Desire Provoked
by
Tracy Daugherty
For my family
Part One
CARTER, Adams’ boss, has developed a lively system for recognizing merit. Some years ago he returned from a holiday in South America with several insects in a box. They had been treated with a mixture of South American tree saps and preserved in cotton. Though they resembled common tree roaches, these were, Carter assured his associates, intelligent creatures: platula, a species domesticated for over five centuries by the Indians. Native to Peruvian rain forests, the bugs were originally attracted to the aroma of the Indians’ pipes. They would crawl onto smokers’ shoulders and perch there like parakeets. “The relationship of certain South American Indians and their insects parallels that of the American Indian and his dog,” Carter said. When a favorite insect died, it was coated with tree sap and worn around the neck on a string.
Carter bronzed the bugs and made them into pins. He decided to collect insects wherever he went: Carausius morosus from Asia, Bellicostermes from
Africa, Glossina from Saudi Arabia. He had them dipped in bronze, silver, and gold, like Olympic medals, and distributed them to his employees as merit badges. A five-year man received a bronze Dolichorespula Saxonia. Ten years earned a silver Polistes bimaculatus. The Buthus, Orb spider, and Ixodes ricinus were bonus pins. At first the employees of On-Line Information Systems reacted with distaste, but when it became apparent that Carter set store by the bugs, the pins gained value within the corporate structure.
Adams has more bugs than his peers. At work he wears the Ixodes on his lapel. Before leaving the office at night he carefully removes it from his coat and drops it in his pocket.
“Some decisions, Sam, I need to make without you,” his wife insists. Pamela is beautifully pale, Pennsylvania Dutch, a strict guardian of her youthful health and happiness. Her father, a Lutheran minister, told her nightly end-of-the-world stories when he tucked her into bed; she’s fond of overstatement. Often she refers to the topography of her body, the scale of her emotions, and the basin of depression in which Adams has placed her.
Last week, in a long-meditated move, she left with the kids and their fabulous toys.
“An investor and a father, who am I to say whether running from our wives is the problem, a result of the problem, or a symptom of some larger ill,” Adams writes his younger brother. Kenny is a session drummer in Burbank. “All I know is, we are collectively bored, we’re not in love — we’re no longer interested, here, in the pretense of love. Whether this makes us more or less civilized than other men is not for me to say.
“Our wives’ reactions have been standard. They claim that our defections are standard. In a way, our behavior has been entirely predictable. The violence of our daughters, of course, is something none of us could’ve foreseen.
“One positive note: to combat boredom we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on the job. Some marvelous work has resulted. The artists among us have been particularly successful. Last night in the town square a local acting troupe presented a charming skit, ‘The Return of the Black Death,’ in costumes entirely fashioned out of cereal boxes.”
Within days of moving into the new house with their mother, the kids have accidents. First a hot-water heater in the pantry ruptures, a small hole at the bottom scalding Toby’s calf. Then Deidre burns her eyebrows lighting the oven. “I was teaching her to help me in the kitchen,” Pamela tells Adams. “I didn’t know she’d already turned on the gas.”
Sometimes after sunset boys light fireworks in the field behind his house. Rockets glide through the grass. The boys scatter when Adams comes to the window, though he doesn’t mean to frighten them. He remembers the field he played in as a kid (Red Cloud, Nebraska, geographical center of the nation, latitude forty degrees) and enjoys the fragmenting colors. On cool evenings, as the frogs chirp, he stands with a glass of Scotch at the screen door, imagining the miles between his home here in Elgin and the house where he was born. He has never mapped that particular stretch of Nebraska — faded Indian trails, mistletoe high in the trees, a thin pitted blacktop.
Tonight, an unusually warm night in March, he is naked in the dark. He pours himself a Scotch, then opens a package of Rainbo Rolls. From the kitchen window he glimpses a man in a dark blue suit standing in the shadows at the gate. Looking closely, Adams believes it to be young Jordan from the Records Office. Tall, blond, large head and hands. Pamela once remarked at a party that Jordan would be a nice-looking man if he’d cut his hair.
What is he doing in Adams’ backyard?
Adams buckles his pants and steps outside. A heavy mist is falling. Hair prickles on his chest. He is not at all sure, now, that this man is Jordan. Too much paunch.
“Who’s there?” he calls, switching on the outside light. “Who is it?” In the time it takes his eyes to adjust to the glare the man is gone. Adams, barefooted, steps onto the grass, touching the barbecue pit as he pauses to look around. Charcoal blackens his fingers. His feet are cold. He returns to the house, straightens the half-finished map on his table, and picks up a pen. Sketching farm roads and freeways has always helped him calm down.
Pamela phones. “I told my parents, Sam. There didn’t seem to be any sense keeping it a secret any longer.”
“How’d they take it?”
“They were shocked, naturally. Wanted to blame you for everything. I told them that wasn’t fair.” “Thank you.”
“I tried, Sam, God knows I tried. Didn’t I try, Sam?”
“Yes. What can I say?”
Pamela hangs up.
He turns on the television. Lee Trevino misses a putt. Adams turns it off. He walks into the bathroom, smooths the top of his head in the mirror. He is fair-skinned, with slightly reddish-brown hair. Small shoulders.
He calls Pamela back. “Why don’t you stop this and come home?” he says.
“I was thinking of talking to a lawyer.”
“What about?”
“Irreconcilable differences.”
“The only difference is you’re lost and I’m not.” Immediately he apologizes, to keep her on the line. He mentions the stranger in his yard.
“Can you pick Deidre up at dance class?” “All right.”
At six he drops by the studio. Deidre’s flushed from the workout, her hair is damp.
“How’s my room,” she asks.
“Just as you left it.”
“Good.” She’s eight years old and thinks she’s on vacation. His son, Toby, who is twelve, seems to have grasped matters, though he’s been temperamental since he was ten and doesn’t offer his thoughts.
Deidre is silent for two blocks. Then: “I want everything to be perfect.”
“How do you mean?”
“You know.”
“Tell me.”
“When I come back.”
“Ah.” What has Pamela promised? “Does your mother say you’ll be coming back soon?”
Deidre doesn’t answer.
“Well,” Adams says, rubbing the back of her neck. “Everything will be perfect. We’ll see to it.”
“Daddy, what do you do?”
“What do I do?”
“At home. By yourself.”
“Oh. Well. Let’s see. I watch television.”
“Good,” she says. “That’s good.”
They have a night-light in the shape of a bear. It gives them strength — he hears it in their voices when they call. They roar on the telephone, fraying the lines between their mother’s house and his, over stretches of debits and credits. When he drives past their house at night, the porch light sears him to the bone. His tires go bald. He belongs on the other side of that light, a scarecrow guarding his children’s sleep. At home he replaces a burnt-out kitchen bulb. It illuminates things no longer there: a safe-deposit box, a bottle of Old Charter, a gold dish where Pamela placed her rings before washing the plates after dinner.