Wakefield (28 page)

Wakefield doesn't want to think about it. He can get a little paranoid when he's stoned. He's heard of “skill gatherers” before, but he doesn't know why they prefer serving the rich rather than helping out the needy.

Sandina leads him to a wooden bench in the garden. He watches as she takes off her clothes, and he does the same. She's tan and toned, and unabashed by her nakedness. She takes his hand, examining his worm-white frame, and pulls him into the sauna, where they are enveloped in fragrant heat.

Sandina pours a dipper of water over the hot rocks and sits next to him, almost invisible in the aromatic steam. She hands him a cold glass; he grips it, lifts it to his lips, and takes a sip. It's champagne.

“Having fun yet?” Sandina asks.

Fun. What a concept. What a word.

“My husband never understood fun. In Switzerland they call it something that translates as ‘cozy relaxation,' something you do with friends at the ski lodge. Fun is a little more hard-edged, I think,” she says, taking hold of his edge, which grows hard under her touch.

“European fun is never close enough to surrender,” she continues even as she gently plies his firmness. “It's more like a desperate pause between the wars, a release from immovable givens.”

So this is American fun, West Coast style. He's lazing in a river of sensuality, his body a lute or guitar, champagne bubbles playing over his cartoon-figure head. Sandina's hand caresses, cajoles, and his hands cup her breasts. Did she straddle him as suddenly as he thinks? Wakefield shudders, feels her grip, is within the moist darkness of woman, and he waits there, listening. He feels her interior rejoice, and she holds him there until Wakefield, who has never stayed in a sauna this long, begins to feel faint.

The air outside is cold. When he reaches for his clothes, she takes his hand and sprints toward the house, where she wraps him in a fluffy robe. She wraps herself in a short kimono, then disappears into the bathroom. He sits on the paisley futon and picks up the book lying there. It's called
The Art of Bathing
.

Reading it he realizes there is a lot to learn. The Japanese custom involves immersion in very hot water and steam while being laved by professionals trained in massage and music. Even the simple act of pouring a bucket of water on one's head is an art they've developed to poetic ecstasy. The Finnish subdue winter with a ritual of steam, snow, and hot springs. On leaving these womblike environments, they enjoy being birched with green saplings. The thrill of hot water followed by fresh stinging pain is also a favorite of Russians, who consider birching a form of purification. There's a photo of a plump, pink man emerging from a bath and a birching, glowing with physical and spiritual health. In Hungary the baths are like coffeehouses; men lounge about wrapped in towels, reading the newspapers and playing checkers.

Many serious bathing cultures use aromatic herbs to increase the headiness of the experience. The women's baths in Islamic countries, the hammam in Morocco, for example, are veritable herbariums that induce pleasant hallucinations through a subtle blending of aromas and perspiration. “You cannot imagine,” the author of
The Art of Bathing
exclaims, “the arabesque interiors! The perfumes!” Wakefield cannot. He can barely read; his eyes keep shutting postorgasmically, his mind subdued by pleasure. Sandina finds him nodding off and pushes him gently down on the futon, where he sleeps.

“Aw, Sandina, he's just a tourist!”

Wakefield opens his eyes. He's lying on the futon, covered by something angelically soft. He must be dead. He runs his hands over the material and it makes him want to sleep again. Sitar music is playing in the clouds. But then he hears Sandina say, “Don't be such a square, Beth.”

Through the bedroom door he can see Beth sitting on the butcher-block counter in the kitchen, bringing an Inca Cola to her lips.

“I'm not square! I thought we had a rule! No tourists or monks!”

“He's not a tourist, Beth. He's here for a reason.”

“To you, Sandina, everybody's here for a reason.”

Time to intervene. Wakefield rises and looks around for his clothes. He finds them draped over a trunk at the foot of his nest. His nakedness covered, he approaches the kitchen and coughs.

Both women turn toward him.

“I don't know what to say. I should know what to say, but I don't.” He realizes that he's still stoned, a little drunk, and his body tells him that he's just had an extraordinary sexual experience. Of course he doesn't know what to say.

“Say thanks,” grimaces Beth, “and then leave before my dad gets back tomorrow.”

Sandina smiles enigmatically. “She's probably right. But I should be the one to say thanks. Thank you for letting me use you, mister.”

“Oh, freakin' jeez, you're disgusting, Sandina.” Beth leaps off the counter and heads for the kitchen door. “I'm never giving directions again to anyone. I'm going to Ella's to study.”

“Black History Month. Good luck,” Wakefield calls after her.

Paradise, it turns out, is only temporary. Sandina hands him a bar of soap wrapped in a banana leaf, tied with red silk. “Finely milled eucalyptus-oatmeal soap, handmade by my very best friend.”

Wakefield kisses her hand, slips the soap in his pocket. Oh, you lucky Devil.

The road that Wakefield takes out of Eden climbs and curves and doubles back on itself, refusing to conform to any traditional narrative structure. He drives all night up the coast, startled occasionally by lights flashing in the dark ocean, deer running across the road. Near dawn he stops to rest for an hour in the car, his sleep accompanied by the pounding of the surf six hundred feet below.

He arrives late the next afternoon in the northwestern city where it always rains and where he is expected by the mysterious art collector. They've put him up in a classy joint; two valets rush to park his car. Moments later he's sipping his customary cocktail and studying the fauna in the opulent lobby. This is the best, he muses: best hotel, best fauna, best time in America. The cigar smoke is Cuban, the money is high tech, the languages are multi. Women in splendid evening gowns and men in tuxedos float up to the mezzanine, and couples in expensive jeans and Italian leather lounge in the bar. Everyone looks as though they train in gyms, climb mountains, tan by lakes, and rub themselves with expensive lotions. The women glow like security lights outside of million-dollar homes; the men walk erect, chin forward, like rising stock.

Still, this is not Typical, where the new lies clearly on the snowy fields like the outline of a crime victim on a quiet street. The brash, impatient new wealth of the West is struggling with the past, a past that's not so old either. Here and there the old rich sprawl in armchairs, wondering where the young rich came from. There's a fleshy gentleman sitting with his mistress, an ex-stewardess he's kept for seventeen years. Her mouth is turned down, her eyes red rimmed from years of waiting by the phone. He is doughy, gone to seed, his money is still in industrials, his kids don't speak to him. Wakefield can see this, and more. The two have a reservation at the Georgian Room for the forty-eight-dollar steak and the fifty-eight-dollar macadamia-crusted rack of lamb, and they will get roaring drunk on champagne, after which his credit card will be rejected and he'll have to wire his Bahamian bank for cash. Then they will climb into the turned-down bed with the fine linen sheets and have perfunctory sex. In the morning she'll be gone, and the note she will leave by his balding head will read “Enough is enough.” When the old fellow sees it he'll take a long bath, put on the heavy cotton robe provided by the hotel, take out his shiny Beretta, and blow out his brains. Good-bye, whispers Wakefield, turning away from the vision.

Drifting in on an effluvium of French perfume, two dizzying fifteen-year-olds examine the oyster of the world they are about to consume with cruel glee. Then the famous host of a TV game show waddles in wearing his signature tennis shoes. A camera crew is not far behind, fronted by a reporter shaved as smooth as a dental mirror. A group of Russians holding grande double mocha cappuccinos from Maxdrip bubble over with joie de money. They have arrived. Ah, dream city of the Eternal Chip!

Wakefield has been in a lot of great hotels over the years, but he's never seen anything quite like this finely restored grand dame, home to a new generation of gold rushers. He can literally smell the money. There isn't enough stuff in the world to spend it on.

After rising next morning from the angel cloud of a heavenly baldachin bed, Wakefield opens the glass door to the balcony of his magnificent room overlooking the bay. A Japanese fishing boat is idling in the blue; sky and water are touched by the rising sun; a mountain peak topped with snow looks like Mount Fuji. Dense forests climb to the snow line. Here and there a plume of smoke hangs like a question mark over the trees.

On another balcony, a big-bellied man wearing blue shorts with red anchors on them is struggling with a fishing rod. His equally rotund wife comes to his aid in shorts and white brassiere. She wraps her hands around his and pulls. The line is taut; something in the water is putting up a big fight. Wakefield sees the slick white skin and gills of a small shark twisting at the end of the line. Inch by inch, they bring the creature halfway up to the balcony. The man's belly strains against the railing like a hairy balloon about to burst. The wife groans, their four hands gripping hard, and then the line snaps, whipping up through the air inches from Wakefield's head, and the shark plunges back into the sea.

Only a few years back this grand hotel had hit rock bottom and was known only for providing guests with fishing reels and bait so they could fish out of their windows; many guests left fish behind to rot, so the management now discourages the practice, but some of the old-timers, the ones who can afford the place, still fish anyway.

Downstairs the concierge tells Wakefield that he is very lucky to see the sun. “It's been raining for ninety-nine days,” he quips, “twice as long as it took to break Noah.” Taking advantage of the fine weather, Wakefield strolls along the waterfront.

Before the new economic boom this had been a place with rough characters about, dim bars, working girls, anarchist bookstores. None of that remains: no flophouses, no indigents, no winos, no whores, no sailors—pretty boring. Bright eateries crowd the water's edge serving “fusion” cuisine: Asian simplicity, fresh herbs, poached not fried, fine wines, French desserts. When Wakefield was young and poor his friends, who like himself were poor, despised luxury. He should feel sad about the loss of idealism, but he doesn't. These days he enjoys good food and other expensive pleasures.

In the restaurants on the waterfront young waiters recite the poetry of the menus, the structure of ingredients in each dish growing ever more vertical, each layer complementing the next with perfect esthetic restraint, each special on display like an Amsterdam whore ready to be pointed at with ivory chopsticks. Maybe a clue to the authentic life Wakefield has pledged to find, his
real
life, lies in his youth when, aroused by concealment, everything was bigger than himself. Hiding, he had made himself even smaller, leaving more room for everything that was bigger, more room in the overcrowded human universe. That the world is full of hiding places was an invitation to withdraw from the overinflated ambition of human expansion. It was also a refuge from the malignancy that he felt was pursuing everyone he knew. He was like the acolyte of a monastic order that called its adherents into hiding from the moment they were born. Perhaps this hidden order that he had always imagined was not imaginary at all. He was a bona fide member.

He returns to his freshly made-up suite and resolves to face the e-mail he's been avoiding since he drove away from Wintry City. Amid the abundant spam he spots a message from Maggie. “Thank you for this wonderful warm feeling that hasn't left my body,” she begins. “Everybody at The Company is giving me funny looks. The House of the Future hasn't yet returned my shoes. I think it's because you took that glass. PS: maybe we should have used a condom …”

No, please, not that. Wakefield flashes forward years hence: he's standing in front of another audience, having a public debate with Maggie about
their
child. No, he can't imagine it. He replies anxiously: “Are you late?”

It's funny how quickly well-being can dissolve when the universe singles you out. Suddenly everybody and everything is late and the only thing that will right the world and keep it spinning is resumption of Maggie's menstrual flow. If Maggie gets her period, the earth will correct its erroneous orbit and head away from the meteor, disaster averted. But what if—and here Wakefield has a truly frightening thought—one determined, wayward sperm was actually the shot he's been waiting for? One shot from the Devil's pistol could start a new life for him, for Maggie, for the poor child they may have created. “You better not, Your Scabrous Majesty, or the deal's off, totally off!” Wakefield shouts out loud. He doesn't know exactly what he means by this threat; maybe he's offering to die rather than force another life into being. Wakefield stares at his computer screen, whispering, almost praying, “Please, please, no.” Then Maggie responds by instant message: “Strange,” writes she, “I
was
late, at least six days, but my period started at the exact moment I got your message. Had to run and take care of the sudden flood. Are you happy? Were you scared?”

Immensely relieved, Wakefield pumps his fist victoriously into the air. “Scared,” he writes back. “Weren't you?”

Thank God or the Devil, he's been given another chance, released by Maggie's flood like Noah from the chores of earthbound husbandry.

The demonic conference on the New World Order on Mount Eumenides is still dragging on when the Devil decides to return. By the looks of it, he hasn't missed much, just a bunch of boring lectures about new technologies of reproduction and the streamlining of data collection. But he's interested in the workshop on the psychology of humans. The consensus of opinion, as far as he can tell, is that demons need no longer be concerned with human doubts and misgivings. The primitive moral skeleton left by God inside his toys has become an annoyance that gets in the way of the vast transformations ahead. The demon leading the workshop, dressed in a doctor's white coat and with a stethoscope around his neck, puts forth the proposition that “humans themselves are eliminating their need for guilt and redemption through the invention of drugs that make all such concerns and all the talk about them unnecessary. Our job is to ensure their success by opening our vast stores of knowledge to the best researchers.”