“Aren’t you a little old for that place?” she asked Lucien.
“I guess I am,” Lucien said, staring at a smile that revealed three quarters of a century of cold fury. “I’m kind of chipper when I’m in a spot like that. What d’you think?”
“We’re talking about self-control, aren’t we, Lucien?”
I ought to pound this geek, he thought.
It was the perfect setting. Lucien sat with Dee at the first table this side of the closed-circuit television screen, an immense thing which stood huge and pale in the dark room. Along the wall were dark, empty, intimate booths, and they seemed as infested with ghosts as Mexican catacombs. The bartender put so much shaved ice in the blender drinks that Lucien never knew why his head was numb and his wrists ached. All he had to go by was mood swing.
“What in God’s name am I doing here with you?” she said.
“I couldn’t guess.” He stared in fear at his drink.
“Did I tell you how glad I was you were able to catch a few fish the other day?”
“No, you didn’t, but thank you.”
“So this is love.”
“Well, it’s very nice, isn’t it.”
“So this is your capital F love.”
“No, frankly, it’s not. But it has a nice side. Barkeep, may I have a black olive?”
“For your margarita?”
“Precisely.”
The bartender arrived and dropped the olive from about two feet right into the sno-cone.
“Thank you,” said Lucien, staring straight at him.
Dee was actually pretty, except that, to Lucien, her neck seemed a little strong, a little sculptural. A blue vein crossed it like something hydraulic. Perhaps if her head had been a trifle bigger … Then everything else would have been out of whack. Lucien had been through this before: change shoe size, hollow the ankles a bit along the tendon line, rotate the ass a few degrees north. After that you might as well load it out in a wheelbarrow.
“I ran into my old math teacher. She was cruel and made me feel old.”
“I’ve got a good buzz now.”
“I hadn’t been doing anything wrong, and she kind of nailed me.” Lucien watched her with a wary gaze.
“Le buzz magnifique!” Dee cried.
“So as to what you’re doing here, I don’t know and I don’t care. This old broad made me feel like a bum waiting for his heart to blow up in some bus station.”
She stared at Lucien for a long moment.
“Say my name.”
“Oh, darling.” Lucien felt panicky.
“ ’Cause you don’t know the goddamned thing, do you. What do you take me for, a Kleenex?”
Lucien made a smile. It looked right and understanding. It looked okay. He thought if dismounting were given the same importance in sex as it is in horsemanship, this would be a happier world.
“Stay right there,” she ordered him. “Don’t move.”
She went to the bar and had a word with the bartender. He leaned on the hand that held a towel. From Lucien’s distance, the bartender looked like Father Time. He blinked while she talked to him, nodded, wiped at the bar suddenly, and she curved on back to the table.
“Don’t worry about a thing. I’ve got a late date with the bartender. He dearly loves to party.”
“So everything’s fine …?”
“Yeah,” she said, feeling in her purse for a cigarette. “Said it’d be about half an hour.”
“Dee!” Lucien shouted, but it was too late.
A Kleenex. It was astonishing that she could make a remark like that, whatever her bitterness. Lucien, with not a little delusion, attempted to picture her husband, the background of the bitterness. Her husband belonged, by all Lucien could tell, to that class of people, usually vainglorious cuckolds, who chainsaw through trailer houses, use dump trucks for revenge upon their wives and girlfriends and are eventually captured, lambs with anomalous records, by baffled authorities, accorded treatment for stress and released into a new world.
Lucien drove up the valley. The purling creeks glittered in the hillsides. It is still heartening, he thought, that the water goes on going downhill.
So he launched his drift boat again. He floated and smoked between the chalk cliffs. For a couple of hours he let the river take him away, toward the bubble of the ocean, toward teeming populations with women who looked like they came from Egypt, who did not seem to have been raised on pancake mix. For a while he felt the nation and its people coming to him, and then he dragged the boat out on a gravel bar, spooking eight fledgling ducks whose takeoffs failed. They pinwheeled into the reeds and disappeared.
I am a family man, thought Lucien, despite what has been stolen. He persevered in viewing himself as a victim.
Please send one tall bottled spirits of oleander. The north wind is tearing this joint up. Please send one sentimental war memorial heated by the sun and suitable for emplacement on coastal Bermuda grass. Am anxious to review above-captioned properties with canal and floating coconuts as pistol targets. Guard dog an unnecessary extravagance, also dismantle hydroponic tomato system as I am in all respects devoid of a green thumb especially as it applies to my own life.
Lucien thought, Possibly I should not have thrown out all the furniture. The wind has a bit of a run at things as is, don’t you think? Of course it has. It’s like being left in the barn.
He sat bolt upright in the cane rocker, an amber shooter of whiskey in his hand. The cruelest thing I did on my father’s death was to request “no keening” of my relatives. We could start from there. Sixty-six years of his wreaking havoc did not seem an appropriate background for some loud Celtic attempt to grease the boy to heaven. I’ll take my lumps; he’ll have to take his. If he’s going to heaven, it will have to be as an exemplary criminal, a figure of pathos, there to give the chiaroscuro effect to happy souls who have everything.
As to my child, maybe I am doing no better. Perhaps I should deal with principals only, phone it in without too much English on it, looking at myself with the instrument to my ear in the wind-shuddering front window and ascending foothills enameled on the darkness. Punch in this Yankee-Doodle area code, digits falling through the computer. If I get a boyfriend, I’ll sing “How’s My Ex Treating You?” with castrato enthusiasm. Calm down.
“Suzanne?”
“Yes?”
“It’s me.”
“What time is it?”
“About eleven here. I can’t see my watch.”
“Huh. One here. What’s up?”
“Are you having company?”
“What’s up, Lucien?”
“I’m afraid I’ve been rude to your lawyer.”
“Oh, so I’d heard. You’re going to have to stop that.”
“I have already. On advice.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m out at my ranch.”
“What time did you say it was?”
“Almost nine.”
“Huh. Must’ve dozed off.”
“Where am I?”
“What?”
“Where am I?”
“Lucien, I’m sure if you don’t know—”
“Remember years ago, New Blue Cheer?”
“Yes—”
“They still make that stuff.”
“All right, pal. That’s enough.”
“I was playing our old tune, Suzanne.”
“What was our old tune?”
“ ‘My Girl.’ ”
“This is news to me.”
“Anyway, I listened to it and it was good. It was clear and it was good.”
“Okay.”