William Boyd - Stars and bars

“You can get lung cancer from cigarettes, you know,” he said.

“Sure. And emphysema and cardiac arrest and they kill cowboys. I know all that.” She sat back and smiled for the first time. “It’s a calculated risk. Don’t you ever take risks, Henderson?”

“Not if I can help it,” he said.

She looked at him. “No, I guess not.”

♦

They drove on through New Jersey. Sometimes the turnpike was raised high on stilts over a baleful marshy landscape, studded with small brown lakes and acres of tall reeds. Here and there a huge concrete and glass power station would rear up like an island, its cooling towers disgorging steam, humming wires looping out from its hot dynamos to feed the sprawling suburbs and distant cities — Edison, Metuchen, Plainfield, Sayreville. Power-lines, he saw, were everywhere. Electric cables had a prominence and visibility in America that was wholly unlike the neater, tidier Europe. Now he thought of the power stations as vast mills, churning out their miles of cable to enmesh the entire country with its warp and weft; cables that festooned every townscape and street-view, a great tangled net of fallen rigging over the land, holding it together. The effect was, he thought, to make everything appear messier and half-finished, ramshackle and rundown. American streets and roads looked, to his eyes, unnecessarily fussy, with wire and cable stretched all over the place.

There was generally, he saw, as he looked at the scene on either side of the turnpike, more ironwork of all kinds in evidence: from the gawky, teetering TV aerials to the criss-cross cantilevers of the road signs, most of which looked in need of a paint. In Britain, he thought, we maintain our street furniture to an extraordinarily high degree; everything looks new and neat on the roads. Gangs of men roamed the country furiously repainting the white dashes of the lane dividers. He thought of some of London’s streets with their multitude of lines and zig-zags: double yellow or single, the various flashes on the kerbs, the grids and arrows. You needed a dictionary to park your car these days.

But here everything looked well-used. The verges were dusty and ragged; where road ended and verge began was a matter of real ambiguity. In England edges were distinct. Kerbstone production had never seen such boom years. Verges were sharp, and well-defined: finished off, beaded, seamed. Sometimes in America you saw the same rectitude, but usually edges were frayed and worn. There was no manic energy expended in maintaining them.

So what? he thought later, suddenly bitter. Here energies were directed to making the important things work — like telephones, food production, heating and cooling — not dissipated in buffing up roadsigns or polishing cats’ eyes. By their verges and street furniture shall ye know them…

His sombre mood continued to darken as they bypassed Philadelphia. He was getting thoroughly disenchanted with the belching smokestack in the front seat beside him. For the most part he drove in tight-lipped silence. He could be as sulky and withdrawn as any spoilt teenager, he told himself with quiet satisfaction: no trouble in descending to that level at all. He contented himself with looking at the scenery and pondering on its strangeness: all the houses made of wood; the astonishing number of playgrounds, tennis courts and baseball diamonds scattered generously about.

Unfortunately his ill-humour seemed to make Bryant relax, as if it had been the very self-consciousness of the adult-child relationship that irked her. Now he was being selfish too, she seemed to unwind. She switched on the radio for a while and sang quietly along to some of the pop-songs. She proffered the odd remark: “Hey, look at that neat car!” or, “I spent a weekend in Philadelphia one night.”

Henderson confined his replies to monosyllables, then she said: “Do you know that you have really a lot of hair growing out of your ears?”

Henderson did indeed know. It was one of the catalogue of alarming body-changes he’d been registering recently. He had rather too much hair growing out of his nostrils too, if it came to that, for his liking. He certainly didn’t care to be reminded of it.

“These things happen, you know,” he said. “As you grow older your body changes. It’ll happen to you too,” he observed with some relish. “Things will happen to your body when you’re a mature woman that you won’t be too pleased about.”

“I’ll have plastic surgery.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

She shrugged. “So how old are you, then?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“Is that all?”

“What do you mean ‘Is that all?’”

“I don’t know. I guess I thought you were older.” She scratched at something on the dashboard. “I mean, Grandpaw Wax has got hair in his ears too. You’ve almost got as much as him. I just figured you were, you know, older.”

Henderson felt himself colouring. The nerve, he thought. The little bitch. He tried desperately to think of some way of getting his own back.

“We’re staying at the Jefferson-Burr tonight, aren’t we?” Bryant asked.

The Jefferson-Burr was one of Washington’s grander hotels. If you hung out of certain bathroom windows you could glimpse the White House lawn. Melissa had booked two rooms.

“No,” Henderson lied, revenge inspiring him. “It was full up.”

“Oh. Where are we staying, then? The Hilton?”

“No, no. It’s a little way off yet. I’ll tell you when we get there.”

‘Skaggsville Motor Hotel’, a tatty billboard proclaimed at the side of Highway 95, along which they now drove, “Next junction.”

“Here we are,” Henderson said.

“You’re kidding!”

“Best I could do at short notice.”

The motor hotel stood in an expanse of crowded carpark. It was long, three stories high and as functional as a tool box. Henderson ordered Bryant to stay in the car while he ‘checked’ their reservation.

The lobby was carpeted in worn orange sunburst pattern, with matching curtains. Underfoot it felt vaguely adhesive. It was ideal. By the reception desk was a little noticeboard.

THE SKAGGSVILLE MOTO HOT WELCOMES

THE DELAWARE FIBRE-GLASS CURTAIN

WALLI G CONVENTIO

“Welcome to the Scaggsville Motor Hotel,” echoed a small plump receptionist. “Are you with the convention, sir?”

“Me?” Did he look like a fibre-glass curtain-walling contractor, he wondered? “No, no. I just want a room for the night.” He put down his credit card on the desk. “Two! rooms.”

She looked at a chart. “We don’t have two rooms left, sir. The convention.”

“Oh.”

“I have a junior suite.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like an extra large room with two double beds, some armchairs. Sorta like a suite but in one room.”

He thought. What should he do? Press on?

“Your name, sir?”

“Dores. Look, I’ll be back in a second.”

He dashed outside to the car.

“They’ve only got one room. A junior suite.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

He realized he was getting in a bit of a flap. Calm down, he told himself. He went back in. Bryant followed at her own pace. Henderson signed his name on a card, was given his key and told where he could find the room.

“Great,” he said, a little worried. This wasn’t quite how the revenge was meant to function. He turned. Bryant was looking at a mildewed picture of the Capitol hung on the plastic pine panelling.

“Enjoy your stay, Mr and Mrs Dores,” carolled the friendly receptionist. Henderson whirled round in horrified protest, but the girl was on the phone. Good God, he thought, this is probably some sort of federal offence — crossing state lines with a minor masquerading as a wife.