by Lydia Millet
“In Malibu?”
“White people.”
“You should chill out, honey. Stop worrying. There’s nothing you can do, he’s safe and sound, we’re both coming home soon. And listen, I promise. He’s not going to call anybody ‘nigger.’ I’ll go out on a limb and guarantee that.”
Brady was impatient. He was not paying attention. He stood with the room door half-open.
“OK,” said Susan, in a dissatisfied tone.
“OK. I’ll call you in the morning.”
•
As they drove to the party, Hal in the passenger seat wrestling with a broken seatbelt, it became clear that Brady had an agenda for the evening. It was unclear to Hal what that agenda was, but clearly there was one. He was purposeful in his movements. He drove fast. He was out for more than just a good time; he had a mission.
“You think T.’s doing OK in that place?” he asked, as Brady lit a cigarette at a stoplight.
It was already dark and the streetlights were on, surrounded by circling insects. Staring at a single light, he could see hundreds of them, possibly thousands.
His eyes smarted with the brightness. He turned away, blinking, and saw stubborn afterimages.
“He’ll be fine, he’ll be fine,” said Brady dismissively.
Hal found him irksome. Most of his smoke went out the window, but not all of it.
The afterimages of the streetlights were fading slowly.
“You ever spent the night in a jail around here?” he asked.
“It’s a holding facility,” said Brady, accelerating with a jerk.
“But how can we know what the conditions are? There’s no transparency! What if it’s a whole, you know, bitches-and-shivs kind of situation? Bend-over, rusty-razorblades-in-the-shower-type scene?”
Brady looked at him sidelong, one eyebrow raised.
“Relax. He’s going to be fine. You know, you seem a lot more uptight about it than he was, you realize that? Guy didn’t seem that worried to me.”
The cigarette dangled and jumped precariously as his lips moved.
But it was true, seemingly. No argument there.
Hal should have had something to drink before he met up with Brady. He didn’t like him, he realized. There was something sharp about Brady, something sharp and rancid.
Suddenly he longed for the company of Gretel. He liked Gretel. She was nice.
Germans, he reflected, were possibly not so bad. Even if they were a super-race, maybe they didn’t mean to be. After all, as national arrogance went, in his recollection from traveling, the French were far worse. And people often forgot that it was the Frogs, not the Krauts, who invented fascists. When people thought about the French, they thought of wine, the Eiffel Tower, the fatuous berets and painters on streets. They forgot these were the same guys who invented the whole fascist deal in the nineteenth century, then let the Germans run with it.
It was easy to be sucked into the thrall of a European. That much was true. German or French, English or Italian, even quaint, poor and Irish, there was something superior about all of them. They valued education, for one thing, which gave them a bit of a head start. They did not cherish ignorance like his own countrymen. For that reason—recently, at least—they were less destructive, megalomaniacal and brutal, for instance. Which might be seen as an advantage for them. On the other hand, their maturity could also be somewhat boring. In America adults acted like children; in Europe the children acted like small adults. Even the cornboys, though boyish enough in their activities, were more like miniature engineering students than carefree ten-year-olds.
Also, the lack of childish, wanton destructiveness failed to stand the Europeans in good stead when it came to world domination. Being smart, educated and civilized, and having learned some fairly significant lessons from their history, they had pretty much retreated from the world-domination forum over the past half-century and now were like a small band of AARP members watching the carnival from a distance and drinking nonalcoholic beer.
But as far as super-races went, the German women, at least, were warm and generous. He liked them.
The one he knew, anyway.
“Here we go. Bit of a walk. Nice beach house. No parking any closer.”
“Your friend Cleve coming?” asked Hal to fill the space as they got out of the car.
“Should be. Yeah. You know, see most of the same people at these things. Whole city’s what, sixty thousand bodies. You got a small expat community, you got your local figures. Same old. Except for the help. The help changes.”
Ahead of them was a large, white, blocky house surrounded by waving palms. A nice breeze had sprung up off the ocean. It was good to be here, after all, Hal thought with relief, if only for the breeze. There were people milling on a second-floor terrace, which was strung with lights.
“Pool, too,” said Brady. “Jacuzzi.”
“I didn’t bring my suit,” said Hal.
“No worries,” said Brady.
He followed Brady into the house, through an atrium full of waxy-leaved plants with huge flowers, up tiled stairs onto the terrace, where the drinks were. There was music, but he could not tell where it was coming from. People around, most of them tanned and quite young. Where were all the geriatric expats? They had to be around somewhere. People retired here, after all. There should be plenty of wrinkled old crones smeared with Coppertone. But instead there were only models and athletic types. Among them Hal would not shine.
A bartender, tables with candles in the center, and there: a topless woman in the hot tub. Already. She was on the other side of the pool, down off the terrace on the first floor, but he saw her. Her shoulders were brown but her breasts floated whitely on the water like twin buoys.
He encountered a lot of nudity, in this tropical location. For years, in his life, almost no nudity, only clothing. Clothing, clothing, clothing. Wherever he went, there seemed to be apparel. Although he lived in Southern California, and not far from the beach either, somehow he did not frequent the nude locations.
Then he came here and suddenly: nude. Nude nude nude.
“Here, have this one,” said Brady, and put a drink in his hand. Out of it stuck a parrot fashioned from colored pipe-cleaners: red, blue, yellow.
“So who’s our host?” asked Hal, lifting the drink to his lips. As he raised it the parrot swiveled and hit him on the nose.
“The folks throwing this shindig,” said Brady, whose own drink featured no parrot, “are ethanol. They just inked some kind of deal with BSI. The sugar monopoly.”
“Huh,” said Hal. If he took the parrot out it would stop falling on him when he drank. But in his pocket it would be crushed. He liked the parrot. He could give it to Casey. She enjoyed souvenirs, especially if tacky.
He held the parrot with one crooked finger while he raised his glass. That was the trick: restrain the parrot. Keep the parrot captive.
“Toucan’s giving you a tough time, huh,” said Brady.
“Oh. I thought it was a parrot.”
“Hey! Jeff!”
There was the lawyer, lifting himself out of the pool. He wore a Speedo. He reached out and grabbed a silky bathrobe, mounted the stairs and came up to them, nodding and waving at others he passed.
“Let me introduce you around,” he said.
They walked down the far stairs to the pool area again, where there was another bar. Beyond a wall lined with flowering vines were the beach and the ocean. A DJ played music on a stereo and people danced. They stood next to the dance floor, watching.
“Thanks for inviting me,” said Hal.
“Marcella. Marcella, this is Jeff Brady. The U.S. embassy. The one I told you about? The racquetball story?”
A passing woman shook Brady’s hand. Hal noticed long fingernails, shining silver.
“Hal Lindley,” he said, because the lawyer seemed to have forgotten his name. “Just visiting. Tourist.”
A guy on the dance floor bumped into him, sloshing his drink.
<
br /> “Marcella handles the Canadians,” Cleve was telling Brady.
A server brought up an hors d’oeuvres tray. Brady picked up a small food item and shoved it into his mouth.
“What are they?” asked Hal, peering down.
“Sribuffs,” said the server, a dark young woman.
“Sribuffs?” repeated Hal. “I’m not …”
“Shrimbuffs,” she said again, nodding anxiously.
“Shrimbuffs. Huh,” said Hal.
“Shrimp puffs,” said Brady, impatient.
“Oh. Oh, I see,” said Hal, and took one, smiling sheepishly at the server. He tried to seem obliging.
“Why they can’t hire fucking English speakers,” said Cleve, shaking his head. “When the official language is fucking English.”
The woman moved off, her head down.
“You’d like her better if she had three nipples, you’re saying,” said Brady.
“Shit yeah. I would.”
Hal wanted another drink. Not to be critical; to suspend his judgment. The second thing he had learned, on this trip—after the fact that he liked knowing the truth about other people and at the same time keeping his own truth to himself—drink more. He should drink more, in general. Not to the point of alcoholism, but enough to float, in the waning part of the day, in a kind of pleasant and light liquid, a beery amber light. Life was better that way. People were softer around the edges, their conversation less grating.
“Excuse me. Making a bathroom run, then a drink. Get anyone anything?” he asked, raising his near-empty glass.
“G&T,” said Brady.
“Cognac,” said Cleve.
“OK,” he said, and moved off. See what the house held. He would have to find a way to keep the toucan in shape … on his way in he took it carefully off the straw it was impaled on and slipped it into the loose pocket of his shirt. It should be safe there, unless he crushed someone against him. Manfully.
But that was unlikely. Gretel was absent.
•
In the bathroom there were seashells of all shapes and sizes. They were made by something, seashells. Various organisms. Were they some animals’ excreta? He could not remember. He had seen a show on shell-forming animals with Casey. The term calcium carbonate came to mind. The animals formed the shells slowly, but how did they do it?
Possibly the shells were like fingernails, protruding suddenly from the skin.
It was strange, come to think of it. He looked down at the back of his hand. Fingernails. They just started up.
They were made of keratin, he remembered that.
They were a form of hair.
He had read this, but frankly he did not believe it. Or simply, he did not agree. They might be made of similar proteins, he accepted that readily, but still they were not a form of hair. Any idiot could see that.
He finished peeing, washed his hands and picked up a shell that looked like a snail shell, except huge and spotted. There were also stripes. It was attractive. Inside, it was shiny.
He placed it back on the shelf.
The drink was treating him well. No doubt it had been mixed quite strong. They fooled you with the toucan. You thought: child’s play, and swigged heartily. Then you were drunk. But he should not complain, not even to himself. It was what he had intended, after all. He had already made the decision. From now on he would be a man who drank. He would stop short of chronic impairment, though. That was the trick; you had to learn to drink the correct amount. It was said two glasses of wine a day improved your health. Surely three could not do it too much harm, in that case. He could become an oenophile. That was the name, if he recalled correctly, for wine lovers.
Wine-loving assholes. Because let’s face it, a wine lover was basically an asshole. Like a cigar lover. The word connoisseur, in general, was a synonym for asshole.
If it was up to him, connoisseurs of all kinds would be audited on a regular basis, their files tagged and them personally harassed by the Service until forced to surrender their assets. They would be targeted for audits on a non-random basis, if it was up to him. Wine, cigars, old cars, all pastimes of the genus Assholus.
It wouldn’t be wine, not for him. The point was, he could have three drinks a day and cultivate new fields of knowledge. He could keep more secrets, possibly lead a secret life with secret leisure pursuits. But what kind of secret life could he lead?
Before, when he found out about Susan, he had wanted to lead a secret life to get back at her. Now he wanted one for a different reason: his own pleasure. Excitement.
He picked up his glass. He still had to get drinks.
Because the life he had currently, he reflected, climbing the stairs, was insufficient. It was quite simply inadequate. At a certain point, you had to insist on quality.
A woman he once knew, who lived down the street from them, had said frequently, “I’m going to exercise my rights as a consumer.” She had said this often. Then she would call a mail-order catalog, for instance, and complain about a substandard product she had purchased therefrom. She would receive bulk samples of things, or luxury items free of charge—bribes from companies in exchange for refraining from litigation, which she threatened often.
When she was his neighbor he had frowned on this behavior of hers, which seemed cynical and opportunistic. Susan had thought it was funny, but he had frowned upon it. Now, however, he felt a certain grudging admiration.
“Cognac,” he said to the bartender beside the pool. He could barely hear his own voice. It was loud now. There was music, coming from who knows where. He did not see Brady or Cleve. There were more people now also. It was as though, alone in the bathroom, he had slept for hours by himself while on the other side of the wall the crowd swelled and gained momentum. Kind of a Sleeping Beauty thing. “G&T.”
“What’s your gin, sir?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s not for me. Whatever you want to give him.”
Two women dancing near him wore hairy coconut-shell bikini tops. He had never thought he would see that, outside a movie context. The shells did not look comfortable. They had to be chafing. Your average breast was not a good fit for half a coconut shell. The breasts would have red circle marks on them, like glass rings on a coffee table.
Maybe he should work on Casey, with regard to the phone-sex problem. Sure, she was an adult, but adults made poor choices all the time and she was no exception. Maybe he should press her harder to go to college. She was still young enough. Was it wrong of him to let her choose her own path? She was his daughter. And she was only in her twenties. And she was doing phone sex. She was going down the old phone-sex road. Where did that road lead? That road was a dead end.
It was all very well to be accepting. Acceptance had its place. But maybe he was shirking his duty. Maybe he should plead with her, or threaten. Did Susan know? She did not, was his suspicion. Maybe he should talk about it with Susan. Maybe they should formulate policy. Of course, he had just told Casey he was fine with it. The downside of drunkenness. But it was true, in a way. That is, he was fine with the sex aspect, in a sense. What sense? Well, in the sense that he could admit his daughter was a female, and—
OK, so he was fine with it in the sense that he could ignore it, if he tried, or maybe chock it up to youthful mischief, risk-taking, or perversity, or also possibly a nihilistic, self-abnegating impulse Casey had been known at times to embrace. But he was not fine with the whole career dead-end thing. Would she feel amused and fulfilled doing phone sex at fifty? No she would not.
When he got home he would hunker down with Susan. They would devise a phone-sex strategy.
•
“What the hell happened to you?” asked Brady, when Hal approached with drinks in hand, finally. He already had a new one, and was talking to a pretty girl. Cleve the lawyer was not around. “You fall in?”
Brady’s sharpness and his focus were on Hal, yet Hal sensed it was for the benefit of the pretty girl. She was half Brady’s age at the most and quite
elegant, with her black hair swept up on top of her head in a chignon style Hal’s mother had favored. This, he realized, was why Brady had driven fast to the party.
He put down the cognac and G&T on a table, the better to drink his own whiskey. Behind Brady, against a vine-covered wall, people in skimpy bathing suits were blindfolded and playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, shrieking with laughter. He drank the whiskey; Brady was leaning in close to the girl, plying her. He was trying to get her to sleep with him. Hal could not hear what he was saying, nor did he want to.
But his whiskey was already gone.
He grabbed up the extra G&T surreptitiously, without Brady noticing, and moved away from the two of them, toward the taped-up banner of the donkey. Tails hung all over it, willy-nilly. He stood there sipping and watching as a plump woman in a tiny, ill-advised purple thong approached, giggling. She was being roughly steered, almost pushed in fact, by a large man behind her who held onto her shoulders. She raised a braided donkey tail, her arm wavering.
“Colder, colder, warmer, colder,” chanted other men in the crowd. But they were toying with the woman. They misdirected her and then they laughed.
Abruptly the large man turned her toward the pool, and she stepped forward. She screamed as she fell. But then seconds later she resurfaced, sputtering and annoyed, tugging at her blindfold as laughter resounded. Hal stepped away, thinking maybe she had let it happen—there was something about her, something irritating—but also touched by sadness.
At his elbow was a young man with a brush cut in wet swimming trunks, toweling his buff body.
“Pathetic, isn’t it,” said the young man.
Hal felt called upon to defend the woman.
“She’s the victim,” he said. Possibly slurring.
“That’s what I mean,” said the young man, and shrugged on a T-shirt. “They’re pathetic. Not her.”
“Oh. Yeah,” said Hal, though in fact it was all of them.
“You know anyone here?” asked the young man.
“No one I want to talk to,” said Hal. “You?”
“Same,” said the young man. “I’m on leave, I don’t live around here.”
“You in the army or something?”
