This Location of Unknown Possibilities (8 page)

IN THE ORCHARD

1.

M
arta detached a brochure clipped to the shade of the room's bedside lamp. An Economy Facility for Family Fun, the Star-Lite Motel evidently counted every penny: “Guest credit cards will be charged
$10
per missing towel, no exceptions.” Looking around spare and clean
#10
—complete with a set of three water glasses protected by crinkled hygienic cellophane—brought to mind untroubled lakeside and mountain slope vacations tightly budgeted by their autocratic mother, Marta and Lester in one room with Dianne and George adjacent, inset doors normally connecting them. Possibly, decades ago, she'd politely knocked on this very door next to the bulky television, her thrifty parents requesting privacy in their room and—never the doting kind—respecting that of their children.

Marta now checked to confirm the lock's security. She inspected the closet and bathroom and found everything in order. Spotting no ashtray—times had changed—she slipped the car keys on a novelty holder shaped like a fishing lure for a world of giants. Though the rental coupe wasn't strictly necessary, Marta desired the mobility.
I can go out for a drive now
, she thought,
and enjoy a freedom unavailable in the city
.

The entire winding valley of prodigious manufactured fecundity was familiar enough, but from the emerald parcels she glimpsed during the steep descent from the crest there'd been substantial refurbishing. The single-family orchards and modest roadside stands with arrow-shaped signs announcing “Peaches, Cukes 4 Sale,” so plentiful once, now slouched into history; magazine-ready viticulture and the affluent metropolitan tourist demographic it attracted—discerning eyes peeled for organic preserves, half Ironman marathons, grape cultivar trends, and gourmet lunches on chic verandas overlooking luxuriant vineyards—had become the new economic order. A rectangular plot cut from the surrounding orchard of dwarf peach trees, the Star-Lite represented a
1950
s vestige with a passenger pigeon future.

Capillary dirt roads still crisscrossed the arid valley, Marta had noticed, picturing a tour along them after hours, air rushing though open windows, dust plumes trailing.

The other burgs between the amoebic city sprawl and the Star-Lite's roadside solitude—scrappy agricultural pockets and malnourished communities built in close range to mined hillsides of tailings long abandoned and overgrown or close to exhaustion—did not appear to have been touched by the aspirant's grab-the-future-by-the-horns outlook so pronounced on the valley's wine grape plateaus.

Marta felt reassured as she journeyed by the hardscrabble outposts, recognizing gas stations, restaurants, motels, and log homes—entire main streets, in fact—possessing a trapped-in-amber quality that was cousin to the revived historic gold rush settlement deeper in the province's interior. Surviving off visitor dollars, that destination promised to bring one version of history alive by hiring hordes of students each summer and paying them to stroll the dusty streets in character, the select calico- and wool-clad population educational viewing for the whole family, G-rated of course: no rape, racism, smallpox, domestic violence, or situational homosexuality, and perhaps just one town drunk rendered as red-faced and obnoxious yet benignly comical, a pioneer Falstaff.

Although the gradual climb from sea level contained her within one time zone, Marta had been conscious of how barreling so easily beyond the embrace of routine registered as such a heartfelt charge. Passing from sopping dense forests of hemlock, salmonberry bush, and clinging boreal mists to arid, needle-strewn stands of skinny pine, she noticed roadside Great Mullein (“desert tapers,” her mother's fanciful coinage, sprang to mind first), and, at last, caught sight of the gateway marker, a loaf-form mountain, velvety camel and puckered by dark undulating furrows. Marta's shoulders began to relax despite the tension caused by traffic: nearby called out the landscape of childhood vacations.

The silence from the production office about tomorrow's schedule gnawed at Marta's nerves.
To her chagrin, the immediate future was not a mapped road but an opaque wall, and that made her peevish; as always, the lack of a specific plan proved irksome. Marta's core punctuality—
6
o'clock does not mean
6
:
10
—routinely stood at odds with a world of delayed services and detained, inexact people.
There's nothing to do now except stare at the phone
, she thought.
Of course
.

At the motel's front desk office, Mrs. Simms, the Star-Lite's affable and confiding owner/operator, had endeared herself to Marta with a sisterly offer of counsel—“You got any questions, Marta, anything at all”—she'd said with a sly conspiratorial tone, as though Marta might be seeking a back-alley abortion, or dry county moonshine—“you come right to me. My family's been operating this place for two generations, so believe you me, I've heard 'em all.” Cross-legged on a stool, Mrs. Simms hadn't mentioned any calls. Fretful, Marta wondered if she'd missed an important email. One might have been sent after she left home.

The red light on the room's telephone wasn't flashing; she lifted the receiver to check for a dial tone.

To her knowledge no one—and by now she'd learned the office's unwavering chain of command: Jakob near the apex, Lora next, and one of the pawn-like PAs at the base—had sent information about a “session” or “pow wow” (Jakob's and Lora's preferred terms for meeting, respectively) following check-in, so Marta guessed she was at liberty to plan out the evening.

The prudent choice to wait could serve her best, she decided. Perhaps Lora's short term plans included a call to explain next day's schedule. Marta needed to sort out the per diem, too, excited by the novel concept of daily cash allotments handed out in discreet white envelopes, she imagined, like bribes in movies. She thought of dropping by to check with Mrs. Simms one last time, just in case. Advice about nearby restaurants could supply a reasonable pretext.

In the meantime, she'd try to relax inside the cinder block cube, vintage print spun nylon curtains drawn for solitude.
The room was warm and smelled of the staleness of age as well as of lingering bathroom chemicals. She'd prop open the door after sunset.

Marta slid off canvas sneakers. Unpacking luggage could wait, ditto the drive and inaugural wander along Main Street to investigate three blocks of retail offerings. Poised on the edge of the bed—covered with a slithery polyester satin quilt that made her squeamish and would soon be folded away in the closet along with the untenable poly-cotton sheets—Marta grabbed the remote and found the channel guide.

She clicked on a station that specialized in drive-in classics and arrived in the midst of a favourite moment. Tracking the prostitute-fixated serial killer with the light of righteousness to guide them, Angel and Mae skirted around the murky brick alleys of Sunset Boulevard during a breezy California night that nevertheless caused no movement in the stiff curls of Mae's voluminous wig or Angel's beribboned hair.

The improbable scene—the
15–
year old Angel/whore character being played as innocent by a
24–
year old performer in thick layers of purportedly age-defying makeup that rendered her hardened and mannequin-like rather than sweetly, dewily adolescent—always prompted Marta to recall a sibilant-heavy review, one that for a time she'd delighted in quoting to fellow graduate students, whose faces reflected no empathy for her fascination with déclassé subject matter. The writer called the B-movie a “screwy, sickening, and semi-satisfying stew of shtick, sleazeball, and sentimentality.”

Sleazy or not,
Angel
was also a fortunate discovery—and heartily satisfying too, Marta would argue—that became the subject of her debut conference paper, an analysis of notions of prostitution and feminine duplicity that compared the wily centuries-old archetype Moll Flanders to a contemporary descendent, the soon-to-be avenging Angel.
Plus ça change
, the essay had implied with a tentative finger of accusation.

2
.

F
or an accidental find,
Angel
had proven invaluable. Touching on
Psycho
or
Marnie
here,
Dressed to Kill
there, Marta revisited and elaborated on the topic at subsequent conferences. Variation-on-a-theme papers were a venerable if unmentioned tradition at such gatherings: forever eyeing the publish-or-perish quota—the cliché updated as publish-and-perish by rung-eyeing fresh PhDs—the congregated scholars welcomed the efficiency. Utility aside, Marta enjoyed rooting through non-literary source material as much as the political dimensions of the subject; the male-penned account of feminine duplicity opened up as richly complex and imbued with an agreeable taint of controversy.

By the fourth time Marta stood at a lectern for the mandatory twenty minutes to uncover the intricacies of Angel's narrative—complete with audience-pleasing film stills placed atop a overhead projector—both the character and the speaker had ceased to be students. Over the course of
Avenging Angel
,
Angel III: The Final Chapter
, and
Angel
4
: Undercover
, Angel could no longer be labeled a “high school honor student by day,” having graduated and become a respected police photographer. Nor was she a mini-skirted “Hollywood hooker by night,” though she agreed to pose as one—
for one last time
—in order to trap yet another prostitute-fixated murderer. Exempt from B-movie plot mechanics, Marta's better paying new role at the classroom's helm didn't demand so much as a change of blouse.

Hollywood's retread economy arrived as a welcome ideology to Marta since she exploited its reliance on low-budget reiterations. She viewed the timely latest installment as grist for the conference paper mill—her constant work generated with one primary aim: the mecca of tenure. Marta barely needed notes to explain Angel's tidal flux of feminine agency; a single sitting through the latest sequel had replaced the earnest and painstaking shot-by-shot explication of former days. As for the conference talk, she easily stitched together the required minutes worth of material during the flight. She felt proud if absurd when cluing into a fact: her rank as the leading scholar on
Angel
. Dr. Spëk, the globe's preeminent
Angel
ographer. Checking later, she'd confirmed the unique monopoly. Careers had been founded on lesser accomplishments.

Marta spoke about
Angel
4
: Undercover
and listened to the panel's three other speakers—occasionally feigning the ritual expression of rapt interest evident throughout the audience. After responding to a request to clarify a point and throwing in a comment during the roundtable, she left the windowless room and walked at a brisk pace to the exterior doors of the brick campus building that housed the entire event. Bracing Idahoan air and a winding pathway soothed her nerves as she retreated from the unofficial goal of the conference—stiff and polite and nuanced after-session mingling that eventually stripped down to serial pissing contests. The crowing over publications and grant funding,
3
.
5
Richter scandals, and fathomless complaint always suffused Marta with dread and a rip-tide undercurrent of nausea.

Naturally no one needed to explain to Marta that any group—from kindergarten on—invented unique means of instituting hierarchies and channeling animosities. And she didn't need to be told that without tactical participation a career could atrophy. Landed in a group of any variety, though, she ordinarily and habitually conceived of reasonable exit strategies and then gravitated toward lone corners and peripheral tables of finger food and coffee urns. Or, if fortune was smiling, there'd be print of some kind to scan, publisher book displays at which she could devote long minutes. She likened the movement to a plant leaning toward sunlight; more than comprehendible, the perfectly organic and sustaining motion followed earthly laws.

For this one occasion, she forgave herself for not dividing the room into will nots, haves, has beens, and have nots, and then arranging contact with the haves, artfully dropping mention of CV-worthy accomplishments and exceptional busyness into measured conversations—chapters to write! funding applications! student thesis supervision! journal articles! far-flung conferences to attend! book reviews! classes to organize!—and illustrating how bold new grant-nourished research would ensure the ongoing skyrocketing of an esteemed reputation. Even a courtier's tongue required rest.

The conference was held in Boise, “The City of Trees”—so she'd read about the place, whose completely recognizable name had floated up unaccompanied by facts, images, or trivia. Say “Jupiter” and Marta conjured a solar system illustration, enormity, dozens of moons in whizzing orbits, pinky-orange swirls of volatile gas clouds, and the Great Red Spot; but Boise only summoned Idaho and with it the seemingly contradictory occurrence of vast flat potato fields and angular swathes of coniferous trees. Boise's cloak of anonymity fluttered attractively.