Willing

by Scott Spencer

  Across the room, Tony and Dr. Gordon shared a table, along with a sharp-faced young woman who patted her close-cropped hair as though comforting herself while she spoke on her cell phone. Tony, whose back was to us, was gesturing emphatically, and Dr. Gordon, who looked even grayer and more fatigued than he had when I saw him last night in the elevator, was nodding weakly, a look of dismay in his large wet eyes.

  I think someone better keep tabs on Dr. Gordon, I said to Stephanie. He looks like he’s going to end up in the emergency room. I’d like to put Tony Dinato in the emergency room, Stephanie said. He’s gone completely off his rocker. He has? Stephanie looked at me with surprise. You mean he hasn’t come after you with his Bible stuff? I shook my head no. Well, he will. I’m surprised he hasn’t gotten around to you yet. Maybe he thinks I’m a lost cause, I offered. He’s tried to convert two of the girls so far, Stephanie said. He’s proselytizing hookers? I can’t even get these women to laugh at my jokes, I said. Stephanie nodded. I think winning all that money and then this, it’s been too much for him. I think he’s snapped. Maybe when we get to Latvia he’ll have better luck. A lot of the Latvian girls are very religious.

  The waiter came with coffee, croissants, little fluted tubs of pale white butter, a basket of miniature jam jars. His hands were shaking; he had nicked himself shaving, right below the nose. You’re going to love Latvia, by the way, Stephanie said. The girls there are some of the most attractive of all the countries we’re going to; I’ve actually heard some guys say they’re the most beautiful women in the world, tall and fair, and even the older ones are very fit. Yet very religious, I said, distancing myself from the pleasures awaiting me. Don’t worry about that; there’s nothing you can imagine and for sure nothing you could physically accomplish that these girls can’t handle. They’re all so glad not to be living under communism any longer. And they believe in Fate, which means that for them whatever is happening is meant to happen. It makes them very accommodating.

  The thought of the Latvians and their believing in Fate and, especially, their being very accommodating—we all knew what accommodating meant—had a slightly sickening effect on me, as would a detailed description of the next meal when you haven’t begun digesting the last one. In fact, the idea of getting back on another minibus that would take me to the airport and then onto a plane that would take me to another airport, where another minibus would await me, made me as weary and anxious as the thought of meeting yet another woman who would be somewhat nice to me as a way of paying the rent or buying her boyfriend a new guitar.

  In Riga, Stephanie said, you’re probably going to meet Anastasia. She might be a little young for you, but she’s great. A little dark-haired beauty. A lot of the guys have gone for Marianna, but I think she’s generic. Too blond—or maybe you don’t think it’s possible to be too blond. She looked up toward the ceiling, to organize her thoughts. You like dark-haired women, don’t you? I find myself caring less about what anybody looks like, I said, but I might as well have said nothing. Then there’s Lubov. What I like about her—I know this is silly—is how she holds her head, like she’s ducking under a doorway that’s too low for her. She’s supercute and full of attitude. All the other girls look up to her; she’s sort of a leader. Maybe Yulia, if you like big. She’s a folk singer, not only Latvian songs but songs from all over the world. She has fantastic hair, too, dark red. I like red hair, I said. Stephanie shook her head. You should stick with Lubov, she said. Or Yana, very intelligent, loves books. The only thing is she’s too tall for you. I think Len when I think Yana. And I’ll bet Romona ends up with Jordy. She’ll want to take care of him. Stephanie laughed, shook her head. It’s the greatest show on Earth, she said.

  The names sound Russian, I said. The Russian girls were very popular, Stephanie said, back in the day, but we’ve stopped going there since the war. Because our governments are not really getting along right now, some of the girls were getting a little sarcastic. It was very disappointing to Mr. Castle. He especially liked taking the guys to Russia. I think his father was part Russian. More like pro-Russian, I said. And when Stephanie looked at me uncomprehendingly, I said His father was a Communist. He was? That’s wild, that’s about the cutest thing I ever heard. Anyhow, we dropped Russia and we put Latvia on the itinerary and you know what? The guys had a better time in Riga than they ever had in Moscow or St. Pete. One guy said—Stephanie looked over her shoulder to ensure privacy and then silently mouthed the name of a well-known, recently retired congressman—that Vilnius is like a small town filled with beautiful sex-crazed models. Except, let’s face it, I said, they’re not sex crazed. They’re doing it for money. Stephanie shrugged. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. I love flying—but I also love getting paid. So I combine the two. Especially the Latvian girls, they don’t like the local men. The men are like twenty years behind the women when it comes to being modern. The Latvian girls say that the Fleming guys treat them with a lot more respect than the guys they meet in their regular lives. Which is great, I said. Just when our country needs us the most, we’re putting the ass back in ambassador.

  Stephanie lowered her eyes and began giving her coffee far more attention than it required—you don’t really have to stare at the surface of your coffee while sugar dissolves.

  I heard a rapping at the window, and when I turned toward the sound I saw Cobb, who was on the sidewalk outside, dressed in black satin shorts and a T-shirt, jogging in place. He gave me a wave and took off on his run.

  He’s self-medicating through exercise, I said to Stephanie, and then I reached for the little pile of postcards she had next to her coffee cup. Do you mind? I asked. The topmost postcard was the inevitable reproduction of The Scream, but the next was a less familiar Munch, a painting of a lithe young girl, her lower half tentatively covered by a blue robe with white lining, her hands knitted together behind her head. She is offering her tender breasts while five sets of feverish red and green hands monstrously grope their way toward her. The next card showed a man painted against a violent background of flame and smoke. He was naked to the pubic bone, with a red slash across his throat and ominous green paint at the back of his shoulder. His gaze was steady, wry, and somewhat contemptuous, as if by looking at him we were invading his hellish privacy, for which he was going to forgive us because he was doomed and we were not worth being angry with.

  He sort of looks like Castle, I said, sliding the card across the table. She did not so much as look at the card as bat her eyelashes in its direction. No, really, I said. He bears an uncanny resemblance. It’s called Selvportrett I helvete, Stephanie said. Self-Portrait in Hell. Here’s another one. She reached over for the postcards, found it. This is called Self-Portrait with Red Background. See, he gave himself a nice green suit to wear, and even a little vest. I like the way he has his hand in his pocket, like a businessman. Very satisfied with himself.

  I looked at the postcard. Munch’s face was scorched by red light. The painted red background surged like a sea of fire. Do you ever think that maybe we’re in hell? I asked Stephanie. And that Lincoln Castle is…you know, an extremely bad person, so bad he’s not even a person anymore? Stephanie looked disappointed, as if she had expected more of me, something better. I realized I could draw a map of my whole life with every point along the way another woman I had disappointed. But it was too late to change that now—not in Oslo, not on a sex tour. No one really expects you to get your life on firmer footing while you’re on a sex tour. It seems, I said, that he doesn’t cast a reflection in a window or a mirror. What mirror, Avery? Any mirror. Things that reflect, in general. She broke off a piece of croissant. I wouldn’t worry about it, she said. But that wasn’t nearly enough to put things to rest. I said I felt there was something strange about him, from the very beginning. And then Stephanie said What’s the beginning? You understand? Can you ever really say where anything begins?

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what to say to that. If we can’t find our way back to whe
re something began, what hope do we have of ever understanding why we are where we are? Are you all right? Stephanie asked me. Just tired, I said. Long night? she asked, with a box-cutter smile. It took me by surprise. Such disappointment, such antipathy—I was surprised she felt anything so intense. Did she have some sort of feeling for me, or was she just showing bitterness about the whole enterprise? Many long nights, I said. Two months on the sofa, a flight across the Atlantic Ocean, then an insane night in Iceland, then the attack, then…I gestured, implying I would spare Stephanie the gory details. But she was having none of it. Then what? she asked. More insanity? Yes, much more. Aw, poor you. She took a prim sip of coffee, crossed her legs. Her disdain for my mental health, probably meant to have some chastising effect, a way of putting me in my place by reminding me I was a john with a john’s predictable miseries, only made me feel more sympathetic toward myself. In fact, I was just about to launch into my familiar twelve-bar blues called Four Fathers when my attention was seized by the sound of the door to the restaurant squeaking open, and when I turned toward the sound there she was, weighing in at 115 pounds, wearing the striped black pants and the green satin blouse, Naomi Cohen Kaplan Kearney Blake Jankowsky.

  Avery? Stephanie said, with some alarm. My mother’s here, I murmured. I’m looking right at her.

  Naomi saw me, too. Confoundingly, she was with Romulus Linwood, the goddamned steak knife king, who had already confessed to me that he was looking for someone a little older, a little more maternal. Mom stopped her progress into the Christofer’s restaurant so abruptly that she stumbled for a moment. But then she turned and began walking away. It seemed, at least for the moment, that she was no readier to see me than I was to see her. I was momentarily paralyzed by uncertainty. Should I run after her or hide? My legs trembled uncontrollably.

  You do not allow your mother to walk away in such a situation, no matter how dense and detailed your case against her may be. You do not allow your mother to be in the company of some guy on an around-the-world sex tour. If your mother has traveled from Costa Rica to Norway to slap you across the mouth because of a (perhaps ill-considered) article in Esquire, then just take it like a man, for God’s sake. Be a good Latvian and accept your Fate. Hey, Mom, I shouted out, as I set out for the door connecting the restaurant to the hotel lobby.

  I got there just in time to see the elevator doors sliding shut. Romulus and my mother, I assumed, were in the elevator, rising up to whatever floor he had been booked onto. The numbers above the elevator door remained dark; all that was illuminated was the arrow indicating that the car was rising.

  I went to the front desk clerk and asked him to ring Castle’s room. I didn’t care how irregular it might be, or what he might think of me. All I wanted was for him to tell me which room Romulus was checked into. I was directed to the house phone, while the desk clerk—a frugal-looking man with neat gray hair and a bureaucratic mustache—put me through to Castle’s room. I stood there listening to the low guttural ring, like the death rattle of all communication. The house phone was on a marble-topped table, which it shared with a couple of pots of African violets, a yellow bowl with a blue stripe filled with red and white peppermint candies, and a wicker basket filled with small, imploding apples. I couldn’t see an apple without thinking of Kearney, Father Number 2, who ate five of them a day and smoked apple-scented pipe tobacco. Though he smoked, drove recklessly, and went through several cans of Old Milwaukee beer every night, Kearney maintained a nervous relationship with his own health. He weighed himself morning and evening; he respected the federal dietary guidelines as if they were constitutional amendments, including the green and yellow vegetables and the six glasses of water daily, which he didn’t even bother to drink cold. Apples were always in abundance in what was then the Kearney household. They were on the table near the front door, in a large bowl next to where keys and loose change were deposited. When I was six or seven I helped myself to fifty cents, having no idea that for all the casualness with which Kearney emptied his pockets into the bowl at the end of the day, he nonetheless kept an uncannily exact count of what was in there, and those two quarters hadn’t been in my pocket for more than fifteen minutes before I was dragged back into the front hallway and raged at as if I were on my way to a life as a career criminal. Kearney’s soft, handsome Irish face was suddenly as hard as a horseshoe. He grabbed my arm and tattooed it with a thumb-shaped bruise, and reminded me that my father, whose flickering existence in my memory was on full life support, wholly dependent upon information supplied by Kearney and my mother, was dead and in the ground because he couldn’t keep his hands off of other people’s property, and did I want the same thing to happen to me? Even as a hairless little blob I recognized the injustice and the sheer tackiness of what he was saying, but when I opened my mouth to protest I saw my mother, standing a few feet behind her second husband, her eyes dim behind a mist of fear, her finger, with its wrinkled knuckle and long scarlet nail, placed imploringly on her lips.

  A dull marimba ring announced the arrival of an elevator. For a moment, I thought it was my mother emerging, but it was Gabrielle, who stepped out of the brightly lit car, wearing a smart black suit. A pair of glasses hung from a long matronly chain and came to rest on her bosom. She wore a short dark skirt and a white satin blouse. She carried a small biography of Thomas Edison; she was probably on her way to lunch. I called out to her, and she turned slowly toward me like a shopkeeper who must somehow produce a labored smile even though you have come into the store ten seconds before closing time. I need to get hold of Romulus, I said, rushing to her side. Oh yes? She put a step’s worth of distance between us. May I ask why? There didn’t seem time to come up with some bogus excuse, so I simply said He just left with my mother.

  Gabrielle had eyes like a nurse—promising understanding, even compassion, but always at a distance, always with a reminder she had important business elsewhere. Remember? I said. He was into older, more motherly types? He said this. He said it to me, and he said he told you, too. You were trying to find him someone else in Iceland. Don’t you remember? He asked for someone else? Yes, of course I remember, he wanted a change, but there were many changes after, you know, after the Blue Lagoon. Fuck the Blue Lagoon, I said, improvidently. This has nothing to do with that. He wanted a change before any of that happened. He said he wanted to be with someone more motherly. Gabrielle shook her head, slowly at first, and then more emphatically. The act of shaking her head created its own momentum, a physics of denial, the way a lie will pick up velocity once you have started it rolling. Look, I said to her, Romulus walked into the restaurant with my mother. They saw me, they disappeared, and now I would like to see my mother.

  Your mother is here? a voice behind me said. I turned toward it with the same hopeless fear I turned toward the Town Car when I heard it materializing on the edge of consciousness. It was that old devil Castle, wearing one of his festive silk shirts. He looked at me with his head cocked to one side. Apparently, I said. Apparently? What are you talking about? Either she is or she isn’t. My mother is here in the hotel. Like there was a man in your room? Castle said. No, not like that. Other people saw her, too. Maybe you better tell me what’s happening here, Castle said. I mean everything. I don’t know what’s happening, I said. I rarely see my mother. She lives in Costa Rica. Costa Rica? Castle said. Is she in the business? What business? I asked. You know, he said, with a wave. Our business. I wasn’t aware you and I had a business, I said. Adult services are legal in Costa Rica, Gabrielle said, though she was still shaking her head no. I paused for a long time, giving them both a chance to fully consider what they were implying about my mother. Then I said, enunciating every word, My mother is not involved in prostitution.

  Then what in the hell is she doing here? Castle said. Can you please tell me that? I have just never heard of something like this. Have you ever heard of something like this? he asked Gabrielle. No, she said. Her head stopped shaking back and forth, though her glasses continu
ed to swing from their chain. Castle returned his inquisitive gaze to me, with even more intensity, as if Gabrielle’s never having heard of someone’s mother showing up on a sex tour was the final proof of its irregularity. I don’t know why she’s here. All I know is she is, she’s here, she’s with Romulus, and I need to speak to her. Well, Castle said, don’t expect me to tell you Romulus is in Room 625. I opened my mouth to further argue my cause but then realized what he’d said. I didn’t want to further compromise him with my thanks; I nodded brusquely and walked quickly to the elevators, jabbed my thumb against the call button a number of times, and just happened to glance toward the restaurant at the moment Stephanie was coming out, perhaps in search of me. I waved her back in and flashed my fingers a number of times, hoping to indicate that I would be back in fifteen or twenty minutes, but Stephanie didn’t seem to know what I was trying to tell her and gave me a puzzled look. I was forced to call out to her, I’m going to get my mother. Instead of going back into the restaurant, however, Stephanie walked over to Castle and Gabrielle, both of whom looked glad to see her. By now, I was in the elevator, and the doors smoothly shut out the sight of the three of them exchanging continental kisses. Of course, of course, I thought, they’re a team.

  I pressed the button for the sixth floor, but the slow-moving elevator stopped on two, and Webb got on. Avery! he cried out, clapping me on both shoulders. You’re the only guy in this whole outfit who doesn’t give me a pain in the ass. He looked rested and relaxed, though his eyes held a glint of Webbian menace. He was in the company of a frightened-looking woman in her early twenties, her dark hair cut like an English schoolboy’s, her milky green eyes showing enough anxiety to get her detained at any major airport. She wore a blue leather skirt and an orange T-shirt lettered in blue and saying SOMMERJOBB. She seemed aware that it was her misfortune to have ended up with Webb, and, indeed, as the doors closed and the elevator resumed its laborious ascent, she stepped a foot or two away from him. She carried an ice bucket, heaped with cubes and crowned by a pair of silver tongs, in which was reflected the elevator’s illuminated ceiling.