Desire Provoked

by Tracy Daugherty

  Desire Provoked

  Tracy Daugherty

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1986 Desire Provoked by Tracy Daugherty

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for

  permission to reprint previously published material:

  Laurie Anderson: Excerpt from “Let X = X”/lt Tango, words and music by Laurie Anderson. Copyright © 1982 by Difficult Music. Reprinted by permission.

  Little, Brown and Company: Poem #378 from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Copyright 1935 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright renewed 1963 by Mary L. Hampson. Reprinted by permission.

  Published 2012 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938604-07-2

  eBook Cover Designed by Steven Seighman

  Published in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For my family

  Part One

  CARTER, Adams’ boss, has developed a lively system for recognizing merit. Some years ago he returned from a holiday in South America with several insects in a box. They had been treated with a mixture of South American tree saps and preserved in cotton. Though they resembled common tree roaches, these were, Carter assured his associates, intelligent creatures: platula, a species domesticated for over five centuries by the Indians. Native to Peruvian rain forests, the bugs were originally attracted to the aroma of the Indians’ pipes. They would crawl onto smokers’ shoulders and perch there like parakeets. “The relationship of certain South American Indians and their insects parallels that of the American Indian and his dog,” Carter said. When a favorite insect died, it was coated with tree sap and worn around the neck on a string.

  Carter bronzed the bugs and made them into pins. He decided to collect insects wherever he went: Carausius morosus from Asia, Bellicostermes from

  Africa, Glossina from Saudi Arabia. He had them dipped in bronze, silver, and gold, like Olympic medals, and distributed them to his employees as merit badges. A five-year man received a bronze Dolichorespula Saxonia. Ten years earned a silver Polistes bimaculatus. The Buthus, Orb spider, and Ixodes ricinus were bonus pins. At first the employees of On-Line Information Systems reacted with distaste, but when it became apparent that Carter set store by the bugs, the pins gained value within the corporate structure.

  Adams has more bugs than his peers. At work he wears the Ixodes on his lapel. Before leaving the office at night he carefully removes it from his coat and drops it in his pocket.

  “Some decisions, Sam, I need to make without you,” his wife insists. Pamela is beautifully pale, Pennsylvania Dutch, a strict guardian of her youthful health and happiness. Her father, a Lutheran minister, told her nightly end-of-the-world stories when he tucked her into bed; she’s fond of overstatement. Often she refers to the topography of her body, the scale of her emotions, and the basin of depression in which Adams has placed her.

  Last week, in a long-meditated move, she left with the kids and their fabulous toys.

  “An investor and a father, who am I to say whether running from our wives is the problem, a result of the problem, or a symptom of some larger ill,” Adams writes his younger brother. Kenny is a session drummer in Burbank. “All I know is, we are collectively bored, we’re not in love—we’re no longer interested, here, in the pretense of love. Whether this makes us more or less civilized than other men is not for me to say.

  “Our wives’ reactions have been standard. They claim that our defections are standard. In a way, our behavior has been entirely predictable. The violence of our daughters, of course, is something none of us could’ve foreseen.

  “One positive note: to combat boredom we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on the job. Some marvelous work has resulted. The artists among us have been particularly successful. Last night in the town square a local acting troupe presented a charming skit, ‘The Return of the Black Death,’ in costumes entirely fashioned out of cereal boxes.”

  Within days of moving into the new house with their mother, the kids have accidents. First a hot-water heater in the pantry ruptures, a small hole at the bottom scalding Toby’s calf. Then Deidre burns her eyebrows lighting the oven. “I was teaching her to help me in the kitchen,” Pamela tells Adams. “I didn’t know she’d already turned on the gas.”

  Sometimes after sunset boys light fireworks in the field behind his house. Rockets glide through the grass. The boys scatter when Adams comes to the window, though he doesn’t mean to frighten them. He remembers the field he played in as a kid (Red Cloud, Nebraska, geographical center of the nation, latitude forty degrees) and enjoys the fragmenting colors. On cool evenings, as the frogs chirp, he stands with a glass of Scotch at the screen door, imagining the miles between his home here in Elgin and the house where he was born. He has never mapped that particular stretch of Nebraska—faded Indian trails, mistletoe high in the trees, a thin pitted blacktop.

  Tonight, an unusually warm night in March, he is naked in the dark. He pours himself a Scotch, then opens a package of Rainbo Rolls. From the kitchen window he glimpses a man in a dark blue suit standing in the shadows at the gate. Looking closely, Adams believes it to be young Jordan from the Records Office. Tall, blond, large head and hands. Pamela once remarked at a party that Jordan would be a nice-looking man if he’d cut his hair.

  What is he doing in Adams’ backyard?

  Adams buckles his pants and steps outside. A heavy mist is falling. Hair prickles on his chest. He is not at all sure, now, that this man is Jordan. Too much paunch.

  “Who’s there?” he calls, switching on the outside light. “Who is it?” In the time it takes his eyes to adjust to the glare the man is gone. Adams, barefooted, steps onto the grass, touching the barbecue pit as he pauses to look around. Charcoal blackens his fingers. His feet are cold. He returns to the house, straightens the half-finished map on his table, and picks up a pen. Sketching farm roads and freeways has always helped him calm down.

  Pamela phones. “I told my parents, Sam. There didn’t seem to be any sense keeping it a secret any longer.”

  “How’d they take it?”

  “They were shocked, naturally. Wanted to blame you for everything. I told them that wasn’t fair.” “Thank you.”

  “I tried, Sam, God knows I tried. Didn’t I try, Sam?”

  “Yes. What can I say?”

  Pamela hangs up.

  He turns on the television. Lee Trevino misses a putt. Adams turns it off. He walks into the bathroom, smooths the top of his head in the mirror. He is fair-skinned, with slightly reddish-brown hair. Small shoulders.

  He calls Pamela back. “Why don’t you stop this and come home?” he says.

  “I was thinking of talking to a lawyer.”

  “What about?”

  “Irreconcilable differences.”

  “The only difference is you’re lost and I’m not.” Immediately he apologizes, to keep her on the line. He mentions the stranger in his yard.

  “Can you pick Deidre up at dance class?” “All right.”

  At six he drops by the studio. Deidre’s flushed from the workout, her hair is damp.

  “How’s my room,” she asks.

  “Just as you left it.”

  “Good.” She’s eight years old and thinks she’s
on vacation. His son, Toby, who is twelve, seems to have grasped matters, though he’s been temperamental since he was ten and doesn’t offer his thoughts.

  Deidre is silent for two blocks. Then: “I want everything to be perfect.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “When I come back.”

  “Ah.” What has Pamela promised? “Does your mother say you’ll be coming back soon?”

  Deidre doesn’t answer.

  “Well,” Adams says, rubbing the back of her neck. “Everything will be perfect. We’ll see to it.”

  “Daddy, what do you do?”

  “What do I do?”

  “At home. By yourself.”

  “Oh. Well. Let’s see. I watch television.”

  “Good,” she says. “That’s good.”

  They have a night-light in the shape of a bear. It gives them strength—he hears it in their voices when they call. They roar on the telephone, fraying the lines between their mother’s house and his, over stretches of debits and credits. When he drives past their house at night, the porch light sears him to the bone. His tires go bald. He belongs on the other side of that light, a scarecrow guarding his children’s sleep. At home he replaces a burnt-out kitchen bulb. It illuminates things no longer there: a safe-deposit box, a bottle of Old Charter, a gold dish where Pamela placed her rings before washing the plates after dinner.

  Their first child, Alan, died in the hospital after three hard days. He was premature, small as a shoe. Adams stood at the nursery window urging his son to hold on, but the little lungs couldn’t do it, Alan turned blue, the nurses wheeled him away. Adams sat in an old green chair in the waiting room, no longer a father. Leave It to Beaver played on a Magnavox TV on a shelf near the ceiling.

  Pamela closed her eyes when Adams told her about the baby. The birth had been difficult and she was still exhausted. The room was yellow, square, pungent with alcohol and talcum. The sun was taking a long time to set and Adams was hot in his long-sleeved shirt, his face felt oily. He kissed Pamela’s fingers, she stroked the soft skin above his lip. “It’s okay,” he whispered into her hand.

  Later, once she was asleep, Adams rode the elevator. He paced each floor of the hospital, one after the other. Families waited on their doctors. Nurses came and wheeled people away.

  Pavarotti is singing “E lucevan le stelle” from Tosca. The large mole on the left side of his face somehow looks attractive, riding the crook of his beard. In his right hand he holds a white handkerchief; so far he has done nothing with it. When he raises his head, eyes brimming with tears, Adams is moved, but his attention is continually drawn to either the handkerchief or the mole.

  Meanwhile, the chicken breasts on Adams’ cutting board are drying out. They’ve been there since five, when he turned on the television. He goes into the kitchen, pulls chili powder and cumin from the spice rack, then spreads parsley in the bottom of a dish to make a bed for the chicken. He butters the chicken and lays the pieces in a pleasant pattern on the parsley.

  Pamela seems to have taken the cilantro.

  Returning to the living room, he is in time to see Pavarotti bow. The handkerchief swings from his fingers.

  Someone taps on Adams’ door. It’s the Reverend Sister Rosa, a fortune-teller from down the block. “Hi,” she says, adjusting a thin black shawl on her shoulders. “I wanted everyone in the neighborhood to know I’m giving a group discount on Tarot readings. Wednesday nights. If you come with a friend, it’s half off for you and free for the friend. I’ll also have complimentary cheese and coffee.”

  “Thanks very much,” Adams says. “But I have a standing engagement on Wednesday nights. I play at a little dance club.”

  “Oh, well, too bad.” Rosa sniffs. “You’ve just sprayed your house? I need to spray mine.”

  “That’s the chicken,” Adams says.

  She gives him a curious look. “I miss those little munchkins of yours. Haven’t seen them lately.”

  “My wife left a couple of weeks ago. The kids are staying with her.”

  “Vacation?”

  “No, we separated.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.” She fumbles with her shawl. “You know, I could give you a private reading anytime you’d like. Find out when you’ll be lucky in love.”

  “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “See you.”

  “Good-bye.”

  She walks next door and rings the doorbell.

  Adams removes the chicken from the oven, wraps it in foil, and places it in the refrigerator.

  Pete and Denny have worked up a new song—Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” They are teaching Bob the chords when Adams arrives. Adams sets up, fills in a standard beat, then adds a few flourishes as he becomes familiar with the breaks. He is still sore from helping Pamela move.

  Denny, their lead vocalist, is no King of Soul but he’s funky, and Bob decides to include the new song in the final set.

  Morty’s Place is crowded on Wednesdays because Morty serves beer and wine to minors between ten and midnight. “Only on Wednesdays, and only if you’re as discreet about it as I am,” he tells the teenagers. He’s on good terms with the sheriff and in no danger of losing his license. The band begins at nine. Other bands play throughout the week, so Adams has to store his drums in a back room.

  Together he and Kenny wore out three copies of Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” featuring rockin’ sockin’ Earl Palmer, when they were young. They played along with the record after school almost every day. Kenny had magic in his wrists. He taped their mother’s Kotex to his tom-toms to get the sound he wanted. Adams played for enjoyment.

  The songs become routine after a while, guitarists and vocalists get the spotlight—it’s the positioning of the drums on stage, the tightening of the wing nuts, the tuning, the anticipation that gives him the pleasant edge he needs to perform well. He adjusts the ride cymbals, tightens his snare, loosens the head on the floor tom. Temperature variations inevitably cause the drums to slip out of tune, and he spends a solid hour tapping the tight heads, ears close to his fingers, searching for the right sounds with the drum key. He lays three extra pairs of sticks, 9A (thin), beside the bass drum. Brushes and soft mallets he keeps on an old music stand behind his leather stool, known in the trade as a drummer’s throne.

  The drums sparkle dark blue. He bought the set two years ago with extra money he earned mapping the sea floor off Japan. It was his last international assignment.

  Bob, the bassist, sells Lincoln-Mercuries. He is Adams’ dealer. Through him, Adams met the other members of the band: Pete, a radio newsman who idolizes Les Paul, and Denny, a local jeweler who likes to flash his rings while sawing on rhythm guitar. For a year they practiced in Bob’s basement; then, billing themselves simply as the “Bob Parke Combo,” auditioned for Morty. In those days Adams still had his first set, which he’d put together over a period of years, buying used drums whenever he could afford them: A Ludwig snare, a Slingerland bass drum, a Gretsch tom-tom. With the purchase of his first Zild-jian cymbal, the top of the line, he felt versatile and whole.

  Pamela had infinite patience with his music when they first started dating at the University of Nebraska. At the time he was trying to make an Indian tom-tom from aspen wood and cowhide. In studying ancient maps he had run across Chippewa drums, whose heads were painted to represent the world. On his strip of cowhide he drew a pattern in which the edge represented the ocean, the bisecting lines the fields of the earth, the drapery a battery of storm clouds, the jagged lines lightning, and the spots below thunder. It was one of his earliest maps.

  For the Chippewa, the drum had the power of both thunder and the heartbeat. For Adams, it held only frustration; he was unable to carve the wood to his liking. Pamela tried to help, but was no more skilled than he. At night he played with a jazz trio at a coffee house near campus. Each weekend Pamela came to listen, ordering c
up after cup of cappuccino. The same songs every Saturday, but she never seemed to sour.

  They tune for twenty minutes, order drinks, then with a kickbeat Adams propels them into the blues. Soon they are galloping to Merle Haggard—Bob does a “cowboy shift” in the middle of the song, from C to C sharp, signaling Adams he wants to run with this awhile, and they jam for fifteen minutes. By this time the club is packed—middle-aged men, mostly, still in their business suits, though a number of teenaged girls twist around the dance floor.

  Some nights Adams leaves the club exhausted. On other nights he doesn’t want to stop. There’s no accounting for it. Whether the band is up or not has nothing to do with his own physical reaction to the music. He can feel bored when they’re playing well, excited when they’re sloppy. Tonight, when the final set ends, just after two, he’s wide awake, hungry, talkative. So is Pete, so they go for breakfast at Adele’s, an all-night diner.

  “I’ll be shit on the air tomorrow,” Pete says. He has a six A.M . news broadcast. “Every morning it’s Nicaragua, Nicaragua. I can’t even say Nicaragua till about noon.”

  Adams orders orange juice and pancakes. He remembers the chicken in his refrigerator. At three o’clock, when he finally reaches home, Jordan is standing in his yard. Adams calls the police. “I’m sorry, sir,” the sergeant says. “You’re out of our jurisdiction.”

  Adams argues that his neighborhood is well within the city limits. The sergeant insists that county records are unclear. By now the man has disappeared.

  Deidre answers the door and leaps into his arms, her hands gummy with peach ice cream. “Can we go to a movie, Daddy?”

  “If you want to,” he says, kissing her sticky cheek.

  Pamela is dressed to go out. “There’s an opening tonight at Cyndi’s gallery,” she says. “She may be interested in showing my photographs. A friend’s picking me up.”

  Adams does not mistake the tone of her voice. She’s seeing a man. As if unsure of his footing, he walks slowly back to the car holding Deidre in his arms.