“That’s not the matter with you now?”
“Here’s hoping,” said Lucien.
“Here’s hoping!”
“I didn’t mean that. I just didn’t want to jinx myself. I know we’re happy, a bit at least. I’m thinking, little steps for little feet. All I’d need is some jinx now and that would about do it.”
Lucien wondered about her work. He knew that there would be a certain lingering foulness about his enquiring as to her relationship with her employer. And besides, he was briefly bored by matters of sexual envy. It was like talking endlessly about the toothed holes in people’s faces through which they passed pieces of food. Finally, enough was enough, though the variegated impulses continued to leave a ranker scent trail than the most ancient jackal. In the end, one was put off by the body itself, a virtual Kelsey, suitable for donation to some godforsaken college. One wanted the brain, a pure sensorium, flying around without weight. The poor old dick was continually fighting gravity: making trouble in resistance, falling down the wrong pant-leg in remission. Younger owners each considered his a lordly shlong; but finally it is seen for what it is, a little maniac.
There was a bedside lamp, and Lucien wrote their initials in the light covering of dust, thinking, I do in fact love this girl. When she fell asleep once more, he got up quietly and went in to look at James. It seemed to Lucien that children took up great space when they were awake and then became so small when they fell asleep. James looked completely different because he did not wear his thick glasses. The odd way in which he hovered within his own clothes was replaced by a carelessness that relieved Lucien as he looked at the boy. It was as though James could someday emerge from his frightened self and go on and be happy and maybe through some as yet undiscovered process lay claim to the years his father misused. Lucien knew perfectly well that this last thought was completely foolish; but it gave him peace and he was able to sleep immediately, as people with self-respect are said to do.
Sweet is fleet. They could pick up and go. They were their own society. They could go back to Green Turtle and take the place at Black Sound. Lucien could even paint a little. James could collect hermit crabs out of the mangrove roots for bonefish bait and they could run down to Manjack and fish the flats. Or back in the USIA! In many ways that was an interesting job, all right, and he could get back to it before he lost his Spanish for good. Anything was possible once the center had been restored. Not that Lucien was thinking there were anything less than countless scars from the past, near and far. He thought now he could get over Emily, as he had seen her for what she was and she was out of the question, and she was gone. Obviously that all made him sad, but her chain of bad luck seemed something he lacked the power to break. If that was fatalism, then it would have to be. Nor would he brood about Suzanne’s interim love life. Certain things had become tedious, and watching himself start over again like a cat on perpetual linoleum was something he would do no more.
They had to get an ambulance for one of the nannies. She just wouldn’t wake up. She had paid off housekeeping to stay out of her way, and there were all sorts of food scraps from the kitchen that had to be cleared out. She woke up at the hospital and was vacationing again in a few hours with the Australian nanny, who looked like she herself would conk out in a matter of a few more hours. All the nannies were on some kind of marathon; two of them could take it and keep on eating and, clearly, two couldn’t.
Lucien drove his truck into Deadrock for a cortisone shot. During the long winter alone, he had actually gotten tennis elbow from self-abuse. Now it wouldn’t go away and he was accepting treatment. His doctor, of course, tried to have a discussion about larger health issues. Lucien scotched that.
“I’d like you to pay a little closer attention to your health. This is the middle of your life,” said the doctor.
“You got that right. And it runs about a hundred years in length with record-breaking happy stretches.… Pump that sonofabitch. I’m a working man with a family to support.”
Then he took a walk through the streets of Deadrock, retracing a few childhood paths, remembering places where dogs got him on his paper route, and seeing the fine big houses, as well as the small homes in which there was owner pride; the different buildings where his father had had offices and the small pharmacies where his mother had secured wacky prescriptions and home-permanent kits. There were kids running along the sidewalk, many of them the kind of reasonably comely youths in which an already typed and crude adult can be seen. He saw where he learned to play third base and where he lost a big fight with his best friend and where he made his first wages pumping gas and working for a roofer. He could still remember leaving an unfinished brake job, the sedan up on the hoist, to go off and try to be a cowboy in the hills around town. He stayed away from the house where he had lived with his mother. Was it like women and childbirth in that the pain was not remembered? He still loved the place and saw no reason that you could not live there and always be happy.
He drove back to the house. When he went inside, Emily was sitting at the table reading the local paper. “I brought you a coconut from where the trade winds blow,” she said.
“You did?” he said vacantly.
“I put it on your side of the bed,” said Emily. Her hair was bleached bone-white and only her eyes were made up. She had a thin, hell-bent air.
“So!” said Lucien in a tone of discovery. “You’re back.”
19
By five Lucien was at the airport with the mayor, the city officials of Deadrock, a handful of community leaders and prominent ranchers, a Production Credit Association man, a trio from the Chamber of Commerce, one woman from the Better Business Bureau and the Deadrock High School band. Lucien still did not have the correct name of the sister city, but its delegation stuck out like a sore thumb climbing off the airplane. For one thing, they were tiny people and wore dresses or sarongs that swept the tarmac; you couldn’t tell the men from the women, and until one of them stepped forward at the end, there seemed to be no order to their arrival. They merely swept off the plane and moved haphazardly around the runway. One of the baggage handlers shooed them along toward the terminal. Once they got inside, an old man not much more than four feet high made a speech in his native tongue, a coursing of percussive notes across an unfathomable scale. A couple of the ranchers took it upon themselves to herd these people into the waiting cars. Lucien was not much help. In fact, the mayor studied him for a moment and asked, “Cat got your tongue?” Lucien shook his head quickly, then listened as the leader of the delegation from wherever it was said in perfect English, “We got jet lag. Time to sack out.” The line of cars strung along the interstate toward Deadrock and the hot spring.
Lucien watched the guests receive the delegation. Everyone was at poolside to observe the little people. Quite suddenly about half the delegation pulled off their sarongs; they were wearing cloths knotted about their loins, and they sprang into the pool, where they shot around like marine animals, hardly struggling but moving at what seemed an unnatural speed through the water. Some of them had larger breasts than the others and must have been women. Lucien used the house phone to call Suzanne.
“Hi, darling, I’m over at the spring. Look, I don’t know how long this is going to be going on. I think I’ll just kind of tough it out and stay at my house.”
“Have you taken something?”
“Taken something?”
“You sound as though you had taken something.”
“God no, I wish I had. I’ve just got my hands full here. Look, I’ll spell this out later.”