“Where was that?”
“Way up in French Canada on the St. Lawrence, north of Riviere du Loup. A little town called Trois Pistoles. Ten thousand saints, ten thousand churches all over that country. Convent school, uniforms, vespers, acts of contrition, the whole scene. I ran away when I was fifteen. With my best friend, Diane Barbet. We got across the border and into the States. Things got kind of messy for us. You survive or you don’t, I guess. I don’t know what happened to Diane. I think about her sometimes. A guy in Detroit helped me really go to work on my hick Canuck accent. Movies, television, radio, and using a tape recorder. I think in English now, except if something startles the hell out of me or scares me. I get scared in French. Another man sent me to business school. To learn to be an executive secretary. That was in Cincinnati. He was a real old guy. He picked me up. I was hitchhiking. He took me home. He lived alone—his wife had been dead two years. He wanted me to stay there with him and pretend I was his grand-niece so the neighbors wouldn’t turn him in. I wanted somebody to send me to school so I could be a secretary, so it worked out okay. He bought me pretty clothes. I was eighteen by then. He bought me a little car, even. He was retired. He cooked and kept the house clean and did the laundry and made the bed. He even ironed my things that needed it, and he rinsed out stuff. I was really pretty rotten to old Harv. He was forty years older than me. That is a lot of years. When he got on my nerves, I wouldn’t let him touch me. I cut off the supply. He didn’t really want me too often or give me much trouble. I finished school and got my certificate and got a job. The way I was living, I could put it all in the bank, and I did. I came home one evening, and he was on the floor in the utility room. His whole left side had gone dead. His eye drooped and spit ran out of the left side of his mouth, and he couldn’t speak. He just made terrible noises when he tried. I packed all my things into the trunk of my car, and then I called the hospital. I parked in the next block and walked back to make sure they found him and put him in the ambulance. I went to a motel. I finished out the week after I gave notice. I got my money out of the bank. I left and went down to Mobile and sold the car there. You can sell cars easy in Alabama. Then I flew home to Canada and got a good job in Montreal. I kept missing old Harv. I still miss him, I guess. It was a pretty good way to live, you know? I wasn’t very nice to him. If I had it to do over, I’d be a lot nicer. I’d never hold out on him the way I did. It never cost me a thing to make him feel good.
“Anyway, I had a wonderful life in Montreal. There was a great bunch of kids there. And then I fell really really in love. When my guy took off with a girlfriend of mine, I did what I always do when I hurt. Buy, buy, buy. Shoes, clothes, wigs. I like money. I guess I spend it to hurt myself. You know? I knew I was in real trouble unless somebody bailed me out. So I went up to Quebec and saw Cousin Paul. I think I could have gone the rest of my life without the kind of help he gave me. Hey, look!”
“Shooting star.”
“I know. But such a big, bright, slow one, huh? It lasted forever.”
“Did you make a wish?”
“Was I supposed to? Would it work?”
“The way to make a wish come true is to wish for something you’re going to get anyway.”
“Is it okay to wish a little late?”
“Go ahead. It wasn’t my shooting star.”
“Okay. I wished.” My arm was around her. She turned in a twisting motion that slipped her breast into my hand. Under the thin fabric of the blouse she wore no bra, and in seconds I felt the nipple growing and hardening. “Does that give you a clue, friend? Something I’m going to get anyway?”
I sat up, raising her with me, slid my hands onto her waist, picked her up, and dropped her onto the sand beside the chaise.
“Ow! That made me bite my tongue, you son of a bitch!”
“Just be a good girl and stop trying to hook me on the product. It’s there anytime I want it. Stop pushing it.”
She stood up. “Don’t be too damned sure it’s going to be served up on a damn tray when you decide to ask for it, Gav. And I wasn’t trying to hook you on anything. I just think it’s friendly and nice to get laid. It isn’t a big thing, is it? And it got me going, what I was talking about.”
“Old Harv, for God’s sake?”
“No, you dummy! The money. Big gobs of money, just thinking about it makes me feel all hollow and crawly inside, and I guess it’s so much like the feeling you get when you know you’re going to get laid, it works the same way.”
“Go take a cold shower.”
“You’re terribly nice to me. You’re oceans of fun. I’m going to walk up and down the beach and think about blizzards and icicles and catheters and having my teeth drilled. That takes me off the edge fast.”
“I should think it would.”
So she went walking out there, clearly visible, scuffing barefoot through the foamy water that came running up the wet slope after the thud of each slow, small wave. A girl walking slowly, slow tilting swing of hips, legs shapely and dark below the white glow of the shorts.
She had deftly pushed a lot of my buttons. She had worked on proximity, touch, forthright invitation. She had talked in areas that accentuated sexual awareness. She smelled good, felt good, kept her voice furry and intimate. I knew she wasn’t being made wanton and reckless by my fabulous magnetism. We were moving toward an association, possibly profitable. For maximum leverage within that association of two, she wanted to put that weapon to work which had profited her in the past, probably in every relationship except the one with her cousin.
I was another version of good old Harv, whom we last saw on the floor with spit running out of his mouth. She’d pushed Harv’s buttons and got her secretarial training and a car and a lot of clothes. Her libido certainly wasn’t out of control. It was just a useful thing for her to do, a nice little inexpensive favor for her to grant, and if it clouded the recipient’s judgment, eventual profit from the relationship might improve.
Were I a great ape, a giant anthropoid, munching stalks torn from the jungle, and able to lead her to forgotten treasure, Lisa would take her best shot at making everything friendlier and nicer. As she said about Harv, it wouldn’t cost a thing to make that big monkey feel good.
But knowing how and why the buttons are pushed doesn’t diminish the physiological after-effects of the button pushing. The tumescence is noticeable. The palm of the hand retains the shape of the breast—the precise size, warmth, and rate of erection. The eyes watch the slow walk, creating an increase in the heartbeat and rate of respiration and blood pressure and surface body temperature, as the conditioned mind anticipates the simple progression of events of calling to her, bringing her close, shucking her out of the shorts, pulling her astride, and settling her properly for that sweet, grinding task that would end so quickly the first time.
The buttons tripped certain relays. I had to go back into the mind, into central control, and reset those relays, compensate for the overload, switch the current back to those channels designed for it.
I went searching through the past for the right memory, the one which would most easily turn growing desire to indifference.
I thought a memory of Miss Mary Dillon long ago aboard the Busted Flush would do it. There were more than a few, but they would not come through vividly enough to achieve turnoff.
Lisa made it so damned easy, so completely available, there was no importance to it. And with no importance to an act, why did it matter whether or not it happened? Why did McGee need some cachet of importance in this world of wall-to-wall flesh in the weekend living room where the swingers courteously, diligently, skillfully, considerately hump one another to the big acid beat of the hi-fi installation, good from 20 to 20,000 cycles per second?
Is McGee still impaled upon some kind of weird Puritan dilemma, writhing and thrashing around, wrestling with an outdated, old-time, inhibiting and artificial sense of sin, guilt, and damnation? Is that why he couldn’t accept the lifetime gift Lady Jillian
offers? Is that why he has this sickly, sentimental idea that there has to be a productive and meaningful relationship first, or sex degrades? So bang the doxy, because easing the ball-pressure is reason enough.
Who needs magic and mystery? Well, maybe it is magic and mystery that an Antarctic penguin will hunt all over hell and gone to find the right pebble to carry in his beak and lay between the funny feet of his intended, hoping for her favor. Maybe sex is a simple bodily function, akin to chewing, sneezing and defecation. But bald eagles fly as high as they possibly can, up into the thinnest air, making the elegant flight patterns of intended mating all the way up, then cleave to each other and fall, fall, fall, mating as they fall fluttering, plummeting down toward the great rock mountains.
The way it is supposed to work nowadays, if you want to copulate with the lady, you politely suggest it to her, and you are not offended if she says no, and you are mannerly, considerate, and satisfying if she says yes.
But the Tibetan bar-headed goose and her gander have a very strange ceremony they perform after they have mated. They rise high in the water, wings spread wide, beaks aimed straight up at the sky, time and time again, making great bugle sounds of honking. The behaviorists think it is unprofessional to use subjective terms about animal patterns. So they don’t call this ceremony joy. They don’t know what to call it. These geese live for up to fifty years, and they mate for life. They celebrate the mating this same way year after year. If one dies, the other never mates again.
So penguins, eagles, geese, wolves, and many other creatures of land and sea and air are stuck with all this obsolete magic and mystery because they can’t read and they can’t listen to lectures. All they have is instinct. Man feels alienated from all feeling, so he sets up encounter groups to sensitize each member to human interrelationships. But the basic group of two, of male and female, is being desensitized as fast as we can manage it …
“What the hell is there about me that turns you off?” Lisa demanded. She had walked up the slope to stand by the chaise, blotting out a Lisa-shaped abundance of stars as she looked down at me with a faint angle of pale yellow light laying across her cheekbone and lips.
“I was wondering what you’d do if I picked up a pebble in my beak and put it between your feet.”
“I’ve heard of a lot of ways guys get kinky, but that is—”
“Why do you want reassurance from me? Take my word for it. You are a fantastic piece of ass. Ask practically anybody.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t checked it.”
She stood there for a few seconds in silence. Then she said, “If you ever do want some, friend, you’re going to have to take it away from me, because that’s the only damned way in this world you’re ever going to get any.”
“Goodnight, Lisa.”
She walked away from the shoreline, a silhouette moving toward the yellow lights.
Fifteen
Thursday I was up early. Awakening in a new place makes the day of arrival seem unreal. There had been no Carl Brego, no Lisa Dissat trying to be Mary Broll, no Lisa Dissat striding angrily away from me in the hot, buggy night. I went to my cottage after she left, swam in my minipool, two strokes per lap, changed, and went to the open dining room. The food was good, the service indifferent. There were some beautiful people there. A fashion photography team. Some yacht people. Some twosome guests had tried to get as far as possible from wherever they didn’t care to be seen together. Some guests were ritualistic sun worshipers who had been there for many many weeks, using the intense tropic sun to add each day’s tiny increment of pigmentation at the cost of blinding, suffocating, dazed hours and quarts of whatever oil they happened to believe in. Johnson’s or coconut or olive. They were working toward that heady goal of becoming a living legend in Bronxville or Scranton or Des Moines.
“Tan? You think that’s a tan? So you didn’t see Barbie and Ken when they got back from Grenada that time. Dark? I swear to Christ, in a dark room all you could see were white teeth. And Barbie’s diamonds.”
I took a cab into town, memorizing landmarks all the way. I negotiated the rental of an Austin Moke. A Moke is a shrunken jeep with a very attractive expression, if you look at the front of it and think of the headlights as eyes. It looks staunch, jaunty, and friendly. It is a simplified piece of machinery. Stick shift which, like the wheel on the right, you work with the left hand. The horn, a single-note, piercing beeeeep, is operated by pressing in on the turn indicator with the right hand. A quick whack with the heel of the hand is the approved method. Four speeds forward, small, air-cooled engine, pedals so tiny that if you try to operate one with your bare feet, it hurts like hell. Canvas top nobody ever folds down in the hot season, and all they have in Grenada are two hot seasons, one wet and one dry.
With the tourist season almost over, there were a lot of them in stock. I picked one with a lot of tread, and the rental man and I walked around it and tested lights, horn, directional signals, windshield wiper (singular). He wanted his total rental in advance, which is standard for the area. While we dickered, I practiced getting in and out of the damned thing. I’d learned in Grand Cayman and Jamaica that with the length of my legs there is only one possible way. Stand beside vehicle on right side. Bend over at waist. Reach across body and grasp steering wheel with right hand, while simultaneously lifting left leg, inserting it into vehicle so that foot comes to rest on the floor well beyond pedal area. Swoop your behind onto the seat and pick up right leg and lift over high broad sill (which contains gas tank). In driving position both knees are bent sharply, spread wide apart. Steering wheel fits between knees, and lower part of legs must angle in to assure foot contact with pedals. Adjust to inevitability of frequently giving oneself a painful rap on the left leg while shifting.
We arrived at a mutually agreeable fee of five Yankee—ten Biwi—dollars a day for a one week rental or any period of less than a week. I buy the gas. I will phone him when I leave and tell him to pick it up at the Spice Island Inn. I promise not to leave it at the airport. I tell him I would not drive it over that road to the airport for a hundred dollars a mile. Can I drive safely on the left side of the road? I suggest that perhaps no one in Grenada can drive safely on any side of the road. But yes, I have so driven on other islands of this British persuasion.
We accomplish the red tape, he gives me a free map of St. George’s and environs. I note that, as expected, there is at least one half-pint of gas in the five-gallon gas tank. I edge carefully into the tourney and immediately am nearly bowled over and over by a small pale bus with a name across the front of it. The name is: I AM NOTHING.
After I have bought petrol and felt my way back into the center of town, avoiding too intimate a contact with a large gaudy city bus called LET IT BE ME, I park my Moke and wait until I am certain my legs will work. (“You will enjoy browsing in St. George’s along the narrow, quaint streets.”)
• • •
I changed another wad of Yankee dollars into Biwi at the Bank of Canada, picking that one from among all the shiny banks downtown, from Chase to Barclay’s to the Bank of Nova Scotia, because there was a faint aroma of irony in the choice. The girl standing behind the money-changing counter was very dark, very thin, and totally antagonistic—so much so, there was no chance of ever making any kind of human contact with her unless you were her identical anthracite color.
I asked some questions and was directed to a big busy supermarket called EVERYBODY’S FOR EVERYTHING. As long as I had kitchen facilities and I could make my own ice cubes, it seemed useful to set up shop. Gin, rum, fruit juices from Trinidad, mixes, and a couple of large substantial drink glasses. I am a fussy old party about glassware. Nothing takes the pleasure out of drinking like the tiny dim glasses supplied by hotels and motels. I always buy heavy glasses, always leave them behind. Tiny glasses turn drinking from a pleasure rite to a quasialcoholic twitch.
The final purchase was on impulse at a shop I saw on the Carenage on the way home. A great big planter’s
hat of straw with a batik band. Put a man in a rental Moke with advertising painted on the side of it and put a funny hat on him, and he is a tourist. All tourists look alike. Regardless of age, sex, or the number of extra lenses for their cameras, they all look alike.
I found my way back out to Grand Anse to hotel row, and I found an overland way to get the Moke close to my cottage. I carried my box of stuff in. From the moment I had awakened until the moment I finished putting the stuff away and sat down, I had not let myself think about Mary, Lisa or the mechanics of impersonation.
It is a useful device. If you keep things in the front of your mind, you worry at them like a hound chomping a dead rabbit. Throw problems in the back cupboard and keep them there as long as you can. The act of stirring around seems to shuffle the elements of a problem into a new order, and when you take it out again, there are new ways to handle it.
I tossed my sweat-soaked shirt aside. The air-conditioning felt good on my back and shoulders. Okay. Mary is dead. I want Paul Dissat. I want him very badly. The money is the bait, and Lisa is the bait in another sense. I want very badly to convince Paul and Lisa and Harry Broll that, if given a choice, they would elect retroactive birth control. I want them so eager to be out of it they’d dig their own graves with a bent spoon and their fingernails.
Secondly, as a professional, as a salvage consultant in areas of considerable difficulty, I want to come out of this with a little salvage for myself. If I walk away without a dime, with only expenses I can’t reasonably afford, then I lose all respect for myself as a con artist. I would have kicked the hell out of their little wagon just to avenge one hell of a woman, Mary Dillon. Pure emotionalism is bush league.
So? So I do not advise Mr. Willow not to make the loan on Mary’s securities. They go to Harry eventually anyway. That is, if Harry happens to be still around. The money has to be loaned to Harry, and Harry has to pick up his block of stock in time and get himself in position to make a great deal of money when the public issue comes out. But that is a long long time for me to wait for my money. I shall use the leverage to extract a reasonable chunk from Paul, maybe from Harry, maybe from both, before I set them to work with those bent spoons.
A Tan and Sandy Silence Page 15
