William Boyd - Stars and bars

Bryant looked at him through thin eyes.

The room was at the very end of a very long corridor. Outside the door was a mumbling drinks dispenser and an ice-machine. They had a good view of the car park.

The same orange sunburst pattern encountered in the lobby prevailed here too.

“This is it,” he said. “Not too bad.”

It looked lived-in, certainly. By keeping his eyes restlessly on the move and never allowing them to settle for a second he found it was just about possible to avoid noticing the many little rents and stains and cigarette burns, legacy of a thousand previous occupants.

There were, as promised, two double beds, and a pale green, three — piece plastic suite with the bonus of a baby’s cot in one corner. Henderson looked in vain for a shred of natural fibre or piece of wood. Perhaps that was why the curtain-wallers had their convention here — they felt at home.

“I’ve seen worse,” Bryant said, not nearly as put out as she should be. She turned and looked at him.

“Let me get one thing straight,” she said. “This ‘Mr and Mrs’ business. You’re not going to try and fuck me, are you?”

“Good God, no! I wouldn’t dream…How dare you…A simple error on the part of—”

“Relax,” she said. She was beginning to sound like Teagarden. Henderson mopped his burning face, aghast at the obscenity of the notion.

Bryant threw her jacket on the bed. “Just checking.”

♦

They ate in the hotel dining room at half past seven. It was full of large men rather uncomfortably and selfconsciously dressed for ‘business’ in suits and ties. Henderson ordered a steak, which overlapped his plate by a good inch on either side. Bryant had a vegetarian salad and three cigarettes.

Henderson managed about eight square inches of his steak and pushed it aside. He felt strangely depressed, which he put down to having been in Bryant’s company for most of a day. This didn’t bode well for the marriage. He sighed, and thought about tomorrow. He wondered when they would get to Atlanta. Beeby had phoned Gage to let him know Henderson was on his way. They would make an early start in the morning; get Bryant dropped off as soon as possible…He looked around the dismal dining room, suddenly missing New York. He wished he were staying at the Jefferson-Burr, instead of this anonymous hotel. Too clever by half, he considered ruefully. This was what happened when he tried to be malicious or cunning: he ended up inconveniencing himself. He was condemned to remain ineffectual, tolerant and nice.

Bryant tipped saccharine into her Sanka.

“What exactly are you meant to be doing on this trip?” she asked.

Henderson told her about the Gage collection, its significance, what he had to do when he saw the paintings.

“Where does he live, this old guy?”

“Somewhere called Luxora Beach.”

“Are you going there?”

“Later. I’ll get directions in Atlanta.”

“Are you staying with him?”

“No. I’ll probably stay in a local hotel.”

“Could I come?”

“ What!? ”

“Can’t I come with you? I’ve never been to the real South.”

“Absolutely out of the question.”

“Come on , Henderson, I won’t get in your way.”

“Completely impossible.”

“I just can’t stand the thought of a week with Grandma and Grandpa. You don’t know what they’re like.”

“Too bad.”

“ Ple-ease .”

“No. No. En oh.”

“God!” She looked genuinely irritated. Touche, at last, he thought triumphantly, smiling to himself. She couldn’t take being denied.

♦

After dinner Bryant went back to the junior suite complaining of a headache. Henderson walked down another quarter of a mile corridor to the bar. It was called The Barbary Coast but for the life of him he could see no thematic reflection of this motif in the place’s wholly unremarkable decor. It was filled with grim curtain-wallers who were being entertained by a haggard country and western chanteuse seated at an electric organ on a small dais at the end of the room. Two bored waitresses in very short beige satin dresses ferried drinks to and fro.

Henderson sat at the bar, sipped at a large Scotch and thought about phoning Irene in an attempt to rebuild a few of the burnt bridges. Unaccountably, as he sat and drank, he found himself getting more and more dejected and heavy hearted. He looked suspiciously at his whisky. He felt an immense weariness of spirit descend on him, as if some deity had personally and unequivocally confirmed that all the follies and inexplicable cruelties of the world were man’s lot, and that attempts to ameliorate them were utterly vain and futile.

He looked around him. The curtain-wallers’ faces were slumped with a similar bitter wisdom. Was it something to do with the Scaggsville Motor Hotel itself, he asked himself? Some curse on the hapless building? Some maverick charge in its static electricity? He wondered if he had been drugged…Then he realized what the source of the universal tristesse was.

The haggard chanteuse had a repertoire consisting solely of the most morose country and western numbers in the songbook. She set her Japanese electric organ (thin as an ironing-board) to plangent, and sang heartrendingly of suicide, abortion, adultery, desertion, mental and physical cruelty, alcoholism and terminal illness. Her own face, pale and scored beneath dyed blue-black hair, seemed to testify to first hand experience of these various afflictions — but perhaps that was merely the side-effect of singing that type of song each evening.

The tune she was currently playing seemed vaguely familiar; a recent or current hit, Henderson thought. He listened to a verse.

Each gnat she cooked me a fan dinner,

Each gnat I throwed it on the floor,

Then I took my sailf to town,

Till the mornin’ come aroun’

Drinkin’, gamblin’ ‘n’ sleepin’ with some whore

She switched her machine to ‘soughing violins’ for the chorus (“I was the happiest, meanest, full-time, sigried-up sinner”) but Henderson decided that he’d had as much as he could take.

He walked down the endless corridors feeling markedly more happy with every step he took away from the mournful saloon. Some convention, he thought. He had heard they were usually an excuse for a riotous booze-up. The curtain-wallers would return home to their wives shriven and repentant.

He let himself quietly into his room. The lights were out, Bryant seemed to be asleep. He went softly into the bathroom. The basin area was scattered with pots and tubes, grips and make-up. Long fair hairs clung tenaciously to the wet enamel.

He confirmed that the door was locked and took off his clothes. His body had a yellowish whiteness under the lights. He swiftly checked out the crisis areas. His nipples, once neat buttons beneath a shading of chest hair, had grown into wide pink coarse teats. Always rather hefty, he had never worried unduly about putting on weight: he ate and drank as he wished and carried the usual penalty padding as a result. But now he had critical weight loss: his buttocks were disappearing. They were shrinking. His trouser seats, usually stretched and shiny, were now loose and flapping. He turned sideways and looked in the mirror. A good kilt-wearing arse, a Scottish girlfriend had once complimented him. If he wore a kilt now its rear hem would hang inches lower than its front — be brushing the backs of his calves. And, talking about legs, his legs were going bald . Normally covered in a springy furze, his legs, from the knee down, had gone smooth and shiny. And yet all this extra hair was sprouting from his ears and nostrils…He wondered if some backstreet trichologist would transplant his nasal and aural growth; re-sow it on the desert slopes of his shins.