robbie?”

  “My husband.”

  “Ah. Now that casts another complexion on matters,” Frog said. Robbie and Roxanne, he thought. They might have his and hers bath towels. He had not set out last night to make a cuckold of anyone.

  “He works night shift,” the girl said. “Can you drive me back to Carnarvon?”

  Frog felt bad, demoralized. He had his own code of ethics and it did not vindicate cuckoldry, although there were serious lapses usually born out of ignorance. Naked, he slipped out of the van and stretched his arms, listening to the sluggish whimper of the stream nearby. The girl stuck her head out, her black hair falling forward on her bare shoulders.