Dinner Along the Amazon (22 page)

Rosetta fishes around in her pockets for her false eyelashes, kept in a small enamelled box that she is always losing. It is nearly time to walk to the corner, catch the bus, and go home to Clyde. She makes a rosette of her mouth.

“Now” says Alicia.

“Yes, ma’am,” says Rosetta—and gets away with it and goes.

Alicia straightens, meaning to continue on into the den and the desk where the mail waits, but she strikes her head, almost impaling it on the iron chandelier that mars the entranceway and she spouts: “Great bleeding Jesus!”

She looks at the cello in the corner, wanting very much to kick it into the hallway, but she knows (having done it before) that afterwards she would regret that. Instead she throws a convenient paperback in its direction and misses it by a mile. She sits down, wanting to scream, perhaps, and the telephone rings. Alicia throws it across the room.

Arthur Anderson is escorting Ishmael to the top of the steps above the beach. Each man carries a glass—the one of gin, the other of vodka.

“That blue ketch there belongs to the Kileys,” says Arthur. “They’ll see we have a guest and insist on taking you out tomorrow, if you can bear it.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t. I get sick. But maybe Alicia would go with you.”

“They don’t actually go to sea, do they?”

“Oh, no…” and a laugh. “They never leave the Sound. But the Sound’s quite big enough for a proper sail. Do you know this place at all?”

“No. No. I’ve never been…”

“That place over there belongs to William F. Buckley, Jr.”

Ishmael spits.

Arthur puts one arm behind his back and they begin to descend.

Several children play on the beach, including a token black boy with an Afro.

“That’s our ‘token black boy,’” says Arthur with a smile. “We get quite a laugh out of calling him that.” Stepping downwards. “He thinks it’s funny, too, you know. We like his hair.”

Ishmael nods: “Unh-hunh. What’s his name?”

“I don’t know. He’s the son of one of the maids.”

“Oh.”

“But she doesn’t work this street anymore, so it works out fine. Nobody’s embarrassed that way. And boy, can that kid ride a bike! Fantastic!”

“That person there,’ says Arthur, indicating the woman with a wave of his gin, “is Lydia Harmon. She’s a lesbian and she wants us to pay attention. That’s why she wears an open shirt.”

They get off the bottom step and make for the tide.

“That,” says Arthur, stepping from one stone to the next, as if he had them all by heart, “is a certain Mr Crosley. Beware.”

He does not elaborate.

Ishmael says: “I will.”

They stop and stare across the water. Arthur sighs.

“We call it ‘Buckley-ham Palace,’” he says, “and it’s really supposed to be rather dreary.” He lets the vision sink. “Not at all like Hyannis Port,” he sighs again and then walks on. “Do you know who I met the other night?”

“No idea,” says Ishmael.

“Truman Capote,” says Arthur and is disappointed when Ishmael only says: “Oh.”

Now it is Ishmael’s turn to walk on the stones.

“Oh, yes,” says Arthur: “and Johnny Carson and Linda Lovelace too. All the same night. It was a riot. Just a riot! Everyone got stoned and lay on the floor and played Monopoly. Linda Lovelace kept winning…”

They cross on over the slimy greening stones that once made up retaining walls but now are fallen to the sand. Arthur gets some distance ahead of Ishmael here and then turns round and says, with a certain grave contempt: “Truman Capote wears a bracelet.”

Ishmael stops. Then Arthur turns away again.

“It was a private party, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But…we all had a pretty good time. It was fun.”

“…I wish I’d been there.”

Arthur now finds a dead fish and must avoid it by walking out into the Sound.

“These shoes cost me forty dollars,” he says—apparently delighted by what he is doing. “Isn’t that a scream?”

Over the shrimp, Alicia asks: “Did you get to the script at all?”

“Not really,” says Ishmael. “I’ve read the first sixteen pages, that’s all. I’m sorry.”

“Oh! Don’t be sorry, dear. I’m glad that’s all you’ve read, because,” she looks at Arthur, “I wanted to forewarn you.”

“Forewarn me?” says Ishmael.

“Yes.” Alicia waves her fork above the plates like a wand, but the food remains what it is—just shrimp salad, lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, and radishes. “You know in the book, where what’s-his-name is lying in the barn and Glorianna is getting undressed beyond the windows…?”

“Yes.”

“And he’s lying there, thinking what a pity it would be to go ahead and kill such a lovely woman after all…?”

“Yes.”

“And in his mind he forgives her for what she’s done and he decides, right then, not to kill her, but to leave her alone?”

“Oh yes.”

“Well…on page 122 I have him get up and go in and kill her.”

“Oh.”

Supper is over. They stand on the lawn.

“Who’s that?” Ishmael asks.

A figure is wandering along the street, the epitome of another age: Edwardian and elegant and carrying a walking-stick.

“That’s Professor Dinstitch,” says Arthur. “He invented the atomic bomb.”

The allure of violence hangs in the air for a moment and then is gone, replaced by the faint and lovely odour of the lilac trees next door.

“I think I will go to bed,” says Ishmael.

“Sleep well,” says Alicia. “Yes. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

After Ishmael has gone, Alicia takes Arthur by the arm and they hang there, two cadavers in the twilight. “Addie will be here, tomorrow,” says Alicia. “Oh dear,” says Arthur. And it gets dark.

By morning spring has well and truly come. Rosetta comes up to the house without her coat—not even carrying it over her arm. She is full of news. There has been a fire in the night, downtown, and even now the soldiers and the firemen are sifting through the ashes for the victims.

“Soldiers?” Alicia asks, hung-over.

“Well, I said the same thing to Clyde,” says Rosetta. “But it seems they’s legit. Th’ army’s usin’ it as some kinda trainin’ program. Or something. You know? Like them games they play—only this one’s real.”

“What’s it like out?” Alicia asks.

“Warm,” says Rosetta. “Like lemonade weather.”

When Ishmael awakes, he hears this distant narrative of fire and lemonade and he thinks it must be floating up to his windows from the garden. But when he looks, the garden is empty below him and nobody there but the cat, asleep in Alicia’s canvas deck chair.

He can see the Sound, or part of it, beyond the roofs and the treetops, and already there is someone sailing: two white sails smack out in the breeze and he imagines he can hear them. Will he have to sail today? He hopes not.

Suddenly a power-mower shatters the pristinity of the atmosphere. The usual unseen person is ruining Saturday.

Ishmael leans on the bar of heaven and watches the world as he lights a cigarette. In the Baker House he perceives a figure in one of the windows staring out directly at him through a pair of binoculars. Hastily he remembers his robe is only loosely tied and he snatches it shut and kneels on the floor so that only his head and shoulders, together with his folded arms, can be seen. He slides his eyes back carefully, to see if he is still being watched and something in him, perverse, is sorry to discover he is not. The figure with the glasses is staring down, now, into a yard that Ishmael can only barely discern through the trees and the froth of flowering shrubs. The lawnmower shrieks and complains that it has hit a rock. The fingers holding the binoculars seem only to be bones, barely fleshed, with great knuckular rings of heavy silver and opals. Now Ishmael sees what the glasses are watching and watches it too: the naked thighs, the naked breasts, the naked buttocks of Lydia Harmon exercising in her garden.

Ishmael bites his lip. He has been unnerved and now he forces his head forward, leaning further out, remembering that Arthur has said “She wants us to pay attention” and now sees a knotty little man in a sweat-shirt and walking-shorts working in a flowerbed. He is pulling up fistfulls of weeds, presumably; all the while he works he is apparently whistling, for the shape of his lips betray him. Then all at once the power-mower dies and Ishmael hears the tune: it is Beethoven’s ‘Seventh Symphony,’ the Apotheosis, and he turns away, already wondering how many victims have been sifted from Rosetta’s fire.

In the bathroom, Ishmael stands before the mirror and regards his whole self. The vision is brief; having dropped the robe to the floor, he now reaches round and takes the largest towel and wraps himself out of sight from the waist down. Then he puts his finger to his lips and studies the contents of the shelves: colognes, blades, razor, brushes, combs, and that new, untried, but intriguing man’s deodorant: “Lash.” Then he commences, as always, with the tumbler of vodka and the running of the bath.

In the kitchen the table is covered with tabloids, oily rags, and Q-Tips. Rosetta is seated, already at work, Alicia is standing by the counter, emptying the contents of her handbag over the arborite. Being terrified of any combination of drugs and alcohol, she has refused all offers of aspirin and Anacin and suffers the effects of her hangover like a pro: bad-tempered, mean, and nervous. Rosetta refrains from humming and from turning on the radio. There is only the sound of their mutual clanking, clinking, and cluttering—and then their conversation.

“You got that oil-can there? That all-purpose oil?”

“Three-in-One, Rosetta. It’s called ‘Three-in-One.’

“Don’t throw it! My floor…! Jesus!”

Pause. Alicia shuffles in blue slippers to the table and sits.

“Do we have to do this every damn week?”

“Clyde says if we don’t, the barrels gets musty and then they explodes in your hands…”

“Well. I don’t want that to happen.”

Another pause and the chambers thrown open, inspected, poked at with Q-Tips. Bullets laid in two neat rows over the headlines: “PULLING WIRES BEHIND THE SCENES” and “MAN’S WORST ENEMY: THE DOG.” Rosetta is nonchalant about her work, but Alicia gets right down to it with her glasses falling from the end of her nose.

“This fire, do you think it was started?”

“I think there isn’t a fire in this world, M’s Anderson, that isn’t started somehow…” Rosetta holds her .32 up and stares through the empty chambers at the pots of winter savoury on the sill. “Clyde says he’s sick o’ niggers startin’ these fires in the District. Clyde says to us: ‘Why not move up-town?’

Alicia’s glasses fall at last. Rosetta flips her chambers closed with a snap.

“But there’s nowhere for you to live up here,” says Alicia, whose policy is always reality. Her coffee is cold, but she drinks it. Rosetta grunts.

“Oh, we ain’t gonna move,” she says. “It’s the gasoline that’s comin’ up.”

This receives silence, so Rosetta says, changing the subject: “You want me to put them flowered sheets on your sister’s bed?”

At about eleven o’clock from the Anderson household there is a short expedition to the shopping plaza, where the sun is reflected in over a mile of plate glass windows, causing Alicia to mutter the words: “Bloody sadist,” not making it clear whether her reference is to the designer of the shopping plaza or the sun itself. Here Arthur departs to purchase four bottles of gin and two of Alicia’s favourite scotch. Later he will have to pretend, as always, that he has bought the scotch by mistake—forgetting “Alicia’s problem.” This forgetfulness, which some might have called a tolerance, is not a tolerance at all, but only a symptom of exhaustion. The will to fight Alicia’s battles has been submerged in the need to forget his own.

Meanwhile Alicia and Ishmael have visited the A and P where they have bought such items as half-a-dozen large bottles of Canada Dry ginger ale (“in honour of your lovely country, dear”) and a bottle of pickles and two dozen cans of Schlitz. Alicia has also bought some nippy English humbugs and when they all get home again they all dine standing up, from plates of gritty lettuce, cherry tomatoes, celery sticks, and a bowl of pretzels. At two o’clock there is target practice.

Bang!

“Alicia?”

Bang!

“Ali-cia!”

Bang!

Alicia: “What?”

“Ishmael and I are going to the beach.”

“All right, dear. When I’m through with this—”

Bang!

“—I’m going to have a rest.”

And so, Arthur thinks, no doubt, are the neighbours.

Bang!

“Goodbye, dear.”

Bang!

“Goodbye.”

Rosetta would like to see Miss Addie before she leaves and so she hangs around, sucking humbugs and looking up the movies in the papers. Nothing is playing she likes and at three o’clock a cab arrives.

Miss Dinstitch watches Addie’s arrival from between the bushes across the road.

She sees the taxi-cab is not a local one, but a Yellow Cab from New York City, and this gives her curiosity just enough adrenalin to propel her forward under the trees.

The girl who emerges is slim, but of ordinary height, with short blond hair only slightly longer than Lydia Harmon’s. She wears a dress so thin that it must be unlined, and its material is patterned, not unlike Miss Dinstitch’s view of the street, with pale, translucent leaves. Addie is barefoot and carries a shoulder-bag, and while she is paying the taxi-driver the bag slips all the way down her arm to the ground, causing her to laugh. Miss Dinstitch does not like this laughter: it cannot be heard and it must be caught in the girl’s throat, somehow—the way actresses laugh, and singers—or worse. And now the girl is saying good-bye to the driver, who has a strangely satiated smile. There are words and waves and then he is gone, leaving the stink of his exhaust behind him. Miss Dinstitch draws back, for the girl has done something inexplicably moving. All at once she has clasped her hands before her chin and closed her eyes and let her whole demeanour of ebullience escape through parted lips. Then she breathes it back in and picks up her bag and squares her shoulders and marches to the door.

The stairwell is cool: a good place to stand and wait.

Alicia is on the lawn, asleep in her hat, the very image of Virginia Woolf. Addie has seen her there through the mullioned windows of the den and has left her there, unspoken to, ungreeted. Rosetta has left, but has told her that Arthur and the house-guest are down on the beach and that, perhaps, the young man has gone sailing. And Addie smiles at the thought of this, for once when she was here a long, long while ago she too went sailing and Mr Kiley made a pass at her and she wondered if Mrs Kiley would make a pass at the young man whose name was…
Ishmael
?