He picked it up just as the caller hung up. He slumped in the chair. He knew it was Suzanne. He would have called her at the White Cottage but he felt awkward about it. Maybe James was calling. Maybe he wanted to go fishing. Maybe his sunburn wasn’t bothering him anymore. Then the phone rang again and it was Suzanne. “I just called you,” she said. “What’ve you got on for this evening?”
“Not a thing.”
“Well, I borrowed a car from your secretary and stocked up for a few days. What about if I made us a nice pork roast and a cold beet salad?”
“I haven’t had it since you last made it. I couldn’t be happier.”
“Around eight?”
“I’ll be there.”
When he hung up the phone, Lucien clenched his fists in front of him and shook them up and down, humming through his teeth loudly. Then he rubbed his hands together and clapped them once, hard.
11
Lucien walked in, self-infused vigor taking shape out of old habit. The sulfuric steam plumes had lost the Dantean fugal quality with the coming of summer and stood out over the buildings and against the high dry blue sky with rare gaiety. It was still early in the morning.
There was a meeting of the Deadrock Ladies’ Bridge Club. All bluebeards and George Washington look-alikes. Things were quiet.
But Antoinette, the receptionist, had a weary irritated appearance whose meaning Lucien suspected.
“There was a death in Antelope Suite early this morning,” she said. “We couldn’t reach you at home. There’s some snafu about the arrangements. I’m afraid you’ll have to sort this one out.”
“Who is it?” Lucien’s hair stood on end.
“I got your ex a car,” said Antoinette as she flipped through the register.
“Who died?”
“Mr. Kelsey.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sakes, that’s clear to some tank town on Lake Erie.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I would,” said Lucien. “He was going to have his last drink at the bar with me before signing up for the enema training table. Drank a quart of Finlandia. I know the town well.”
Lucien went through the glass doors and into the fetid steam. Certainly Antoinette thinks that I am callused, but if I fall apart, what is to become of this place, and all who depend upon me? Heads looked up from the steam, and arms waved or offered favor-currying salutations, down the wavering poolside that took the press out of his shirts before he’d even started his day. He knew many here were afflicted, if only in their thoughts. Lucien himself was no different. He too was afflicted; lately nothing could have been more trying, more purgatorial, than the activities of his poor old dick. Apart from the obvious, it had begun making two streams during urination, one for the bowl, the other filling his shoe or starting him upon an unwelcome dance; often, too, it saved a final spurt for when it had been returned to his pants: things no hot spring cured. Well, we weren’t promised an easy road.
One of the employees, a local youngster whose cowboy boots peeped out from the trousers of his hot-spring uniform, stood outside Antelope Suite in shock. “Never seen one of these before, huh?”
“No, sir.”
“They say the first mile’s hell.”
Lucien walked in, gingerly followed by the youth. Mr. Kelsey was still in bed. An unfinished plate of saltimbocca with some julienned vegetables next to it, a nouvelle cuisine flourish.
“How in the hell he get this?” Pointing to the food.
“I’m not sure,” the boy stammered. Henchcliff, the chef, had pocketed some change here. Kelsey had fed himself very well and expired before his first enema. Mary Celeste would have canceled him when she saw that saltimbocca going by. Then Lucien would have had her to quiet, another day without the river, without running the dog, without excursions in the saddle, nor tonight’s dinner with James and Suzanne.
Lucien leaned over; nothing to confirm here beyond the open pores, the sharkfin lips, the unhearing ears, the full mortality beneath monogrammed hot-spring sheets. Kelsey had planned a hair-dyeing experiment. At all events, we must get these leftovers to the shores of Lake Erie, to the shadow of abandoned steel towns, to the windrowed fish and bird bodies of that storied Midwest.
“We’re going to need a shipping bag and the air-conditioned station wagon. Make sure Antoinette has contacted next of kin. Have housekeeping stand by. I’ll be in my office.”
Lucien walked the long corridor. He rang Antoinette. “Antoinette, re Kelsey: A. Get him embalmed. B. Get him a container. C. Ship him home. And when you confirm shipment with next of kin, verify the new billing address.” Lucien hung up and sighed. He buzzed again. “Make sure Mary Celeste is not still awaiting Mr. Kelsey. Then come in here for a letter.”
Antoinette appeared in about five minutes with a spiral notebook and pen. The last ten percent of her looks were still there to extrapolate the loss from. “This one is to the Chamber, attention of Donald Deems. ‘Dear Donald, Do you think it is right that I should be asked to offer a rate reduction for the sister-city delegation when, one, no one knows the size of that delegation, and two, no one else in town is making a similar contribution to the success of the show? See you Thursday. Write it down. All best, Lucien.’ ” He looked up at Antoinette. “Chop chop. Today’s mail.”
Lucien hated having to be this way with Antoinette. But in the first six months of work she’d gone on and on about her no-good husband, her car loan and her period. Then she left her husband, and every time she had a new boyfriend there was a renewed outbreak of cystitis and she’d whine on about the cost of antibiotics, conspiracies between the AMA and pharmaceutical manufacturers to keep the prices up, and so on. Endless bladder-infection chats had finally turned Lucien into a man who watched his topics.
When she was gone, Lucien sighed, “A cowboy’s work is never done,” and started through his papers. Lang and Hughes in New York had sent the new ads, and they reflected the greater specificity he had requested: “Sun ’n’ Sulfur” for the travel magazines, “Minerals Plain” for The New Yorker with a wide-angle of the sage barrens making them look like a grass court. He vetoed for the last time, he hoped, an overweight children’s wing because of the inchoate evil he felt in the presence of fat youngsters. The very young failed to see the point of a rich mineral spring; they ran around yelling Who Cut the Cheese and other zircons of new wit. Besides that, a day that began with the purchase of seamless gutters to keep from provoking a scandal left a lot to be desired.
He went through the back of the kitchen, where a refrigerator truck of fresh fruit and vegetables from Oregon was being unloaded. “Hello, Henchcliff,” he called out. “How is it by now?” Henchcliff, whose habit it was to dress on or off the job like a prison trusty, twisted his head quickly in the don’t-ask-me of the perpetually angry. But Henchcliff had the touch. He was under the brutal constraint of cooking only longevity food, like so many of the nutritionists who made the rounds of spa kitchens. Henchcliff could loosen up, pour on the cholesterol, salt and grease with the best of them. On his best behavior, however, he sent forth hundreds of dewy, steamy, identical, fructoid marvels through the double doors to the fruit bats around the spring. How they could eat in the steam was beyond Lucien; but he was entrepreneur enough to recognize that dining on row crops half invisible to one another in an ambience that anywhere else would have gagged them was part of the mystique, part of what they took home to their dense-pack satellite homes, in gratitude. Pink faces hung mysteriously over the greenery in the steam. Satisfied faces, thought Lucien.