The Heavenly Table

32

AGAINST HIS BETTER judgment, Bovard had taken a taxi into town that night and had the driver drop him off in front of the Majestic. Soft and slothful Lucas Charles was the complete opposite of everything the lieutenant respected in this world, but, as so many men throughout the centuries have discovered, a contrary nature often proves the most irresistible. He promised himself, however, that this would be the last time. He was too close to fulfilling his dream — with Pershing now in Chaumont, there were rumors that they might finally be shipping out within the next few weeks — to ruin everything with a sordid scandal. So, one last dalliance and that would be the end of it. He bought a ticket at the booth and endured an utterly stupid performance by some inept vaudevillians who brought out a monkey every time they began to lose the audience. He felt sorry for the poor animal. It was obvious from the way he attacked a stagehand that captivity had driven him insane. As soon as the show was over, Bovard rushed over to the Candlelight and downed two brandies to rid himself of that brainless song the performers kept singing, something about life being as sweet as a cherry pie. When he returned to the theater, he found the crowd gone and the theater manager standing in front of the closed double doors smoking a cigarette. “I wasn’t sure you were coming back,” Lucas said.

“After that atrocious spectacle, neither was I.”

Lucas laughed, then said, “Well, I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it. Would you like a refund?”

“It’s hard to believe they get paid for that.”

“The Lewis Family is actually quite popular. Didn’t you notice? There wasn’t an empty seat in the house.”

“Yes, but—”

“Look at it this way. Did you think about your problems while you were watching them — that is, if someone like you has any? About the war, say? If not, then they did their job. Sure, those poor bastards can’t sing or dance their way out of a paper bag, but being so goddamn awful is part of their appeal.”

“But when an ape is the most talented one of the bunch, then—”

“Mr. Bentley is a chimpanzee,” Lucas said curtly. “Not an ape.” Although he knew that the five brothers who made up the Lewis Family were a stupid, vulgar bunch — and, Lord knows, they were almost impossible to deal with at times — criticism of any of the acts he brought to the Majestic always rubbed him the wrong way. For sure, he’d rather be booking someone with class, say, one of the famed Barrymores or the juggler W. C. Fields, but he did his best with what he’d been handed. He flipped his cigarette out into the street where it landed in a pile of fresh manure. “Come on, let’s go upstairs and have a drink.”

As soon as he locked the door to the room, Lucas began shedding his clothes. “Hold up,” Bovard said. “Let’s not get in a hurry.”

“Don’t worry,” Lucas replied with a smirk, “I’m not going to defile you. I just need to get this goddamn suit off.” He reached for a silk kimono hanging on a hook. Then he poured some Kentucky Tavern into two dirty glasses, and handed one to the lieutenant. It had a bit of dry lipstick on the rim. Probably Caldwell’s, Bovard figured. The druggist had found a tube of red in the nightstand drawer the other night, had it smeared all over himself by the time they tied him to the chair. “Cheers,” Lucas said, as he sank back on the bed.

Bovard sat down on the chair and took a drink. He was beginning to regret his decision to come here tonight. He looked about the room, the wrinkled sheet stained and crusty, the smashed crackers scattered on the rug, the leather whip curled up like a viper in the corner. The smell of a slow, relentless decay hung in the stale air, and he found himself breathing through his mouth as lightly as possible. Silence filled the room and he nervously took another sip. Bovard wondered, for the first time, how Lucas had ended up here in this tomb. He recalled something an uncle had once told him: “Vincent, whenever you find yourself in a situation with nothing to say, just remember that most people love to talk about themselves. A condemned man could probably forestall his execution by fifteen precious minutes just by asking the hangman where he hailed from.” And the truth was, he realized, he actually was curious about how Lucas had become overseer to an endless parade of debauched thespians, shameless comedians, and mediocre songbirds hoping for a big break. “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself?” he finally said.

The theater manager arched an eyebrow at the lieutenant, then looked into his glass, twirled the amber liquid around. “Sounds like we’re getting serious.”

“No, I just wonder how you came to be working here.”

“You mean at the Majestic?” Lucas said.

“Yes,” Bovard said.

Lucas rose up and poured himself another drink. “Well, I grew up in Meade,” he began. His family had been well off, the bulk of the money coming from a brewery and a canning factory that his grandfather had built from scratch. He’d always felt that he was a little different from other boys, but he didn’t realize why until he went skinny-dipping one summer afternoon when he was thirteen with a couple of older cousins. Their nakedness aroused him so much that he cramped up and nearly drowned in three feet of water. Lucky for him, they’d thought his erection was caused by a story one of them told about seeing a neighbor’s housekeeper through the fence one night in the backyard, sitting astraddle a drummer who’d been canvassing their street that day selling magazine subscriptions, pumping up and down on him like a piston while the moon shined on her round, white ass.

“That’s quite a detailed description for something you heard so long ago,” Bovard said.

“Well,” Lucas replied, “it was a memorable day.” Anyway, not knowing what else to do, he’d tried to fit in, even dated a couple of girls from the better families in high school, but it was hopeless. All he could think about whenever he was with them was their brothers. Sometimes the only thing that kept him from killing himself was knowing that someday he’d be leaving, taking his secret with him. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Lucas said, “going off to William and Mary.” On campus, he quickly became acquainted with a shadowy group of his own kind. They were so secretive and paranoid that they didn’t even acknowledge each other’s presence in public, but by the end of his first semester, he’d been to bed with all of them, even a fat one with a clubfoot and an addiction to sweets who lost his mind over the winter break and ended up entering a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. And then, one evening in the library, he happened across a reproduction of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and decided he wanted to be an artist. He dropped out of school the next fall, spent the next several years wandering around Europe, supposedly searching for inspiration. “Of course,” he told Bovard, “that didn’t make my old man happy, but he went ahead and paid for everything anyway. I think by that time he had things figured out, and was just relieved he didn’t have to look at me anymore.”

He stopped for a moment and put out his cigarette in an ashtray, then settled back on the bed again. “I was getting ready to board a train for Berlin with an Italian boy I’d fallen in love with, a street cleaner, of all things,” he said wistfully, “when I got a telegram that he was dying.” But by the time he arrived back in Ohio, his father was already in the ground, and Lucas soon discovered that the old patriarch, as sensible and prudent a man as ever lived, had lost almost everything investing in a rubber plantation in Bolivia that, as it turned out, existed only on a sheet of worthless paper. That was over eight years ago.

“He didn’t check it out first?” Bovard said.

“Well, he had lost most of his marbles by that time,” Lucas explained. “Old-timer’s or thick blood or whatever.”

“That must have been quite a blow.”

“Oh, it was, but looking back on it now, I suppose it could have been worse. I missed Giuseppe for a while, but I was lucky that the theater job opened up. I’ll be the first to confess that I have no skills whatsoever. By the time the taxes were settled and the funeral paid for, Mother didn’t have anything left but the house and some jewelry.”

They sat there for a while without speaking, and then, through the open window, Bovard heard some men passing by in the alley below. They were talking loudly and he thought he heard Wesley Franks’s voice among them. He stepped over and pushed the dirty curtain back just enough to peek out, but they had already disappeared around the corner.

“Something wrong?” Lucas asked.

“No, I just thought I heard a familiar voice. One of my men.”

Lucas smiled and pulled open the drawer on the nightstand. He withdrew the small brown bottle the pharmacist had brought over the other night. “Some of this will help you forget all about him,” he said. “At least for tonight.”

The lieutenant hesitated. He was already a little drunk. “Not too much,” he said. “I damn near missed reveille the other morning.”

Lucas spilled a little into both their glasses and they drank. Then he stretched out on the narrow bed and lit another cigarette. Taking a drag, he patted the empty place beside him, and Bovard thought of the ugly slattern in the hotel room in Columbus. She had done exactly the same thing. Lucas blew smoke rings at the ceiling while he watched the lieutenant fumble with the buttons of his uniform. After dropping his pants, Bovard happened to glance over at the dead actor’s face on the wall, and was suddenly stricken by his merry, eternal gaze. Evidently, the old boy was still having a ball when he had posed for the poster. Bovard stared back at him for a long moment, vaguely wondering if he had been up to this room, too, then stepped unsteadily to the edge of the smelly mattress. Time seemed to slow down, and he thought of Odysseus’s men, drugged by the lotus-eaters. Perhaps, he thought dreamily, if he survived the war by some quirk of fate, he and Wesley could settle down on an island somewhere in the Aegean Sea. They could become simple farmers or fishermen, live in a stone house filled with golden sunlight. He heard Lucas sigh, felt a hand come to rest on his leg. His mouth felt dry, and the last thing he remembered was wetting his lips with his tongue.

In the middle of the night, he awoke feeling as if he had been wrapped in gauze, his head as dull as a wedge of cheese. Lucas had rolled off the bed and lay passed out on the floor. He dressed hurriedly, and then, after taking one last glance around the shabby room, made his way down the dark stairs. He found a cab parked at the corner of Paint and Second, and had the driver let him out a block from the foggy camp entrance. As he sneaked past the three sleeping guards, that stupid song comparing life to a fucking pie started up in his head again, but now it didn’t sound quite so bad. In fact, he was humming it softly to himself a few minutes later when he tripped over a boot that some bastard had left in the aisle of the barracks and damn near broke his neck.