by David Martin
“That’s right.”
“I’m Annie Milton.” She held out her hand and he came from around the desk to shake it but didn’t offer his own name in exchange. Instead he said, “Annie Milton … yeah Teddy’s told me all about you.”
That’s a lie she thought … if Teddy had mentioned her at all he would’ve used her maiden name, Annie Locken. “And you’re …” she asked.
“Late for a date,” he said pleasantly except that his smile was more leering than friendly. “You got Teddy working on Cul-De-Sac for you isn’t that right little lady?”
The reference to Cul-De-Sac started her heart beating fast, her palms sweating … Annie making a point of checking her watch. “He’ll be back any second now.”
Which also amused the man. “I’ll catch him next time.” He waved and winked and left the office … Annie locking the door after him.
She was still feeling anxious when she went over and stood by the phone to try Paul again. I’m staying with Teddy Camel, she rehearsed … he’s an old friend of the family, a former policeman, I came to him because I’m scared about what happened last night and frightened of you too Paul, the way you denied that man was even there.
Paul will be suspicious, he’ll ask, now who did you say this Teddy Camel was.
I told you, a friend of the family, an old friend of my mother’s … and then there would follow other lies and half-truths, Annie using them as stepping-stones to get through this minefield.
Because she can’t of course tell Paul about the Teddy Camel she’s been in love with since she was ten years old, can’t tell Paul how she tricked Teddy Camel into joining her at the beach house when she was twenty-one and Teddy was thirty-six … certainly couldn’t tell Paul any details of that summer, how she walked around sore between the legs and sore in her heart too, crying over Teddy Camel and wearing his shirts, and if he’d said let’s knock over a convenience store and kill some clerks she would’ve said yes and if he had wanted to tie her down and fuck her in places she’d never been fucked before, she would’ve done that too, she might even have been the one who suggested it … she practiced writing her first name next to his last name and all during that summer when she was twenty-one and saw him walking toward her she experienced an elation like being bitterly cold then drinking something warm and sticky sweet, his gestures endeared him to her and she kept looking at his face when he was looking elsewhere and, if she could have, she would’ve spread her body over his like an ointment … you can’t tell something like that to a husband even if it is tucked away fourteen years in the past.
When he got to the beach house those fourteen years ago and discovered no other guests in attendance, Camel knew she wasn’t telling the truth about all the other people canceling out at the last minute. She hadn’t expected him to believe her, what surprised Annie was how angry he became. “Don’t ever lie to me,” he told her in a voice so chilling that she was physically afraid of him and almost called the whole thing off … then took a chance and said, “Stay with me anyway.”
No he said he wouldn’t do that … but he’d spend the night because it was too late to find a room.
Which meant she had the night. Annie was twenty-one and this time when she slipped into bed with him his protests were feeble and although they didn’t make love that first night, neither did Teddy demand that she find somewhere else to sleep.
She made him breakfast.
She walked around in cotton underwear.
It wasn’t that difficult.
So that by the third day they were in almost constant coitus, during recesses Annie would take him out along the shore and say, “Oh look, Teddy, the insatiable sea.” He would hold her hand as they walked but only at night; in public, during the day, he wouldn’t let her touch him.
She fell into talking jags which wasn’t like her at all, not like her to cry for no reason either, she told Teddy Camel things that, hearing them today, would make her cringe … for every woman there is one man, for every man, one woman, and although you don’t always end up with your soul mate and in fact can be perfectly happy with someone who isn’t your soul mate … you’re mine, Annie declared, and I’m yours.
He’d listen to all this while drinking expensive gin and smoking unfiltered cigarettes and making no replies but when Annie told him she had the beach house for all summer, Teddy surprised her by saying he’d accumulated almost two months leave and could go back to work for a week, make arrangements, then return here and the two of them could spend what’s left of summer together.
That week he was gone Annie pined for him in ways that would strike you as pathetic if you’ve never been in love the way Annie was … and when Teddy returned they fucked so much that her genitals turned swollen and her nipples ached from his mouth and she bore his bruises.
Her jaws were sore, for the first time in her life she tasted semen and biting a shoulder she tasted blood … Annie swallowed both.
Her emotions shrink-wrapped to him so tightly that circuitry on occasion went haywire flipping Annie from laughter to tears or the other way around … Teddy watched without asking what any other man would ask, what’s wrong? Sometimes she wanted to hurt him, he’d have to yank her by the hair to stop her biting him and once she slapped him across the face as hard as she could apropos of nothing except the delirium of love, it brought a glaze of tears to his eyes but not from emotion, just an automatic response to being slapped hard in the face … then he walked away, poured a gin, sat down to drink it, never asking why’d you do that, either he knew or didn’t care.
They drank beer for breakfast and formed a conspiracy it didn’t count as alcohol.
She read to him passages from books she loved and quoted poems she knew by heart. Listening carefully, Teddy often said nothing.
“Oh listen to this Teddybear, right up your dark alley. ‘J’ai appelé les bourreaux pour, en périssant, mordre la crosse de leurs fusils. J’ai appelé les fléaux, pour m’étouffer avec le sable, le sang. Le malheur a été mon dieu. Je me suis allongé dans la boue. Je me suis séché à l’air du crime. Et j’ai joué de bons tours à la folie.’ ”
Trying so very hard to impress him, I’m a senior in college, I can speak French … making him wait patiently for the translation.
“ ‘I called to the executioners that I might gnaw their rifle-butts while dying. I called to the plagues to smother me in blood, in sand. Misfortune was my God. I laid myself down in the mud. I dried myself in the air of crime. I played sly tricks on madness.’ ”
She looked up from the text and pronounced the author’s name carefully for Teddy: “Rimbaud.”
“A Season in Hell,” he replied … astonishing her.
He didn’t like massages, giving or receiving, but allowed her to shampoo his hair.
She watched when he shaved and one time in the shower together she said he could pee on her if he wanted to but he didn’t want to.
He bathed her, touching Annie more tenderly than any supplicant ever touched any queen … then fucked her like a whore on the bathroom floor.
She was always showing off for him, posing provocatively, raising a skirt to reveal her bare ass.
One night she dressed in a red skirt that barely covered that ass, wearing a tight tube top then in vogue, she balanced on red high heels with straps that wrapped around her ankles, she put on too much red lipstick and piled her red hair on top of her head and, emerging from the bathroom, demanded with theatrical bitchiness, “I’m bored, take me dancing.” He told her he didn’t dance and in any case wouldn’t take her out looking like that, he’d be getting in fights all night long. She threatened, “You don’t take me dancing, I’m going alone.” Leaving the implication hanging like his cigarette smoke in the air between them, she demanded, “Well?” Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, he conveyed through gesture, posture. Annie left, Teddy didn’t call to her or ask her to reconsider, neither did he follow after her or say, when she returned at midnight, wher
e have you been I was worried sick. She told him, “I just went out and sat on the beach, in case you were wondering.” He said, “I wasn’t.”
They shot pool, they played miniature golf … Teddy was serious in these endeavors, having fun without smiling unless you counted the way he squinted.
Unprecedented in her adult life she begged for attention, debased herself and felt ennobled doing it … pouted, played a little girl, cried on purpose, went all kittenish and coy.
One time she pulled a knife on him. He slapped it out of her hand and neither spoke of the incident again.
She said things a person seriously in love will say, linking the concept of love with the word forever, getting giddy over the moon … he never laughed at her and never hurt her physically except as an unintended consequence of vigorous intercourse.
Teddy was always surprising Annie by what he knew, whom he had read, he surprised her by being good at crossword puzzles, they got preferred service at restaurants and bars maybe because of the way she gazed at him with adoration and the way he looked noble and this combination elevated the spirits of waiters and bartenders and even passersby who’d turn around for another look at Annie Locken walking with Teddy Camel.
If she’d kept a diary that summer she would’ve capitalized his pronouns.
Annie wasn’t on the pill, she’d lied to him about that and for some reason the Human Lie Detector didn’t detect this particular lie. He was however aware that she wasn’t nearly as sexually experienced as she wanted him to believe, much of what she did in bed with Teddy that summer she’d never done before … like getting pregnant.
Annie didn’t tell him.
Fourteen years ago she was in love with him as deeply as a person can be in love, as deep as the sea she might’ve said at the time … once she masturbated him as they stood in that ocean and Annie told him, salt to salt.
Each time they’d walk down to the shore she’d say, “Oh look, Teddy, the insatiable sea.”
Until finally on the last day of that summer he asked the question she’d been angling for: why do you keep saying that?
“Because I’m the insatiable sea,” she answered.
He didn’t comment.
“Now you’re supposed to ask, ‘If you’re the insatiable sea, then who am I?’ ”
“Okay.”
“Ask it.”
“Consider it asked.”
“You’re those rocks there, see how they’re getting worn down.”
He looked at the rocks, then at Annie, then he said, “Takes a long time.”
“I got all the time in the world.”
He said he didn’t.
“Let’s get married.”
He didn’t say no, he just looked seaward his blue eyes squinting in a way she found almost unbearably attractive.
“I’m serious.” And she was, Annie already knew she was pregnant. “Let’s go get a license right now today, we’ll stay here whatever waiting period there is, then we’ll get married and I’ll go back to Washington with you.”
That’s when he said no.
“I can make you happy, I love you … marry me.”
“No.”
She kicked him hard in the leg and demanded it: “Marry me goddamn you!”
“No.”
“Yes. Marry me or I’ll fucking kill you.”
“I doubt it.”
“If you don’t marry me I’ll kill myself.”
“Yeah well …”
Annie performed all the tricks she knew, pouting and crying and cajoling and promising what she’d do for and to him on their wedding night and every night of their marriage after that, debasing herself and begging him and then threatening to go off and fuck every man she meets … nothing worked.
“Do you love me, can you at least say you love me?” she asked.
“No.”
Jesus he was a hard man.
“Then it’s over?” Her mind would not compute such a sentence. “The summer, us … everything?”
When he didn’t deny it she felt claws at her heart.
“Teddy …”
He waited.
“And so, sir, how would you sum up this past summer?” she asked, her voice playful, mocking the weight on her heart. “How would you characterize the young lady?”
He looked her right in the eye. “The sweetest little piece of ass I ever had.”
Annie choked on it but willed herself to be tough … tough like Teddy Camel, telling him, “Or ever will have.”
“Probably.”
“Or ever will have.”
“Yes.”
None of which Annie Milton could tell her husband so when Paul finally answered the phone at Cul-De-Sac she told him lies and half-truths, committing those sins of omission to which marriages are docked like little boats too fragile for the open sea.
17
Paul put the phone down and touched his face. Everything hurt. His nose had been freshly broken, a tooth knocked out, the older injuries along the left side of his face still being heard from … but it was Growler’s final violation that hurt the worst, both physically and mentally, causing Paul Milton’s already fragile hold on sanity to slip. I did this for Annie, he told himself. I lost all her money, I did this for Annie. Telling himself these things didn’t help.
He wished he could sleep or, failing that, could simply and peacefully die, Paul no longer cared if Annie went to the police. Is that where she was? On the phone just now she said she was with a policeman … Paul couldn’t remember everything she’d told him, something about a policeman coming out later this evening to … what, to what?
“What?” he asked aloud. He was lying on his side on that big black leather couch in the middle of the old library he’d made into his workshop … finding it difficult to concentrate because of all the whispering from the chimney, that girl, those men. What were they whispering? “What?” he asked again.
“You talking to me?”
When Paul sat up everything hurt.
“Jesus buddy what happened to you?”
Paul looked to the doorway of the workshop and saw a golfer standing there … wearing green pants, pink shirt, white shoes, white golfing cap. He was smoking a cigar and holding a club. Considering the mysteries of Cul-De-Sac this apparition didn’t surprise Paul as much as one might think.
“You want me to take you to the hospital?” the golfer asked, removing the cigar from his mouth.
Paul touched his swollen lips and misshapen nose … and thought, he can’t see where it hurts the worst.
“I’ll run you to the hospital,” the golfer offered again.
Was this the policeman Annie had mentioned on the phone, an old friend of her mother’s she’d said.
McCleany came into the room and stood in front of the couch. He looked at Paul for a long time then addressed an imaginary ball, aimed down an imaginary fairway, taking a real swing … then held up the club for Paul to see and said, “Three-wood.”
But there wasn’t any wood on the club, the grips were plastic, the shaft was graphite, the head was metal … Paul knew there was a parable in this if he could just figure it out.
“He’s been pretty rough on you?” the golfer asked as he walked to the fireplace and threw his cigar in.
Paul said nothing.
The golfer came back to stand very close to him. “Where is he?”
Paul shook his head.
“You ain’t telling or you don’t know?”
The question struck Paul as incredibly difficult to answer.
“You sure you don’t need to see a doctor?” McCleany asked.
Another tough question.
“He won’t let you sleep will he?”
“No he won’t.” There was an assumption between the men, who they were talking about.
“I know what the two of you are looking for, where is he?”
“I …” Paul wasn’t sure how much he should tell this man.
“Yeah?”
Paul
thought if he could just close his eyes and go to sleep, maybe when he woke up the golfer would be gone.
“I’m waiting.”
Paul reached up to see if his glasses were on … they were but then why couldn’t he focus?
“Photographs,” the golfer said.
“What?”
“That’s what the two of you are hunting.”
“We’re hunting elephants,” Paul said.
McCleany’s turn to be confused. “Elephants?”
“I would like to confess now.” Paul found the golfer vaguely reassuring, he was squat and waddly and grandfatherly … but was this a golfer from God or was he from Satan?
“Ever hear of Moe Norman?” McCleany asked, swinging the club again.
Paul hadn’t.
“Greatest natural ball striker the game has ever seen.”
Paul listened carefully.
“Set forty course records, so accurate they called him the Pipeline, could put a ball in a bushel basket at two hundred yards, weird-ass swing though. Canadian.”
It was like a story in the Bible, you had to listen carefully and then pray for understanding.
“You find those pictures or not?”
“Elusive,” Paul said.
“What?”
“More elusive than any elephant.”
“Jesus buddy you’re—”
“Jesus is my buddy.”
“Where’s Growler?”
“Who?”
McCleany put the head of the club on Paul’s neck. “I don’t care if you are beat up, I’ll finish the job you get cute with me … now where’s Growler?” He was pronouncing the name Grow-ler, Paul had been told it was Growl-er. McCleany pushed on the club until Paul choked. “Donald Growler goddamn you.”
“Goddamn me,” Paul readily agreed, making no effort to remove the club head from his neck.
“You’re weird,” McCleany said, withdrawing the club and taking a casual half-swing.
Paul agreed with that assessment too.
“Give me the photographs or tell me if Growler’s found them yet, you do either of those things for me and I’m out of your life … now ain’t that simple?”
