Paul Theroux - My Secret History

The boys my age made me feel like an outsider. They were not intentionally rude, but they were too selfish to know how to be friendly and too stupid to hold a conversation. The girls were all daughters and the boys were all sons — special for that and protected. Their whole lives were taken care of. They were fat and slow and they would become fatter and slower; they had money. Even the younger ones were hairy, and a few fourteen-year-olds had mustaches. I could tell from the way they jumped into the pool and splashed everyone that they would be hell when they grew up.

“That’s my kid, Kenny,” a man said to me one day. The boy had done a cannonball from the end of the pool, nearly landing on a woman’s head. But the man was laughing. He loved seeing aggression in his son. He pointed to himself. He said, “Deek Palanjian.”

I smiled at him. I saw Mattanza watching. He was thinking: No talking. But Palanjian was talking to me.

“Elia Kazan — know who I mean? Big movie director? He’s an Armenian.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Michael Arlen? Wrote a lot of best-sellers? Know what his real name is?”

I shook my head because Mattanza was watching.

“Dikran Kouyoumjian.”

“No kidding.”

“That guy in Russia — he’s Armenian.”

“Which guy in Russia?”

“Anastas Mikoyan,” he said, and waved to his son, who had climbed onto the diving board. He was a short heavy brown boy with a shaven head, and he moved nimbly with his arms down, like an ape. “Hey, Kenny, show me a dive!”

“How do you stand this job?” the woman said. It was the same woman who had been reading Norman Mailer. Today she was reading The Henry Miller Reader —the man’s sly devilish face on the book jacket looking up at me from between the woman’s breasts.

“The job’s all right.”

“You don’t have to be polite to me. I’ve been watching you,” she said. “I think you hate it here.”

It astounded me that she was able to read my mind, and I was embarrassed because I guessed she might have an inkling of all the ingenious ways I had devised to destroy the Maldwyn Country Club: making a minefield of the golf course, poisoning the water cooler, bombing the clubhouse. And lately I had been thinking that, just for the cruel fun of it, I would jam a potato in everyone’s exhaust pipe — all those limousines in the parking lot — so that they wouldn’t be able to start the engine. Then they would have to walk, like me.

“I do hate it,” I said. “But I need a job.”

“What would you like to be doing?”

I thought: I would like to be lying here in the sun, drinking cold lemonade and reading a good book. I would like to be doing pretty much what everyone here was doing, which was another reason I hated this job. It was like being very hungry and working in a restaurant, bringing people food; like standing on the sidewalk reading Whale Steaks $1.29 and not having any money.

“I’d like to be reading,” I said, because it seemed rude to tell her what I pictured — myself on the chaise lounge, with my feet out. “What do you think of that book?”

“It’s lovely,” she said. “He’s so funny. Have you read Henry Miller?”

“No. I thought he was banned in the US.”

“His best books are banned. But someday we’ll be able to read them, and we’ll probably find them very boring. Imagine preventing people from reading something — as if reading is going to make us into monsters!”

I looked up expecting to see Mattanza: that stupid man had a book-banning mentality. No sane person could ever find a book dangerous, and it struck me then that an unmistakable sign of beetle-browed paranoia was seeing a book as a threat. The fact that I couldn’t spot Mattanza made me suspect that he was spying on me.

“Lawrence Durrell thinks Miller’s a genius. He wrote the Introduction.”

“I’ve read Justine ,” I said. “And Balthazar . I’m waiting for the others to be published in paperback.”

“You know the characters Narouz and Nessim? I’m their mother.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Same name — Leila. My other name is much too difficult. You must find our names ridiculous.”

“Mine’s pretty ridiculous. Andy Parent.”

“I’m Leila Mamalujian — my husband’s the contractor. The John Hancock Building? He put it up. Big deal.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen him here.”

“We never come here together. We never do anything together. That’s probably why it works. Would you like to have lunch sometime?”

I said, “I’m not supposed to fraternize with the club members. It’s a rule.”

“That’s why I asked. It’s more exciting if you’re breaking a rule.”

“Mattanza would kill me.”

“He has a problem. His size, I think. Did you know that his wife won’t sleep with him unless they’re planning to have a baby? She thinks sex has something to do with having children.”

She didn’t laugh. She lit a cigarette, reddening one end with her lipstick and looking at me through big bulbous sunglasses.

“Mrs. Mattanza could use a little Henry Miller,” Mrs. Mamalujian said. “So how about lunch?”

“I work every day.”

“You have a day off. I’ve been watching you.”

“On my day off I’m usually hustling.”

Mrs. Mamalujian said, “Lunch is just a figure of speech.”

It wasn’t a figure of speech to me. It was a meal in a restaurant. You went in, had a drink, ordered prawn cocktail to start, and then a whale steak with mashed potatoes and string beans, and apple pie à la mode for dessert, and two coffees; and afterwards you went for a walk and smoked a White Owl to digest the meal. It was something I longed to do. I liked the weighty word “meal” and nowadays meal meant whale steaks.

Mrs. Mamalujian’s close attention was making me self-conscious. I said, “I’ve got to get back to work.”

That evening as I was getting ready to go home, Mattanza stopped me and said, “I’ve been getting complaints about you.”

“What kind of complaints?”

“Serious ones. Like you’re neglecting your job. Like you’ve been goofing off. Like you talk too much. And somebody saw you with a book.”

“What was I doing with the book? Something weird?”

My sarcasm enraged him. “That’s right — keep it up! Piss me off. See where it gets you.”

For a moment I was going to tell him to shove the job. But I needed it. It was more money than I would be earning at Wright’s, and fewer hours. The State was hiring lifeguards for the MDC pools, but I knew they were zoos.

“These complaints,” I said, “are they verbal or written?”

“You are such a smart-ass,” Mattanza said.

“Who complained about me? What did they say? I’ve got a right to know.”

Mattanza narrowed his tiny eyes at me. “You writing a book?”

I stared at him until he blinked. Then I said, “Yeah.”

“Then leave this chapter out.”

He started to walk away, a little bowlegged Indian brave from Sicilia. He suddenly turned as I was watching him, and he said, “Don’t mess with me. I was in the army. Korea. I seen action.”

For a few days I didn’t speak to anyone. Were any of these people complaining about me? I felt Mattanza was making it all up, but what if he wasn’t? On my way to work one day, cutting through the parking lot, I saw a big blue Lincoln leaking gas — the full tank expanding in the heat, and gas all over the bumper. Why not fling a match on it and blow it up? The only thing that kept me from doing it was the thought that I might be blown up with it. I hated these huge cars; but I knew how to sabotage them — sugar in the gas tank to foul the engine, a potato to plug the exhaust pipe. I saw Mrs. Mamalujian drive in — she had a white Buick — and I crept away.