If the state of shock is a deep sleep of the senses that protects us in our cores from the sharp edges of the world, then I was deeply thankful for it at that moment. I felt it come over me like a blanket, like a drug, felt my lips go numb, my eyes glaze. I wasn’t thinking of perfidy, rottenness, greed: I was thinking nothing.
“It’s not what you think, Felix,” Vogelsang said. He looked embarrassed, caught with his hand in the jar; he grinned till the long pale roots of his teeth showed. “I never laid eyes on her till you sent me down there to talk to her. I swear it.”
“My mother’s an asshole,” Savoy said, as if we’d been discussing mothers and assholes for the past fifteen minutes.
“I made a deal with her. An arrangement. She wanted out of little Appalachia and I told her she could come stay here with me and Aorta if she’d back off the project.”
I was aware of a movement to my left. Aorta had come up and was standing at my elbow, stark naked. We made a foursome, I realized, a grouping, huddled round the scattered bones and the tray of goodies like actors in a necrophilic epic plotting out the next coupling. Music was playing, something I didn’t recognize, percussive, nasty, like the hissing of adders. I glanced at Aorta. Her expression was noncommittal. I felt drunk. My face was on fire, my groin throbbing.
“Eugene’s an asshole, too,” Savoy said.
Vogelsang reached for his wineglass, breaking the tableau, Aorta scratched herself absently and reached for a cracker, Savoy threw back her head to take a swig of beer. Uneasy on my heels, my eyes riveted to Aorta’s crotch, navel, nipples, I stuffed my hands in my pockets and backed off a step. It was then that I caught the scent of it. Rank, hot, urgent, it was the odor of sex, the musky perfume Vogelsang and Aorta had been wearing the night we’d lifted our glasses to the success of the summer camp. I snuffed it like a tomcat, like a caveman, and it had a rotten edge to it. The bones lay on the table, Aorta was watching me, the music hissed in my ears, and I hated them all. I hated cabals, plots, schemes, hated the hungry clawing fornicating faces of the world, I hated myself.
I turned and made for the door, for the smell of eucalyptus, the night, the wind, medicine for my hurts. My hand was on the latch. “Felix,” Vogelsang said, and I paused to look back at him. “You can stay if you want.”
I didn’t want.
Across the redwood planks, legs pulling me along, legs and feet, past the fallen mannequin and down the steps the way I’d come. A wind had risen to shake the trees. I was around the corner of the house when I heard his voice coming at me — he must have been standing at the door. “The calendar,” he shouted, “it was only a joke.”
I don’t know how long I sat in the car. Ten minutes? Twenty? An hour? The wind drove in off the ocean, steady as a hand, the moon lay across the hood of the car like a cheap bauble. I was thinking. Of chinless Rudy, of Jones, Vogelsang and Savoy, all the stingers and stingees of the world, all the beat deals, the scams and the hustles, and I realized how precious little it all mattered. Go for it, they said, get it while you can, early to bed and early to rise. Well, I’d gone for it and now I was out of work, out of money and out of luck, I had a trial coming up and no place to live, and I felt like an emotional invalid, like a balloon without the helium. I sat there, getting cold, and I thought of Phil and Gesh back in the apartment clipping away at the shreds of their yachts and restaurants with scissors that grew duller by the moment. Money, give me money. Then I thought of Petra. No, I saw Petra. Her hands, sunk in the raw clay, kneading it like bread, molding it, pulling the hard, lasting stuff from its shifting, shapeless core. Wet, yielding, fecund: I could smell the clay, I could feel it.
I slipped the key into the ignition and started the car with a roar that sounded like applause, like a hundred thousand hands clapping in the dark. Then I backed out from under the shadow of Vogelsang’s gate, wound my way up the driveway and past the ghostly stripped trunks of the eucalyptus trees, and turned north, for Willits, a long rainy winter ahead of me, time to think things over, break some new ground, and maybe even — if things went well — to plant a little seed.