Something to Be Desired

15

The four nannies came up from Aspen in a chartered plane. Lucien met them and helped throw their numerous pieces of luggage into the carryall. The pilot barely emerged from the cockpit to open the wing compartments. He looked like he had been through hell and seen all its famous inconveniences. He got back into the plane and stared saucer-eyed at the four ladies. The oldest of them, a girl of nearly thirty, wore an old prairie skirt and a T-shirt that said

ASPEN, COLORADO.

JEWS IN FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE.

The shirt made Lucien nervous. She took the lead conversationally and told Lucien that Montana was great, really great, she couldn’t tell him how great. Two of the others looked to be sisters, early twenties, Eastern Mediterranean-looking. The last was almost silent, and when she remarked on what a nice day it was, she did so in an Australian accent. She wore Zuni jewelry and loud lipstick, hot pink. All bore the same high-strung, peaked quality that Lucien associated with the end of civilization as we know it.

He took them to the spring, checked them in and followed from a discreet distance as McCourtney showed them their rooms. Each tore into the contents of her luggage, then closed the door. It must have been very exciting luggage. The eldest nanny leaned out past McCourtney and called down the corridor to Lucien, “I’m Freddy. Ring me up when nothing’s happening. I’m a light sleeper. And, you know, whatever.”

Late that night Wick Tompkins came out and asked Lucien to have a drink with him. They sat off at one of the glass tables where you could hear the voices from the spring and where you could imagine anything from being at sea to being at an old sanitarium in the Alps. Wick took out a cigarette and tapped it tight against the table, reversed it, tapped the other end and then set it between the edges of his teeth. He struck a match and gazed at Lucien.

“Remember that guy Emily ran off with?”

“W. T. Austinberry,” said Lucien. “I do indeed.”

Wick lit his cigarette. “Pretty-boy type.”

“Only compared to us.”

“What was your impression of him?”

“My impression? I don’t know. Kind of a harmless cat, y’know. But not so bad. Why?”

“Smart?”

“Uh, not too smart.”

“That’s right,” said Wick. “Not too smart.”

“What are we driving at, Wick?”

“Emily shot him.”

“Dead?”

“M-hm.”

Lucien got the old sick heart back. He just wouldn’t believe it. “Where is she?”

“Turks and Caicos.”

“What’s that?”

“A little island country.”

“What’s she doing there?”

“What else? Avoiding extradition.”

“How do you know this, Wick?”

“Why, she called. She needs five thousand dollars. I gather that she has plenty of money but is embarrassed temporarily because of sudden moving.”

Lucien wiggled his hand in the air for another round.

“Send it,” he said. Then he gave his small smile that meant the discussion was closed. Wick sighed in resignation and made himself a note.

“I love you, I hate you,” said Wick. “But I can’t save you from yourself.”

It was quite late by the time Lucien walked Wick to his car. Wick looked back through the side window with a sad, uncomprehending smile and drove away, red tail-lights flicking on and off tentatively as Wick tried to make out the exit. Lucien went inside, wondering what terrible thing Austinberry must have done to make Emily take his life; absolutely no one was giving her a chance. She was like a deer being run by a pack of wild dogs.

He picked up the in-house phone and rang Freddy. He had feared waking her, but she was unbelievably wide awake. “Give me five minutes,” she said. “Walk in and, whatever.”

Lucien went behind the bar first and made himself a Stolie and tonic. He walked out to the edge of the spring. An elderly couple circled in each other’s arms, dancing a musicless waltz in the night-blue depths like old and beautiful love on the rim of eternity. This is where we first made love, thought Lucien, my fugitive and I.

He sipped his way down the long corridor, carpeted for the comfort of wet bathers’ feet, to Freddy’s door. He finished his drink and leaned to set it next to the door. Inside he heard a vague hum like the sound of a transformer on a public building which has been shut up for the night. He went inside and there was Freddy, by God.

She was stretched out sideways on the bed, naked. The humming came from a gadget she had clutched to her genitals; her head hung upside down from the edge of the bed. She opened her mouth wide and indicated its dark center with the long fingernail of her one free hand. You won’t have to ask twice, thought Lucien, quickly undressing. He stepped over to Freddy and she manipulated him rigid without turning over. Lucien braced his knees on the mattress edge either side of her upside-down head. She stretched her tongue out far and wide. Whatever, thought Lucien mirthlessly, and slid himself all the way down her throat. He was able to glide freely in and out before her thrilling epiglottal clench drove an orgasm up through him. He fell forward on his hands to steady himself through the spasms; and heard the heated giggling from underneath. In a moment he dragged himself from Freddy as her glistening mouth closed in a kind of backward kiss. He went down on his knees and peered under the bed. There were the three little faces of the Aspen nannies.

“Just what sort of people are you?” he asked.

He woke up the next morning, made breakfast and brought it back to bed with him. This morning he let Sadie get in bed with him. That was a Sunday morning privilege and ceremony, when he would read the previous Sunday’s New York Times. Sadie always spotted the plastic mail wrapping and knew it was her day. Today was Thursday and Lucien had gotten four days behind; but Sadie didn’t know that, so today she got bed privileges and finger-held fragments of bacon and egg whites. People wondered why he didn’t build a better home to go with his new prosperity; but this old house suited Lucien fine. It was two ranges of hills from the hot spring, an increasingly important factor of insulation.

He cradled the phone against his shoulder, scanned “The Week in Review,” and dialed Antoinette. “Anybody looking for me?”

“The coroner’s office.”

“The coroner’s office …”

“They want to know what to do with Kelsey.”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Lucien, grabbing the phone in his hand. “Wait a minute,” he shouted. Sadie jumped off the bed. “Call the coroner back and tell him you talked to me. Tell him I said there was no such fucking thing as Kelsey. You got that? Just tell him so he knows: There’s no Kelsey.” He hung up and waited until his breathing was normal before he went back to his paper.

As luck would have it, Turks and Caicos was in the paper. Apparently it was a cluster of islands in the eastern Bahamas. Apparently it was all beaches and banks where dope dealers and Vesco types stored their money. There was a picture of a palm-shaded beach with a lethal-looking cigarette boat in the foreground and a modern slab of a bank in the background. Lucien knew Emily’s taste, he thought, enough to think she’d find this beach scene tacky and shallow. It saddened him to imagine her hurrying up the crushed coral walk and pushing through the plate-glass door to the air-conditioned room that held the five thousand he’d sent.

He got up to dress. Sadie jumped on and off the bed till he looked over at her and she stopped. He really didn’t know how to dress; whether to dress for his guests or to dress for the plumbing repairs he had to make on the mixing valves beneath the spring. Maybe a flight suit to symbolize either getting out of town or aiding Emily in her banking would have been on the nose. Maybe a diaper.

· · ·

The mail contained an eight-by-ten envelope from Wick Tompkins. Now, this was suspicious. Lucien hardly ever knew Wick to use the mail to him. Wick’s hand deliveries of trifling papers were part of their life together. The contents of the envelope were simple and eloquent: a Uruguayan police photograph of W. T. Austinberry with a bullet hole in his left eye socket. The face had been scrubbed free of blood, the right lid tucked in place. The horrid gap nearly obscured the identity of Austinberry, but somehow the vaguely cowboy Scots-Irish face remained his.

Lucien went to the phone.

“Where did you get the picture?”

“The police here in town.”

“What were they doing with it?”

“Helping verify who it was.”

“Well, it’s him.”

“It sure is. Wouldn’t you venture he’d kind of lost his looks?”

“I’d like to know what he did to deserve it, Wick. That’s what I’d like to know.”

There was a long pause.

“Lucien,” said Wick. “Don’t do this to me.”