After Bathing at Baxters (3 page)

Subsequently, if you had asked Susy to recall the details of what passed in the ensuing weeks (and Mom at least made the effort), they would have existed merely as single, isolated images: sharply focused snaps pulled at random from an interminable roll of film: standing on the hills above Baton Rouge watching the Mississippi stream away towards the Gulf; an open-air concert at Jefferson where they walked airily through the fringes of the crowd as the evening sky turned the colour of blue velvet; driving through Alabama at night with Artie Tripp continually falling asleep at the wheel and having to be nudged awake, until in the haggard light of dawn they hit Montgomery and crashed out in the back seat of the car in the middle of a municipal car-park.

Crackling, moving pictures: with soundtrack. Susy saying
freedom is the road
, Springsteen singing ‘Born To Run' out of the car radio above the din of the freeway, Artie Tripp getting mad with a bullet-headed Arkansas straw-chewer who had given Susy the eye in Little Rock, Susy in a diner call-box outside of Nashville saying to Mom that honestly it was OK honestly it was and Mom not saying anything at all and finally hanging up and going out to be comforted by Artie Tripp who put his arms round her and hugged her while families in Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses looked on with prurient interest.

And always the road – the wide, eight-lane Missouri highways, winding mountain motorways that took them out of Colorado and into the wheatfields beyond, tiny Godforsaken dirt tracks that snaked along parallel to the freeway and you could travel for hours without sighting another vehicle – going on for ever, south and east to the Ocean.

So where did they go in these weeks of late summer and early fall? Eastwards of course. ‘So what's so fuckin' great about California?' Artie Tripp had demanded. Through Cheyenne and across the South Platte towards Kansas. Late August found them in Oklahoma, cruising on towards the Ozark mountains, the view from the cadillac window a bewildering mixture of flat fields and undulating hills, of movement and inanition, of things going on and things not happening at all. At Clarkesville they fell in with a hippy convoy heading north towards the Lakes where there was supposed to be a free festival in the spring. Susy had wanted to go with them, finding in the buckskin-clad babies, the karma-chewing docility, something that transcended simple curiosity, but Artie Tripp dissuaded her. They left the hippy camp one morning in September, waved on by a regretful crowd of long-haired children. A week later they were in New Orleans, holed up in a cheap motel while they went on day-trips to Breton Bay and Grand Lake. The day they went to Grand Lake it rained – the first time it had rained since Tara City – and Susy stood looking at the sky in disbelief.

Throughout these days of ceaseless travelling, this frenetic dash from the northwestern corner to the southeastern extremity of this great nation of theirs, the question of motive remained curiously unresolved. Two weeks, three weeks into the journey Susy could not have told you for what purpose the grey cadillac sped eastwards through field and town and mountain, could not have told you at dawn where they would fetch up at dusk. Artie Tripp remained strangely taciturn. ‘Reckon on making Tulsa this evening,' he would remark as they unfurled stiff limbs from about each other in the grey, early-morning light, the prelude to long, abstracted silences and the consultation of road maps. It did not occur to him as necessary to explain the provenance of the cadillac, just as it did not occur to him to reveal its ultimate destination. Sometimes he talked about getting a job in the East, ‘New York, Chicago, someplace – I got references.' At night Susy, watching the intense, white body purposefully gyrating above her, occasionally wondered if he were a little mad, wondered whether nine years on the gas station forecourt had done something weird and irrevocable to Artie Tripp's (admittedly negligible) mind. But then the sixteen-year-old Artie Tripp had begun to recede from vision, so much so that Susy often found it safer to pretend that he had never really existed.

From the outset Susy had always incubated a sneaking suspicion that it wouldn't last. They started off staying in halfway decent hotels, whose receptionists eyed the ‘Mr and Mrs Arthur Tripp' that Artie signed with a flourish in the visitors' book with tolerant disdain, progressed to roadside motels full of teenagers balling their girlfriends and glassy-eyed English tourists (the pound was having a bad time against the dollar that summer). Late September found them holed up in grubby rooms above freeway diners where the hum of car engines could be heard outside the window until dawn. Artie Tripp said nothing about this decline in the quality of their accommodation. It could not be that he was running out of cash. The twenty dollar bills, Susy noted, still flicked across the station forecourt when they stopped for gas. Oddly, or perhaps predictably, it was only at gas stations that Artie Tripp became talkative. ‘Look at the dumb bastard,' he would grin, as the garage hand lurched towards the car, ‘Well he can kiss
my
ass goodbye.'

October, as they turned northwards and New York became not just a speculative talking-point but a possibility, a real-live name up there on the distance boards, the weather broke. Baltimore remained in Susy's mind as a confused impression of wet concrete and endless avenues of dripping trees. In Baltimore they had an argument, a grinding night-long argument at the conclusion of which Artie Tripp told her how he had come by the money and the cadillac. ‘All of it?' questioned Susy incredulously. ‘You mean to say?' ‘Uh huh' said Artie Tripp proudly. ‘A week's takings outta the till. What the fuck? He owed it me.' ‘Christ,' said Susy, thinking of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, ‘some fuckin' wild man you turned out to be.' ‘I got a hundred dollars left,' said Artie Tripp nervously. ‘It'll last till the end of the month.' His hair, which was wet and had not been barbered since leaving Tara City, hung limply down either side of his face. ‘You can give me twenty dollars to see me home,' said Susy, ‘to see me home, because this is where I quit.' Though it was the last thing she expected Artie Tripp handed it over without a murmur. Susy checked out of the hotel at first light, trudged in tears through the moist streets to find a Greyhound bus depot. Although it had been possible to predict that it wouldn't last and that Artie Tripp wouldn't last, nothing else in her whole twenty-four and a half years had ever made her feel this sad.

Tara City, glimpsed through the rain-streaked window of a Greyhound bus early one leaden Sunday morning, did not seem outwardly to have changed. Inwardly Susy, checking off the features of the main street against the mental kaleidoscope of the last two months, found it had shrunk: that Trapido's, display-case for so much local éclat, was no more than a glorified dime store, that Baxter's – outside whose porch it now seemed impossible that Artie Tripp had ever lingered – was no more than a second-rate sports club. Walking into the apartment Susy found Mom and Larry Vosper sitting together on the sofa, a spectacle so unusual as to defer more obvious questions and explanations. ‘So what's he doing here?' Susy enquired, examining Larry Vosper's brilliantined hair and stacked boots. ‘We're getting married next month,' said Mom. ‘Anyhow, he's got a
right
to be here.' ‘Susy baby,' said Larry Vosper, Adam's Apple working up and down his throat like a tomahawk. ‘Eat shit,' said Susy. For the rest of the day she refused to speak either to Mom or to Larry Vosper. It was not, when you thought about it, a particularly auspicious homecoming.

In Rosati's delicatessen the warm reek of overcooked spaghetti rose impenitently to the ceiling. ‘Shit,' said Mr Rosati quietly as Susy slammed a plate down on an adjacent table, ‘that ain't no way to serve an order.' ‘You wanna see me dance?' said Susy, twitching her ass at him. Mr Rosati shook his head. It was curious, Susy reflected, considering the past week, the way in which things changed, how, bolstered by external camouflage, inner mechanisms simply ground to a halt. Mr Rosati was an altered man, his window bereft of exotic pasta, himself resigned to dispensing pizza to undiscriminating gooks. There had, it transpired, in Susy's absence been a regrettable incident in which Mr Rosati, disgusted by public indifference to a stupendous
canneloni alla Campagnola
had pushed a customer's face into a plate of lasagna and been bound over to keep the peace. Susy thrust her head close up to the till. ‘Hey,' she told him, testing this newfound good nature, ‘you owe me twenty dollars, remember?' ‘For Chrissakes I remember,' said Mr Rosati. Just as there had been other changes, small yet significant, to the complexion of Rosati's delicatessen, so other aspects of the known world had not escaped alteration. Lulu Sinde, unable to contemplate the rigours of parturition, had had an abortion. Aunt Berkmann, jilted by her lover in favour of a Swedish hotel receptionist had returned from Europe (‘and serve her dam' right' in Mom's opinion). Susy felt that in some way her return was a small example of the past fighting back in the face of present assaults, that while accepted matter-of-factly it possessed deeper implications. ‘About fuckin' time,' Mr Rosati had said, but there had been a painful gleam of recognition in his eye. ‘Shift your ass over there,' he shouted as Susy, stirred from rapt contemplation, heaved a plate crosstable into the midriff of a waiting diner. Obscurely the thought comforted her. Outside the rain rattled on the windows. ‘OK. OK,' Mr Rosati was saying. Susy thought for the last time of Artie Tripp, framed in the doorway of Baxter's, the gleaming Iowa cornfields, before turning to consider the more pressing details of Mom's wedding suit, the expression on her face half fretful resignation, half dreamy content.

Dreams of Leaving

The walls of the studio had been whitewashed a fortnight ago and the raw scent of ammonia still hung in the air. Fuchs unscrewed the cap of the zoom lens and snapped a fresh reel of film into place. Mr Van Oss said: ‘OK. So give us the fuckin' works, whydoncha.'

Someone switched on the arc lamp, drenched the room in pale-white light. ‘Fuck those asshole bulbs,' said Mr Van Oss. Somewhere in the background a fan began to rasp. The two girls, one black, one white, who had spent the last five minutes shivering behind the canvas screen, removed their robes and began listlessly to belabour each other's rumps with dull, heavy slaps. The smoke from Mr Van Oss's cigarette wreathed their breasts, hung in dense clouds over the camera. Fuchs tried to shoo it away with his hand.

Fuchs had seen it all. Guys and girls. Guys and guys. Girls and dogs. Brawny dykes romping in thigh-high bracken. Banana shots. Fladge. He had graduated from taking twenty-dollars-a-reel pictures for the kind of magazines Mr Van Oss thought ‘there ought to be a fuckin' law against' to a staff job on a Brooklyn glossy called
Cocksure
and thence to Mr Van Oss. ‘And you can cut out that back-street crap,' Mr Van Oss had told him, when he had suggested a few variations on the usual display of Technicolor pudibunda. ‘Jeez, do you think I'm some kind of fuckin' pervert? That stuff with cripples, it's depraved, it's for sickos. What sells this magazine is
class
.'

Fuchs snapped a few pictures. The white girl, having finished chastising her partner, allowed her breasts to be fondled while emitting gusty sighs. The bodies clinched, broke apart, came together again. ‘OK, OK,' said Mr Van Oss impatiently. ‘OK. So you had the hors d'oeuvre. So make with the fuckin' main course.'

Fuchs sometimes wondered why he took this sort of picture for this sort of magazine. For Mr Van Oss was not classy. The studios up at Staten Island or on the Bronx were classy, where the models arrived in Bentleys, had stockbroker boyfriends and cooled you out if you made a pass at them. Moreover, Fuchs found the sight of so much female flesh, so freely available, strangely unnerving. Fuchs had tried telling this to Ellen. Ellen had dismissed this as ‘just what a porno photographer would say'.

Fuchs tried to stifle the yawn of boredom that rose in his throat. Before him the two girls began to lick each other's goose-pimples. ‘Yeah, OK,' said Mr Van Oss. The white girl, spreadeagled like a starfish, writhed in simulated ecstasy. Her nipples, Fuchs reflected, looked like coathooks. He remembered the conversation he had had the previous night with Ellen, at the end of which Ellen had announced her intention of leaving ‘this whole motherfucking east-coast asylum' and by implication Fuchs as well. This conversation had been calculated to impress Fuchs with a sense of his own insignificance. Oddly, it had left him almost jubilant. He had felt so good, he remembered, he could have reached out and pummelled the sky.

The girls were by now amusing themselves with a curved, ebony dildo. Fuchs trained his camera on the black girl's hand as it caressed, without interest, her partner's mottled thigh. ‘Fuck it,' said Mr Van Oss. ‘Cut.' The girls disengaged, looked at him sheepishly. ‘Waste my fuckin' time, whydoncha,' said Mr Van Oss bitterly. He looked suddenly woebegone. ‘OK. Same time tomorrow.' There were, Fuchs reflected, good days and bad days. This had been a bad day.

Sometimes Fuchs thought (thinking it now as he wandered back to his apartment on the fringes of Harlem, where giant spades surveyed you coolly from street corners) his problems were a result of his name. Checkout assistants sniggered when he handed them his credit cards. Postmen smirked as they delivered his mail. For a time he tried to get people to pronounce it ‘Fookes' or even ‘Futch', had even gone so far as to ask Mr Van Oss to call him Ralph, but Mr Van Oss had just said, ‘Aw, fuckit Fuchs, whydoncha.' Fuchs gathered that the amusement Mr Van Oss derived from his name was one of the principal reasons for Fuchs's employment. He had tried explaining this to Ellen one night, after the third successive occasion on which he had failed to achieve an erection. ‘Jesus, why are you so hung up?' Ellen had said and Fuchs had wanted to reply ‘Because I take dirty pictures for a living. Because my name is Ralph Waldo Fuchs. Fair enough, wouldn't you say?' Instead he had not said anything. ‘Maybe,' Ellen had suggested unkindly, as a reminder of past infidelities, ‘maybe you should try making it with one of the broads at the studio.'