Lorraine was right of course, dream prophecy or no, about Waldo’s infidelity, though she may have underestimated its extent. In truth, he was fucking around at every opportunity and the opportunities were far from few. Clarissa’s view of her father’s malls as magic spaces was one Waldo, had he known of it, would have shared. Since John had moved the home decoration business out to the new big one, Waldo was having a rousing great time, working some of the same turf Clarissa did, though at a different mall. He could have done with a more intimate business maybe than paint and wallpaper, but Waldo could work bedroom fabrics and bathroom fixtures like others worked novelties and lingerie, and there were always the food courts and the movie lobbies and the corridor outside his place of business which faced a bank of phones and a ladies’ room. Much of the traffic was off the highway, it was like meeting in an airport terminal, but his targets were less the transient crowds than the mall’s own working staff, a lot of them drifters themselves, migrant labor from out of town, just passing through. He’d hired a lot of them, with or without the telltale bruises on the inner arms that made them more vulnerable, and fucked not a few. He’d had some bad times, some of these gals being pretty tough cookies and a far cry from the sorority debs of the golden age, but mostly good times, hard, clean, invigorating, and without complicating residue. Quickies he took to a little office behind the stock room, a Vice Presidential perk (thanks, good brother John), but for true love he used Dutch’s motel, his old pal there having given him a key to use, asking only that he call ahead to be sure the room was free. It made Waldo proud to live in a place where folks went out of their way for you, just because they knew and respected you. Smalltown life: shit, you couldn’t beat it with a stick.
Dutch, who shared Waldo’s appreciation of smalltown life, was grateful to the paint-and-wallpaper man for taking up some of the slack at the motel with his impromptu midday affairs when otherwise business was slow, and when the room, even when curtained, was still pretty well lit. Like a clear stream on a gray day. Dutch now owned a piece of the new luxury motel up near the Interstate and had money in a number of John’s enterprises, including his cargo operations, but his little motel at the edge of Settler’s Woods with its Getaway Bar and Grill and secret Back Room was his real home and where you could usually find him any hour of any day when he wasn’t fishing. Dutch of course preferred his performers young, high school fumblers and nervous virgins festooned with zits, cocky college kids excitedly bringing home their newly acquired expertise, but this was prime-time pageantry mostly. For daytime shows you had to take what you could get. True, there was something drearily predictable about Waldo’s scores, but for Dutch, a movieseat connoisseur by now of meat fever’s finer points, there were never ever two exactly alike, and Waldo himself was always open to any kind of goofiness and generous with the money that perked these women up, losers mostly, or at least that helped them go along with Waldo’s games, which, depending on how much he’d had to drink, could be a bit rough but never mean. The most memorable of recent vintage was the woman with the colored dice tattooed between her tits and what looked like the Second Coming all over her butt (Dutch, silently, pleaded with Waldo to bring the woman over to the mirror to show him the sights, but no such luck), who told Waldo, in between humps, if he gave her a hundred-dollar bill she’d turn a trick he’d never seen before. Waldo, grinning expectantly, got one out. She rolled it up carefully, holding it up for him to see, then, spreading her legs wide to give him, and Dutch, too, a good view, slowly inserted it into her gash, pushing it deeper and deeper until it disappeared. Then she invited Waldo to try to get it out of there without using his hands. This was the sort of challenge the old sportsman relished, especially whilst recharging, and laughing his donkey laugh, he went after it with mouth, tongue, nose, cock, even his toes. “Give up?” “Naw!” He tried some of the gadgets that Dutch left lying around in that room (“No hands!” the woman giggled, the dice bouncing on her chest), but finally it was the simplest tool that worked: his own breast-pocket toothbrush clenched between his teeth. He worked the brush end in past the rolled-up bill and slowly eased it out of there. He unrolled it and what he found was a single dollar bill. “Haw!” he snorted in amazement and went fishing with his hands, causing the woman to whoop and squeal, but that C-note was gone for good. To Waldo’s credit: to his delight. He gave that apocalyptic high roller a good fucking after and tucked another hundred up her gully to match. Witnessing Waldo having a poke was, admittedly, about as much fun most of the time as watching slugs fuck, but Dutch admired the guy’s gutsy persistence, his bighearted determination to get it up, and up again. Too many wimps in this town got turned into grumpy house pets too fast, and as for their women, if they were having it off with other men more like men, this was not, for the most part, happening at Dutch’s motel, though there were entertaining exceptions, Daphne and her young well-hung mechanic most recently. Irregular showtimes, but most often between lunch and happy hour. Daphne’s ass had, to put it kindly, matured over the years, but then so had everyone else’s, Dutch’s included, he did not begrudge her this, especially given the exhibition the two of them were staging for him now. They went at it like animals, ravenous and wild, and Dutch, too, watching them from the Back Room, would often find himself up on his feet and pumping away like a madman, having to bite his tongue to keep from letting out a whoop when he popped his cork. And it was after one of these sheet-ripping furniture-wrecking sessions one afternoon that Dutch suffered a jolt of déjà vu that took him back a decade or more to the days when his motel was new, when old Stu’s Winnie was still alive and Stu and Daphne were going at it in this same room. It was Daphne who brought it up then, too, if he remembered rightly. Now, Daph and her grease monkey were stretched out smoking and Dutch had just zipped up and turned to leave the Back Room, go check on things at the bar, when, over his shoulder and on the other side of the mirror, he heard Daphne say: “Hey, lover. Listen. What are we going to do about the old man?”
Déjà vu, as Ellsworth could have told anyone who wanted to know, was French for “already seen,” and was properly used to describe that uncanny but illusory experience of feeling that something that was happening for the first time had actually happened before. It was in this sense that he had used it in his novel-in-progress when the Artist, leading his Model down to a riverbank and perching her on a stone there, has the sensation suddenly, as the Model leans forward to peer down into the gently flowing river, that he has witnessed this entire scene before, perhaps in a dream or a vision, but certainly at some psychic level profounder yet less concrete than the literal prospect that confronts him now. Alas, this was another scene largely obliterated by the Stalker: only the barren stone remained like an unoccupied pedestal, or something hard fallen into reality, inexplicably, out of a dream. Dreams and déjà vu often seemed to go together. The preacher’s wife Beatrice tripping or Lorraine in the middle of her histrionic nighttime theater often felt that they somehow “recognized” the scenes they were in, as though from another life, just as Floyd, slicing the throat of the redhaired faggot outside Wichita, had the uncanny feeling, and not for the first time in such matters, that it had all happened before, as if in a crazy dream he’d had. Or, weirdly, was still having. What caused Veronica to faint in church when Reverend Lenny quoted from the Second Letter of John the Elder to the Elect Lady and Her Children, if it was not this sort of déjà vu? When Opal remarked to Kate, back before the librarian died, that sometimes she felt like she’d dreamt her whole life before living it (she’d only meant to suggest how simple and predictable it all was), her friend had frightened her by replying: “You probably have some childhood story you don’t want to tell me, Opal…” That Kate. She’d also told Opal once that falling in love in a dream and then meeting that love in real life, an example of déjà vu often reported, if seldom believed, should not be regarded as an uncanny experience at all, and that those who did so held to an outdated, mechanistically passive theory of perception. “The percept is, always, a creation,” she said, or something like that. Over Opal’s head, really, and when she said so, Kate said: “We see what we want to see.” “Oh yes.” When Clarissa and Jennifer asked Uncle Bruce if he believed it was possible to fall in love in a dream, he said it was the only way he had ever fallen in love, all the women he had loved and even some of those he had married he had met first in dreams, and it was just a matter of recognizing them when they turned up later. In fact, he was still waiting for some of his dream loves to show up in the real world. Then a wink their way: or grow up.