The Lost Time Accidents (6 page)

I was standing in the home entertainment grotto, slack-jawed and helpless, gawking at you through the open kitchen door; you returned my stare calmly for exactly six seconds, then covered your upper lip with your ring finger. A mustache had been drawn between your first and second knuckles in ballpoint pen—a precise, Chaplinesque trapezoid—making you look like a beautiful Hitler. You held it there a moment, keeping your face set and blank, then solemnly tapped the right side of your nose. The air seemed to thicken. A signal was being transmitted, a semaphore of some kind, but I didn’t have a clue what it could mean. Perverse as it seems to me now, the image of you there, hunched stiffly against the counter with that obscene blue mustache pressed against your lips, will remain the most erotic of my life.

The apartment belonged to my cousin, Van Markham, the only member of the Tolliver clan who’d succeeded in adjusting to the times. His living room yawned snazzily before me, an airy product showroom accented by a sprinkling of actual people. I crossed it in a dozen woozy steps. The idea that just a moment earlier I’d been alphabetizing the DVD cases, counting the minutes until I could leave, seemed outlandish to me now, beyond crediting. Creation itself was blowing me a kiss, tossing me my first and only blessing, and all I had to do was let it hit.

The man in the boater was still droning on when I reached you, but now you sat crouched on the floor with your back to the fridge, so that he seemed to be complaining to the freezer. It might have been a suggestive pose, scandalous even, if you hadn’t been so obviously bored. I glanced at him in passing and saw that he’d clenched his eyes shut, like an eight-year-old steeling himself for a spanking. He was a giant of a man, a colossus in seersucker, but I was past the point of no return by then. I knelt down beside you and you gave me a nod and we hid ourselves under the counter. I’d foreseen all this happening—I wouldn’t have had the courage otherwise—but the fact of it was still beyond belief. Not a word had passed between us yet.

“I’m Walter,” I said finally.

“You look uncomfortable, Walter.”

“To tell you the truth, I’m not usually this limber.”

You smiled at that. “I’m Mrs. Richard Haven.”

You saw the shock register on my face—you must have seen it—but you didn’t let on. You might as well have been married to Godzilla, or to Moses, or to some medium-sized Central American republic. By now, as you read this, you know the significance the name Haven holds for my family; perhaps you even knew or guessed it then. I should have stood up instantly and sprinted for the door. Instead I shook your hand, and said—if only to say something, to make some kind of noise, to keep you there with me under the counter—that you didn’t look like Mrs. Anything.

“That’s kind of you, Walter. I guess I’m well preserved.”

“How old are you?”

You waggled a finger, then sighed. “Oh, what the hell. I’m twenty-eight.”

I bobbed my head dumbly. In the light of the kitchen your skin looked synthetic. I felt an odd sort of pain as I watched you, a seasick alertness: the sense of something massive rushing toward me. For an instant I wondered whether I might be the victim of some elaborate prank, and studied the legs of the people around us, trying to identify them by their socks—I remember one pair in particular, striped red and blue and white, like barber poles—then realized I didn’t give a damn. You were still holding my hand in both of yours.

“He’s gone,” you said. “That’s something.”

“Who’s gone?”

“
You
know who. The Sensational Gatsby.”

“The Great Gatsby, I think you mean.”

You shook your head. “I’m married to him, Walter. I should know.”

The weariness in your voice was both an invitation and a warning, and I felt the helpless jealousy then that only someone else’s past can trigger. The years that lay behind your weariness, with all their hope and risk and disappointment, were utterly out of my reach: as long as time ran forward, I would never see or touch or understand them. But the knowledge was pale and drab with you beside me.

“Whose party is this?”

Your question caught me by surprise, if only because you seemed so perfectly at ease under the counter. I noticed for the first time that you spoke with the hint of a lisp.

“Don’t you know Van?”

“Eh?”

“Van Markham.” I pointed into the living room. “The man in the gabardine shorts.”

You made a pinched sort of face, as though trying to make out something far away.

“Go easy on him, Mrs. Haven. He isn’t as bad as he looks.”

“Let’s hope not.”

“For the sake of full disclosure, he’s my cousin.”

“That explains
you
,” you said vaguely. You seemed to be thinking about something else already.

“What do you mean, that explains me?”

“Your being here, that’s all. At this kind of a party.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I kept my mouth shut. You yawned and looked past me and I felt the first stirrings of panic.

“What’s your last name, Walter? Is it Markham, too?”

“Tompkins,” I answered at once. “Walter Tompkins.” The lie was out before I’d weighed its pros and cons, before I’d asked myself why: it was as automatic as ducking a punch. But of course I knew why. You’d just told me you were R. P. Haven’s wife.

“Nice kitchen he’s got here, this cousin of yours.”

“Very nice,” I said. “A premium kitchen.”

“He doesn’t look old enough for an apartment this posh. Is there family money?” You blinked at me sweetly. “You’re not a fabulously wealthy recluse, are you, Walter?”

“A recluse? Not at all. Why would you ask me that?”

“I was watching you earlier, out in the living room. You were alphabetizing all the DVDs.”

“I don’t think of recluses as going to parties,” I said stiffly. “I tend to think of them as staying at home, in a bunker or a tower of some kind. And as for those DVDs—”

You gave my hand a squeeze. “Don’t get your shorts twisty, Walter. I’m sure the DVDs were frightfully out of order.” You watched me for a while. “I’ve always had a soft spot for the blue-eyed, moony type. Also, for the record, I’m sloshed.”

I considered pointing out that my eyes were a sort of muddy greenish gray, but prudence prevailed. Your expression grew pensive.

“Do you mind if I ask how you pay the rent?”

“I’m working on—I suppose you could call it a book.” I stared out at the forest of pant legs and skirts. “A book of history.”

“History, did you say?”

I nodded.

“Anybody’s history in particular?”

Talking about my book always made me want to commit seppuku, and this was no exception. I hadn’t so much as glanced at it since I’d dropped out of college.

“Mine,” I answered, fighting the urge to bark or gnash my teeth. “My family’s, I mean.”

To my infinite relief you didn’t laugh. “Your family? What’s special about them?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. Which was the second lie I told you.

“I know what’s special about mine, Walter. Would you like to know?”

“Very much.”

“We’ve always had noteworthy tombstones. My great-great-uncle Elginbrodde—of the Massachusetts Elginbroddes—wrote his epitaph himself, and it’s a doozy. Want to hear it?”

“Of course.”

“All right, then.” You screwed your eyes up fiercely. “It was etched in a kind of cursive, I remember. Let me think—

“‘Here lie I, Melvin Elginbrodde:—

Have Mercy on my Soul, Lord God,

As I would do, if I were God

And Ye were Melvin Elginbrodde.’”

Neither of us spoke for a moment. If I hadn’t already known that I was at your mercy, Mrs. Haven, I’d have realized it then.

“That’s quite an epitaph,” I said at last.

“I’d like to read your book one day, Mr. Tompkins.”

No one had ever told me that before—and no one has since. “You would?” I said. “Why?”

“Something tells me I’d like it.” You turned my hand over, as if reading my palm. “If we become friends, maybe I could have a walk-on part.”

“It’s not
that
kind of history,” I managed to answer, painfully aware of how pompous I sounded. “It starts almost a hundred years ago. I’m trying to make a sort of pilgrimage, you might say, back along the causal—”

“There must be money in your family.” You let go of my hand. “An apartment this hideous doesn’t come cheap.”

“Van came by his riches honorably, I’ll have you know. By the sweat of his loins.” I attempted a grin. “He has a mail-order pheromone business.”

Your eyes widened. “He has a what?”

I cleared my throat carefully. “He sells pheromones—”

“Has he got any here?”

“Here?” Something in your voice made me uneasy. “In this apartment, you mean?”

Your face was close enough to mine that I could feel your hopsy breath against my neck. “In this apartment,” you said, “is
exactly
what I mean.”

I felt suddenly exposed under your attention, undersized and at risk, like a chinchilla caught in a searchlight. I found myself wondering whether it hadn’t been a mistake to tell you about Van’s business. I was still trying to make up my mind as I followed you out of the kitchen and up the spiral staircase to the second floor.

“They’re probably in here,” you said, opening the door of what my cousin liked to call his “cockpit.” “This is where I’d keep the monkey drops.”

“Monkey drops?”

“The
pheromones
, Walter.”

You were already rifling through the drawer of Van’s night table. A vaguely pornographic poster above the headboard advertised something called Equus Special Blend: two women with airbrushed, lava-colored bodies caressing a man-sized vial of iridescent goo. I studied it for a while, trying to figure out why Van could possibly have had it framed, then recognized it as a poster for his company. The vial was sweating angrily and so were both the women. A banner of digital-looking text across their genitals proclaimed:

YOUR. TIME. IS. NOW.

“Your time is now,” you said quietly. You were standing at my shoulder, gazing up at the poster with a look that I couldn’t interpret. “Isn’t it always?”

“If that were true, Mrs. Haven, my cousin would be out of a job.” You sighed, and I realized—too late—that your expression was one of melancholy. “I only mean that, in this case, ‘your time’ is a reference to getting a girl—I mean, to finding somebody to—”

“It’s always now,” you said. “It’s never then.” You seemed to be speaking only to yourself. A second wave of jealousy broke over me, even more overpowering than the first. My sense of predestination was gone without a trace.

“I’d rather not talk about time, if you don’t mind.”

“Why not?”

“If you really want to know, Mrs. Haven—” I hesitated, at a loss as to where to begin. “You might say that time is my family curse.”

“Time is
everyone’s
curse.”

“That’s a popular misconception, actually. Without progressive time—that is to say, without what physicists refer to as the ‘thermodynamic arrow,’ life as we experience it—”

“Put a cork in it, Walter,” you said, pressing the thumb of your right hand against my lips. Your left hand held two vials of brownish liquid. I was gripped by a new sensation then, one that I’ve always hated: the feeling of life imitating advertising. The mimicry wasn’t perfect—you weren’t sweating or lava-colored, and you had your clothes on—but it was close enough. I took one of the vials from you, squinted at it a moment, then pulled out the rubber stopper with my teeth. A smell of grease and toffee filled the room.

You gave a tipsy-sounding laugh. “What’s your next move, Walter? What are you—”

“My time is now,” I said softly. I knocked the little vial back like a shot.

For the space of a few seconds I felt nothing: my sense of propriety stirred in certain of the remoter furrows of my brain, but that was all. Almost at once, however—with astonishing speed, at any rate—a warmth began to muster at the bottom of my spine. My eyes had closed at some point without my noticing, and I quickly lost all awareness of the room, of the party, even of the fact of you beside me. Purple and crimson and cinnamon-colored shapes began to creep across my sight, and behind or below them were other shapes, less abstract, more carnal, squirming and writhing together in patterns and rhythms that brought a prickling flush to my skin. I felt exalted, singled out by obscure and erotic forces, ready for anything as long as it was filthy. I have no clear sense of how long this condition lasted, Mrs. Haven, or how obvious my voluptuousness was to you. With every passing second I became more deliciously aware of each fold and recess of my body, more physically greedy, more depraved. I took in a deep and languid breath, held it as long as I could, then decided I was ready to have my way with the cosmos, beginning with you.

When I opened my eyes, you were staring at me as though I’d just swallowed a tooth.

“You’re not supposed to
drink
it, Walter. It’s a musk.”

By the time I’d fully grasped what you were saying the voluptuousness had drained away completely, rushing out of my body as if it couldn’t wait to escape, leaving me baffled and self-conscious and alone. For the blink of an eye, I was able to savor a feeling of mortification as acute as my arousal had just been; then, without the slightest transition, I was lying facedown on the corkwood floor.

“Walter? Come in, Walter. Are you alive?”

Your voice was all breath and no sound, the voice of a panicked conspirator, and I wondered, considering my position, how I was able to hear you at all. Then you spoke to me again, and your lips brushed my earlobe, and I realized you were with me on the floor.

“I hear somebody coming, Walter. I think maybe it’s time to get up.”

“Why are you lying down, Mrs. Haven? Did you take a shot, too?”

You cursed under your breath and rolled me over. I opened my eyes with reluctance. You were floating above me like a kind of cherub, but also like a creature in a lithograph I’d once seen, a gargoyle hunched over a woman in the throes of a terrible fever.