It was all too much for Duffy. He considered climbing over the rail and splattering himself on the hotel marquee or at least vomiting into the parking lot. Instead he wept. There was nothing he hated so much as to be where he was among the dirty-smelling rivulets of the Gulf of Mexico.
Very shortly, as he knew, the phone would ring and they would come for him. He was dining that evening before his reading with a professor from the university. And also, it seemed, with the professor's entire overextended family, wife, children, in-laws, all visiting from Mrs. Professor's homeland, wherever that was, a land of healthy palm trees and subsisting folk. The professor had proposed to bring them all. Would it be all right? Sure, Professor, Duffy had assured him. A pleasure!
Before going out, he cut himself on the cord that secured the lock of the minibar, scattering small gouts of blood on the carpet and his television screen. He tried to ease the flow with cold water from the bathroom tap, but the tiny wound kept bleeding. He bent to drink from the faucet; the water tasted of baitfish and the Confederate dead. In desperation he wrapped a wad of toilet paper over his finger. Finally, as he knew it must, his telephone rang. He cringed. In desperation he took a sip from his liter of booze. Nothing good came of it, neither comfort nor light.
"Hi, Jim," the voice on the phone said. "Hank Rind down here. Got the folks with me."
At first Duffy could make no sense of it. But of course, Professor Rind was the man from Pahoochee State University, where he had come to lecture. He had signed his letter "Henry Rind, Head."
"Hello there," Duffy said.
"We're all here!" Rind said. "Can we come up?"
"Up?"
"Up to your room, Jim. The boys would love to see the water. They like to ride the elevator too."
Duffy was silent.
"No, really," Rind said. "They like to look out the window."
"Maybe they'd like it," Duffy said, "if I threw them out the fucking window. How many are there?"
There was no answer for a moment. Then Rind said in a merry voice, "Only two, ha ha."
Duffy was frightened by the force and vividness of his imaginings. He envisioned the professor's children, although he had never seen them. He saw himself pitching them over the balcony to descend into the hellish night, like bales of tea into Boston harbor. The image was so congenial it seized his troubled mind with a maniac's grip. He realized he had spoken inappropriately.
"Just a bad joke, Hank. A dumb gag. Trying to be funny again, you know?"
"Oh, I do, Jim. So what floor is it again?"
The place was of Moloch, Duffy thought, and deserved a rain of screaming children to incarnadine the tin pool.
"Don't move," Duffy said. "I'm not dressed. Stay where you are." He hung up and hurried to the bathroom, splashed some polluted tap water on his face and wrapped more toilet paper around his bleeding finger.
The narrow hallway outside was lined with trays of spoiling food that rested in front of many of the room doors. Duffy struggled with claustrophobia in the mirrored elevator. To accompany passengers on its funereal descent, it played them the Pahoochee State fight song.
At the lobby, the elevator doors opened with a plink on the Rinds. The professor was tall, pale and sneaky-looking. His wife, like his Otis another professor, was outrageously beautiful, silken-haired, almond-eyed, ivory-skinned. He had heard she came from an ex-Soviet autonomous zone beyond the Artaxes, where Nestorians and Yezidis worshiped Gnostic angels. Her name was Eudoxia; her smile was polite but disappointing. With the couple were Eudoxia's parents, a sharp-faced, eager old man and his lady, withered and fatigued. The two boys who enjoyed vistas were round-faced and lustrous-eyed, and Duffy thought one was making insolent faces at him.
"Say hi to our guest, guys," the children's father said. The children said nothing.
"Hello, everyone," Duffy told them.
They all went into the Petrel's Perch, which was the name of the hotel's nautically themed restaurant. The two young Rinds fought silently but viciously over chairs, each one landing masked tae kwon do strikes. The professor and his wife took seats at opposite ends of a rectangular table. Duffy eased himself in between their parents. The old pair conversed past him in French, which they seemed to be certain he would not understand. It was so.
"A pleasant trip?" the professor's wife asked Duffy. "One hopes?"
"Very nice," Duffy said, sniffing Eudoxia's sandalwood scent. Only ex-Soviets were so haughty and serene.
"Tell Mr. Duffy where you saw his work, Tanko," Rind urged his elder son.
"In Copenhagen, I think." The boy smirked. "It was hot. Like deliberately nutso," he added, glancing mischievously at his mother. Her disapproving frown half concealed delight in his insolence.
"It reminded us all of the German expressionists," Hank Rind hastened to say. "Like Otto Dix, maybe."
Duffy stared at him.
"Otto Dix?" He dutifully tried to remember the painting that had been to the Louisiana Gallery in Copenhagen. "Otto fucking Dix?"
"Sort of," Rind said uneasily. "Expressionist paratroopers attacking a woman. Blue sky, clouds. Soldiers in green cammies. Nude woman."
Antiwar period, Duffy thought. Ghastly stuff, if he said so himself.
"Of its time. Great stuff."
Duffy thanked him as courteously as he could manage.
"To leave a mark in history is good," said the senior Rind, the dignified arrogant old man.
"Damn right," Hank Rind said.
The children stopped shoving each other under their mother's gaze. Duffy ordered whiskey, and the thin waitress told them no alcohol could be ordered. Sunday in Pahoochee. Duffy was upset. Regardless, he had brought his flask from the plane. When the waitress's back was turned he took a slug from it, ignoring the Rinds. Although he was not quite aware of it, he had passed an undetectable line between inebriation and riot.
"Ah, fuck me," said Duffy the artist.
The children stared at him. The adults studied their kidney-shaped menus. The waitress, apparently a hard-living old salt, waited.
"Do you serve crystal on Sunday?" Duffy asked her. She seemed amused; it was a pretty tough town. "Sure," she said. "No alcohol, though." She turned and walked away.
"What is crystal?" the grandmother asked.
"It's what we use instead of betel nut," Duffy told her. "A related substance."
The émigré Rinds looked blank but were sensitive enough to know they had received a deeply wrong answer. Duffy, distracted, was picturing Eudoxia Rind nude and crushed by roses for her beliefs. Something about her name.
A new waitress appeared, a virtual child, wearing a little blue badge that said "Staci." Duffy noticed that the menu made much of crab. Crab salad merely, but there were happy crab caricatures with antennae and puns about crabs and claws and Claude and on and on. He began pouring whiskey from the flask into his water glass, holding them under the table. Staci came back and caught him but stayed gamely cool. Thinking somehow to reward her discretion, Duffy ordered the advertised crab salad. The Rinds ordered the soup. When the child returned she carried a tray lined with cups of thin, gruelish gumbo and a heaping serving dish full of iceberg lettuce and pale tomatoes and red-veined crablike stuff.
"Oh, wow," Professor Rind exclaimed. "What a lot of food."
Duffy grunted and tasted his.
"Looks mighty good, though," Rind said. His in- laws only watched him. One of the kids sounded a raspberry.