Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (28 page)

 
          
 
Preston noticed that Lupone contributed
nothing but sat back and chuckled knowingly at the various theories.

 
          
 
I'm right. I know I am. He just wants to feel
superior.

 
          
 
He noticed, too, that Priscilla wasn't there.
Either she had gone to bed or she had gone out and was waiting for him.

 
          
 
He hung around for a few minutes, smoked a
couple of cigarettes, then mumbled something about being tired and slipped away
down the hall to the row of bedrooms.

 
          
 
There was a light under Priscilla's door. He
knocked. No answer. Maybe she was in the John. He listened for the sound of
running water, heard nothing, and knocked again. Still no answer.

 
          
 
He went to his room, wondering what to say if
Twist asked him questions. But Twist wasn't there. Preston turned out the
light, opened the window and climbed out into the cool night.

 
          
 
He stood with his back against the wall and
let his eyes adjust to the darkness.

 
          
 
He heard a scratching noise from a far comer
of the building. A match flared and was cupped in some hands. Then the match
fell to the ground, and the orange glow of a cigarette end hovered like a
firefly. The smoker coughed and disappeared around the comer.

 
          
 
Where was she? She couldn't be waiting in the
open. There were no trees out here, no bushes large enough to conceal a human.
He replayed in his mind the walks they had taken. There was only one
possibility, at the very outer limit of the path surrounding the clinic
grounds, where sand had been pressed into a bulwark to stop erosion. One night
they had lain behind the bulwark and gazed up at the stars, and because neither
of them knew anything of the heavens, had perceived private constellations and
awarded them silly names.

 
          
 
She was there, pointing up at the sky and
outlining their constellations and whispering the names to herself.

 
          
 
She didn't hear him approach, for he had trod
delicately through the soft sand, avoiding sticks and stones and clumps of low
brush. He stood over her for a moment and watched, trying to still his heart.
He hadn't spoken to her in days, and the longing had festered in him, until
now—against his mind, against all reason-he was convinced that he was actually,
truly, profoundly in love with her.

 
          
 
Which, as soon as the thought coalesced in his
brain, he condemned as arrant bullshit.

 
          
 
He stepped off the bulwark and slid down
beside her in the sand and said, "Hi."

 
          
 
"Hi." She smiled.

 
          
 
"Sorry I'm—"

 
          
 
She kissed him. She reached up and put a hand
behind his head and pulled it down to her and put her lips on his and . . .

 
          
 
And nothing. That was it. There was no moving,
no tonguing, no urgency, no passion. It wasn't a kiss; it was a smooch.

 
          
 
She let him go and said, "That was for
when we were so rudely interrupted."

 
          
 
"I see." He wanted to try again, to
lean over her and open his mouth and look into her eyes and enclose her mouth
in his and encourage her to . . .

 
          
 
Stop it!

 
          
 
He said, "That was nice. We should do it
again sometime."

 
          
 
"I went up the mountain."

 
          
 
Wham! I told you not to! Are you nuts? He
said, "Why?"

 
          
 
"He asked me to an A.A. meeting, I told
you that. Then he asked me to another one. I asked Dan and he said it was okay.
So I went. I thought it'd be fun."

 
          
 
You drag me out here in the middle of the
night to tell me about fun times at Stone's ?

 
          
 
"Was it?"

 
          
 
"No. It was ... I guess weird is what it
was."

 
          
 
"Tell me."

 
          
 
"An A.A. meeting is supposed to be a lot
of people telling about their experiences and helping each other, but when I
got there it was just the two of us. He said a couple of others would be coming
along, but nobody ever did."

 
          
 
"So you left."

 
          
 
"We had some sodas, and he'd put out
cookies and things as if there were other people coming, and suddenly he
started telling me how lonesome he was and all he needed was a friend, a real
friend ..."

 
          
 
The ballad of the lonely satyr.

 
          
 
"... and I told him I'd be his friend,
and he asked if he could hold me . . ."

 
          
 
''Hold you?”

 
          
 
“. . . just like a friend, and I had to think
about that, but before I could say anything the phone rang. He went to get it.
I think it was from one of his cars."

 
          
 
"Why?"

 
          
 
"I heard him say, 'Where are you now?'
and then 'Ten minutes! Holy shit.' Anyway, when he came back he was a different
person. He said he was sorry, this had probably been a mistake, maybe we'd get
together sometime soon, he really did want to be my friend . . . a lot of junk
like that."

 
          
 
''Then you left."

 
          
 
"He had picked me up, but he said he
didn't have time to drive me back, he had an important meeting, did I mind
walking. That's two miles. But it was a nice night and all downhill, so I said
okay and started walking. I wasn't too far from the house, just at the top of
the hill, when I saw these headlights coming up the mountain, coming fast. I
didn't know if he could see me, so I got off the road behind a big rock. This
limo zoomed past and stopped in front of the house. The driver got out. He went
around to open the back door, but she was already out of the car.''

 
          
 
"She?"

 
          
 
"Natasha. I heard him ask her if she
wanted him to wait, and she said. Yes, please, she'd only be a few
minutes."

 
          
 
"How did she look?"

 
          
 
"Great. It was dark, but she was all lit
up by the floodlights from the house. Her hair was done, she was made up, she
didn't slur her words or anything, didn't stagger around. She was fine."

 
          
 
"Then what?"

 
          
 
"She went in the house and I walked down
the mountain."

 
          
 
"And her driver waited for her."

 
          
 
"It wasn't her driver."

 
          
 
"What d'you mean?"

 
          
 
"It was Chuck."

 
          
 
Preston
leaned back on his elbows and looked at the sky, at the constellation Priscilla
had named Eloise because it looked like a little girl (he didn't see it at all)
and she liked the story of Eloise who lived in the Plaza.

 
          
 
Priscilla said, "I don't think Stone was
telling the truth tonight."

 
          
 
"No,"
Preston
said. "Neither do I."

 
          
 
Twist was asleep and snoring like a diesel bus
when
Preston
crawled through the window, so
Preston
let his clothes fall by the side of the bed
and slipped between the sheets.

 
          
 
He would have liked to call Marcia, but the
only phone he could have used was the coin box in the common room, and
eavesdropping was a favorite pastime.

 
          
 
Besides, there'd be time enough to speak to
her in the morning. He'd ambush her on her way to the cafeteria.

 
          
 
"Where'd you get to last night?"
Twist asked as
Preston
pulled out a chair and unloaded his tray.

 
          
 
''Nowhere."
Preston
mashed pieces of banana around in a bowl of
All-Bran and watched Twist tuck a napkin into the neck of his T-shirt (its
fibers stretched nearly transparent by his pectoral and deltoid massifs) and
survey his breakfast tableau: four fried eggs lying on a bed of buttered grits
and surrounded by a bulwark of bacon, sausages and ham.

 
          
 
"I don't know why you bother exercising,
Twist. Save a lot of time and effort if you started every day with a heart
transplant."

 
          
 
"You grow up so hungry you eat wall paint
and bush berries, then come talk to me 'bout what I eat." Twist dropped a
sausage onto the yolk of an egg and folded the white around it—like swaddling a
baby—and aimed the package at his mouth. "What's up your nose this
morning?"

 
          
 
"Nothing."

           
 
Duke came to the table, followed by Hector,
and because Twist was the only person in the Western world who hadn't heard
about the paparazzo's rendezvous last night with Nurse Bronsky, Duke felt
obliged to tell him the whole story, embellished with sound effects.

 
          
 
Preston
was
grateful that he didn't have to talk. He could sit with his back to the wall
and let his eyes drift around the staff section of the dining room, then to the
door, then back again.

 
          
 
Where the hell was Marcia?

 
          
 
He had risen early and gone to wait for her in
the parking lot. He had checked her office, in case she had had to take her car
for servicing and someone had dropped her off. He had been the first patient in
the cafeteria.

 
          
 
Other people trickled in, and everything
seemed normal. The serving women called the patients honey and lovey; the
patients made lame jokes about the ingredients in the coffee.

 
          
 
But when the staff section began to fill up,
with Larkin and Nurse Bridget and Nurse Bronsky, with the counselors from
Bandito and Geronimo, with the shrink and the doctors and the others who kept
the engine of the clinic running,
Preston
sensed a difference. None of them ate alone, as some usually did, reading
newspapers or whatever. They appeared to huddle around their tables. They spoke
very little, and what they did say was uttered very quietly.

 
          
 
It was as if someone had died during the
night.

 
          
 
Someone had died, of course—Natasha—but that
hadn't happened last night, and it wasn't a secret. No one had to whisper about
it.

 
          
 
Then
Preston
noticed something else.

 
          
 
Dan wasn't here either.

 
          
 
* * *

 
          
 
They waited in Marcia's office, in their
circle—
Preston
, Hector, Twist and Lupone, and an empty
chair that
Preston
had set up for Marcia.

 
          
 
Preston
looked at his watch. Five after. Marcia was never late for therapy.

 
          
 
He wondered if the others felt the same
uneasiness. But then Lupone let go a noisy fart and made a comment about
needing more fiber in his diet, and Twist said he didn't need fiber he needed a
cork, and Hector said something in Spanish and laughed, and
Preston
concluded that none of them noticed
anything, ever.

 
          
 
The door opened, and a woman strode in and
shut the door behind her and walked over and dropped a pile of patient folders
onto Marcia's desk.

 
          
 
She was big—probably
five ten
, a hundred and sixty pounds—and solid. She
wore a plain black dress, no jewelry and practical black lace-up shoes. Her
hair fit her head like a tightly curled champagne-colored bathing cap.

 
          
 
She turned and stood behind Marcia's chair and
looked down at them and smiled.

 
          
 
She had terrible teeth—snaggled, askew and
spotted brown and black.

 
          
 
"Good morning!" she said cheerily.
"My name is Gwen, and I'm an alcoholic and an addict."

 
          
 
There was some South in her accent, but
Preston
couldn't place it. It didn't have the warm
roundness of the
Deep
South
, or the
casual elisions of the Southwest. It was probably
Tennessee
or
North Carolina
, but whatever it was wasn't natural. It had
been studied, either to get rid of something or to acquire something. Her teeth
spoke of poverty, her clothes of determination, or bitterness.

 
          
 
Suddenly
Preston
was frightened.

 
          
 
Twist and Hector looked at each other. Lupone
eyed the woman through his little slits, as if deciding whether or not to have
her erased.

 
          
 
"Well?" Gwen said. "What do we
say?"

 
          
 
No one said anything.

 
          
 
"We say"—she raised her arms and
shouted, grinning—"Hi, Gwen!"

 
          
 
Silence.

 
          
 
Lupone shifted his weight on his two chairs. "What
we say is, who the fuck are you?"

 
          
 
The smile didn't vanish, didn't even shrink.
"I told you. My name is—"

 
          
 
"Where's Marcia?"
Preston
said, hoping to hear— willing her to
say—that Marcia had a cold. Or pneumonia. Or a broken leg. Something finite.

 
          
 
"Marcia won't be with us anymore."
She glanced at the folders on the desk. "Let's see, you must be—"

 
          
 
"What?" Lupone said. "She
croaked?"

 
          
 
"Heavens, no." Gwen laughed. "I
guess she just got another position. Moved on. We all must, sooner or
later."

 
          
 
"Bullshit!" said Twist.

 
          
 
Gwen paused, still smiling, always smiling, as
if the smile was stitched onto her face and anchored there by those rotten
teeth. "One of the little changes we'll be making, Khalil, is—"

 
          
 
"Name's Twist."

 
          
 
"I don't like nicknames, Khalil. I think
they're escape mechanisms, ways of hiding who we really are. So I'd like to
call you by the name God gave you."

 
          
 
"No God gave me that dumb-ass name. Louis
fuckin' Farrakhan gave me it, forced the old man to call me it. Mama called me
Junius."

 
          
 
"Fine. Junius, then. One of the—"

 
          
 
"Name's Twist."

 
          
 
Hector laughed and nudged Lupone.

 
          
 
"—little changes we'll be making is that
we're all going to try, honestly try, to clean up our language. Gutter language
is lazy language. You don't want people to think you're just a lazy nigger, do
you, Junius?"

 
          
 
Preston
saw
Twist start, had a second's horror of Twist launching himself out of his chair
and throttling the grinning cow.

 
          
 
But all Twist did was straighten up and lean
back in his chair and look at her and say, "Keep it up, honey-bun, and all
people gonna be sayin' 'bout you is you're a dead cunt."

 
          
 
"So it's threats now, Junius?"
Smile, smile. Not a hint of fear.

 
          
 
This woman is hard as spikes.

 
          
 
"Well, I guess we have to wallow at the
very bottom before we can reach upward for God's sweet light.'' She stepped
around
Preston
and sat in Marcia's chair. "Now,"
she said, looking from face to face, "the quickest way for us to get to
know each other is for us each to take a turn on the Hot Seat. Do we agree? . .
. Scott?"

 
          
 
"The what?"

 
          
 
"Marcia didn't put you on the Hot Seat?
Naughty. It's so effective."

 
          
 
While she looked at the other faces,
Preston
sneaked a glance at his watch. Half an hour
to go. Keep her talking. Keep her from doing anything. All he wanted was to get
through the session, survive it, so he could get out of here and discover what
had happened to Marcia.

 
          
 
“Let's begin with you, Guglielmo," Gwen
said.

 
          
 
"Let's not," said Lupone.

 
          
 
"Why do you keep scratching yourself?"

 
          
 
"I don't."

 
          
 
"Yes, you do." She pointed at him.
"There."

 
          
 
Preston
had
been in Lupone's company for twelve or fifteen hours a day, more or less, for a
week and had never noticed it, but as soon as she pointed it out, it was as
obvious as a goiter. Every few seconds, Lupone scratched a spot just above his
belt on his right side.

 
          
 
"It itches," Lupone said.

 
          
 
"Why?"

 
          
 
"The fuck do I know why it itches? It
itches."

 
          
 
"Are you allergic?"

 
          
 
"Yeah," he snorted. "Allergic.
To ninety-eight-grain thirty-eight police-special plus Ps."

 
          
 
"What are they?"

 
          
 
"It's a bullet hole, lady!"

 
          
 
"I don't believe you."

 
          
 
"I care."