Small World (35 page)

6.6.80    —
VIPerpetrations, VIP

The station
wagon, awash in popcorn and paper cups that trickled sticky red puddles of Kool-Aid onto the carpet, stank of sugary artificial strawberry and salty butter. The kids were limp on the backdeck, in a sea of pillows and old quilts. Laurie snored softly; Zach was lost in the deep unreachable sleep of very small children. The second feature was just half-over.

Nick and Lucy, entwined quietly on the front seat, were not watching it. Lucy, her head against Nick’s chest, murmured, ‘Are they asleep?’

‘Ummm.’

‘Is that a yes or a no?’

‘Ummm.’

She dug an elbow into his side. ‘Ha.’

Nick laughed softly. ‘Hey, is this what being married is like?’

Wall-to-wall popcorn and Kool-Aid orgies? Yes. If you have kids, and live in the U.S.A., anyway. I wouldn’t know about the other half of the world, the childless and un-American. This,’ she enclosed the interior of the car in one quick gesture, as if she were catching a butterfly, ‘is a closed universe.’

I was really thinking in terms of going to the drive-in with the
■Lids
in their summer pajamas, and you and I necking in the front 'eat while they cork off.’

'We don’t come very often. Once or twice a summer is enough. You forget, from one summer to the next, about the bugs and the mess in the car. Anyway, I never before brought anybody along to neck with.’

He buried his nose in her hair and they tussled briefly. She backed out first.

‘Wait,’ she giggled.

'Aargh,’ he mock-groaned.

Glancing out at the cars parked in curving ranks before the wall of moving pictures, he grew thoughtful.

'I’m glad I don’t own this place.’

Lucy was quiet, looking around them.

It looks run down, but they always do. It’s part of the 205

ambience, isn’t it? Drive-in-tacky?’ she observed.

Nick grinned. ‘Yes. But I meant it’s obsolete. Unless somebody invents an automobile that doesn’t use gasoline or uses a hell of a lot less of it, the drive-in movie is only a footnote on the long list of American institutions that are going to stall out permanently.’

‘I never thought of that.’

After a time, she slipped a hand into one of his. ‘Now I feel like a goose walked over my grave, or something. I never think about the Future, with a big F. It seems like there’s enough to do, thinking about getting along on our own. Do you think Laurie and Zach will lead lives very different than ours?’

‘It’s hard to imagine anything else. If the pace of technological development continues, their lives will be as unimaginable to us as ours would have been to our great-grandparents. If technology stalls out, life is very likely to be a lot'grimmer and harsher than ours. Different, for sure.’

Lucy shivered. ‘How could we all be so stupid?’

Nick smiled and squeezed her comfortingly. ‘We’re not stupid. We’re too clever for our own good. My ancestors—I can’t speak for yours—the blue-blooded English landowners on my mother’s side, and the good high class butchers who produced my father, would have said that a proper respect for God and one’s place in society, plus a heartfelt devotion to hard work, was the best road to survival and prosperity, in this life and the next, for any man.’ ‘Jesus saves, and so do I, at the First National Bank?’ Lucy mocked.

‘Just right. Our generation, and to be fair, our parents’, with the attitude you just displayed for religion, and a certain cynicism as well about hard work and its fruits, puts its faith in technology, or science. Mary Shelley warned us about that some time ago, but we haven’t taken her message, or all the others, along the way. Our technology is at once the most dangerous thing in the world, and our most likely salvation.’

‘I’ve never heard you talk like this. I would have expected you to say something about art.’

Nick shrugged. ‘My early upbringing has soured me a little on the almighty importance of art. And then, you can’t eat art, when the crops fail.’

‘That sounds bitter.’

‘I know.’ Nick sighed and drew her closer. ‘We should be making love, not talking about the end of the world as we know it.’ Lucy sat up and faced him. ‘What’s wrong?’

She was a study, sitting cross-legged between the steering wheel and the back of the car, he thought. In the light from the movie screen, her denim shorts and red-checked halter were blackly purple. Running, biking, working in the garden had tanned her and slimmed her. Her hair, neatly pinned up when they left her father at her home, had fallen in loops and tendrils to her shoulders. He was prepared to look at her all night.

She answered her own question. ‘I’ve been thinking, off and on at the oddest moments, about Leyna Shaw.’

Leyna was a potential finger-burner. Nick decided to adopt a neutral posture.

‘Really?’

‘What ever could have happened to her?’

You know the possibilities as well as I do,’ he chided gently. All laid out in
VIP
and all the newspapers, on all the network news programs. Kidnapping, murder, suicide, runaway,’ he enumerated, ‘or some combination thereof.’

‘Yes,’ Lucy agreed. ‘But you knew her. What do you think?’

'I wasn’t her best friend,’ Nick protested. ‘I’ve known her for a ung time; I know things about her. I don’t know and can’t magine what happened to her.’

Well, what things do you know?’ she prodded.

Her husband, Jeff Fairbourne, is one of an old moneyed family. The Fairbournes are characterized by magnificent Roman -oses, complete insensitivity to the rest of the human race, and the usual bug-eyed acquisitiveness of the truly rich. Also, the family throws up, from the general level of beady-eyed Philistine, east one idiot savant per generation. Jeff is the last generation’s ;?-erration. He told me he intends to be the last generation, period.’

Idiot savant?’

There have been some genuine classic Fairbourne idiot savants. Jeff is marginal. He has the characteristic extraordinary grasp of the properties of numbers and dates, but he can’t make change. He functions, he has a college education or two, et cetera. He's an architect, and his stuff is wonderful on paper, but has a tendency to be disastrous once built. Either somebody notices, list when the ribbons are being cut, that the thing looks like dog puke piled fifty stories high, or all the glass falls out in the first high wind. or else he leaves the plumbing out. He’s done that twice. Ca:ms high-mindedness.’

Lucy giggled. ‘That’s amazing. And people hire him?’

Sure. He’s a Fairbourne. Fairbournes attract money like rotten seat draws flies.’

‘So that’s her husband. But they were separated.’

‘Almost as soon as they married. I think it was sort of a spite marriage. Jeffs family had to eat all those crude suspicions that he was homosexual and Leyna could throw all that Fairbourne money in her mother’s face. She hates her mother.’

‘Why didn’t they get divorced?’

‘Liked things the way there were, I expect. Simple as that. There’s no animosity. You saw the pictures of Jeff right after she disappeared. He was genuinely distressed. It was a pretty bloodless marriage, but they both got what they wanted out of it.’ She nodded.

He continued: ‘I can’t feature suicide, unless there was something wrong with her, an illness of some kind. She’s exactly the sort of person who would cut out rather than go through a terminal illness. Not for lack of courage or for fear of pain, but because she’d hate the indignities, the degeneration, the dependency.’

‘That was my reaction to the idea,’ Lucy said. ‘She seemed . . . tough.’

‘She was. Apparently she wasn’t kidnapped, as there’s been no notes that could be trusted. That was the most likely possibility to me. All that Fairbourne money, plus her notoriety as a journalist. ’ ‘Maybe she was, and something went wrong, and the kidnappers killed her.’

Nick nodded. ‘A possibility. One that may never be provable ’ ‘What about out-and-out murder?'

‘She had some big-time enemies and a lot of just-plain-people hated her. But I don’t know of anybody who would have put out a contract on her, let alone done it themselves.’

‘But somebody might have. You don’t know, right?’

‘Maybe. She wasn’t the most dangerous journalist in town, for sure.’

‘So what about the runaway theory?’

‘No motivation I know. She was handling her life just fine, it seemed. She wanted to be the famous television journalist, and she was. She liked it. Got off on it.’

‘I think something terrible happened to her,’ Lucy said mournfully. Her face, in the light from the movie screen, was troubled.

After a brief silence, Nick agreed, ‘So do I.’

Lucy swiveled around the wheel. ‘Let’s go home.’

‘To go back to my original question,’ Nick poked, trying to lighten the mood, ‘is this what marriage is like? Take the kids to the drive-in, neck a little, and go home before the second feature finishes, without even getting to second base?’

She keyed the ignition. ‘We’ll take the kids in and put them in their beds . . . ’

‘And turn off the tube and put your father in his bed?’ Nick interjected.

‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘And then we’ll put the driver and her passenger to bed. But you have to leave by five-thirty.’

Nick groaned. ‘What I have to do to get laid.’

‘I’ll drop you off on the way home,’ Lucy offered, i’ll take the first offer,’ he told her hastily.

‘Okay,’ she said amiably, ‘just so you understand. I’m not having my kids wake up to find Mummy in the sack with good old Nick, or anybody else.’

He shook his head. ‘You’re a hard woman.’

‘It’s a hard world.’

‘But it’s hypocritical, Lucy. It’s not like you. You’re too honest for this kind of charade. ’

‘No, it isn’t hypocrisy at all,’ she insisted, letting the car slide down the slope to the rough-packed lanes between the ranks. ‘My kids are too young. If they were fifteen, I’d sit them down and say, listen, you know about sex. Mom likes it, too. She has a boyfriend; she sleeps with him. She’s not a whore, she’s not sleeping with anybody who asks or stands still long enough. She likes this guy. Sex is just part of her relationship with him. You can’t explain that to a seven-year-old. All they see is somebody between them and Mum who is either a potential Daddy, or an out-and-out intruder.’

’I don’t know. I never was in your position. I don’t have a seven-year-old. And when I was seven, I thought it was the most normal thing in the world to have a father as old as my friends’ grandfathers, and another younger father who blew in sporadically from exotic places like the coast of Maine. It didn’t change how I felt about my mother. She was still the most "beautiful, wonderful woman in the world. Nothing she did could be bad.’

i was seventeen when my folks split, but the marriage had been bad for years, as far back as I could remember,’ Lucy reminisced, i was glad. But there wasn’t anyone else involved. Just my father and his bottle of rye and his bad back, and his failures; my mother and her precious restored Colonial house. They both took out of the marriage pretty much what they brought into it.’

Everyone’s world is a little different, I guess.’ Nick cleared his 209

throat. ‘Now that we’ve talked about divorce, can we talk about

marriage?’

Lucy took her eyes off the road long enough to flash him a smile. ‘Talk to me in six weeks. When school goes back into session.’

He folded his arms across his chest as if to hug himself. ‘Amazing woman.’

She laughed.

There was no place to bury her. Roger built up a barrow on the west side of the grounds, near a group of willow-oaks. The silver coffin that had once been an amusing cigarette box and now held Leyna’s remains was fitted into the stone-lined cave and the barrow sealed, heaped with soil to cover the rocks, and planted over with turf. In the absence of a marker, Dolly allowed Roger to install a fountain nearby. With that, he lost all interest in the Doll’s White House, claiming he didn’t have the skills to repair it.

Dolly was furious with him but there was nothing she could do. If she forced him to do, he. might deliberately bungle it and damage the dollhouse beyond fixing. She had to content herself with cleaning up the water damage in the Gingerbread Dollhouse, which fortunately had not been directly under any sprinkler and had only taken a mild soaking. The Glass Dollhouse was the easiest to clean up; a little window cleaner and some paper towels plus the patience to do it right, and it was back to its old tricks with the light.

Roger immersed himself in the physical fitness program offered by Dolly’s Health Club. He gave up sneaking beer, pizza, and Twinkies, and picked at Ruta’s crepes and seafood medaillons as if they were so much liver and spinach. His books and apparatus arrived from California and, after rearranging the small, second bedroom in the apartment as a workshop, he spent many hours at work on mysterious adjustments to the minimizer. There was no admittance for anyone else, including Dolly, after he installed a lock on the door and pocketed the key.

Dolly plotted to seduce him away from grief. The theatrical instinct that made sex with Roger piquant broke through the bonds of costumes and B-movie roles. At first, he showed himself to be a brilliant improvisor, and then, abruptly, led her into a round of sudden, silent, occasionally violent intimacies, in the course of which Roger was established as the dominator. Increasingly, they were engaged in a ritual looting of each other’s bodies and spirits.