Something to Be Desired

20

The band was playing “Red River Valley.” Lucien sat with the mayor and the rest of the party, nearly forty people including the convocation from their sister city. Flatware accumulated with course after course of Henchcliff’s food. The little people were eating with their hands and radiating a rare and genial mood that affected the earnest citizens around them. Wick Tompkins was there too with the grin of a sprite. He tried their eating methods and praised them. Lucien called down the table to Wick, jumping his eyebrows in a gesture meant to break the ice. He said, “I have to talk to you.” The little people stared around in incomprehension. Their elder, who spoke English, cried out, “Party time!” with a hopeful smile. Lucien went down to Wick’s end of the table.

“Emily’s here.”

“I thought something was the matter with you.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Have yourself a couple of belts. You’ve got a speech to make.” Wick was wearing a striped suit, and his face was as blank as that of a bystander at an excavation. “I’m afraid you’re all alone on this one.”

“The trouble is, I still have some feeling for Emily.”

“No, Lucien,” said Wick. “You love Suzanne and little what’s-his-name, little four-eyes.”

“Speech! Speech! Speech!” They were clapping their hands and repeating the imprecation while looking straight at Lucien. He returned to his seat and stood for a moment until it was quiet. Then he spoke of his town and his country and his life. He was not afraid of losing his listeners. He knew he still had them as he talked about children and the next world. When he sat down they applauded while the elder and his closest aides cried out, “Top brands!” with such merriment and accord and humanity that in it was a kind of sacrament between them all. Lucien couldn’t imagine where it was coming from.

When the meal was finished and the milling began, Lucien returned to the house and went upstairs. Emily was stretched out on the bed with her hands over her forehead like a cloth. He couldn’t see her eyes. “I hope that you can appreciate that I am coming off an extremely checkered year.”

“I understand,” said Lucien, aching with sympathy.

“Did the sad tale of W. T. Austinberry make it this far north?”

“Yes, it did.”

“A sad tale for all.”

“Yes,” said Lucien, shocked.

“I shot him with this.” She held up the pistol. It was a polished, thin, flat thing. Lucien felt a fleeting, mad regret that he hadn’t found a way of exchanging W.T. for Kelsey. Then he knew it was crazy. It was alarming to feel the desire to go on rescuing Emily.

She reclined on her side. He found himself staring. “And don’t imagine you’re the only one who wonders why I am back. I had a vivid, I’m telling you vivid, life among those special American people who cannot return to the country. It is a superb club composed of the most interesting people that our society produces. You ought to look into it. Membership usually requires doing something awful, but where is it written life is to be easy? We even had a couple of Nazis. Not that I approve. But they were gentlemanly in all respects, and more than anybody else in the group, they seemed to know how to dress fashionably in the tropics. You know? The rest of us were rolling up our sleeves and gleaming with perspiration. I can only imagine we must have seemed pathetic. But that life down there takes time to learn. As I speak of it, Lucien, I grow more and more nostalgic. Obviously W.T. didn’t fit into any of that. Till my dying day, I will see W.T. wearing cowboy boots on those beautiful beaches. And believe you me, whoever said the ones in the big hats are the premature ejaculators had that one right.”

“Why weren’t you tried?” Lucien asked.

“Some very good American friends found me one of those countries you can spit across, and we went there in a sport-fishing boat. And that little country was just full of people who couldn’t go back to their little countries. So I found myself in a society that was entirely less attractive than the one I had just left. But if it could have been proven that I killed W.T., it was because in his desperate, misguided adoration of me he began to behave just exactly as my husband had, though he never quite reached the heights of beating me, slamming my hands in car doors, selling my piano and all but kenneling me. In short, I have not had clear sailing. Do you think I have?” She was crying, her rage and grief showing all at once.

Lucien was tormented. He had to get out of there. He told Emily that he had to be at the spring by closing time and went out of the house, leaving her upstairs with the curtains blowing.

The bar was still nearly full of customers. When Lucien walked in, Wick cried out from a bar stool, “ ‘Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic and sore vexed. For ofttimes he falleth into the fire and oft into the water.’—Matthew seventeen.”

“That’s nice,” said Lucien coldly. “Everyone should read the Bible. It’s not getting the play in bars it once did.”

“Are you gonna stand there till you fall to China?” said Wick drunkenly. “Or are you gonna drink?”

“Drink.” Lucien sat at the bar.

“Lucien,” said Wick, “there’s a time to try and a time to fly and a smart bird knows why.”

“How true,” said Lucien with sarcastic tolerance. The bartender set their drinks down. Wick brought him into focus, then pushed some money his way.

“Excuse me,” said Wick to the bartender, “but you’re shitting in my wallet.”

“Why don’t you go home and go to bed,” said Lucien. Wick gulped his drink and stood up haughtily.

“I wonder if you know who you’re talking to,” said Wick while everyone looked on. “I’m currently starring in the life story of an elderly auto dealer, now appearing at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, which features endless laughter from a fortune-teller’s booth and other modern situations. History at its most informative. Do come back and see me in my dressing room. Free mints. Standing ashtrays. Others like yourself from the smart set. At the end of the play they pin a big paper daisy to my chest and hand me a piece of spoiled fish. The curtain falls to immense applause, mostly for me.”

He took one step and passed out.

Lucien walked around past the spring. It was now quiet, and he tried to imagine it as it had been when he was here with his father and the cloud of crows lifted from its surface into the sky. He thought of the poem where death leaves a hole for the lead-colored soul to beat the fire. And he thought of the days he floated the river alone, carrying a life jacket in his son’s size.

Lucien could tell from a distance that Suzanne’s light was still on, the windblown shrubbery turning its glow into semaphore. Inside, Suzanne sat beside a table reading. She wore a sweater over her bathrobe. “Where have you been?” she asked.

“You knew I had that dinner.”

“Yes—?”

“And Emily is here,” said Lucien. Suzanne’s eyes were so blank it was as if the optic nerve had died.

“Is she.”

“I thought I had better tell you that.”

“Why don’t you not talk about it, Lucien.” She turned her book onto its front.

“Okay.”

“But when you see her, remember how well I’ve been doing on my own. And no matter what, it might be years before I trust you again. It might be never.”

Lucien said, “I’ll take that chance.”

Emily slept naked on top of the covers with her purse next to her. She woke up when he came in but barely moved. The security light broke through the venetian blinds and striped everything. There was a light in the bathroom, too, and you could see half of the medicine cabinet and a wet washcloth hanging from the edge of the sink. Digital numbers glowed on the clock radio and it was very quiet. Lucien asked her to get dressed, and she stood up and started dressing; the stripes of light divided her body. Lucien watched.

“I’m in your hands, aren’t I? Especially if I like where we’re going. Because mystery is glamour and vice versa. That’s what courtship is all about. People court love — reach me those shoes — and they court death. All the big things are courted. Where are we going?”

“To get you a plane. I’m sending you away.”

“What if I don’t go?”

“I’m not sure. I guess the police will find you.”

“You absolutely will not hide me?”

“That’s right. I could sell the place and send you whatever it brings. I could do that.”

“No, darling, you should keep it. It fits you like a glove. It would be like defacing a painting to separate you from your sideshow.” He knew she still had the gun, and when she gazed at him, he felt her weigh him neatly. It was a privileged, eerie look at eternity.

They drove on until the starlight on the prairie showed the winding road like a piece of string. There were huge dry-land farms on either side of them where the wheat had been cut in panels of design and immensity. The cool night wind crossed the cropland and entered the sedan. Whatever it was that was happening to Lucien seemed as if it could have come from some source thousands of years or thousands of miles away.

“Do you understand that if you send me away it might be the end of me?”

“Yes, I do,” he said, and he felt suddenly uprooted, a feeling as violent as childbirth. Light jumped at them from the airfield, and a clamor of wind from the croplands filled the interior of the car. Lucien stopped. He got a dime from her and called the pilot. A light went on in a trailer a few hundred yards away.

“Do you remember when you came home from your broken marriage and your shattered wifette and made that wonderfully infantile gesture of paying my bail?”

“Why do you call it infantile?”

“Because I could perfectly well have paid it myself.”

“I thought it meant something when you let me do it.”

“It did mean something! It meant that the ranch would not be seized when I left the country because it was in your name. It meant that I would always have it to come back to. That’s how much contempt I had for you.” The flashing light from the airfield ignited their faces.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I should think you would be. But you’re not cruel, Lucien. That’s what sets you apart from the others. On the other hand, you haven’t faced much either.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

Lucien stood out on the grass to watch the plane take off. It started across the runway and swung into the wind. It was away in the dark when it left the ground and began to climb at a steady angle. In a very little time, Lucien couldn’t tell its lights from the stars.

Suzanne rented a car because she wanted to drive across Wyoming with James and let him see the Wind River Range and the Red Desert, where the bands of mustangs could be seen from the road. They would turn the car in when they got to Denver and fly home. She said she wanted James to know she was a western girl even if they spent all their time in the city. James hung around his father’s neck and kissed him goodbye and said he would see him next time. When the boy was in the car, Suzanne said, “He isn’t afraid of you anymore. That’s the best thing that’s happened. Weren’t you always afraid of your father?” She got into the car.

“I guess I was,” said Lucien, “but he’s long gone now.”

Lucien’s son waved back to him, and Suzanne kept her eye on the road.