Thomas Mcguane - Something to Be Desired

“Just what sort of people are you?” he asked.

He woke up the next morning, made breakfast and brought it back to bed with him. This morning he let Sadie get in bed with him. That was a Sunday morning privilege and ceremony, when he would read the previous Sunday’s New York Times . Sadie always spotted the plastic mail wrapping and knew it was her day. Today was Thursday and Lucien had gotten four days behind; but Sadie didn’t know that, so today she got bed privileges and finger-held fragments of bacon and egg whites. People wondered why he didn’t build a better home to go with his new prosperity; but this old house suited Lucien fine. It was two ranges of hills from the hot spring, an increasingly important factor of insulation.

He cradled the phone against his shoulder, scanned “The Week in Review,” and dialed Antoinette. “Anybody looking for me?”

“The coroner’s office.”

“The coroner’s office …”

“They want to know what to do with Kelsey.”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Lucien, grabbing the phone in his hand. “Wait a minute,” he shouted. Sadie jumped off the bed. “Call the coroner back and tell him you talked to me. Tell him I said there was no such fucking thing as Kelsey. You got that? Just tell him so he knows: There’s no Kelsey .” He hung up and waited until his breathing was normal before he went back to his paper.

As luck would have it, Turks and Caicos was in the paper. Apparently it was a cluster of islands in the eastern Bahamas. Apparently it was all beaches and banks where dope dealers and Vesco types stored their money. There was a picture of a palm-shaded beach with a lethal-looking cigarette boat in the foreground and a modern slab of a bank in the background. Lucien knew Emily’s taste, he thought, enough to think she’d find this beach scene tacky and shallow. It saddened him to imagine her hurrying up the crushed coral walk and pushing through the plate-glass door to the air-conditioned room that held the five thousand he’d sent.

He got up to dress. Sadie jumped on and off the bed till he looked over at her and she stopped. He really didn’t know how to dress; whether to dress for his guests or to dress for the plumbing repairs he had to make on the mixing valves beneath the spring. Maybe a flight suit to symbolize either getting out of town or aiding Emily in her banking would have been on the nose. Maybe a diaper.

· · ·

The mail contained an eight-by-ten envelope from Wick Tompkins. Now, this was suspicious. Lucien hardly ever knew Wick to use the mail to him. Wick’s hand deliveries of trifling papers were part of their life together. The contents of the envelope were simple and eloquent: a Uruguayan police photograph of W. T. Austinberry with a bullet hole in his left eye socket. The face had been scrubbed free of blood, the right lid tucked in place. The horrid gap nearly obscured the identity of Austinberry, but somehow the vaguely cowboy Scots-Irish face remained his.

Lucien went to the phone.

“Where did you get the picture?”

“The police here in town.”

“What were they doing with it?”

“Helping verify who it was.”

“Well, it’s him.”

“It sure is. Wouldn’t you venture he’d kind of lost his looks?”

“I’d like to know what he did to deserve it, Wick. That’s what I’d like to know.”

There was a long pause.

“Lucien,” said Wick. “Don’t do this to me.”

Lucien stopped down at Dominic Armada’s room. By keeping the room year-round — and he never asked for a rate-Dominic had transformed it into his own single flat, with none of the atmosphere of a hotel or spa. The room smelled of Ben-Gay and garlic; the beady-eyed Madonnas stood along the wall like duck decoys. There was a photograph of the bay of Naples that made Lucien long suddenly and irrationally for the sea, a longing that ended abruptly with a memory of the island church where Lord Nelson was married and where Lucien raised questions about his life that he still had not answered.

“Siddown, siddown, siddown, Lucien,” said the old penitent. Lucien sat on one of the Miami lawn chairs Dominic had brought for its associations and drank wine from a highball glass. Lucien immediately entered into the sort of urbanized character he became around Dominic; it was a relief to be that person for a moment.

“Lucien, sell me this hot spring, please.”

“You’ve got a nice room, Dom. That’s enough. This place is my pride and joy.”

Lucien realized that Dominic wished to pass his declining days among vaguely genteel people, defending his Madonnas against the occasional drunk who got the wrong door. Dominic’s laughter displayed his long teeth, and on Saturday night he always sent down a hundred dollars to buy a round of drinks for “the nice cowboys in the bar. And their gals.” Dominic had first drawn Lucien into conversation by explaining to him that he had spent many years in the horse business. When Lucien asked him where, he said, “The fifty-dollar window.”

Dominic’s phone rang. “Yeah, he’s here.” He reached it to Lucien.

“I’ll take it in my office,” Lucien said to Antoinette. “Gotta go, Dom.” He chugged the red wine.

“I could help you.” Dominic smiled. “Keep the headache.”

Lucien walked toward his office, imagining the solid squeeze the pale hold button had on the caller. He was not in a hurry. It seemed he alternated regularly between a placid acceptance of the need to be normal, to get, spend and lay waste; and the sense that his time was the only true coinage and he was misspending it and death was creeping at him on little cat feet.

“Darling?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Emily.”

“Emily!”

His nerve net became a skein of heated platinum wire. How different this terror and desire seemed in the face of a platitudinous day barely saved by the epiglottal clamp of Freddy. Lucien stretched the coiled telephone cord to get the door open and admit Sadie, a fine bird dog who had become a poolside whore in Lucien’s newest life. Sadie jumped repeatedly over Lucien’s desk while he talked.

“Are you doing all right?” Emily asked through clouds of Caribbean static.

“Maybe too well,” Lucien shouted nervously. “I’ve overstabilized the risk factor.” Suddenly he was uneasy for having said that. What did she want? What did she want of him?

“Well, I’m only calling to say thanks. You’ve been terribly generous. And I’m fine, I’m going to be okay. Don’t worry about me, Lucien, okay?” The static arose, making palpable all that distance, all that southerliness and ocean distance. And finally it swallowed Emily.

“Where are you?” Lucien asked in an excited voice as Sadie sized up the filing cabinet. “Emily, where are you?”

Lucien buzzed Antoinette.

“Antoinette, did you get a call-back number on that last one?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Because you came to the phone, Mr. Taylor.”

“Ah, so I did.”

“Are you all right?”

“That’s what the lady who called just asked. Is there something wrong with my voice?”

“No, I—”

“Would you like me to intone something in a lower register in order to prevent these inquiries as to my well-being?”

Monday and Tuesday were spent with the accountant. The spring was at a kind of financial income limit. The question was toward the write-offs now, or an outright sale. All the little things, raising the rates, improving the dining room and its revenues, adding services, were fairly well used up. And besides that, the concessionaires, if you could call them that, noting the stability of the business through advance bookings and other sensors, wanted raises. Mary Celeste was particularly bad about that: she viewed Workmen’s Compensation as a neglected gold mine. Lucien was afraid to tell her that for every person who was drawn to her therapy there were two who were appalled at sending feces across the wall in glass tubes; so he gave her a raise and she sulked off in her caftan. The accountant, Dan Janoff, stared at his sheets and made itchy traceries on his bald spot with the point of his pencil.