After Bathing at Baxters: Stories

by D. J. Taylor

  As Dorfman blundered into the arc of the sprinkler, felt the sting of icy water rip through his pants leg and hurriedly blundered out again, Mr Kopechnie moved easily out of the deep shadow of the cypress tree. ‘Figured you might drop by,’ he said seriously. Take a Coke, maybe, or a beer?’ There was a pitcher of ice on the garden table, Dorfman noticed, and a couple of tall glasses with lemon twists. ‘Got a six-pack of Bud in the chiller,’ Mr Kopechnie went on. ‘Just say the word.’ Oppressed by the memory of his twenty-minute stakeout athwart the drainage ditch, Dorfman settled for Coke. Seated in one of Mr Kopechnie’s spindly garden chairs, the thin stanchions digging into his buttocks, stretched polyester crowding out his bulky thighs, he felt simultaneously elated and cast down, cheered by the grave reservoir of peace that would lap around him for the next half-hour, depressed by the inevitable professional dead-end. From the vantage point of the insurance salesman, Mr Kopechnie was a walking disaster area, a kind of LA faultline snaking across Dorfman’s career. Once, two years back, he’d actually got as far as figuring out a quotation for Mr Kopechnie, based on Mr Kopechnie’s living until ninety and receiving the minimum death benefit, and the premiums had weighed in at four hundred dollars a month, leaving aside the thrice-yearly medical check. Plus they hadn’t liked it at the office either. ‘Jesus, Dorf,’ Guyland had whistled, as he cast his eye over the panels of neatly framed statistics. ‘Quit fooling around with eighty-year-olds, huh? I mean, what’s in it for him, with the premium at five grand a year? Ten to one the guy has a fucking actuary for a nephew and they’ll sue us for entrapment. Just forget it.’ But Dorfman, who had worked out that the salesman’s commission on a ten-year policy of the kind suggested to Mr Kopechnie would raise approximately ten thousand dollars, didn’t feel like forgetting it. Not quite. Awareness of the policy and its occasional resuscitation fell across their conversation like the cypress shadows.

  Meanwhile, there were other, sunnier bowers where he and Mr Kopechnie could linger. ‘Hey,’ Mr Kopechnie said sharply. ‘Knew there was something I means to show ya. Here now.’ Reaching into the big metal chest beneath the table, he pulled out a squat, oblong cardboard box. ‘What do ya reckon of that?’ Dorfman turned the container over gingerly in his hands, eyeing the four-colour illustration and the red and white AIRFIX logo in the corner. That was another thing about Mr Kopechnie. Dorfman knew that no matter how many collectors’ conventions he attended, no matter how many ads he placed in Windsock or the North American Aeromodellers’ Association Journal, the chances of him walking off with a first issue World War II RAF Blenheim fighter bomber for under two hundred dollars were rather less than Tom Harkin’s in the Democrat primary. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said slowly, struck by a pang of envy so intense that for a moment he stopped looking at the box and gazed upward beyond the trees, as if he expected the Blenheim’s real-life equivalent to sail into view above his head. ‘It’s a special kind too,’ Mr Kopechnie went on. ‘Night fighter markings and camouflage. Silver-grey on the undercarriage. Flying low to beat the radar. Catch that baby over your shopping mall just before dawn and you’d wonder what hit ya.’ And for a second Dorfman imagined the scene: the forest of upturned faces, tracer bullets zinging across the tiled patios, the sluice and spatter of spilled blood; opened his eyes to find calm Iowa sunshine sinking away into the foothills of the fading day. ‘Hey,’ he said unconfidently, just before he got up to go. ‘Don’t suppose you had time to think about … about what we discussed last time I was round or nothing?’ Mr Kopechnie, regarding him stoically, shook his head. ‘Sure. I done some thinking, and, fact is Dorf, I don’t see the reason for it.’ ‘No?’ ‘Surely not. If Wilma was alive, then maybe there’d be some point to it. But seeing as …’ He made a tiny gesture with his hand of the kind Dorfman encountered a lot with his elderly clients: it meant terminal illness, funeral parlours, widow’s weeds. ‘You got kin though ain’t you?’ Dorfman found himself saying. It was an old trick from out of the. salesman’s manual: make your target feel guilty about any dependent relatives he or she may have. ‘Thought you said you had a kid?’ Mr Kopechnie frowned, the keen-eyed rancher seeing smoke signals along the trail. ‘Sure,’ he admitted. ‘But Spence now, he ain’t shown up in years. Jesus, if I went and left him life insurance the lawyers wouldn’t even know where to address the cheque.’ Dorfman smiled his careful salesman’s smile, the smile of reduced rates, absent signatures and unforeseen death. At the car Mr Kopechnie bobbed awkwardly and thrust the cardboard box through the open window onto the passenger seat. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to have this.’ ‘Hell no, Mr Kopechnie,’ Dorfman heard himself saying. ‘You can’t give me a thing like that.’ But Mr Kopechnie was inexorable. ‘You’re a kind of guy I like, Dorf,’ he explained. ‘You got respect for old people like me, guys that served our country in its time of trial. I want you to know that I appreciate that.’ Still Dorfman found himself prodding the box back in the direction of Mr Kopechnie’s long, curved fingers. In the near distance, beyond the carport, he could see the arc of the sprinkler beating down on the sodden turf, Mr Kopechnie’s dog slinking off to some bolthole by the trees, empty glasses side by side on the table. ‘Go on, take it,’ Mr Kopechnie commanded. Revving the convertible’s flatulent motor, waving one hand negligently out of the nearside window, the box glistening up at him from the seat, Dorfman found himself crying tears of mingled pride and shame.

  Back home, Dorfman stowed the convertible in the car-port, resisted the temptation to take the Blenheim straight into the workshop, and slunk into the house. There was no sign of Franchie. On the kitchen table lay a hunk of Francine’s home-baked cornbread, parched and adamantine from the sun, and a platter of black-bean chowder. Mindful of his earlier problems at the roadside, Dorfman junked it airily down the waste disposal chute and decided to hit the chiller. Munching on a hastily constructed cold pork and sauerkraut sandwich, he played back the half dozen or so messages on the ansaphone. No surprises. Two members of Francine’s Tai Chi group wanting to reschedule a class date; Guyland from the office; one of the gay guys from Sioux City asking about medical cover restrictions on pre-senile dementia. The last message – an unidentified female voice – cut off almost as soon it began talking. Out of curiosity Dorfman played it back a couple of times, losing whatever it was that was being said in the slurp and crackle of static before retreating to the lounge to cast a critical eye over a mail order video called Wildcats over Korea.

  Francine came back at eleven, red-faced and perspiring and bearing a paperback titled Body Essence: Smelling Sensuality the Swedish Way. ‘Sorry I’m late, hon,’ she apologised. ‘Only Mrs Fogelberg’s husband got back from his realtors’ convention and we just sat around talking. How was your chowder?’ ‘Great,’ Dorfman lied. ‘Fuckin’ A.’ Francine regarded him fondly. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Mrs Fogelberg reckoned she’d seen you last week.’ ‘Oh yeah. Where was that?’ ‘Over at the drome is all. You know she does a class at the recreational centre there? Said she saw you out on the spectator’s gallery watching the flights come in.’ Embarrassed by this revelation, which somehow reminded him of being caught naked in the bathroom ogling a copy of Playboy magazine by his mother, Dorfman peered stonily back. ‘Yeah, well it’s my hobby.’ ‘Funny kind of a hobby, Mrs Fogelberg said, for a guy that never went on a plane in his life.’ For some reason Dorfman, who had once travelled on vacation to Tucson in a greyhound bus rather than face the traffic of the skies, meekly conceded the rebuke. ‘Hey,’ he exhaled desperately, not caring, what they talked about as long as it avoided the airport, ‘how was your class?’ ‘Uh huh.’ Francine’s attention was gone now. She fussed round the room tidying magazines, wrinkling her nose over the remains of Dorfman’s sauerkraut. ‘It was OK.’ She giggled. ‘Actually hon, tonight we did sex and smell.’ ‘Yeah?’ I mean, for instance,’ Francine went on, ‘did you know there are thirty-seven separate olfactory responses associated with the act of love?’ ‘Is that so?’ For once Dorfman was dumbfounded, in spite
of himself. ’Tell me about ’em.’

  Later that night, unaccountably, they had sex. To Dorfman, playing it back on the VCR screen of his mind early the next morning, the encounter seemed to have taken place in fathoms of icy water: the sky spinning in the remote distance, furry limbs thrashing in the ooze of the ocean floor, heads breaking the surface for an instant and then disappearing once more. Afterwards Francine went to sleep immediately, her head slumped back over a pillow, while Dorfman roamed disconsolately round the downstairs rooms fixing himself cups of coffee which he failed to drink, switching on the video and then switching it off again, padding into the workshop for a last gloat over the Blenheim. From across the way came the chugga-chugga-chugga, the dadawa-dadawa-dadawa and the plinka-plinka-plinka of Enzo Manzoni’s rap music. Dorfman shouted ‘Wop sonofabitch’ quite loudly, secure in the knowledge that old man Manzoni was off licking the floors of his restaurant. Back upstairs he discovered that Francine had turned the overhead light on and was staring brokenly at the gap in the stairhead into which he emerged. ‘Oh hon,’ she said sadly, ‘I’m so worried about you.’

  Remembering the words by chance a week later as he cruised gently down one of the approach roads to the airport, Dorfman realised that Francine was not alone in her concern. He, too, was worried about himself. Specifically, he was worried about his job. Business was down, way, way down, and Guyland back at the office was chewing his ass. Daily and by phone. In vain Dorfman had countered the remonstrances about unfilled quotas and loss-making accounts with an upbeat assessment of possible medical scenarios faced by the gay couple in Sioux City. Guyland was wise to smokescreens of this kind. ‘Forget it, Dorf. Two fags who met ten years ago in a bath-house, shit-scared of taking the test. ‘What else you got? Engaged couples with bubonic plague wanting to cover their Diamond Wedding. Stop wasting my time huh?’ Dorfman, assimilating this advice in a hallway packed out with Francine’s sports gear and a bunch of RAF Short Stirling kits that had arrived that morning from a mail order firm in Teddington, England, had wanted to say: Look, what makes you think people want your lousy insurance? And what makes you think they want it from me? Plus a few remarks about the deodorant-proof stains that edged out from the underarm of Guyland’s shirt and the reek of garlic that lingered round his upper body after he came back from the dinner hour stake-out at the Robespierre Grill. Instead, seeing Francine’s awesomely tracksuited form surging up at him from the hall mirror, Dorfman had confined himself to neutral, even-tenor salutation. ‘Yeah Neville,’ he had whispered solemnly into the cradled receiver. ‘OK Neville, I’ll check it out.’ Or not.

  Meanwhile, pushed up against the epicentre of this bewildering spiral of fucked livelihoods, there were compensations. The Asian hostess’s name was Ascension. Oddly enough, Dorfman’s guess had been bang right: a Filipina, from a city in the South Dorfman had never heard of called Gobernador de Leon. There were no jobs for twentysomething girls in the Philippines. Ascension had explained matter-of-factly. Two of her sisters were currently working as bar hostesses in Manila. A third was HIV.

  Ascension was naive and confiding. ‘You must have an important job, no?’ she suggested to Dorfman early on in their conversation, ‘to be able to come here just when you want, huh?’ And Dorfman had obligingly sketched in a farm manager’s job out in the cornfields, negotiating contracts with the wheat mills in Chicago, running his eye over the files of Massey-Ferguson tractors at the Iowa farmers’ conventions. Ascension – and they’d only had drinks twice, that and an early evening saunter round the spectator’s gallery – was the kind of girl you said things like that to. Her trust, he’d already discovered, was limitless, credulity-defying, unreal, embracing all known forms of religious observance and superstition. She believed in the healing powers of stackfuls of Catholic saints, in the efficacy of charm bracelets, horoscopes, astrologer’s charts, the lot. To Dorfman, who had discarded belief in the numinous in his early teens the year the Globetrotters had gone down before the Oakland As, this kind of inclusiveness was curiously engaging. There were other things he liked about Ascension too: being four feet eleven inches tall (at five six Dorfman felt a stupendous, swaggering giant beside her); smiling at him a lot, peppering her speech with Filipino colloquialisms; not minding about the time he spilled a Seven-Up down the side of her hostess’s tunic.

  Stowing the car down in the long-stay bay (you never knew), nodding to the burly security joe, Dorfman made his way briskly through the shopping mall towards the hostess’s lounge. There was no guarantee of Ascension’s presence here. She worked short-haul domestic flights mostly, East-West stopovers, with occasional long-haul excursions out of LA and San Francisco to the Antipodean. Even here, balanced above a complex world of time zones and mid-flight refuellings, her ingenuousness persisted. ‘It must be pretty exciting, going round the world for a job,’ Dorfman had ventured, halfway into the first round of Cokes he’d dared to buy for them, thinking as he did so that maybe five days a week in the air, eating airline food and crapping into a tin bucket behind the foc’sle (though a non-flyer himself, Dorfman had heard the stories) sounded like a disaster area. ‘Sure,’ Ascension had volunteered. ‘You know my sister, the one in Manila? (there was some complex factor that differentiated the two bar hostesses, but Dorfman could never remember what it was). ‘When I tell her. I travel all over the world, wear a uniform, and get paid, she say she not believe me.’ Amazingly, Dorfman’s luck held. No one he knew lurking around the malls (and in the wake of Francine’s data about Mrs Fogelberg he had resolved to be fucking careful, OK?), waved on by the goons at the NO PUBLIC ACCESS barrier, the hostess’s lounge deserted save for the trim, tiny figure posed neatly over the shining surface of the bar’s end. ‘Hi,’ Dorfman said throatily, checking the whereabouts of the barman (head down and tut-tutting over some piece of pump apparatus), edging into the empty space alongside of her in a gesture that was meant to impress any unnoticed third party with its studied casualness, but in fact only succeeded in conveying terminal anxiety. Ascension blinked in a way that to Dorfman’s Disney-soaked consciousness recalled nothing so much as Bambi registering the advent of the Great White Hunter. ‘It’s great to see you, Dorfman,’ she said relaxingly. Dorfman whinnied back. ‘It is?’ ‘Sure. You know, when I wake up this morning back in the motel I think maybe this is a sad day for me, no?’ Dorfman shrugged. Ascension patted the rim of her glass with a delicate movement. ‘And how is Senora Dorfman and the little ones at home?’ Rather to his surprise, Dorfman had invented a thin, Vassar-schooled wife and two crop-haired sons to go with the farm manager’s job. ‘They’re fine,’ he admitted, and then, seeing that something else was required, improvised a line about Wayne (they were called Wayne and Archie – shit, he ought to write them down in case he forgot) having measles, but the doctor saying it was OK. ‘You are a good man, I think, worrying about your family in this way,’ Ascension deposed. Dorfman nodded his head. One or two of the other hostesses were drifting into the lounge now; pale, haggard sirens flaked from fourteen-hour flights from Lima and Montevideo. Dorfman doled out cautious waves, hoping that nobody would speak to him: nobody did. Back at his side Ascension pulled an olive out of the complimentary platter and split it in two with a gleaming incisor. ‘But maybe in the end I find that, yes, this is still a sad day for me. ‘Yeah?’ Dorfman’s voice radiated concern, glowed and boiled and gave off seething fumes of empathy. ‘Why’s that then?’ ‘Oh is just that I get this letter from my mother, no?’ Ascension volunteered meekly. ‘Is that so?’ Dorfman wondered dreamily. Outside the planes trawled and laboured over the tarmac surround like giant scorpions.

  ‘This is Kent,’ Francine said carefully in a tone about half an octave higher than the one she used to order Dorfman to find the VCR switch or fetch in the groceries from the car. Dorfman, stumbling into the room with a pained expression on his face, saw a line of rising ducks and a photo of some vaguely imbecilic kid on the far wall. From the davenport by his knee a fat guy in shirt and suspenders r
olled expertly onto plump, slippered feet. ‘Name’s Errol Fogelberg,’ he said. ‘Any time you want to sell your place just give me a call, OK?’ Dorfman nodded. Years of piecemeal social interaction had taught him that the confraternity of fatmen is a myth, that the one thing a bulging two hundred-pounder with a stomach jutting over the waistband of his pants detests is a replica of himself. ‘Yeah,’ Mrs Fogelberg came in, winding carmined fingers round a pitcher of iced vodka-tonic, ‘and Errol’s mom always reckoned she called him after Errol Flynn. Can you imagine that?’ Mr Fogelberg joined in the laughter at this. Watching him, Dorfman thought it sounded like tired laughter, a sitcom watched too many times. The dinner party had been Mrs Fogelberg’s idea, ‘Just so you boys can get a notion of what we get up to on our evenings off.’ On another davenport in the far corner of the room, so far in fact as to suggest that they occupied a subsidiary status – would get up without warning, say, and start serving the meal – sat a couple named Harris, the male half of which Dorfman figured he just might have met at an Elk convention.

  ‘You like vodka, Kent?’ Mrs Fogelberg hazarded. ‘Or Errol says there’s beer in the chiller.’ Dorfman shook his head. For once in his life he was content for Francine to do the talking. He had things on his mind.

  The first of these, predictably enough, was Ascension. Directly behind the hostess’s bar, down a flight of stairs and along a corridor marked AIRPORT PERSONNEL ONLY there was a row of rest rooms where cabin crew sometimes grabbed an hour’s sleep during refuelling or crashed out after winging in from the Pacific. Here, greatly to his surprise, on three of the preceding seven afternoons, Dorfman had found himself lying on the starched sheets of a tiny truckle bed clasped in Ascension’s fervent embrace. Not having any yardstick for his own or Ascension’s behaviour, it was difficult to know what to make of this experience. The closest he could come up with was watching an adult movie from the decent obscurity of a cinema back row and then suddenly being requested to climb up onto the screen and take part in the celluloid thrash and gouge. He had tried talking to Ascension about this, without success. Five minutes later found her dressed, the red check airline scarf pushed firmly back into the top of her blouse, the blanket folded, only the faint tang of sweat in the air a reminder of what had passed between them.