The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  “You take care of yourself,” Metger said.

  His father raised his face. His mouth was open and closing silently as he computed the number of his candies.

  He smiled.

  “Sammy Caskie. Old Sammy, we called him,” he said.

  “Was that the kid’s name?” Metger asked. “Sammy Caskie? Was that it?”

  Stanley Metger’s hand closed around his candy. He raised the clenched hand to his lips, wiped the saliva from the corner of his mouth. He was already elsewhere, leaving his son behind. “You tell your mother to bring candies when she fetches that rug. I’m getting pretty damn low on them. Okay? Don’t you forget now.”

  “I won’t forget,” Metger said.

  33

  Louise stared past Max, past the bottle of wine on their table, and looked across the restaurant. It was a pleasant place, decorated in a plum color; the waiters were discreet and hushed and served nouvelle cuisine as if they were administering communion wafers. Louise reached for the wine and poured herself another glass.

  “You see some hair inside a glass and you think—” Max said.

  “Not any old hair, Max! Denny’s hair!”

  “Denny’s hair then.”

  “It struck me as very odd. It shocked me.”

  “Maybe it isn’t Denny’s hair.”

  “I know my son’s hair when I see it. I know his curls by heart. A mother knows that kind of thing. God, I brushed that hair every day when he was a small boy—”

  Max held up one hand. “Okay. It’s Denny’s hair.”

  “Yeah, and it shocked me at first. I mean, why save somebody’s hair? Why do that? And then Charlotte tried to hide it from me—”

  “She was embarrassed.” Max shrugged. “Maybe she thought you thought she was some kind of thief.”

  Louise shrugged and was silent, remembering how she’d felt when she’d seen the hair in the glass jar. It was almost as if she’d been kicked in the stomach, painfully deflated. Now, after a fair meal and several glasses of wine, the whole thing didn’t seem very important to her. Puzzling, sure, but not as significant as she’d thought at first.

  “Maybe the Summers feel like surrogate grandparents. They wanted to save Denny’s hair for sentimental reasons,” Max said. “They think they’re grandparents for the summer.”

  “I never heard of grandparents saving reams of discarded hair, Max. That’s a new one on me.”

  “Some people have a thing for keepsakes. Your friend Polly What’s-her-name has this baby book. I remember she showed it to me once—it was filled with curls of hair, baby teeth, even a disgusting, dehydrated umbilical cord. The only thing missing was a shriveled placenta. The point is, people keep the strangest things. Sentimentality goes deep.”

  “Polly Ketchum always went too far with the collection if you ask me.”

  “She didn’t think so,” Max said. He topped up his wine, sipped.

  “There’s something so … personal about hair, Max.”

  Louise smiled at their waiter, who was approaching the table to ask about dessert, which both Max and Louise refused. They ordered brandies.

  “You’re superstitious, Louise.”

  “I am not superstitious.”

  “You never walk under ladders. I’ve noticed that.”

  “Something might fall on my head. I’m only being practical.”

  “Certain superstitious people don’t like having their photographs taken,” Max said. “They think the loss of their image is like having their soul taken away from them. Is that how you feel about hair?”

  Louise shook her head and smiled. “You’re mocking me again, Doctor.”

  “Hair,” Max said.

  “I’m listening. Let’s hair what you have to say about it.”

  “Why is it, when you drink wine, you make terrible puns?”

  “Who? Me?”

  Max rolled his big brandy glass between the palms of his hands. “Hair’s nothing but the outgrowth of the epidermis. It grows out through the sebaceous glands, rising up from the papilla, the bulb, and the follicle, et cetera. When you cut it off it isn’t a part of you anymore.”

  “Big words.” Louise sniffed her brandy. She lit a cigarette. Across the restaurant now, on a small upraised platform, a skinny young man was playing piano. “I Get a Kick Out of You.” She listened for a moment. When the Summers had appeared that evening to baby-sit—punctually at seven—she hadn’t said anything about the hair, nor had Charlotte alluded to it. The Summers were as they always seemed—friendly, anxious to please, kind. And maybe, just maybe, goddamn Max was right—they wanted a souvenir of their summer “grandchild,” nothing more than that. Why shouldn’t they keep Denny’s hair in a glass jar anyhow? After all, there were people in the world like Polly Ketchum and perhaps the Summers could be included in that category of keepsake-keepers, collectors, and general sentimentalists.

  She shut her eyes and moved her head in time to the music. It flowed over her, soothing, blandly relaxing. She drank some of her brandy, then smiled at Max, reaching across the table for his hand.

  “We haven’t done this in ages,” she said. “We really should do it more often.”

  Max, dressed in shirt and tie, tasteful sports coat, smiled. “You’re right. We should. At least we’ve got built-in sitters.”

  Louise set her glass down. From the corner of her eye she was aware of somebody coming across the room to their table. She turned her face slightly and as she did so she was conscious of two things.

  One: Max stood up quickly.

  Two: He knocked over his brandy glass.

  Max opened his mouth, smiled, didn’t smile. What went across his face right then was the most curious expression Louise had ever seen, something she couldn’t define, a discomfort, maybe a quick suggestion of pain.

  The girl wasn’t beautiful; she was pretty in a way that suggested the fragility of porcelain and her long hair fell delicately down to her shoulders and she was looking at Max with a smile in which Louise imagined she could read all kinds of concealments, secrets, yearnings. Louise reached out for her brandy even as Max blurted out an introduction:

  “This is Connie Harrison,” he said and his voice was awfully dry, like one bleached-out old bone being rubbed against another.

  The girl smiled.

  Louise looked up and blinked and said, “Nice to meet you.”

  The girl held out one loose hand; her skin was warm as Louise touched it. “Mrs. Untermeyer?” the girl said.

  Louise took her hand away. It was funny but she couldn’t hear the piano now. The whole restaurant might have been totally silenced. The world went quiet except for an odd ringing in her ears.

  “Clumsy of me,” Max said, picking up his brandy glass, fussing with the wet tablecloth.

  “Very,” Connie Harrison said.

  Frog’s teeth chattered.

  He lay shivering inside his sleeping bag in the back of the VW van. Eyelids heavy. Lips cold.

  Some time back—he couldn’t tell how long—a tape of Bob Dylan had quit playing and he didn’t have the strength to get up and change it. The music still echoed in his head, around and around like a thin voice trapped in a marble mausoleum.

  He pulled the sleeping bag up to his head.

  Hot flashes coursed through him. His blood danced and his heartbeat was as sluggish as the stream he could hear in the distance. I am not a well man, Frog thought.

  What was it? A virus? Or had his checkered history caught up with him? Had all the casual fornication of the sixties claimed him now? Syphilis, say. He smiled weakly.

  He was very conscious of his solitude. You are weak and sick and there’s nobody around to attend to you. A sad case, old Frog. Path-etic.

  He stared up through the skylight of the van at the canopy of the night. Earlier he had downed a couple of aspirins, but they weren’t actually doing anything for him. The sickness made his forehead very hot and his limbs weak. An hour back—was it that long ago?—he’d tried to g
et down to the stream to plunge his face into the brackish water, as if such an immersion might revive him, but he hadn’t even made it out of the van.

  Was it something you ate, Frog? Something you took inside your body without knowing it was toxic?

  He considered rising and stumbling down through the trees to find Max Untermeyer, the physician. Cure me, Max. Make me well. He shuddered inside the sleeping bag. He felt like something trapped inside a pod—an unsprouted bean or something equally distorted.

  He found his flashlight and flicked it on, playing the beam around inside the van. As he did so he had a curious sense of his own doom, as if it were looming up on the horizon—black and huge and shuffling down through the pines to get him.

  The Boogeyman.

  How could he afford to get this sick? He shut his eyes. Maybe the Summers would come by on one of their walks and rescue him. Or maybe Denny would find his way up here. Maybe maybe maybe …

  Now, through the skylight, he perceived the moon. It hung in the sky like an artificial thing—a counterfeit coin. He struggled up into a sitting position.

  What the fuck is wrong with me?

  His hands trembling, his whole body shuddering, he had the weird idea of drawing up a will. He found a notepad and a blunt pencil and he started to scribble—then he threw his head back and laughed feebly. I am neither sound of mind nor body, he thought.

  He lay back down again. A chill rose from the soles of his feet and advanced upward through his body to the top of his scalp. The pencil and pad slipped out of his fingers.

  He thought he knew what it was. One of those twenty-four-hour beauties that rendered your whole system useless. One of those viral babies that just shot you to shit—and then, without so much as a how-do-you-do, it would vanish into the ether and he could get on with his life without this kind of undignified inconvenience.

  He was a believer in dignity and the basic rights of man. The right, at least, to pick and choose your own sicknesses.

  He stared up at the moon. Tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow I will be well.

  Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.

  Then he lay very silent, listening to the faint meter of his heart and the quiet knocking of his pulses.

  34

  It was Louise who suggested they stop for a nightcap at the Ace of Spades, a dim place with country-western music pouring out of the jukebox. They stood at the end of the bar watching the woman pour their drinks. Louise sipped her brandy when it came. Max, who had asked—rather curiously Louise thought—for schnapps, swirled his drink around inside the glass.

  “I didn’t know you liked that stuff,” Louise said. What else don’t you know about your husband? she wondered. Good old Max. Dear Max. How much do you really know?

  Max shrugged. He said nothing. He felt strangely drained, empty inside. In the restaurant he’d gone to the rest room just as soon as Connie Harrison had left and he’d swallowed three Darvon. Three little talismans, pink-orange and attractive to look at. Now, here in the Ace of Spades, they were taking their effect on him. The world might have been glazed over. He saw things as if through glass. Even the music that droned out the jukebox was thin and distant, a voice crying in another room.

  Louise put her glass down. There was something darkly comforting in this tavern, she thought. If she could dig into the secret heart of this place, its unlit pulse, its soul, she understood she would be safe. She shut her eyes a moment.

  “She’s nice-looking,” she said. “If you go for the fragile angular type. Do you go for that type, Max?”

  Max didn’t speak. He lifted his glass to his mouth and swallowed.

  “It’s funny,” Louise said. “The woman calls you on the telephone one night and then turns up the next. That’s funny. Isn’t that funny? Why would she come all the way to Carnarvon, Max?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t know, huh?” Louise looked across the bar. A drugstore-cowboy type was gazing at her, one eyebrow raised on his thin face. “Max doesn’t know. A patient follows him all the way up here and he doesn’t know why. Aren’t we being obtuse. Aren’t we just.”

  “Louise,” Max said. “You read too much into things.”

  You read too much into things. Poor Louise. Her hyped-up imagination. Poor old thing. Hadn’t Max said Connie Harrison was forty and sagging? Why had he lied?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  “Max Max Max. A pretty girl comes up to you in a restaurant. She drools over you. She lays a hand on your arm in a manner a blind man would say was proprietary, and she tells you none too nonchalantly the name of the hotel where she’s staying, and you don’t know what I’m talking about—”

  “Jesus, Louise.”

  “Add to the foregoing that the said Connie Harrison looked at Mrs. Untermeyer only once with something akin to a dagger, and the picture is transparent.” Louise pushed her brandy glass away. She felt a claw of tiredness descend on her.

  “Sometimes a patient transfers all his or her affections to their physician,” Max said. “You know that. You’ve always known that. It’s classic.”

  “Words, Maxie. Words. I hear emptiness. Sounds signifying nothing. You should have seen your face! Dear God! I would have given a thousand dollars for a Polaroid right then! You looked as if you’d just had a goddamn stroke.”

  Max shook his head. Why the fuck had Connie Harrison come all the way up here? Why had she presented herself at the fucking table as if she were an old family friend? His head felt as if it were filled with moisture, a swamp sucking him down into its depths. Fuck fuck fuck! The horrible thing was not the shock he’d reacted with when she came up to their table. It wasn’t even the way color had drained out of his face and his heart had buckled. It was the god-awful yearning for the woman he’d felt when she laid her hand against his arm. Was he to be doomed by that longing? Even now, even as Louise flailed away at him, he wanted to go to Connie Harrison’s hotel and get into bed with her. Dismiss it, Max. School’s out. Let Connie go.

  “Do you see much of her in San Francisco?” Louise asked.

  “You’re so very wrong about this.”

  “My head tells me to believe you. My heart’s screaming.”

  “Listen to your head.”

  Louise called for a second brandy. She saw all over again the face of Connie Harrison looming up in the restaurant. She saw the woman’s hand on Max’s arm—a casual familiarity, an air of possession, a touch that belonged only to lovers.

  “When do you meet her, Max? Is it cozy lunches and midday screwing in motels? Is it like that?”

  Max said nothing. He finished his schnapps.

  “Did you encourage her, Max? Was it mutual?”

  He shook his head from side to side. “There’s nothing, Louise. The girl’s neurotic. I can’t be responsible for the way she feels, can I?”

  “I’m struggling here, Max. I’m really struggling to believe you.”

  He put his hand over hers. Her flesh was warm. “You have to believe me,” he said quietly. It was his best voice, his bedside voice. You’re going to get well, Mrs. Untermeyer. You have my word on that score. He felt shitty—how the hell had he ever stumbled into all this crap? Lies operate under their own laws—they expand and they fill every vacant space available until you find your whole world is one of fragile fabrication. And he’d told so many that the fact he was compounding them now didn’t impress him.

  “I want to,” Louise said. A couple of tears slipped out from under her closed eyelids. She took a Kleenex from her purse and dabbed it against her face, conscious of the attractive woman behind the bar watching her. Big Scene in Bar! Domestic Strife! Woman Weeps Over Suspected Infidelity! It was just so goddamn cheap, such an epic cliché. Laugh, Louise! Laugh it off! Max is still your husband.

  “What does she mean to you?” she asked.

  “As much as any patient means.”

  “And that’s it?”

>   Max nodded. “That’s it.”

  Louise didn’t finish her second brandy. “I think I’d like to go home, Max.”

  He took her by the elbow and steered her out into the parking lot. There he kissed her, but her lips were unyielding and cold against his own. He opened the passenger door for her and she climbed inside and sat staring straight ahead, her eyes wide and her face expressionless and her pale hands lying in her lap like two clay objects. Max turned the key in the ignition.

  He said, “I promise you. There’s nothing between us, Louise. Nothing.”

  “I think I heard that part,” Louise whispered.

  “And I want you to hear it again.”

  “Don’t speak, Max. I think I’d like a little silence right now.”

  Max drove the Volvo down the dirt road, seeing the colorless branches of trees fly out on either side of the headlights like the wings of shapeless big birds hurrying to unknown destinations.

  “The records are a mess, Jerry,” Lou Pelusi said. “Miles didn’t leave them in the best possible shape when he retired.”

  Metger watched as the physician opened and closed drawers of filing cabinets and sifted through manila folders. All the folders bore labels, some of them handwritten, others typed.

  Pelusi said, “I don’t think Miles understood the alphabet as you and I do,” and he laughed quietly. He slammed one of the metal drawers shut and turned to look at the sheriff.

  Metger folded his arms. He was tired. Through the window of Pelusi’s office he could see only darkness—total and inviolate, consuming the night.

  “Of course it would help if you could give me a date for that first name,” Pelusi said.

  “I don’t have a date,” Metger said. “Only the name. Samuel Caskie. I’d guess it was in the 1940s.”

  “We could be here all night.” Pelusi sighed. He looked at Metger with slight irritation now. “You’re talking about a whole decade here, Jerry. Can’t you narrow it down for me?”

  “I wish I could.” Metger rubbed his eyes. It crossed his mind that his father had been deluded, that the old man’s memory had been a false one. Who could say for sure that anything Stanley Metger dragged up from the depths of his mind had any veracity? On the other hand, something in the way Miles Henderson had reacted to the sound of the name—a quiet flinch, a flicker of his eyes—had suggested to Metger that Sammy Caskie had indeed lived and died in the town of Carnarvon.