“Very well.” I’m waltzing.
Wien Wien, du du allein
“Oh, Chief. Are you drinking?”
I must be singing out loud.
“Goodbye, Ellen. Go home and sit tight until you hear from me.”
I turn off the cricket in the rafters and snap the Anser-Phone in a side pocket, away from my heart.
Again the popping of firecrackers. The sound comes from the south. Taking cover in the gloom of the pines, I look between the trunks down number 5 fairway, 475 yards, par five. Beyond the green are the flat buildings of the private school. The firecrackers come from there. The grounds are deserted, but a spark of fire appears at a window, then a crack. Is somebody shooting? Two yellow school buses are parked in front. Now comes a regular fusillade, sparkings at every window, then a sputtering like a string of Chinese crackers. People run for the buses, majorettes and pom-pom girls for the first bus, their silver uniforms glittering in the sun. The moms bring up the rear, hustling along, one hand clamped to their hats, the other swinging big tote bags. A police car pulls ahead, the buses follow, a motorcycle brings up the rear. As soon as the little cavalcade disappears, the firing stops.
Was it fireworks or were people inside the building directing covering fire at an unseen enemy?
At Howard Johnson’s.
Moira gives me a passionate kiss tasting of Coppertone. She is sunbathing beside the scummy pool. Her perfect little body, clad in an old-fashioned two-piece bikini, lies prone on a plastic recliner. Though her shoulder straps have been slipped down, she makes much of her modesty, clutching bra to breast as, I perceive, she imagines girls used to in the old days.
“A kiss for the champ,” she says.
“For who?”
“You beat Buddy.”
“Oh.”
“Poor Buddy. Wow, what a bombshell you dropped. Total chaos. Did you plan it that way?”
“Chaos?”
“In The Pit, stupid.”
“Yes, The Pit. Yes. No, I didn’t plan it exactly that way.” I notice that she has a dimple at each corner of her sacrum, each whorled by down.
“I heard the Director tell Dr. Stryker to sign you up and keep you here at any cost.”
“What do you think that meant?”
“Before Harvard or M.I.T. grab you, silly.”
“I’m not so sure. What was going on over there when you left this morning?”
“Quiet as a tomb. Everyone’s gone to the beaches.”
The golden down on her forearm is surprisingly thick. I turn her arm over and kiss the sweet salty fossa where the blood beats like a thrush’s throat.
Spying two snakes beside the pool, I pick up a section of vacuum hose and run around the apron and chase them off, and sing Louisiana Lou to hear the echoes from the quadrangle.
“Are you going to take the job, Tom?” asks Moira, sitting up. The lounge leaves a pattern of diamonds on the front of her thighs.
“What job? Oh. Well, I’m afraid there’s going to be some trouble around here. You’re sure you didn’t notice anything unusual this morning?”
“Unusual? No. I did meet that funny little man who was helping you yesterday.”
“Helping me?”
“Helping you pass out your props. Wow, how did you do it?”
“He wasn’t helping me. He was — never mind. What was he doing this morning?”
“Nothing. He passed me carrying a box.”
“How big?”
“Yay big.”
I frown. Ordinarily I don’t like girls who say yay big.
The box. Oh my. Terror flickers. I take a drink.
“He was very polite, knew my name and all. In fact, he sent his regards to you. How did he know I was going to see you? Did you tell him?”
“Certainly not.”
“Rub some of this on me, Tommy.” She hands me the ancient Pompeian phial of Coppertone.
“O.K. But you realize you can’t go in the pool.”
“Ugh,” she says, looking at the pool. “I can’t. What’ll I do?”
“I’ll show you. But let me rub you first.”
Foreseeing everything, I had earlier made an excuse and hopped up to the room, cranked up the generator and turned on the air-conditioner.
Now, when Moira’s had enough of the sweat and the grease and the heat, I lead her by the hand to the balcony. From the blistering white heat of the concrete we come into a dim cool grotto. Fogs of cold air blow from the shuddering tin-lizzy of an air-conditioner. The yellow bed lamp shines down on fresh sheets. A record player plays ancient Mantovani music — not exactly my favorite, but Moira considers Mantovani “classical.”
Moira claps her hands and hugs me.
“Oh lovely lovely lovely! How perfect! Whose room?”
“Ours,” I say, humming There’s a Small Hotel with a Wishing Well.
“You mean you fixed it up like this?”
“Sure. Remember the way it was?”
“My heavens. Sheets even. Air-conditioner. Why did you do it?”
“For love. All for love. Let me show you this.”
I show her the “shower”: a pistol-grip nozzle screwed onto two hundred feet of garden hose hooked at the other end to the spigot in the Esso station grease-rack next door.
“And soap! And towels! Go away, I’m taking my shower now.”
“O.K. But let me do this.” I turn on the nozzle to get rid of two hundred feet of hot water.
While Moira showers, I lie on the bed and look at The Laughing Cavalier and the Maryland hunt scene in the wallpaper. Mantovani plays, the shower runs, Moira sings. I mix a toddy and let it stand on my chest and think of Doris, my dead wife who ran off to Cozumel with a heathen Englishman.
Doris and I used to travel the highways in the old Auto Age before Samantha was born, roar seven hundred miles a day along the great interstates to some glittering lost motel twinkling away in the twilight set down in the green hills of Tennessee or out in haunted New Mexico, swim in the pool, take steaming baths, mix many toddies, eat huge steaks, run back to the room, fall upon each other laughing and hollering, and afterwards lie dreaming in one another’s arms watching late-show Japanese science-fiction movies way out yonder in the lost yucca flats of Nevada.
Sunday mornings I’d leave her and go to mass. Now here was the strangest exercise of all! Leaving the coordinate of the motel at the intersection of the interstates, leaving the motel with standard doors and carpets and plumbing, leaving the interstates extending infinitely in all directions, abscissa and ordinate, descending through a moonscape countryside to a — town! Where people had been living all these years, and to some forlorn little Catholic church up a side street just in time for the ten-thirty mass, stepping up on the porch as if I had been doing it every Sunday for the past twenty years, and here comes the stove-up bemused priest with his cup (what am I doing out here? says his dazed expression) upon whose head hands had been laid and upon this other head other hands and so on, for here off I-51 I touched the thread in the labyrinth, and the priest announced the turkey raffle and Wednesday bingo and preached the Gospel and fed me Christ—
— Back to the motel then, exhilarated by — what? by eating Christ or by the secret discovery of the singular thread in this the unlikeliest of places, this geometry of Holiday Inns and interstates? back to lie with Doris all rosy-fleshed and creased of cheek and slack and heavy-limbed with sleep, cracking one eye and opening her arms and smiling.
“My God, what is it you do in church?”
What she didn’t understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.