William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

19 August 1973

To the downtown offices of AOD to present the first draft of my package. Looked in on Lamar but his office was empty. His secretary said you could never tell when he’d be in these days. Over lunch with some of his colleagues I found that Cherylle was the prime topic of conversation. There’s a certain smug satisfaction evinced over the changes she’s wrought in Lamar; normally the paradigm of the totally committed company man, he now delegates more and more, and his faultless punctuality has degenerated to amnesiac randomness.

23 August 1973

Drove up the coast with Lamar and Cherylle in their new car, a preposterously large white Buick convertible. An unusual vernal, sappy feel to the day — all the colours seem unfledged and new. Cherylle was at her most entrancing, telling us stories of her attempts to break into the movies. Looking at Lamar, I see devotion lodged in every feature. He seems not to listen to her words, but rather watches her forming them — noting every smile, eye gleam, pout and hair-toss like some fervent anthropologist.

On the beach Cherylle changed into a skimpy scarlet bikini and we took photographs of each other. Lamar had given her an expensive camera as a present and we played with its delayed exposure device, taking endless reels of the three of us in absurd vaudevillian poses, throughout which Cherylle flirted shamelessly with me. Lamar — a little subdued, I thought — later moved up to the dunes with the telephoto lens. I saw him up there, obsessively sniping shots of her as she oiled herself and sunbathed.

When we got back home I found myself drained and exhausted from the sun and the fervid high spirits. Lamar and Cherylle wanted me to come and “cruise bars.” Lately their favourite pastime, it lasts all night — an intoxicating carnival snaking through the seamier side of the city. I begged off — I scarcely had the energy for a shower. I don’t know how they can keep this pace up.

4 September 1973

Lamar phoned and asked in a morose voice if he could come round and have a talk. Alone. I hadn’t seen him or Cherylle since that day at the beach and I wondered what was going on. He looked something like his old self — neater, back in a suit. Apparently word had come down from the higher echelons that the honeymoon was over. The postures of his body, however, struck attitudes of despair and gloom. Things were not going well. Cherylle hated to be on her own now that he had to be regularly at work. On one of their bar cruises they had met a young hippie-actor friend of Cherylle. He had stayed the night and was still there. “He’s a remarkable sort of guy,” Lamar insisted, unconvincingly. “Only I wish he and Cherylle didn’t laugh so much together.” Kick him out, I advised. No, Lamar said, no. Cherylle wouldn’t like that. My heart went out to him. We sat on and talked a bit longer, Lamar feigning unconcern, but with his strong shoulders slumped, his kamikaze love in a screaming death dive, the end of his fabulous amours, his brief bright horizon dimmed by valedictory clouds.

11 September 1973

I arrived home at the beach house this evening to find Lamar there waiting. I knew from his blank eyes Cherylle had gone. “Took the white Buick,” Lamar said, his voice numbly monotone, “and everything in the house they could hock. No note, nothing.”

I poured him a drink. She was young, I said, headstrong. She’d be back soon, to apologise, wanting to be forgiven. As he left, Lamar gripped my arm fiercely. “You know,” he said evenly, “I can’t face it. If she doesn’t come back.” I reassured him. I’d lay odds I said — five days, ten at the most. Wait until the money ran out, the binge was over.

29 September 1973

Lamar looks pale and sick. He hardly sleeps, he says. He has hired a private detective to look for Cherylle. Apparently everyone at work has been most understanding. Now that Cherylle has been away for three weeks, sympathetic consolation has turned to worldly reasoning. You’re better off without her, his colleagues declare with firm logic. Think of your career — be objective — did she really fit in? Yeah, anyone could see there was something unstable there. Hell, Lamar, they said, she’s done you a favour .

But Lamar, it was obvious, would never agree. He spent more and more time at my place tirelessly rerunning the scenario of his brief courtship and marriage as if he were trying to unlock some code the memories contained. A bleak dawn often broke on these disconsolate monologues: me in a half-doze; Lamar, his head in his hands, eyes staring emptily out to sea as if searching the sombre distance for an answer.

5 October 1973

10.30 P.M. A call from Cherylle. Would I meet her in the forecourt of a filling station not far from my house. Ah, I thought, I am about to be enrolled as mediator. However, Cherylle was proud and unrepentant. The Buick was parked at the kerb. Her boyfriend leaned against it just out of earshot. Cherylle looked more wild and unkempt. She gave me the keys to the car and an envelope of money. “Tell him to keep away,” she said. “I owe him nothing now.” I was puzzled and a little angry. “What about an explanation?” I said. “Why did you do it?” She laughed. “Nobody could take that kind of a relationship,” she said. “I was like some kind of dog, a pet dog. It would have killed me.”

When I got home I called Lamar and told him about our meeting. He came right over. When he saw the car and the money he broke down for the first time. I took him home, told him to get some sleep and said I’d be round the next day. He behaved like the victim of some appalling accident, a focal point for massive stresses.

14 October 1973

Much of my spare time over the last few days has been spent with Lamar. Our conversation on all other topics except Cherylle is desultory and half-hearted. There has been no further word from her.

Lamar is driven on remorselessly by his obsession. Now that her presence has been removed from him he hoards items of her clothing like religious treasures, the banal relics of a consumer saint. He carries around with him a cheap Zippo lighter engraved with her name, and a disposable powder compact which he is forever touching and examining like some demented votary.

We drive around at night to the bars they visited, in the vague hope of spotting her. Every distant blonde is excitedly approached until the lack of resemblance becomes clear. His moods on these occasions oscillate wildly, a leaping seismograph of elation and despair.

One day we drove back to the beach we had visited. Lamar sat in what he felt was the exact spot, raking the sand with his fingers like an insane archaeologist, finding only the cellophane wrapper of a cigarette pack and the plastic top of a tube of sun oil. Then two nights ago he asked me to come with him to Lake Folsom, where he and Cherylle had spent a weekend. We wandered aimlessly through the resort complex and then went down to the marina. There, Lamar stopped to talk to an old boatman who had rented them a cruiser for the day. He said he remembered Cherylle and asked for her. When Lamar told him what had happened he spat bitterly into the lake. He scrutinised the ripples he had caused for a few seconds and then said, “Yeah. I seen ’em all.” Then he paused. “I seen ’em all here,” he went on. “Fame, fornication and tears. That’s all there is.”

Lamar seemed profoundly affected by this piece of folk-wisdom and repeated the remark approvingly to himself several times on the journey home.

17 October 1973

A surprise invitation to Lamar’s for dinner. There were just the two of us. He tells me that after considerable thought he has eventually filed for divorce. He seems calmer but the brimming self-assurance that was there has not returned. The old solidity, too, seems a thing of the past; there is a slight lack of ease — a convalescent’s awkwardness — in his movements. After dinner he brought out all the shiny photos he had taken of Cherylle. He flicked through them once and then burnt them. He pointed to a slowly curling Kodachrome. “Cherylle, that day at the beach … remember the swimsuit?” Then he smiled, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s absurdly melodramatic, but at least I feel it’s over now.”