Willing

by Scott Spencer

  All right, Castle said, pulling off another couple of grapes and shaking them like dice in his half-closed fist. Some of you may need to keep in touch with wives or whatever, fine, but if I were you, I’d keep it to a minimum. A weak current of laughter moved through the plane, like a rivulet of warmth—highly questionable warmth—through a pond. And in terms of each other, let’s really do what we can to keep it on an even keel. My best advice on that score? No politics. Our country’s in a war right now. Piedmont called out, A poorly planned and poorly executed war, in which we are getting our asses handed to us! The less said about that kind of thing, the better, Castle said. We’re certainly not going to solve it on this plane or on this trip. And, come on, guys, we’ve got a returning soldier on the plane.

  We all did our best not to turn in our seats to glance at Jordan. We might not all see eye to eye on politics, Castle said, but I think we all agree that the men and women doing the fighting deserve our gratitude. There was a smattering of applause. Castle put his hand up, as if to quell an outpouring of support, though the two or three people clapping had already stopped. Honestly speaking? I wouldn’t even read the news. Go on a ten-day news fast. We’ll closely monitor the world situation ourselves so we don’t accidentally go somewhere we’d all rather skip. Cell phone, e-mail, all that kind of thing—forget about it. You want to know what I always say? Turn in your cell phones! Hand them over to me, or Gabrielle, or Stephanie, and we’ll hold on to them for safekeeping until we’re back in New York, and I promise you you’ll have an even better time. Men have always traveled, always explored the world, and they did it without holding little pieces of plastic up to their face, telling someone a million miles away every little thing that takes place. My personal opinion? All this electronic checking-in is bad for you; it isn’t even manly, if you really want to know what I think.

  All right. Now you’ve heard the Lincoln Castle cell phone rant. Now I want to say a couple of things about the girls we’ll be meeting. We’re very proud of the talent we’ve gathered for you fellas. Make no mistake; you’ll remember this trip for the rest of your lives. Notice our itinerary—no typical stops made by a bunch of guys looking for female companionship. If what you want is to go to a bar or a massage parlor in Thailand, then you don’t need Fleming Tours. These are the kind of girls—women—you see at the movies, or sometimes even in the movies and you ask yourself: How come there’s no one like that in my life? Why do I work day in and day out and never enjoy this kind of beauty? These are the kind of girls you see when you’re driving past an American college campus and you see one walking with her friends, with a sweet little oval face and dark brown hair down to her shoulders, wearing a sweater and jeans and carrying a book bag, and the next thing you know, you’ve almost crashed your car into a tree because you’ve been staring at her. These are girls you see on expensive beaches or coming out of expensive stores. Are you getting the idea these ladies are expensive? Well, they are. They are not whores, let’s get that settled once and for all. They all have lives that are far outside what we’ll be sharing with them. They’re students, teachers, nurses, dancers; all they have in common is their uncommon beauty and their willingness to tiptoe out of the straight and narrow now and again and earn themselves a hefty fee. And if they have one little weakness in common, it’s this: they love American men.

  These are girls you actually yearn for, not just because they’ve got dynamite bodies but because they’re just simply beautiful, in and out. These are God’s grand-slam home runs. Think unattainable girl next door. Think of your best friend’s daughter or your daughter’s best friend. Grown up, of course. We’re not doing anything that UNICEF or anyone else is going to be coming at us for. We’re grown-up men meeting some very special grown-up women. And now I can tell you something I couldn’t, according to Legal, tell you when we were on terra firma. There is very, very little that is out-of-bounds with these very special ladies. They are all committed to the proposition that you men are going to roar like lions, and if there’s something a little special you want—guess what? They want it, too.

  By now, Castle had worked up most of the group into a kind of low-key call-and-response. They were all into it, except for Webb Doleack. Holding a small leather toiletries bag, he walked directly in front of Castle and went into the lavatory.

  Let me tell you guys how I got into this. To make money! one of the Metal Men called out. True enough, Castle said. But also to…He stopped himself, looked, breathed a long sigh, and a pained look crossed his face. So many men go to Paris, he said, or St. Petersburg, on business, flying first class, staying at deluxe hotels, enough per diem to choke a horse, and they just assume if they want a little female companionship it’s there for the asking. Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t—but most guys either come up empty or end up in some fantastically unpleasant situation. These places are supposedly crawling with beautiful women, but where do you find them? The ancient myth of the bellboy or the elevator operator or the doorman? Forget it, if those guys know any women, trust me, they’re not women you’d want to take to bed. Unless you want to try your luck with some forty-year-old hooker weighing in at a cool one hundred seventy-five pounds, or some sweaty little freak with a rose tattooed on her tailbone, trying to scrape together enough money for her next fix. Criminal connections, the worst of intentions, a penchant for petty thievery, maybe even violence. How do you get from that beautiful hotel room with the satin-covered headboard and the chocolate-covered mint on your pillow into that? And that’s if you get lucky. Most guys never can figure out where the hell these so-called available women are. I’ve known guys reduced to looking in the phone book under escort or massage and just crossing their fingers that whoever shows up, if anyone shows up, won’t be too terrible. Or those free weekly papers with all the sex ads in them? I mean, what kind of hooker is putting ads in giveaway newspapers? What kind of experience are you going to have?

  All right, road warriors. Enough talk. You’ve all worked hard; you’re all successful. Only the best will do. That holds for cars, suits, houses, and, at least as long as you’re with me, it holds for women, too. Fleming customers are often some of the hardest working people in the world. Why shouldn’t you have whatever it is you want—as long as no laws are broken and no one gets hurt? Right? Right. Everyone should just relax, get to know one another. We’re going to be in truly magical Iceland in a few hours; you’re not going to believe this place, or the women. I trust you’ll find the ride a pleasant one—we’re very proud of our fleet. This bird’s going to be our second home, and I must say we’ve outdone ourselves in making this cabin as spacious and comfortable as we know how. Our safety and maintenance standards are the highest in the industry, but, knowing you guys, you’re probably well aware of that. We find that our clients do a lot of research before embarking with us—which is fine by us. In fact, we welcome it. The closer you look at us, the better we look.

  8

  I HAD EXPECTED the North Atlantic to be an icy tumult, fierce and treacherous, but it looked calm as the plane prepared to land in Iceland. Occasional whitecaps ruffled the sea’s smooth surface; from two thousand feet they looked like handkerchiefs someone had dropped. My stomach was contracting and expanding like a sour heart.

  Up and down the aisle, the men were stirring, displacing the stale air with extravagant stretches, yawns, great, shameless belches, a flying fraternity of happy animals. The only one out of his seat was Webb, who was tilted forward with his hands pressed against the bathroom door and his feet as far back as possible. He seemed to be stretching out his Achilles tendons. I wondered if he thought we were going to have to chase the women down.

  Gabrielle, her feet tucked beneath her, wrapped in a blanket so that only her neck, head, and one arm were visible, read her small biography of Napoleon. Stephanie was in the galley, the curtain drawn. I could see her feet, her sensible shoes. Perhaps she was busy at work, but her feet were not moving, and I wondered if she were just standing the
re, helping herself to a few minutes in which she didn’t have to smile or ask if anyone needed anything. A little hiccup of desire—for reality, plain talk, for love—went through me, leaving a faint peppery taste of itself behind. I readjusted myself, looked out the window again. The gray-blue ocean was turning into land with no noticeable transition, no cliffs, no breakers, no seaside community, just a lone coastal lighthouse throwing out its long tangerine-colored beacon of light. The landscape was lunar—while dozing, I had half-heard Castle telling someone that NASA once used Iceland to train the crew for the moon shot.

  AT THE REYKJAVIK AIRPORT, we were shepherded onto a minibus, which would take us into town. It was five in the morning Iceland time, about midnight New York time, not terribly late, but I was fried. I felt a kind of isometric exhaustion from pushing back a thought that had been trying to enter my mind since the ride to the airport: that not only was I making a mistake, but I was going to be a party to harming others. My blood felt like sand. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to be stretched out flat on cool sheets. To the other men on the bus, however, the night was young. This was what they had paid for; this was why they were here. Knees were jiggling, jokes cracking.

  I tried to imagine what the women who were awaiting us were thinking. Were they sitting with their arms folded, rocking back and forth, their faces blank, their private parts anesthetized with dread? Were they smoking crack, or bent over ceramic dishes snorting up long lines of coke? Were they napping, applying makeup, perfuming and anointing themselves? The enormity of the wrong we were about to do presented itself to me, and then it was gone, and when it reappeared a moment later it seemed smaller, just a matter of how things were and always had been. I watched out the window as the bus drove through the heavy gray dawn. The damp steely road wound through the rubble of volcanic rock, covered in lichen, dark green, and moist as creamed spinach.

  As we closed in on the women, I thought about all of the services I had paid for in my life. It didn’t really improve matters, but I thought about these things nevertheless. I had paid to have the wax flushed out of my ears and felt a morbid satisfaction upon seeing the dark amber stalactites emerge from the cave of my auditory canal. I had just a few months ago paid Dr. Tarnovsky to insert an educated finger up my rectum to make sure everything was copacetic, prostate-wise. I had treated myself to a manicure administered by a silent, manifestly homesick Korean woman who worked in a nail salon near my apartment. I had sat there, feeling a mixture of passivity and abashment, as she soaked my fingernails and dislodged their freight of bacteria into a little bowl of soapy water, and I studied her pensive, sad face and searched for some flicker of revulsion as she snipped away at my cuticles. At the end of the process she made a brusque little bow, and I tipped her a fiver. I had the plaque scraped and chipped off my teeth, and believe me I did not fail to note the twinge of disapproval on the hygienist’s masked face—it was just a little pucker of the brows, but I saw it. I’d had a boil lanced. Deirdre sometimes splurged on a housekeeper and when she came to the apartment I took some reading material to the nearby diner while a stranger sterilized our toilet, scrubbed the grime off the stove, swept up swirls of dust, soot, skin, and hair. In hotels, I was capable of leaving a heap of wet towels on the bathroom floor, newspapers strewn about, and, on at least one memorable occasion, semen-stained sheets on the bed; in Portland, Oregon, I allowed a man who was seventy years old if he was a day carry my two suitcases and my laptop from the lobby to my room on the fifth floor, after the desk clerk informed me that the elevator was out of order. True, I had just taken a long flight, but come on. There is something fundamentally wrong with the world when a seventy-year-old man is straining his muscles and breathing mightily through clenched teeth with the hope that someone half his seniority will give him a nice tip. I had tried to take one of my bags away from him, but he jerked it away and shook his head emphatically—he might have been too winded to protest verbally. At any rate, I might not have tried hard enough to wrest control of my luggage. I walked a few steps behind him, my eyes cast down.

  That was bad, but my guess was that I was heading toward something worse. As willing as I had been to pay others to do for me, I still had never paid for sexual pleasure. It had not taken any exercise of self-control. Before the breakup with Deirdre, I never thought that hiring a sex partner would be enjoyable. In fact, I always thought it would be depressing, possibly humiliating, and even dangerous. Clap, herpes, AIDS, mockery, robbery, stabbery. I had had periods of loneliness when I would have been thrilled to touch a woman and have her touch me, and times alone in cities other than my own when I saw the available women along the downtown streets or in the hotel bar—in some cities there even were escort ads on cable TV. But the loneliness I felt was never so very corrosive, or maybe it just didn’t last long enough. Maybe loneliness had to drip and drip and seep and sink and waste you away like acid over a period of months, or even years, until it ate a hole right through everything you once believed about yourself. But on the other hand—and here the Other Hand was a fierce hairy claw—what power does the idea we hold of ourselves, the pious wish, the urgent, magical lie, have against the brute reality of our animal nature?

  I glanced around the bus. I hadn’t had any success getting near Michael Piedmont on the flight, and now Piedmont was seated in the van’s last row, with Len Cobb on one side of him and Lincoln Castle on the other. Piedmont’s lips were parted; his hands were folded in his lap; his heavy chin rested on his chest. Castle was saying something to Cobb and Cobb shook his head vigorously, but then Castle wagged his finger at him and both the men laughed; Castle put out his palm, and Cobb obligingly slapped him five. How very merry, I thought, with that familiar revulsion I so often felt around male strangers.

  I was seated next to Sean, who Castle had said was from Beverly Hills but who actually lived in Pacific Palisades, where, he told me, he had worked for many years in the movie business, as a producer. Sean Westin was a small man in his late forties with luxurious, curly red hair and heavy, black-framed glasses. His grandfather had produced musicals at Warner Brothers in the 1930s, and his father had produced biblical epics in the 1950s, but even with his pedigree, Sean told me, he had just a small handful of credits to his name. Nevertheless, he hadn’t let his professional frustrations turn him cynical or wolfish, as he had seen it go down for other movie business people pushed to the barren edges of that happy hunting ground. Sean remained essentially comfortable, good-natured; he carried the ineffable comforts of sunshine and money. It wasn’t as if he were a stranger to worry. He worried about his health, about the fidelity of the young women in his life; he worried about the time it took for his calls to be returned; lately he had been worrying about global warming and the ongoing assault on civil liberties. But none of these disturbances could get the best of him; they could not subvert the essential peacefulness of his mind.

  At this point in his life Sean was barely in the film business. He ran a company called Mr. Motto, which created and manufactured bumper stickers, with slogans that ranged from the banal, such as I LOVE MY AIREDALE, or SUPPORT THE TROOPS, to goofy, such as I BRAKE FOR JEWS, or ASHAMED TO BE IRISH, to the deranged, such as HONK IF YOU LIKE TO SHIT IN YOUR HAT.

  That’s one of mine! Sean cried out, gesturing excitedly at a white pickup truck that was just passing us. It’s bumper sticker said KALASHNIKOV ON BOARD. Really? I said, that’s pretty intense. Oh come on, it’s all in good fun, he said. People want to communicate. I nodded, wanting to be agreeable. There was something tender and guileless in Sean. You hated to bring anything negative into the conversation; you didn’t want to burst his bubble.

  He glanced at me appraisingly, as if deciding whether or not I could understand what was coming next. I’ve got an intuition about this whole thing, he said. You know, in the movie business, we like to think we’ve got all these scientific methods that will tell us if a movie is going to make money, but it’s all voodoo; that’s why so many people get wiped out. The Japanes
e come in with all their business plans and flow charts and scientific audience tracking research, and next thing you know, half of them are running back to Tokyo in a barrel. The movie business is instinct; it’s basically a little buzz you get.

  So what do your instincts tell you?

  We got ourselves a motley crew, I’ll tell you that. We’ve got three guys working for IR. They won’t say so, but this is a company perk, a little thank-you from on high because these guys did great business, they are major earners.

  What’s IR?

  Oh, International Resources. Spot traders. Mostly oil and gold, but if it comes out of the ground, they buy and sell it. Coal, uranium, gas, even diamonds. They can buy and sell futures on that stuff ten times a minute, bang bang. I don’t even know how they keep track of the shit going down. These guys are the grabbiest, pushiest take-no-prisoners bastards ever walked the face of the earth. They make stockbrokers seem like yoga teachers. Talk to one of them, they really do believe that the dinosaurs died and their bones turned to oil just so some Metal Man a million years later can buy a BMW and a bottle of Cristal. Only thing worse than a Metal Man is an arms dealer. Ever spend much time hanging out with arms dealers? I shook my head no. I didn’t even know any dentists; where the fuck was I supposed to meet an arms dealer? Which I did not say. Man, you do not want to do that, Sean said. You really want to steer clear of arms dealers.