Free Fall in Crimson (9 page)

And that's her myth. If she tries to carry it to the point of its actually happening, it will blow up in her face."

"Like that, I guess."

"And right across the front of her, just above the cleavage, she's got a lot more of those runny little blisters. Hey Travis?"

"What?"

"I didn't call you up to talk about the blisters on the doctor's bride. I had something profound to say. About us. Now it sounds trivial, I guess. The point is, I don't really want to think about us, about you and me, in the way I thought I would always have to think about somebody I was falling in love with."

"Love, Annie?"

"Let me just barge ahead and leave explanations until later, okay? Being in love has been to me a case of being up to here in plans. Whatever you might think, I wasn't being some kind of opportunist with Ellis. He was a very autocratic man, and he was very very experienced as far as women are concerned. I was dumb about him, and it is still sort of blank in my mind the way he hustled me into bed that first time. Then a person says, Oh, hell, whatever harm is done is done, and you get hung for a sheep as high as for being hung as a lamb. I think it goes like that. And l got to love him. He was a dear man in lots of little ways nobody knew about because he kept himself so much to himself. But let me tell you that anybody who had the wives he had certainly wasn't an unattractive man. I hope you are following all this. Anyhow, with love came plans. I worked it all out. Some day he would divorce Josie and marry me, and do it soon enough so I could have a child with him, and the child would make him a warmer person to be with. Then came the news about the cancer, and so that plan was shot to hell. Right? So there was another plan. I would nurse him and care for him and he would live a long time, and the sickness would purify him. It would burn away the nasty. Then he. was killed and I was really really down. But I

,put my life back together, and I am a very fulfilled woman, businesswise. Now here I am falling in love, and I don't find myself planning anything about us, and that makes me wonder if it is
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love, really. All I think about is that maybe our lives are like the end of some long period of planning. I am here and you are there, and we are going to see each other now and again until we are too old and rickety to make it across Florida. But I know I am falling in love because I think of you and I turn hollow inside, and the world kind of veers. You know? Like it goes a little bit sideways for an instant. Hey I wanted to tell you all this as if it was something important. And when I stop talking to you, I don't. want you to feel any kind of obligation to say anything about love. Men hate being pinned to the wall like that. If you feel it, someday you'll say it,, and that will be okay. And if you don't ever feel it, that will be okay too, as long as you don't ever try to fake it."

"Listen, I-"

"Don't say anything, dear. I can talk enough for two. Any time. Anywhere. So go back to sleep.

Good night." Click.

I reached and put the phone back. We had been hooked together for a time by General Tel, and the softness of her voice in my ear in the darkness had recreated for me a world long forgotten, when I had stretched out on the leather couch in the hallway, phone on my juvenile chest, and while the family was in the next room listening to the radio, to Fred Allen or Amos and Andy I was linked to the erotic, heart-stopping magic of leggy Margaret who, at fourteen, kissed with her eyes wide wide open.

I remembered the previous night when, with her head resting on my chest, Anne had stared off into some thoughtful distance. I could look down and see the black lashes move when she blinked. I could see a tiny slice of the gelatinous eyeball: You can repeat a word over and over until it means nothing, until it becomes just a strange sound. You can do the same thing looking at a familiar object until you see it in an entirely different way. Here was a strange wet globe, a shifting moving thing of fluids and membranes and nerves, tucked into muscle that could move it this way and that, that could shutter its lid to remove any dust, to moisten the surface of it. It had looked at me and relayed images of me into the gray suet of the brain behind that eye, where they would remain, instantly available whenever she remembered me. I stroked the dark hair.

The wet eye blinked again. The dreaming thoughts behind it were unfathomable. I could never truly reach them, hers or anyone's. And mine would always be as opaque to others.

The phone rang again and she said, "I was so darn busy exposing my beautiful soul, Travis, I forgot to tell you another thing I called about."

"Such as?"

"I talked with Prescott about the drugs for Ellis. He told me. that after he got back to Stamford he had a call from Josie. She knew he had flown down to check Ellis over, and she called to find out how he was. He told her what he thought Ellis's life expectancy was, and it depressed her.

He knew that Josie still had a certain amount of influence with Ellis, so he told her to tell Ellis that there was really no point in his being so damned brave about his pain and to encourage him to make a connection and buy something. I think she must have tried to do that, because in early July he had several calls from her, and they all made him cross. Crosser than usual. He just didn't like people meddling in his life."

"But it was okay if he meddled in theirs."

"Exactly. That's just how he was. You know, you are really very good at sizing up people. It makes me nervous, in a way."

"Exactly how?"

"Well ... anybody who is really good at reading people can be very good at finding the areas where they are vulnerable and then taking advantage of that vulnerability. You know what I mean."

"I will have to get Meyer to explain me to you."

"Can't you do that yourself?"

"Not as well as he can. According to him I take all emotional relationships much too seriously."

"It is very nice for a person to be taken seriously."

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"I had this same conversation with a girl named Margaret before you were born. She was fourteen. She wanted to be taken seriously."

"And did you?"

"To the point where I couldn't eat and I walked into the sides of buildings."

"I'm jealous of her. And so, good night again, my love."

Once again she hung up quickly, before I could equivocate.

Meyer says that if I could, for once and all, stop my puritanical ditherings about emotional responsibility, I would be a far happier and less interesting man. In childhood I was taught that every pleasure has its price. As an adult I learned that the reprehensible and dreadful sin is to hurt someone purposely, for no valid reason except the pleasure of hurting. Gretel, in her wisdom about me, said one night, "You are never entirely here. Do you know that? You are always a little way down the road. You are always fretting about consequences instead of giving yourself up totally to the present moment."

Add those ingredients together and stir well, and you can come up with a lasting case of psychological impotence. Meyer said to me, "You spend too much time in the wings, watching your performance onstage, aching to rewrite your own lines, your own destiny."

"And just what the hell is my destiny?"

I can never forget his strange smile. "It is a classic destiny. The knight of the windmills. The man rolling the stone up the mountain. The endlessness of effort, Travis, so that the effort becomes the goal."

Right, in a sense. But Meyer is not all that infallible. There are times. Annie had been totally now.

An immersion. So vital and hungry I had no need to be the man in the wings. I turned on the handy projector in the back of my head and ran through a box of slides, of still shots of her in the underwater green of the towel over the bed lamp, when she was biting into her lip and her eyes were wide and thoughtful, and she was shiny with the mists of effort. Being the neurotic that Meyer believes I am has the advantage of giving me a far narrower focus of pleasure than if I did not truly give a damn. The now is that unexpected, unanticipated place where the mind and the body and the emotions all meet in a proper season, . destroying identity, leaving only an intensity of pleasure that celebrates all parts of that triad: body, mind, and spirit.

It is the difference maybe between gourmet and gourmand. In a world of fast food chains, the gourmet seldom eats well. But this again is too much of a celebration of sensitivity: "Oh, my God; look at how vulnerable and sensitive I am!" Which becomes a pose. And turns one into that kind of gourmet who looks for sauces instead of meat. The only suitable attitude toward oneself and the world is the awareness of pathetic, slapstick comedy. You go staggering around the big top and they keep hitting you with bladders, stuffing you into funny little cars with eighteen other clowns, pursuing you-with ducks. I ride around the sawdust trail in my own clown suit, from L.L. Bean's end-of-season sale: marked-down armor, wrong size helmet, swaybacked steed, mended lance, and rusty sword. And sometimes with milady's scarf tied to the helmet, whoever milady might be at the time of trial.

Meyer has pointed out that condition, that contradiction, which afflicts everyone who thinks at all. The more you strive to be sensible and serious and meaningful, the less chance you have of becoming so. The primary objective is to laugh.

Eight

FRIDAY MORNING I drove the Rolls pickup up past Deerfield Beach, turned inland on 887, and after nine miles of nothing much, I came to Ted Blaylock's Oasis, looking not much shabbier than the last time I had seen it.

The long rambling frame structure paralleled the highway, obviously built a piece at a time over a long period. Most of it had a galvanized roof. The sign out at the edge of the right-of-way had
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been assembled in the same manner, one piece at a time. THE BIKER-BAR. Happy Hours 3 to 7. CustomizingTrikes, Shovels, and Hogs. Chili and Dogs. Service on Carbs, Brakes, Tires, Spokes, Tanks, Frames, and Springers. Tank art. Body Art. Paraphernalia.

I could look right through the open shed structure at one end, and it looked as though Ted had put up some more cabins out back. Men were working in the cement-floor shed, and I heard the high whine of metal being ground down. One portion had a display window with decals of trade names pasted on it and racks of shiny chrome accessories visible between the decals, next to some motorcycles in rank, new and.shiny bright. There were some dusty motorcycles parked in front of the center part, in no particular pattern, along with a couple of big brutish pickups, on top of their aversized tires, and a rack with a few bicycles. As I got out of the car, somebody dropped a wrench and it rang like a bell as it bounced off the floor.

I went in through the screen door and, it slapped shut behind me. Ceiling fans were whirring overhead. The combination bar and lunch counter stretched across the back of the room, with a dozen stools bolted to the floor in front of it. There were a half dozen wooden tables, each big enough for four chairs. There were new posters behind the bar, big bright gaudy ones, showing semi-clad young ladies who, according to their expressions, were having orgasmic relationships with the motorcycles over which they had draped themselves. Another poster showed a cop beating on a biker's skull and had the big red legend ABATE.

Three of the brotherhood were on barstools, all big, all fat, all bearded. They wore sleeveless tank tops, denim vests with lots of snaps and pockets and zippers, ragged jeans, boots, a jungle of blue tattooing on their big bare arms, and wide leather wristlets, studded on the outside of the wrists with sharp metal points. Their vests were covered with bright patches and faded patches, celebrating various runs, meets, and faraway clubs. Their helmets were on a table behind them. All three heads were going thin on top but had long locks down almost to the shoulders.

They stopped talking and gave me the look. It is supposed to instill instant caution, if not terror.

The girl behind the counter gave me a different kind of look, empty as glass. She was apparently part Seminole, thin as sticks, wearing white jogging shorts with red trim and a tight cotton T-shirt with, between the widespread banty-egg lumps of little breasts, the initials F.T.W.

I said to her, "Ted around?"

"Busy."

"You want to tell him McGee wants to see him?"

"When he's through in there, okay?"

"Coffee, then. No cream." I took the end stool, and the mighty threesome lost interest in me and went back to their conversation.

"Well, what that dumb fucker did, he put in that time pulling out what he had and fittin' in them Gary Bang pistons and that Weber carb and all, and when he got it all done, that shovel wasn't worth shit. Man, he couldn't hardly get out of his own way. We come down from Okeechobee first light Sunday, rammin' it all the way, heads all messed up from that shit Scooter was mixing with ether, Whisker and me racing flat out. I come in maybe fifteen seconds behind Whisker and we could have took naps before Stoney come farting in. After all that work on it, he was so fuckin' mad, he jumped off 'n it and just let it fall. And then he run around it and kicked it in the saddle, screaming at it, and he was still so mad he run over to a tree and swung on it and cracked his middle knuckle and got a hand that swole up like a ball. We like to had a fit laughing. That old boy just ain't handy, and that's all there is to it."

"Hey," said the one in the middle, "we got to move it, you guys. See you around, Mits."

"Sure thing, Potsie. Have a nice day, guys."

They worked their helmets on as they walked out, swung aboard, and started their engines, and after some deep garoong-garoong-garoong revvings they went droning and popping out onto the empty highway, turning toward the west, riding three abreast.

Mits gave me sly, glances as she cleaned the counter where they had been. I said, "Wouldn't hurt
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to just let him know."

"You selling anything?"

"I'm an old friend."

She shrugged and went out. She was back quickly. "Hey, you can go in. He asked her and she said it was okay you could watch."