Something to Be Desired

19

By five Lucien was at the airport with the mayor, the city officials of Deadrock, a handful of community leaders and prominent ranchers, a Production Credit Association man, a trio from the Chamber of Commerce, one woman from the Better Business Bureau and the Deadrock High School band. Lucien still did not have the correct name of the sister city, but its delegation stuck out like a sore thumb climbing off the airplane. For one thing, they were tiny people and wore dresses or sarongs that swept the tarmac; you couldn’t tell the men from the women, and until one of them stepped forward at the end, there seemed to be no order to their arrival. They merely swept off the plane and moved haphazardly around the runway. One of the baggage handlers shooed them along toward the terminal. Once they got inside, an old man not much more than four feet high made a speech in his native tongue, a coursing of percussive notes across an unfathomable scale. A couple of the ranchers took it upon themselves to herd these people into the waiting cars. Lucien was not much help. In fact, the mayor studied him for a moment and asked, “Cat got your tongue?” Lucien shook his head quickly, then listened as the leader of the delegation from wherever it was said in perfect English, “We got jet lag. Time to sack out.” The line of cars strung along the interstate toward Deadrock and the hot spring.

Lucien watched the guests receive the delegation. Everyone was at poolside to observe the little people. Quite suddenly about half the delegation pulled off their sarongs; they were wearing cloths knotted about their loins, and they sprang into the pool, where they shot around like marine animals, hardly struggling but moving at what seemed an unnatural speed through the water. Some of them had larger breasts than the others and must have been women. Lucien used the house phone to call Suzanne.

“Hi, darling, I’m over at the spring. Look, I don’t know how long this is going to be going on. I think I’ll just kind of tough it out and stay at my house.”

“Have you taken something?”

“Taken something?”

“You sound as though you had taken something.”

“God no, I wish I had. I’ve just got my hands full here. Look, I’ll spell this out later.”

“I love you.”

“You do?”

“I sure do,” she said. “James is listening to me and pointing to himself and saying, ‘Me too.’ ”

“Oh, my lord,” said Lucien.

Emily turned off the television and looked at Lucien coming into the living room. “I just saw you with all those dwarfs on TV. What country is that, for crying out loud?”

“I wish I knew.”

“You can tell they’re foreign as hell,” said Emily “But that’s the first time I saw how you’d fixed up the spring. I mean, I expected a lot, but you’ve been a busy beaver, haven’t you?” She smiled at him fixedly. The room was filled with her perfume, a smell Lucien remembered as a fragrance favored in the big cities of Central America. “Have you turned over a new leaf?”

“Why are you wearing so much eye makeup?”

“Answer mine first.”

“Yeah,” said Lucien. “I have.”

“Well, it’s sort of a new me too. The best of the old and the best of the new. If you’re not crazy about it, you get a refund at the door.”

“At the door?”

“At the door.”

She went into the downstairs bedroom and began throwing things into piles on the floor. “I want to take a dip in my old swimming hole. Es posible?”

“Of course.”

“Well, that’s fine, because I do want to do that. Maybe later, after the dwarfs are sleeping.”

“They’re just small. They’re not dwarfs.”

“Shall we measure them? Where’s your sense of humor! Lucien?”

“You can have everything back,” said Lucien. “You can have it all.”

“You sound exactly like a man coming out of surgery,” Emily laughed. She looked ravishing in this off-center attempt to appear cheap or to be in disguise, which was more likely what it was. “Besides that, I just can’t figure where all this fits in. You’ve made so much of yourself.”

The moon came straight down through the skylight, and the pool was empty except for Emily and Lucien, who swam in its depths. “I want it like poison,” Emily said. “That’s how I want it and that’s how I’m going to get it.” Her silvery hair was almost invisible floating out against the surface. She tilted her head back and looked straight through the skylight. “After that, I want you to give me a room right here at my old swimming hole.”