Jonathan Raban - Surveillance - A Novel

She was good and old, this one — as old as Lucy Bengstrom, maybe even older. “Hi, I’m Estelle,” she’d said when she stepped into his pickup. It was a made-up name. Last week’s girl had called herself Dolores.

“I’m Don,” Charles O had said.

“Hi, Don,” she’d said, hitching her skirt up to show her thigh. He saw her appraising the leather upholstery, the premium stereo, the power seats, the AC.

She sure took her time in the bathroom: lot of water running and the toilet flushing. Still fully clothed, he sat on the edge of the waterbed, lightly bouncing, waiting for his date.

At last she came out, in her underwear — red bra, red panties, black stockings and a lot of hooks and elastic to hold them up. She turned around, cocked her fat ass up at him, big meaty buttocks bulging out from the lacy stuff that barely filled her crack, looked over her shoulder, and said, “How you like me, Don?”

“Lookin’ good, Estelle.”

“I like Asian men. They keep themselves clean, not like Americans. I’m big on personal hygiene. I mean, what with all the DSTs nowadays, you gotta be clean, right?” She perched herself on his knees, arm around his neck, then reached for his pants. “Hey, your little elvis, he’s got wood. ”

She unzipped him, easing his pants down to his knees. He liked the motherliness of her as she swabbed his dick and balls with a Wet One.

“What a big elvis he’s getting to be.”

Charles O knew the drill. He handed her the condom that he’d taken from its wrapper when she was in the bathroom. Gently, skillfully, she unrolled the latex sheath down his dick, as if she was hanging wallpaper. Then she put her lips to the teat of the condom, teasing him.

“Does little elvis want to come in my mouth?”

This was what the old ones were good at. They liked to play around, to pretend. Charles O liked that.

“Is he going to be a good little elvis today, then?”

It was like his entire being had gone into his dick now: he was his dick. “Yeah,” he grunted. “Yeah.”

She had him all in her mouth now, licking, sucking, squeezing, as if she had a whole bunch of baby chipmunks working overtime inside there.

As she labored on him, he thought of Lucy Bengstrom. Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy !

“Oh, you’re a quick one, aren’t you, honey? Was that nice? I like a quick man.”

He went to the bathroom to rid himself of the Trojan and wash up. When he came back, Estelle said, “I only go hoing for my little daughter. Sharon’s ten. You’d like her. She’s doing great at school.”

“Where she at now?”

“I got an aunt looks after her on weekends. In Shoreline. That’s a nice neighborhood. You know Shoreline?”

She was chatty, this one. He shrugged. “Yeah, I been all around there.”

“I gotta go to the little girls’ room,” she said. “You wait there. Turn on the TV. We could watch TV together.”

Impatient to settle up with her and get back on the road, he paced the room, wondering why she trusted him to stay. Then he saw her watching him through the just-open bathroom door — her eyes on his every move as she pulled up her skirt and tucked her shirt into it. She had him covered.

When she came out, she was smiling. He hadn’t noticed her bad teeth before. She said, “I got an idea, Don. I’m really hungry. I thought, you and me, we could go out to lunch someplace, somewhere fancy, like with a cocktail lounge, you know? Like we were on a date date. Then after, maybe I could do your little elvis again — wouldn’t cost you no more, ’cept for the lunch, and you could give me like a gratuity ?”

He was sufficiently tempted to check the time on his watch. “Nah. Too much business I got to see to.” He handed her three twenties, as agreed.

They parted company at the door, Charles O to his truck, Estelle to the street. She was almost at the corner of the motel when she turned around and called, “Don?”

“Yeah?”

“And fuck you too, honey. ”

He was laughing as he switched on the ignition. What a ho — drive two stoplights down Aurora and she’d be gone forever from his mind. Yet the good blow job had only further imprinted the beckoning thought of Lucy Bengstrom. He didn’t want hos no more, he wanted her. Lucy! Just thinking her name made his dick begin to twitch again.

He turned on the stereo.

“Next, when you attain deep understanding about the three circles of your Hedgehog Concept and begin to push in a direction consistent with that understanding, you hit breakthrough momentum and accelerate with key accelerators…”

The deep, confident, moneyed voice filled the cab. Breakthrough momentum —that was where he was at, and Lucy Bengstrom was part of it. Half listening, half dreaming, he was struck by an idea so new to him that it took several blocks to recognize it for what it was, or what he presumed it must be. Love, never an item on his agenda, and a term so far outside his usual vocabulary that he classed it along with such other dim abstractions as “amortization” and “fee simple,” had at last caught up with him in the shape of the tenant of #701 in that big flowery dress of hers. Crossing the Aurora Bridge, Charles O felt suddenly, mysteriously gifted.

LUCY WAS GLAD that Alida had been upstairs in her room when the live crabs had been slid, claws flailing, into the massive pan of raging water, each letting out a desolate whistling sigh as it met its death. At lunch, Alida was engrossed in managing the novel implements — the hinged crackers in the shape of claws, the slender two-pronged forks for teasing the flesh out of the shells.

“So how goes the homework?” Augie said.

Alida looked up from her splitting and crunching. “Oh, I finished it. It was pretty easy. I found the part where Anne says she wants to be Dutch, and put that in.”

Lucy didn’t know what she was talking about. “Who’s this, Rabbit?”

“Anne Frank.”

“We were talking about her earlier,” Augie said.

Alida never discussed her homework with Lucy.

“It’s an interesting question,” Augie said. “Was Anne Frank an emblem of the human spirit in general, or was she the archetypal Jewish victim? Her father, Otto, always claimed her as the first. This guy Meyer Levin tried to turn her into the second. There’s been a big battle over the possession of her memory, so by now there are two different Anne Franks — maybe more.”

This was Alida’s homework — multiple Anne Franks? “I thought you didn’t like memoirs,” Lucy said.

“And here’s why. Otto Frank’s Anne is one person, Meyer Levin’s is another. You read her diary through Otto’s eyes, then through Levin’s, and they’re two different books entirely. One’s about the trials of humanity, the other’s about the suffering of the Jews. Memoirs are always tricky that way.”

“Augie, I was thinking…”

“What were you thinking, Alida?”

“Well, like if we could go kayaking after lunch?”

“Oh, Rabbit, there’s no time. There’ll be long lines at the ferry, particularly in this weather. You’ve got school tomorrow. We have to get away in less than an hour. I’m sorry.”

Alida’s face went pinkly limp with disappointment.

“Hey, talk your mother into coming next weekend, we can go then.”

“Oh, Mom, can we? Please?”

Lucy was aware of a whole battery of alarms going off inside her head. August Vanags was her subject, her paycheck; he was food and rent. She needed distance to get him in perspective, to hold him coolly at arm’s length and not get drowned in this warm tide of hospitality — a tide, she feared, that issued from his and Minna’s loneliness. In the case of Bill Gates, she’d won two one-hour sessions, three weeks apart, and that was about right. In the case of August Vanags, it felt as if she and Alida were moving in. Her piece was in danger; she must get her priorities straight.