Swimming in the Volcano (51 page)

Saconi was up the hill, resting at the Lord Norton compound. Coddy promised to take them there in a while and Sally, content, didn't object. They were handed rum punches and geared into circulation, she and Sally trailing Johanna, who seemed to be the catalyst for a more ebullient pace. Adrian noticed she deferred to Johanna's ease in the world—not to be mistaken for worldliness. Not the world, but groups, clusters of animation. She had a charming, effortless superficiality that many people would want to call charismatic. The surface of her life was seduction, its midrange scales, its pastels, its easy wins. Go on to the next oasis of faces, opinions, anecdotes, stay in the loop or perish.

It was not necessarily objectionable. Adrian had lived it all before; she had virtually existed at Studio 54 last year, orbiting Warhol and his stunning constellation, the decadence benign and waxed and winking, self-parody as a collective effort, and off to the side, always,
permanently emplaced, the arrogance of overprivileged boys, the swollen curling lips of snobbery, the candied snarls and stylized scorn, the drug and sex and studio palaver of the globe's ascendent culture. It titillated her but brought forth her worst side too, tautened her voice with a jaded nasality, made her more ironic than thou, a snoot among snoots, because rudeness was a form of social efficiency, sort of, and a natural defense, sort of, and everybody was that way, out and out rude, free to do what they wanted, free to get away with it, but clearly this was a different sect of rudeness and its practice here among the sociopaths at the Green Turtle. The difference was their blighted eyes, the impudence drained of youth. Their drawstring pants, flowery silk blouses, famished physiques, and thick sea-breezed hair that any woman would kill for all looked cartoonish, more faggotty than faggots, fops of the bankrupt manor. Evelyn Waugh gone to pot. They were her wicked older brothers, they had ridden a crest of boyish rebellion and they were lodged there, yesterday's cutting edge, growing old. They weren't naive, not like the youth of her own city; instead they reeked of the incorporation of innocence and its devaluation. One of them took her hand in his androgynous grip and asked, “When shall we fuck, then?” and then tapped the glass of his Rolex. They were assholes, kinks in the beauty of the nightfall, and yet still they managed some fading puissance, a not-yet-dissipated power to lure her reluctantly forward with a nerve-stretching sense of expectation. They were probably evil. She would probably want to know.
The stars
.

There seemed to be a consensus that they mobilize and move out, everybody, up the beach to Coddy's place. He conferred with Sally—Adrian and Johanna were being given his digs for the weekend, he wanted to take them there now, get them established, rally onward to the mighty Saconi. Coddy, it seemed, because of his light skin and generosity of attitude, had been plucked from the sunny daydream of his life and anointed king gofer for Cotton Island's glittery invasion of rogues and royal understudies. His place, at the dead-end of a crushed coral track that paralleled the beach, set a high premium on castaway charm, more like a meeting house for beachcombers than a space where a person might actually reside, its single room set on knee-high stilts, a large and open rectangle, the lower half of its walls constructed from bamboo, the upper half green nylon screening, the panels sutured together over structural posts supporting its roof, the roofline tacked with gingerbready trim painted brothel red. It sat in humble privacy a dozen steps back off the empty beach, shaded by a grove of palms, tamarind, and gnarled sea grape trees, its yard pocked
by land crab holes. Adrian had never come closer to camping out than this; she was going to think of it as an experiment in dirtiness, testing the unwashed appeal of letting her body go, letting her mind chase after it. It was a right she had never asserted wholeheartedly.

A stereo played “You Sexy Thing” through homemade speakers. Coddy told them get used to it, it was the only record he owned at the moment. They got their bags out of the back of the truck; a caravan of mini-mokes rattled into the yard, toy cars ferrying an elite corps of freaks, the vulturish Peter Pans of legendary bands. Johanna wasn't overawed either, but for other reasons; she was already claiming the boyos for her own court. There were people inside, long-termers, smoking ganj, displaying themselves in languid repose, as if they had been there all day,
en soirée
, slothing through paradise. The interior was a museum of the washed-up and overtraveled, all tropotawdry, seedy and fabulous, conch shells spray-painted Day-Glo colors, starfish mobiles, whalebone ottomans, fishing-lure chandeliers, suggestive contortions of bleached gray driftwood, weird seedpods, a dining table made from hatchcovers, pillow cushions thrown into a rotted-out island rowboat to make a cradlelike couch, the summery pennants of drying swimsuits and damp towels, nautical charts and concert posters, a blowup of Haile Selassie in the year of his downfall, and a refrigerator pasted with centerfolds from
Playboy
magazine. Coddy took Adrian aside to tell her apologetically that the head was
out there
. She didn't understand until he pointed out the screen into the scrub to a pit latrine, roofless, its privacy afforded by half walls of corrugated sheeting, its door impossibly warped.
Oh
, she said,
thanks
, but there was no way she was going to enter that thing, let alone shit in it. She looked around the room thinking Here I am in a beautiful nowhere with the idols of no tomorrow. Someone handed her a can of beer, Lord Norton's private label, picture of a playing card whore stamped on front.
Betty at Bedtime
. There was a blond assortment of ghoulish bimbos variously attached to the males of note, sweating through their pancake makeup. Johanna seemed delighted, words spilled out of her mouth. It was like Gilligan's Island, scripted by Shakespeare on PCP. Adrian looked at the one bed, a double at least, inhabiting a corner of the room and wondered how clean its rumpled purple sheets could be. A once-famous bass player began to talk to her as if he were still cock of the rock. He had made a difference, she told him wryly. The world had noticed. We can be in Monte Carlo by Monday, he said, Ischia by Tuesday, then on to the Seychelles.

Sally rounded them up to ask if they wanted to come along on the
Saconi huntdown. The option was to stay where they were and join up later; they could walk to Lord Norton's, she gave them directions. Coddy opened a cabinet to show Adrian where to find flashlights. The place was theirs, he reaffirmed; kick everybody out when they became a nuisance—implying they would. Adrian and Johanna looked at each other, tacitly agreeing. Go on, Adrian told Sally; go find your man. They'd be up in an hour or two, get a lift or whatever. One of the mini-mokes filled with revelers and followed the truck out.

What happened next Adrian never regretted, but never wanted to explain or fully rationalize, especially to herself, except that everybody had a stock repertoire of fantasies they play-acted through in the dark theater of their imagination, improbable but not impossible acts that seemed nevertheless beyond one's scope or courage or sanity, requiring like-minded co-conspirators (sleeping with your father) and a sequence of willed coincidence you weren't likely to pursue. Still, given the moment, you could never be certain how you might respond, the fantasy suddenly and serendipitously there, clichéd by secret repetition and rehearsal or simply by popular desire, Eve's apple at your fingertips. Getting comfortable with the pattern, you could get yourself in a lot of trouble, but the opposing attitude, restricting yourself to know only
this
much about life and no more, was too boring for words. And so was workaholic Tillman, the Quixote of postmodern tourism, married till death do him part to a hotel collapsing flake by paint flake down around him. There was a popsicle's chance in hell she was going to play chambermaid and bus-girl for overweight suburbanites from Jersey. Or worse, Bavaria—forget it. But she wasn't the baby everybody assumed at first glance, she wasn't the hard-to-please little spoiled bitch (though she reserved the right). Tillman was totally occupied, burdened by incipient failure. Or exhilarated by it, she couldn't tell which. She understood that, she could take care of herself for nine days, then flee back to civilization and culture that wasn't so damn authentic, as in
not mine
, didn't make you choose sides, wasn't such a latent threat. Had she come all this way to see a man? Guess not, she'd have to say, realistically. It was not a great shock.

Someone lit a kerosene lamp then switched off the glaring overhead bulb. Weak light jumped restlessly around the room, spreading along its low gold walls, and then relaxed, diffused into buttery haze. The beachy outdoors chirred with insects, the noise combining with the sandy flow of what used to be music and was now a dull, flattened heartbeat, the mechanical pumping of the environment. Another
mini-moke loaded up and blasted away into darkness. Adrian went to the refrigerator for a second can of beer, recognizing one of her classmates from Barnard, stuck to the door. This girl, if you were a boy, any boy, you could stand outside the dorm and blow a lifeguard's whistle and she'd come down. Boobs that size probably convinced her even nature saw her as an object.

She sat down on a bench at the hatchcover table, thinking somebody should empty the ashtrays. She said hello with her eyebrows to the men sitting there, these two that the whole world knew on sight, the two others, attachés or valets or olés, whatever. Dealers, she figured out. They were engaged in disjointed rapport, unfamiliar slang that seemed to be about drugs, reliability of sources and levels of quality, like wired housewives discussing where they found their baby-sitters. They seemed fairly worthless away from their guitars, disconnected from the amps. Were any of them collectors? she asked. Mumble, mumble, over and out. One collected guns. One collected old lithographs of horses, birds, dogs. One only cared about grossing her out—he collected pubic hair he had shaved off all his conquests. All the cunts I've banged, he said in a mock-sensitive voice. Goonish hilarity. They were boors, philistines who had stumbled upon an abdicated throne and sat down. She looked across the room where everyone else was, flopped on cushions opposite the bed, loosely circled around a burning candle, oddly quiet and soft-voiced, doing something—drugs, what else—with a fastidiousness that amounted to reverence, but their energy was definitely lowering, like a paralyzing fog wafting through the room. She heard Johanna chuckle, deep back in her throat, with such rich sensuality that the sound rang with attraction, motivating her. If it was coke they were doing she wanted some, she had somehow gotten herself on a plateau and wanted off, wanted a foot up to the next level, wherever it was, whatever levity or sensa tion, and then they should get out of here, find Sally and her musician, a fresh mix of people, reinforcements with some intelligence or originality or at least
brio
, my God.

The sound of Johnnie's laughter seemed to pull one of the dealers out of his self-absorption. He looked over at her, then back to Adrian.

“Don't I know your friend there, luv?”

“I doubt it.”

“Isn't that Roberto's bitch I'm looking at. How'd she end up here?”

“Wrong girl,” said Adrian, standing.

“It's a small, small, wee, wee world now, isn't it luv, and that
Roberto is absolutely a crazy fuck, now isn't he? A big, bad bear,” the guy said, cackling.

“Fuck off,” Adrian said, and crossed the room.

She pulled up short when she saw the man sitting one over from Johanna, his sleeve rolled back, strapping his bicep with a length of surgical cord. Was this what they were doing! Centered on the floor between them on a breakfast tray were the needles, the candle, a blackened tablespoon, a snuff can holding a cache of bone-colored powder. Of all that she had seen in the city she had never seen this before; people she knew bragged they shot up, but not once had someone done it in front of her. She could only stare, fascinated and appalled—needles were nightmare instruments—nothing was more viscerally terrifying than having a dentist lean into your mouth with that gleaming filament of pain-tipped steel, its penetrating icy sting—but no one was dying, no one was winging out of control, no one was freaking. Just the opposite, like,
zuck
, peace, love, drool, googoo, an all-saints rodeo being held in the clouds. It caught her off guard, made her light-headed, her arms tingled, pushed a shard of anxiety from her lungs down toward her stomach. She crouched down behind Johanna, needing to know what her intentions were, did she intend to do this,
abandon her
, didn't it matter that they were together, wasn't there some small but necessary vow of loyalty between them? Whoa, girl, she prayed, more caution than plea because she was intrigued too, vice had its own piquant style, underworlds their sly dramaturgy, their covert plots. She wanted to watch, sit among the fiends and see what it was all about. People hunched forward like refugees, their heads lolling. The groans they made were like hums of sexual pleasure. She made herself believe she was being nonchalant and not intrusive. As she edged up closer to Johanna her skirt bunched in her lap and she felt a coolness ride up her thighs, the balding wretch across the circle from her had a generous view of her crotch but big deal, she could have been a nun on fire for all he noticed or cared. Johanna tilted her head back at a worshipful angle, as if she sensed Adrian's nearness and expected her to whisper in her ear. She did: You're not going to do this, are you? Shit. Johanna? But the needle was already home, jabbed in the crook of her elbow, the plunger nearly depressed to its limit, and Johanna, her face luminous, beatific, faultless and chaste, that trick of the demigoddess, put the emptied syringe back on the tray as if it were no more than a pencil she had borrowed, something to write her name in the air.