Something to Be Desired (17 page)

“I don’t know, Lucien. Foreign aid and papaya is their main deal, I guess.”

“Well, we’ll sure try to make them feel at home. If we only knew what home was—”

“I just thought, you being in the State Department …”

“Do you know what letter it starts with?”

“I’ll find out, I’ll find out.”

“Maybe you could go through some back issues of the
National Geographic
.”

The mayor bobbed his chin and looked off pensively. “I know it’s somewheres out there in the Pacific somewheres.”

Suzanne appeared briefly in the window, her brown eyes bright against a new tan. She gave Lucien a small wave in which he was more than a little suspicious there was flirting. He raised his arm toward the mayor in a kind of stiff-arm gesture and darted for the door. By the time he got out to the pool, Suzanne had gone past the far end, wearing a cotton wrap over her bathing suit. By now she was strolling with a tall young man, a college student possibly; and the two of them turned into the open bar. Lucien would have raced after them and spoken to her, but he knew he had almost no chance of appearing self-possessed; and he had perfect capability for imagining himself looking very awkward indeed in front of … the two of them. He went back into the office.

“Is something the matter?” the mayor asked, his secretary standing by to write down the answer.

“No, someone I know.”

“You look sick.”

Lucien cut through this. “Where were we?” he asked.

“We were through. Don’t let us hold you.”

“I’ve got it all down,” said the secretary. The two of them were ready to go now, but they still seemed to want to watch Lucien. There was something about Lucien they couldn’t keep their eyes off.

When the mayor had gone, Lucien stretched out on the couch. He thought back upon happy times with Suzanne. There had been the fall before James was born when they had the cruising sloop. Lucien worked then in the Dominican Republic, distributing leaflets to
Latinos. They spent all their free time sailing, and Lucien took a mail-order course in celestial navigation. He remembered a successful night landing with pride to this day. There was enough moon when they reached St. Barthélemy that they could make Baie de St. Jean by putting the stern on Isle Bonhomme and running for the grove of palms, one of which had been striped white as a monument. Soon they heard the reef pass behind the white of the mainsail. Lucien rounded up and they anchored. Suddenly it was still. The lights from shore caught the curl going down the reef, but the surf could no longer be heard. Suzanne furled the sails carefully and Lucien secured the wheel so the rudder wouldn’t knock in the night. They went below and made love while the VHF radio crackled with island conversations. The riding light appeared and disappeared over one porthole with the slight running swell. Lucien awoke in the morning to see Suzanne making coffee in the small galley wearing only the bottom of her bathing suit. A warm, fragrant breath of the island came down the companionway; from a distance he could hear the small French motorcars. That night they stayed up late in one of the local bars and ended by renting a room in a cottage that faced an old compound of houses. There was a wooden water tower surmounted by a salvaged ship’s water tank, strangely shaped on this support, as it had been made to fit in the bow of a vessel. Water was pumped up to it from a cistern and allowed to fall by gravity into the cottage’s water system. Lucien propped the door shut with a chunk of porous local rock. Trumpet vines lay up against the panes of blueing window glass, and the palm trees moved slowly in the oceanic wind. Suzanne and Lucien lay in each other’s arms.

Lucien was asleep on the couch.

Suzanne sent James over to have breakfast with his father. There was an alcove next to the spring, where they sat together and listened in on conversations at the nearby tables. An older lady talked in a high voice. “It was either this place or the
QE II
. But there had been talk in the press about the stabilizers failing and tummy upset at the captain’s table. So we came here. I like it. I think I like it. Do you like it?” Her companion, another woman her own age, flicked her eyes in Lucien’s direction to signal that he was listening, and things murmured to a stop.

Little James had his head tilted back as though he needed bifocals; he was holding a piece of toast that looked half the size of his head, and he was just smiling at his father without fear for the first time since his arrival. His shirt was one button out of line and Lucien leaned across and made it right. Lucien wondered how in God’s name he could ever leave the boy unguarded even for a moment, much less for the duration of his recent hegira. “Self-discovery,” he thought with loathing, for he was losing interest in himself. He wished now he could install his wasted years as unused time in his little boy’s life. It was a kind of regret.

“I hope we’ll fish a little.”

“That’d be great,” said James anxiously.

“You like sport, though …?”

“Not athletics!”

“This is different. You can go off and be to yourself.
When I was your age, people used to hang out gone-fishing signs and they never had to explain anything. Just go look at the air or find out what’s out past the trees. You can still do that.”

“I can?”

“Sure you can.”

From another table came an implacable voice: “When that Ford tipped over, it took a Jaws of Life to set me free. I’m a lucky man to be here to tell about it.”

“If we fish,” said James, knitting his fingers in his lap, “I don’t care if we get one.”

“I don’t either.”

“But I hope we get one.”

“Me too.”

Lucien ate the same thing he’d eaten for thousands of mornings: bacon and eggs and hash browns, with hot sauce on the eggs. He looked at them and wondered if they were the only continuity he had. As he stared down, there was a moment of complete suspension in which the sound of silverware and morning voices poured through eternity like a river. I want an island, he thought; I want an island.

The year Lucien and Suzanne parted, they had gone up to the States for the usual minor supplies: paperbacks, a cordless electric razor, Suzanne’s contacts, ten or twenty movies, a pump for the saltwater aquarium. It was the year they had both come out of the mall with things that seemed to bode ill for the future: Suzanne with a pair of crotchless panties, Lucien with his first corncob pipe. It proved to be a very bad sign indeed, especially since Lucien was in an epoch when it seemed to him there actually were
signs
, an era in which he could join the
rest of the populace in the wonderful ongoing melodrama of inanimate objects. He thrilled to clothes and cars; he sat at an old tropical wicker desk which seemed to guarantee character in his work. It was also the time he began to feel that his dick had rights of its own. He viewed it the way Vasco da Gama viewed the needle of his compass. Wherever he went, he believed it to be one of the leading dicks in the area. He never wanted to be accused of standing in its way. It was an up-market dick even when it spotted his clothes, made a crude lump or pissed through the top of his shoes. Still, the real story lay in his sense of getting nowhere, the functionary blues.

The voice at the other end said, “I’m told you can put me in touch with Suzanne Taylor.” It was a man.

“I think I can. What’s it about?”

“It’s about when she’s coming back to work.”

“Isn’t this kind of a vacation for her?” Lucien asked. He was racking his brain to recall what the job was: something about life-insurance money and land investment in the Sunbelt. His part of the office did Houston to Memphis, and she worked in his division.

“It’d just be real nice to hear when she is planning to pop up.”

“I think she’s trying for a couple of weeks holiday with her little boy.”

“It won’t do. You tell her to get hold of Lawton Hudson. That’s me. Tell her I said now is the hour.”

Lawton Hudson clicked off. Lucien had felt unable to put in his two cents’ worth fearing he’d jeopardize something he knew nothing about. But he was furious.

He spoke to no one as he made his rounds. In the kitchen, they looked at him from the steam of breakfast
dishes. Henchcliff was receiving meats, checking them off as they were transferred to the trolley in cold storage. There were the usual newspaper readers at the pastry table who jumped up when Lucien came in. Along the poolside, three or four men made notes in their half-glasses, looking up with that peculiar air of dubiety which those glasses produce. One of the nannies was backed up tight to the water intake, absolutely oblivious to Lucien or anything else. The bar was still locked, and the morning light was just making it to the high windows and beaming down on the continually changing pool of thermal water. Once when they were first open, a local rancher had galloped his horse into the pool and gone to the bar for a drink. There had been something of a struggle to prevent the horse from drowning. Afterward Lucien took a chair to the rancher. The rancher had not come back since, though his lawyer made two or three sheepish calls.

Antoinette was taking reservations at a good clip, and the front office was filled with the wonderful smell of hot asphalt from the pavers outside. There was a warm breeze coming through the open windows, and Lucien could hear the American flag pop over the parking lot. Antoinette touched her forefinger to the dimple in her right cheek and bethought herself while the phone flashed. In the lobby a local decorator hung pictures of windmills, buckaroos, roundups and amazingly smoky trains. A smooth operation, Lucien thought.

“Antoinette, has Miss Taylor arranged for any activities for my son today?”

“I believe he has a riding lesson in half an hour. At ten.”

“I see. I didn’t know that. Who’s giving the lesson?”

“I believe it’s Sheila.”

“Antoinette, get Sheila and make sure the lesson lasts a couple of hours. Sheila is to teach James riding for two hours.”

Now Lucien began to move rapidly. From the tennis courts, he could see down to the stables. Sheila was lecturing James about the parts of a saddle while James sat up on a tall bay horse that seemed to be sleeping through the lecture.

Then he walked through the grove of flowering crab apples to the White Cottage. When he got to the wall, he walked around to the side that faced open country and stopped to level his breathing. Then he climbed the timber crossbrace of the wall and looked inside the court. As he expected, Suzanne was sunbathing beside the pool. For some reason he was startled by the lankiness of her naked body. She had one arm crooked over her face, and her breathing was slow and rhythmic. Once the arm swung out suddenly as though at a fly, and the effect of that on Lucien was a kind of fright. One knee was angled slightly against the other, drawing up one long curve of thigh. Lucien couldn’t help studying to see if her breasts had fallen; they hadn’t. Then she sat up and thought for a moment; he was afraid to move. She walked to the table and made a long-distance phone call; he knew this because he counted the digits and there were eleven altogether. Long-distance. She leaned onto her elbows with her fingers run into her auburn hair and talked and laughed for a few minutes. Then she hung up. As she walked back to the pool she kept smiling from the phone conversation and lay down again.

When he climbed back down he felt tremulous. He had the key to the gate and he walked around to the door.
He touched the end of the key to the opening in the lock, waited a moment, then pushed very slowly, feeling each notch fall softly along the shaft of the key. He turned it and the door went loose. He stepped in. Now he was looking straight at Suzanne from a very short distance, unnoticed.

When he held her wrists and kissed her, her scream went all the way down his throat. Then she knew it was him and stopped. She just looked at him, resting on her elbows, with not the beginning of an expression. Lucien undressed and moved her knees apart with his own. He stopped then and waited. A second later, she crammed him inside her and he felt tears on her cheeks. It should have ruined things, but Suzanne’s healthy animalism was something she could never entirely eliminate, and they made love for a long time.

“Why have you done this?”

“I couldn’t help it.”

“Right.”

“I was sort of crazy. I’m not kidding, darling. I was controlled by something else—” He was telling the truth.

“A sort of lever.”

“Please.”

“
Please
. I can’t believe you’d say that to me. What could be more adorable, Lucien, than your put-upon air?”

“You lubricated.”

“I ask you, please stop. That’s how they defend rapists.”

“And your boss called, wants you back at work yesterday.”

“There’s another thing we haven’t touched on. My work. Anyway, let’s not quarrel. James’ll be here in a minute.”

“Not to worry. He’s having a two-hour lesson.”

“Isn’t that thoughtful. You moved him into a larger time slot.” She was getting angry.

“You didn’t have to make love with me,” Lucien said petulantly.

“That’s right, I didn’t. But I hadn’t fucked anybody in about a week. I must’ve needed it.”

“Please don’t talk that way.”

“I’ll talk any way I please. I’m just a working mother and I’ve got my shoulder to the wheel, you sonofabitch.”

“Whooo.”

“You know what,” she said with blazing eyes, “I think I hate you. Why don’t you go fuck something else. I don’t think I want to fuck you anymore. Yeah, that’s it. No more fucking you, and here’s why: it encourages all your sloppy sentimentality and your no-shows and your desertions and your treatment of people who love you as if they were so many pocket mirrors for you to see if you’re aging or what kind of day you’re having or how deep and creative you are or how effective and memorable your personal philosophy is or whether you might not start going back to church or how many months it was since your last complete physical or whether you ought to give up after-dinner drinks. No, you sonofabitch, I don’t think I’ll fuck you anymore. I think I’ll just get the hell out of here and fuck someone else. You know how it goes.”