Something to Be Desired

10

Lucien lit a cigarette. He’d almost quit; then the spring was a success and now he chain-smoked like a foundryman. He was back in Wick Tompkins’s office, secure in its club-like atmosphere with the reassuring clacking of the computer keyboard coming from the next room.

“I thank the Savior for taking my tired feet from the long road of loneliness,” said Lucien.

“You are full of yourself.”

“Well, they’re back.”

“Anything else you’d care to tell me?”

“Yeah, Wick, I was wondering how come I’m so smart and rich.”

Tompkins stared across a pile of uniform green books marked with numerous pieces of folded paper. “It must’ve been something you ate,” he said. “Where’s the little family now?”

“I’m letting them sleep.”

“And, for example, where are you letting them sleep?”

“I’ve got them at the White Cottage, the one with the cabana and wading pool.”

“Why not with you?”

“The truth is, I’m not sure the Savior actually got me off the long and lonely road at all. Suzanne is viewing this strictly as a vacation. I mean strictly. And my boy looks at me very remotely.”

“How long will they be here?”

“Couple of weeks. Maybe more. Y’know, if I pave a glorious trail for their good times. But I can’t just phone this one in. I’ve really got to be on deck. Besides, I’m in love.”

“With whom?”

“With Suzanne.”

“You’re joking.”

“No.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“No,” said Lucien. “It was love at first sight. Last night at the airport.”

“Let me just say this: I approve in a very nonspecific way. Will I be retained as counsel?”

“Yes,” said Lucien. “In due course.” Lucien was no longer hungry. Though he understood it could never last, he felt himself to be autocratic, satisfied and self-absorbed. For him, that made a nice picture. He got up. “I’m going to go,” he said. “It’s after ten. They should be up by now.”

“As you wish,” said Wick. “I have to get in eight billable hours in the next ninety minutes, then go to lunch.”

“You’re like a brother to me,” said Lucien.

“I’ve come to sense that,” said Wick joylessly. “Call me when the roof falls in.”

Now Lucien went to see Suzanne and James at the White Cottage. He came through the gate in the wooden wall that gave the place privacy. Suzanne was in a lounge chair reading, her hair tied back exposing the crooked hairline that Lucien had never appreciated but was one of the many things people always found pretty about her. James was knee-deep in the wading pool. “Good morning!” said Suzanne. She lay the book with its spine up in her lap. Lucien went to the pool, where James tossed water back and forth between his hands, nervously watching Lucien. Lucien dropped to one knee and gave James a small embrace.

“Ow,” said James. “My sunburn.”

Suzanne got up, and for a moment Lucien could still see her shape in the plastic cross-straps of the chaise longue. The book was a traveler’s introduction to the Seychelles. Lucien wondered if she had a trip planned there with someone.

“Pop,” said James, “want to see me do a racing turn?”

“You bet I do.”

James thrashed to the far end of the wading pool, inverted and shot back toward Lucien underwater. When he burst out, there was a sort of brief pride in his face as water streamed down it; and then it was gone.

Suzanne returned to her chaise with a glass of ice water. Lucien sat down a little awkwardly next to her in a kitchen chair, resting his arms on its back. “Maybe we could get someone for James and have dinner together?”

“No,” she said.

“Oh, all right. Perhaps another time.”

Lucien got no response to this. Instead Suzanne said, “I wonder if tomorrow James and I could borrow a car. I want to get some groceries.”

“That’s a handy little kitchenette, isn’t it?”

“He and I will be eating in.”

“Well, sure. You just ring Antoinette, who is my secretary. She’ll have someone drive you down.”

“I’d really prefer it if we had our own car.”

“Easily arranged.”

“Thank you.”

“James,” said Lucien, “am I going to see you later on?”

“Ask Mom,” said James nervously. Lucien thought it was time to go. By the time he got out the door, Suzanne was reading her book on the Seychelles again. When he closed the door to the gate, Lucien heard her exclaim, “Goodbye, Lucien! Thanks for everything!” Then in a conversational voice, “I guess he’s gone.”

He had dinner with Dee instead. Afterward they went to the supper club for dancing and power drinking. An illegal poker game started up and everyone got kicked out by eleven. Lucien drove Dee to her car, parked back of the bank.

“Tonight, sex is out,” said Dee.

“I feel the same way,” he said, and they parted. He liked her. Dee.

“Stop right there,” came the voice, soft, yet clear enough in the tall wooden bedroom where Lucien had slept the long night, the rain impelled horizontally at the panes of glass opposite his pillow. The hot summer lightning cracked into the smoky hayfields that surrounded the old ranch on every side. Lucien looked straight into the rifle barrel first, because it was closest to his head, then followed it back to the sights, the stock, then the face, as expressionless as a blister.

“Are you with one of the churches?”

“No,” said the man. “I’m with one of the women. I’m with Dee.”

But I was in bed by eleven, thought Lucien. And this time I never laid a hand on her. What is meant by this gun barrel? I imagine we shall see in the next few minutes. Times like these turn the happiest memories into affliction. Even the memory of Dee’s bright gaze withered before this weapon.

“Let’s get a bite to eat,” said Lucien, throwing his feet out onto the cold floor and silently promising himself never to touch a drop again. “My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.”

Normally an adroit cook, Lucien felt a cold breeze in his bathrobe as he shakily prepared breakfast, slivering the green chilies into the bowl of eggs, the Black Diamond cheddar, the scallions, the garlic, the microscopic, brutal bird peppers, the sprigs of dill. He reached around the gun to give Gale — that was his name — a smell. Gale nodded, just passing the product through to the skillet: no approval particularly. Gale was bandy with sloped shoulders and flat mosaic knuckles displayed against the wood of the rifle stock. Lucien felt that he would have to say a string of stupid things to get Gale to actually open fire. Gale was starting to get hungry. We must see our way humanely through this: Gale has lost his momentum, is wondering if his manhood is in question.

Lucien put the two plates on the table with glasses of orange juice and a porcelain pot of good coffee. They sat down, Gale with the rifle across his lap. Without emphasis, the gun had become silly. Gale made an attempt at equitability by eating fast: the bird peppers kicked in. Tears burst from Gale’s eyes and his face turned blood-red. He set his mouth ajar and stared in terrible thought.

“A touch of the vapors?” Lucien asked.

“—in the fuck you put in these aigs?”

“I’ll get you some water.”

Lucien hurried. He carried ice water from the refrigerator to the breakfast table, where he threw it in Gale’s face and confiscated the gun.

“Gale, stay right where you are for a sec—” Lucien racked open the bolt, ejected the magazine. There were no cartridges in the gun. He handed it back to Gale.

“They say you can set one of these off with your toe,” said Gale, morosely gesturing to the rifle.

“Not if it isn’t loaded,” said Lucien, wondering if this was not slightly at Gale’s expense.

“I seen on TV the other day where death is kind of a tunnel,” said Gale. Death? “But what few these folks that’s come back claim that first mile is hell.”

“Let’s not talk about death.”

“Your house needs a rain gutter,” said Gale.

“I don’t get it.”

“Well, I’m in the seamless gutter business. And I’m about to go broke.”

“How much is this going to cost me?”

“I’ll make it easy on you. You’ve got to have it.”

“All right, Gale, goddamn it.”

On this note Lucien drifted back: Dee is on the balls of her feet, on the seat of the sedan, saying “Ow!”; Lucien administers a spray lubricant associated with outboard motors, getting nowhere. They smell of mosquito dope. A wobbling fly rod indicates galaxies in the summer night sky. She looks fixedly through the rear window. Lucien reads the odometer and wishes every mile could tell a story. A garland of luck to previous owners, and to all those who like blondes with whiskey tenors, collapsed lungs or gas problems, as they are difficult to portray romantically, even to yourself; I didn’t know at the time I was buying seamless gutters. Lucien realized he was staring at Gale only when Gale said sharply, “Don’t feel sorry for me.”

After Gale left, Lucien made a short float on the river, watching rocks become ghosts in the green clarity. The river was consecutive loops of emerald where one could drift for hours and end up a ten-minute walk from the car. A squall stood over the first big bend, hanging within its own envelope of unearthly light. Water streamed from the blades of Lucien’s oars white as platinum. The transom of the dory lifted and fell in the choppy water as the river swept him under the thunder-head. Lucien folded the oars so that the boat drifted like a sleeping gull; he tucked his head inside his windbreaker and watched the river sweep him out of the little squall, onto the broads where trout dimpled its silky perfection and aquatic insects soared in the changed temperature. Lucien leaned back into the oars and pulled away from a great white boulder, then into a narrow channel, inches from the speeding willows, the bow of the boat a rifle sight down the eye of the current. He had another mile to float, a mile of stony water that took him almost back to the car. Now he was in a hurry to get to work.

He returned to the house and raced through his shower and ablutions, splashing on that fad of his school years, Canoe after-shave lotion. He selected his tie without the normal fuss: their stripes and colors offered the little aesthetic amusement he had of late. Then the phone rang.

He picked it up just as the caller hung up. He slumped in the chair. He knew it was Suzanne. He would have called her at the White Cottage but he felt awkward about it. Maybe James was calling. Maybe he wanted to go fishing. Maybe his sunburn wasn’t bothering him anymore. Then the phone rang again and it was Suzanne. “I just called you,” she said. “What’ve you got on for this evening?”

“Not a thing.”

“Well, I borrowed a car from your secretary and stocked up for a few days. What about if I made us a nice pork roast and a cold beet salad?”

“I haven’t had it since you last made it. I couldn’t be happier.”

“Around eight?”

“I’ll be there.”

When he hung up the phone, Lucien clenched his fists in front of him and shook them up and down, humming through his teeth loudly. Then he rubbed his hands together and clapped them once, hard.