“You better be on time. Daddy’s picky ’bout when he eats. And it takes a whole hour to get there.”
“I’m looking forward to it a lot.” This is not entirely true, but it is my official attitude. This part of tomorrow is actually alive with fearsome ambiguity.
“You hadn’t even met him yet. Wait’ll you meet my stepmother. She’s a breed apart. If you like her you’ll like broccoli. But Daddy’s somethin. You better like him, only he probably won’t like you. Or least that’s how he’ll act. His true thoughts will come to light later. Not that it matters.”
“You love me, don’t you?” When I lean up to be kissed, she gazes down on me with a pert, appraising face. I cannot help wondering if she’s not considering Everett right now and an Alaskan adventure.
“Maybe. What if I do?”
“Then you’ll give me a kiss and ask me to spend the night.”
“No way on that,” she says, and gives her hand a big Dinah Shore kiss and smacks me hard across the cheek with it. “That’s what you got comin. Signed, sealed and delivered, ole Mister Smart.” And then she is off, skittering toward the darkened apartments, across the skimpy lawn and in the lighted outside door and out of sight. And I am left alone in my Malibu, staring at the glossy moon as if it were all of mystery and anticipation, all the things we are happy to leave and happier yet to see come toward us new again.
8
A suspicious light shines in my living room. A strange car sits at the curb. On the third floor Bosobolo’s desk lamp is lit, though it is after midnight. Easter undoubtedly means special preparations for him, possibly a sermon at one of the Institute’s satellite churches which he services now and then to fine-tune his evangelizing techniques. He has put up a wreath on the front door, a decision we have discussed earlier that won my approval. All the houses on Hoving Road are silent and dark, odd for a Saturday night, when there is usually entertaining going on and windows brightened. In the clear sky above the button woods and tulip trees, I can see only the lemony glitter of Gotham lighting the heavens fifty miles away, as though a great event was going on there — a state fair, say, or a firestorm. And I am happy to see it, happy to be this far from the action, on the leeward side of what the wider world deems important.
In my house stands Walter Luckett.
More accurately, waiting in the room I now use as a cozy study, an old side porch with French doors, overstuffed summerish furniture, brass lamps with maps for shades (bought from a catalog), bookshelves to the ceiling and a purplish Persian rug that came with the house. It is the room I normally consider mine, though I am not hard-nosed about it. But even Bosobolo, who has the run of everything, stays clear without having to be asked. It is the room where I finally gave up work on Tangier, where I do most of my sportswriting, where my typewriter sits on my desk. And when X left me, it was in this room that I slept every night until I could face going back upstairs. Most people have such comfortable, significant places if they own a home, and Walter Luckett is standing in the middle of mine with a wry self-derisive smirk that probably caused a certain kind of brainy, pock-marked girl back in Coshocton to think, “Well, now. Here’s something new to the planet…. More’s here than meets the eye,” and later to put up with hell and foolishness to be his date.
Though I can’t say it makes me glad to see him, since I’m tired, and as recently as twelve hours ago was in faraway Walled Lake, having a conversation with a crazy man out of which I won’t get a story to write. What I want to do is put that behind me and hit the hay. Tomorrow like all tomorrows could still be a banner day.
Walter is holding a copy of a canvas luggage catalog, and, upon seeing me, has rolled it into a tight little megaphone. “Frank. Your butler let me in, or I wouldn’t be here at this hour. You have my word on that.”
“It’s okay, Walter. He’s not my butler, though, he’s my roomer. What’s up?”
I set down my one-suiter bought from the very catalog he is now spindling. I like this room very much, its brassy, honeyed glow, paint peeling insignificantly off its moldings, the couches and leather chairs and hatchcover table all arranged in a careless, unpretentious way that is immensely inviting. I would like nothing more than to curl up anywhere here and doze off for seven or eight unmolested hours.
Walter is wearing the same blue tennis shirt and walking shorts he wore in the Manasquan two nights ago, a pair of sockless loafers and a Barracuda jacket with a plaid lining (referred to as a jerk’s suit in my fraternity). In all likelihood it is the same suit-of-casual-clothes Walter has worn since Grinnell days. Only behind his tortoise-shells, his eyes look vanquished, and his slick bond-salesman’s hair could stand a washing. Walter looks, in other words, like private death, though I have a feeling he is here to share some of it with me.
“Frank, I haven’t slept for three days,” Walter blurts and takes two tentative steps forward. “Not since I talked to you over at the shore.” He squeezes the Gokey catalog into the tightest tube possible.
“Let’s make you a drink, Walter,” I say. “And let me have that catalog before you tear it apart.”
“No thanks, Frank. I’m not staying.”
“How about a beer?”
“No beer.” Walter sits down in a big armchair across from my chair, and leans up, forearms to knees: the posture of the confessional, something we Presbyterians know little about.
Walter is sitting under a framed map of Block Island, where X and I once sailed. I gave the map to her as a birthday present, but laid claim to it in the divorce. X complained until I said the map meant something to me, which caused her to relent instantly — and it does. It is a link to palmier times when life was simple and un-grieved. It is a museum piece of a kind, and I’m sorry to see Walter Luckett’s beleaguered visage beneath it now.
“Frank, this is a helluva house. I mean, when I thought you had a colored butler with a British accent, it didn’t surprise me at all.” Walter looks around wide-eyed and approving. “Say about how long you’ve owned it.” Walter smiles a big first-bike kid’s grin.
“Fourteen years, Walter.” I pour myself a good level of warm gin from a bottle I keep behind the children’s World Books and drink it down with a gulp.
“Now that’s old dollars. Plus location. Plus the interest rates from that era. That adds up. I have clients over here, old man Nat Far-querson for one. I live over in The Presidents now, Coolidge Street. Not a bad part of town, don’t you think?”
“My wife lives on Cleveland. My former wife, I guess I should say.”
“My wife’s in Bimini, of course, with Eddie Pitcock. Of all things.”
“I remember you said.”
Walter’s eyes go slitted, and he frowns up at me as if what I’d just said deserved nothing better than a damn good whipping. A silence envelops the room, and I cannot suppress an impolite yawn.
“Frank, let me get right to this. I’m sorry. Since this Americana business I’ve just been dead in my tracks. My whole life is just agonizing around this one goddamn event. Christ. I’ve done so much worse in my life, Frank. Believe me. I once screwed a thirteen-year-old girl when I was twenty and married, and bragged about it to friends. I slept like a baby. Like a baby! And there’s worse than that, too. But I can’t get this one out of my mind. I’m thirty-six, Frank. And everything seems very bad to me. I’ve quit becoming, is what it feels like. Only I stopped at the wrong time.” A smile of wonder passes over Walter’s dazed face, and he shakes his head. His is the face of a haunted war veteran with wounds. Only to my thinking it’s a private matter, which no one but him should be required to care a wink about. “What’re you thinking right now, Frank,” Walter asks hopefully.