Pike's Folly

by Mike Heppner

  The woman emerged from the kitchen, a look of happy, sweaty exertion on her face. “Welcome home, chief,” she said, and pressed her lips to Pike’s cheek.

  Nathaniel patted her on the butt. “We’re hungry,” he said, indicating the others.

  Gregg blushed. “Oh, we’re okay,” he insisted.

  The woman broke away from Pike to shake Stuart’s hand. She looked in her mid-forties, with short, muscular legs that bulged in a pair of dark blue denims. She’d gathered her hair— black but white at the roots—into a wispy bun held in swirling disarray by a chopstick. “I’m Sarah,” she said. “You’ve got two more coming, I know. We’ll eat as soon as I get this ham out of the oven.”

  “No hurry,” Gregg said. He’d been expecting someone younger than Sarah. In twenty years, he’d never known Pike to have a lady friend even remotely his own age.

  “I’m taking jackets,” she said, “and drink orders, if you’re interested. I know what you want, chief.” She nudged Pike, who’d put his arm around her waist. Gregg still didn’t know what to make of her, except that she looked like a lesbian, according to his limited conception of what a lesbian looked like. She wasn’t pretty; her face was apple shaped, with ruby dimples and a gently rolling double chin. Pike’s former girl-friends had all been of a type: fawning waffle heads with size-two figures. He simply didn’t associate with women who weren’t exceptionally beautiful. Sarah’s ordinary appearance was the most striking thing about her.

  “Nathaniel was worried that we might be late,” Gregg said, handing her his jacket.

  She laughed. “He must still be on Rhode Island time. I keep telling him, the rules are different up here.”

  Allison and Heath joined them twenty minutes later in the dining room, where Sarah had laid the food out buffet-style on a sideboard. The ham smelled delicious, and it steamed in the center of the table. Sarah carved it with an electric knife, telling everyone to help themselves to wine and tossed salad. The knife tore into the meat with the razzing sound of a chainsaw, and she operated it manfully, peeling off thick deli-cut slices with one hand.

  Allison stood in front of Heath at the end of the buffet line. The others had got a head start on the booze, and she watched their rowdy jostlings with the detached amusement of a social anthropologist. “I think my dad’s drunk,” she whispered to Heath. She was happy for him; as she saw it, her father rarely allowed himself to have the fun in life that he deserved. The feeling was contagious, and she said, “God, I want a toke so bad.”

  Heath smiled gamely but said nothing. Ever since leaving Providence, he’d regretted coming along on the trip. He could’ve used the time more productively by staying at home. Solitude was healthy for an artist. There was so much that he wanted to do—write “God Only Knows,” produce Pet Sounds, learn to sing like Carl Wilson. What was he doing instead? Hanging out with his girlfriend.

  Sarah cut herself a piece of ham and told her guests to sit down and eat. Gregg continued to mellow as the dinner progressed, and at times Allison even thought he might be flirting with their host.

  “I can’t believe you two went to school together,” he said to Pike and Sarah, who were sitting next to each other at the head of the table. “You don’t strike me as a Rhode Islander,” he told Sarah.

  She smiled, her mouth full of red wine. They’d gone through two bottles already, with another unopened bottle of Bordeaux on the sideboard. The bottle still had the price tag on it, a green sticker from the state-line liquor store. “I’m not—not anymore,” she said. “There’s a whole world out there, you know. There’s Massachusetts, and Connecticut, and—”

  “Don’t forget Maine,” Pike said to the general amusement of all. Only Allison wasn’t laughing; she was too busy scrutinizing Pike for clues, wanting to find out exactly why she disliked him so much.

  “What was Mr. Pike like in high school?” Heath asked. Allison gripped his right leg under the table and squeezed.

  “Oh, kind of a rebel,” Sarah said. “We were a pretty strange couple, he and I.”

  “So you guys actually dated?” Allison asked.

  Pike took a moment to swallow a bite of ham. “Not really. But I did let her carry my books.”

  Sarah grinned, showing her wine-stained teeth. “Don’t believe a word that he says, Allison. It’s all lies.”

  Pike corrected her. “Not lies, dear—fabrications. Peasants lie. Gentlemen fabricate.”

  As their banter continued, Gregg began to understand why Pike had kept her as his secret friend for so long. Being with Sarah had freed up a part of him that was less informed by the public persona he’d taken such care to create in Rhode Island. Like she said, the rules were different up here.

  At the end of the meal, Pike made a special announcement, one that he’d been saving all night. This was the first time he’d mentioned the parking-lot project to anyone who wasn’t directly involved with it. That group now included Gregg, Allison, and Heath, whether they liked it or not.

  “A parking lot?” Allison demanded, reaching for her wine. “What on earth for?”

  “Wait and see, my pet, wait and see,” Pike said, pleased with himself.

  “How do you plan to get the equipment up there?” Gregg asked. Being in the mountains had a transforming effect on him, and he found himself open to ideas that would’ve seemed ludicrous back home.

  “We’ll airlift it,” Pike said, “to a staging area about fifty yards from the main site. It’s expensive as hell, but we’ll save in other ways.”

  Allison was less impressed. “But why a parking lot?”

  Pike answered with relish. “The fact that it’s a parking lot means nothing. A parking lot defies meaning. That’s the beauty of it.”

  “Sounds pretty stupid to me.” With a huff, she stood to help clear the dishes, while her father kept asking more questions. She could tell that Pike was reeling him in, and it disgusted her. “Are you finished?” she asked Heath.

  “Oh, thanks,” he said, glancing away from Stuart just long enough to pass her his plate. He’d hardly touched his food and had spent most of the dinner talking with Stuart, who’d also managed only a half-slice of ham.

  “What about you, Stuart?” she asked.

  Stuart handed her his plate but held on to his wineglass. The seating arrangements hadn’t worked in his favor, with Heath on one side and Gregg on the other. Both expected more out of him—the published author —than he felt able to provide. Heath’s questions hadn’t let up since they’d sat down: about writing, getting an agent and editor, etc. These questions had continued even after dinner, until Stuart finally rose from the table and asked, “Hey, Nate, do you mind if I borrow the SUV? I want to pick up some wool socks. It’s gonna be cold later on.” The excuse sounded forced, but he didn’t care.

  “The Bean outlet’s open all night,” Heath said. “I’ll come along.”

  With a paternal sigh, Pike reached into his pocket, brought out his car keys and said, “Don’t get pulled over.”

  Stuart did what was expected and laughed. He’d driven the SUV before, usually bringing Pike to and from the airport. Every time, he’d heard the same lecture.

  “If you get arrested, remember”—Pike winked, sliding the keys across the table—“I’m your one phone call.”

  Keys in hand, they stepped outside and headed off, Stuart ejecting the James Brown CD from the sound system and tuning the radio to a light classical station. As he drove, he wondered if he ought to call Marlene. She’d be drunk by now—she always drank too much whenever he wasn’t home. Her neediness, her reluctance to assert herself except in the most futile ways, struck him as not endearing but pathetic. Her estimation of him was far too great, and her approval so easily won that it had almost no value. Stuart was tired of being the only bright spot in her life. Rather than put himself through this misery, he wondered, why hadn’t he poured his energy into writing a new novel? That was his job, after all. He’d already written one book, and there was a realistic exp
ectation he would write another. What the hell was he doing here in New Hampshire? He belonged back home, sitting at his desk. He never should’ve married Marlene to begin with. He should’ve invented her instead, plugged her into a story line and turned her loose.

  “So what’s it like to write a book?” Heath asked as they pulled into North Conway. The snow was falling harder now that they’d come out of the mountains. Stuart felt enthroned behind the wheel of the SUV, high above the ground, with an elevated view of the outlets and ski shops that were spread along the main drag.

  He’d already answered the question once tonight but gave it another shot. The truth was, he didn’t think much about his book anymore. All he remembered was that the actual writing entailed a lot of hard work, over the course of many years, and by the end of it, his experience of writing it was so diffuse that he felt unable to take credit for it. This was an honest answer.

  My Private Apocalypse was, as they say, a flop. The premise of the book was too cerebral, the ending too abstruse. If he were to write another, he’d make it more genre-oriented than the first, maybe a spy novel, something that required less emotional investment on his part. Being emotionally invested hadn’t paid off—not that he hadn’t been compensated, because he had. No, what his emotions had failed to produce was a honest book. To write a piece of pulp would’ve been more truthful, in fact. Stuart’s life had all the tawdry, dropped-in-the-bathtub flimsiness of a crappy paperback, clichés on every page.

  “I found a typo,” Heath said. “You probably know about it already.”

  “There’s a lot of typos,” Stuart admitted. The typos were all that still mattered to him. Unlike nearly everything else, he could relate to them objectively. “The hardest part about writing a book is proofreading it. The typos are all my fault. I just wanted to move on to something else by that point.”

  “Another novel?”

  “I thought so. I wanted to be one of those book-a-year guys, like John Updike. But I got . . . sidetracked, I guess.” He could tell that Heath wasn’t particularly interested, so he said, “Thanks for reading it, though. You didn’t have to do that.”

  He wheeled the SUV into the parking lot at L. L. Bean, which was three-quarters full even at this hour. When they got out, he sighed and said, “All right, so tell me about your screenplay.”

  Heath was shorter than Stuart, and he had to hurry to keep up. “Well, it’s really an homage to—and I know this sounds pretentious, but—”

  “Hold on.” Just ahead, under a green awning, dozens of shoppers were streaming in and out of the store. Stuart ran the last few steps and held the door open for a woman who was staggering with her massive bags of purchases.

  Heath continued, “It’s sort of an homage to sixties counterculture exploitation films like The Libertine and, um, Venus in Furs—”

  “Dig it.”

  “The Wild Angels, that sort of thing.”

  “Dig it, dig it.” Stuart stopped to get his bearings inside the store. Nearby, a man’s orange flannel shirt hung on a skeletal rack, along with a dozen more just like it; the same style of shirt also came in red, blue and green, with each color displayed on its own separate carousel. “I tried writing screenplays for a while,” he said, and they both nodded at having something in common. “I was never any good at it. Most of my ideas were pretty lame.” The thought streamed away. Even as a rotten screenwriter, Stuart had liked himself better at age twenty-one, ten years ago, than he did now. “Let’s check out the socks,” he said.

  Heath followed him into the men’s department and tried not to watch as Stuart picked out some socks. This was intimate information—another man’s socks—and it made him uncomfortable. The implications were erotic, homosexual. Head down, he said, “I don’t know what you’re working on right now, but if you ever want to get back into screenwriting—”

  “I don’t.”

  The answer startled Heath. He couldn’t imagine why someone who’d been given a gift—and not just a gift but the opportunity to use it—would be so reluctant to talk about his art. Heath’s single desire was to make a film of such loving, emotional intensity that it would give people the same sense of spiritual well-being that Brian Wilson—whose autobiography he’d been reading sporadically on the toilet since September— talked about when describing some of his more advanced productions from the sixties. Heath’s artistic analogues were all musical; he wanted to make a film that felt to his audience like “Good Vibrations,” “Cabin-Essence,” “Heroes and Villains,” songs that functioned as near-static soundscapes to which one could return, as though to a physical, existing space: a room. He wanted to accomplish this in film.

  The films that Heath most admired all contained an element of danger, not just in the subject matter but in the filmmaking process itself. The first Ilsa movie, for example, was secretly shot on the set of Hogan’s Heroes—a TV show as wholesome as Ilsa was repellent. Sleaze-meister Jess Franco—director of, among hundreds of others, Erotic Rites of Frankenstein and Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies—covertly filmed his female cast members in the nude, then spliced the footage into the finished edit without their approval. The whole genre was tawdry and repulsive. But under the threat of danger, Heath felt, something worthwhile happened. These films were artifacts of a genuine experience rather than a simulated one. The tension resulted not from a script or a storyboard but from real off-screen menace.

  “It’s a genre of film that virtually doesn’t exist anymore,” he explained. “Some of it’s proto-porn, but what I’m mainly interested in—and I know this sounds pretentious—is the social subtext. In Italy, for example, dozens of adult films were shot over a two-year period, from 1975 to 1976—some of the most grisly films ever made. Women being beaten, raped and experimented on by Nazi scientists. Graphic violence, genital mutilation, real sexual torture on camera. And these were mainstream movies, marketed as erotic cinema.”

  “They still make S&M movies.”

  “Yeah, but not with that kind of a budget. And never so overtly political. People used to eat this shit up in the seventies.”

  “Tastes change, I guess.” Stuart started toward the checkout counter. “I know what you’re talking about, though. I’ve definitely seen my share of it—Salon Kitty, The Night Porter and all that.”

  And more, he thought, remembering the hundreds of X-rated videos he’d watched as a younger man. In those pre-Marlene days, the amount of money he wasted on pornography was appalling. He preferred masturbation videos to sex videos because there wasn’t as much interference between him and the performers; watching the women masturbate, he could interface with them directly, then dispose of them at will. The mail-order company he regularly patronized offered five new videos every month, each spotlighting a different model. The catalogue descriptions were often better than the videos themselves, 90 percent of which, when they arrived in a red, white and blue FedEx box, were disappointing. Working on his book, Stuart wished that he could write something as bluntly persuasive as “Samantha, 19, 37DD, this stunning brunette strips from heels and garters to COMPLETELY NUDE in her own backyard and brings herself to a HIP-THRUSTING, SCREAMING ORGASM!!!” Whereas the jacket description of My Private Apocalypse read: “A debut novel that shows, in finely crafted phrases both poetic and uncommonly expressive, the vanishing boundary between dreams and disillusionment, the teeming (and often confounded) hopes of a generation and the fundamental power of language itself . . .”

  They went over to a counter, where three cashiers were waiting to ring up the next purchase. Stuart handed his socks to one of the cashiers, who scanned each pair with an infrared sensor.

  “Anyway,” Heath said, “that’s what I’m interested in. I want to re-create, with as much accuracy and sincerity as possible, the look and feel of an actual, late-sixties, early-seventies exploitation film.”

  “It sounds like a great idea.” Stuart put a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. “Just don’t expect to make a lot of money at it.”

&nb
sp; The cashier handed Stuart his change and the bag of socks. Walking ahead of Heath, he pushed the front door open with his shoulder, then caught the cold metal handle and held it open. “So what’s this crap about turning my book into a movie?” he asked.

  Heath was embarrassed. “Oh, Allison’s just talking. She can be a little bossy at times.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Stuart remarked. Across the lot, Nathaniel’s SUV looked enormous and out of place—taller and wider and more obnoxious than all the other cars parked around it. The breeze was bitter, and Stuart said, “Come on, let’s get moving.”

  Back at the lodge, Heath found Allison packing her things in their cabin.

  She was furious. “I don’t know why I even bothered to come,” she said. “Pike’s obviously a scam artist. He scammed my mother, and now he’s trying to scam my dad.”

  “What do you mean?” Heath asked.

  “Don’t you get it? He’s fucking with us! He wants to turn my father into another rich asshole, just like him. That’s why people don’t like us, Heath. They see guys like Nathaniel Pike, and they think, ‘See? All rich people are like that.’ But we’re not! At least I’m not.” From the desk by the bed, she swiped up a twist-tie baggy of pot and stuffed it into her backpack. “I’m leaving.”

  Heath followed her out of the cabin. “It’s too late to drive back to Rhode Island,” he warned.

  “I’m going to Concord. It’s only an hour. I’ll get a room.”

  “What’s in Concord?”

  “A whole bunch of Reese supporters. There’s going to be a rally in front of the capitol building on Christmas Eve. Celia Shriver told me about it. I want to help out.”

  “I don’t think that Mr. Reese is going to like that.” Gently, he took her sleeve and pulled her toward him.

  She jerked her arm away. “Too bad. I have to do something. Everyone back home is gonna flip out when they hear about this stupid parking lot.” As a peace offering, she said, “You should come too. Take your camera and make a documentary.”