The Hotel Eden: Stories Page 7

  Eddie Zanduce remembers Carol Ann Menager in the car. He hoists his bat and says, “I’m going to kill one of you now.”

  “What’s that, Eddie?”

  Caulkins, the Minnesota catcher, has heard his threat, but it means nothing to Eddie, and he says that: “Nothing. Just something I’m going to do.” He says this stepping back into the batter’s box and lifts his bat up to the ready. Things are in place. And as if enacting the foretold, he slices the first pitch, savagely shaving it short into the first-base seats, the kind of ugly truncated liner that has only damage as its intent, and adrenaline pricks the twenty-four thousand hearts sitting in that dangerous circle, but after a beat that allows the gasp to subside, a catch-breath really that is merely overture for a scream, two young men in blue Maryland sweatshirts leap above the crowd there above first base and one waves his old brown mitt in which it is clear there is a baseball. They hug and hop up and down for a moment as the crowd witnesses it all sitting silent as the members of a scared congregation and then a roar begins which is like laughter in church and it rides on the night air, filling the stadium.

  “I’ll be damned,” Caulkins declares, standing mask off behind Eddie Zanduce. “He caught that ball, Eddie.”

  Those words are etched in Eddie Zanduce’s mind as he steps again up to the plate. He caught the ball. He looks across at the young men but they have sat down, dissolved, leaving a girl standing behind them in a red sweater who smiles at him widely and rises once on her toes and waves a little wave that says, “I knew it. I just knew it.” She is alone standing there waving. Eddie thinks that: she’s come alone.

  The next pitch comes in fat and high and as Eddie Zanduce swings and connects he pictures this ball streaming down the line uninterrupted, too fast to be caught, a flash off the cranium of a man draining his beer at the very second a plate of bone carves into his brain and the lights go out. The real ball though snaps on a sharp hop over the third baseman, staying in fair territory for a double. Eddie Zanduce stands on second. There is a great cheering; he may be a killer but he is on the home team and he’s driven in the first run of the ballgame. His first hit in this month of May. And Eddie Zanduce has a feeling he hasn’t had for four years since it all began, since the weather in his life changed for good, and what he feels is anger. He can taste the dry anger in his mouth and it tastes good. He smiles and he knows the cameras are on him but he can’t help himself he is so pleased to be angry, and the view he has now of the crowd behind the plate, three tiers of them, lifts him to a new feeling that he locks on in a second: he hates them. He hates them all so much that the rich feeling floods through his brain like nectar and his smile wants to close his eyes. He is transported by hatred, exulted, drenched. He leads off second, so on edge and pissed off he feels he’s going to fly with this intoxicating hatred, and he smiles that different smile, the challenge and the glee, and he feels his heart beating in his neck and arms, hot here in the center of the world. It’s a feeling you’d like to explain to someone after the game. He plans to. He’s got two more at bats tonight, the gall rises in his throat like life itself, and he is going to kill somebody—or let them know he was trying.

  THE HOUSE GOES UP

  AS YOU CAN see, I’ve got a nice body. But you can’t get a house to go up with just a body. Other women think it’s a body. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard about it. They think it’s just some sex thing. And sex is part of it, but if it was just having a good body, I couldn’t even get them to sell the station wagon. So I’ve got this nice body and I take care of it in ways most women don’t, but getting the house to go up is simpler than you’ll ever know. It’s got everything to do with men, how easy men are, how absolutely wide-eyed and pleased with themselves they are; how ripe to fall in love.

  Men are simple. If you even knew what blank tablets they are, even the ones married ten, twelve years. In fact these guys are sometimes the simplest, the worst. You’d think they had not been out of the house at night for years or seen a woman in a public place, such as the Castaway, which is where they see me.

  There they are, boys in men’s clothing. Some guy has lived in the same house with a woman for years, and what he knows about women can best be described as zero. I’m not saying I don’t take advantage of this. I work with the materials at hand, I admit it. What am I supposed to do, make it hard on myself? Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. I’m going to be—in many ways—their first woman.

  So I wear this lace. The lace in their household is long gone, believe me, and I wear this camisole, something none of them have ever seen, even the lawyers. They weren’t really looking until they met me. And they like this: a skirt, zipper in the back. How exotic! And a blouse like this: silk, French cuffs. I mean, they don’t understand these things. It is so easy. By the time they’ve lit your cigarette, by the time they’ve moved one barstool down from their friend who is also appraising you carefully, you can sense the house ready to move. I wear simple, understated jewelry, these are tiny zirconium, kind of classy, and I don’t wear a necklace with this blouse. Gaudy jewelry is not necessary. Neither is cleavage. Not at all. And, I’ve got cleavage. I could show them a cleavage, but if I did that, if I hypnotized them with grand curves that started them scratching their palms, the house would never even quiver. They’d take charge and do the stupid things men do to get something they want. Cleavage is no good; men understand cleavage. It won’t work at all.

  The same with tight jeans. Why would you do that? To show them something they can have? Men understand tight jeans. As the woman said, cleavage is cleavage, coming or going. It’s as simple as the man himself. What you need is mystery. My rule is three layers. I wear three layers: everywhere.

  This is not about sex, do you see? This is about real estate. This is about getting someone’s attention. This is about making him think that it’s all his idea, which actually will happen as easily as rain falls, and eventually he’ll be in love … and the rest will follow.

  When I was married, we lived not far from here really, on a funky little street that dead-ended into a golf course, and my husband, who I understood less then than I do now, laid a flagstone patio and lined it with a short and pretty flagstone wall. It was a place to have cocktails in the afternoons and we did that for a few years. It was good, or so I thought at the time, and now I see that it was neither bad nor good. It was something we did out of doors. It was different from drinking at the Castaway.

  In the Castaway I do very little. I sit at the bar for an hour and then I sit alone at a little table near the bar for the rest of the night. I drink Wallbangers or Sunrises or Sombreros, drinks the men are not going to drink, drinks they don’t understand. Sometimes I smoke and sometimes I don’t smoke. I keep my cigarettes in this. It’s not really silver, but they’ve never even seen a cigarette case before. I say very little and smile shyly. They like it if I seem hurt somehow as if the last man in my life was a beast, a cretin, a rude rotten son of a bitch, and though I never use those words all I have to do is nod quietly and eventually the men will. They are all heroes ready to show me—if I will allow it—that men can be decent, caring individuals. “That son of a bitch,” they’ll say. “Didn’t he understand anything?” And then they’ll order me another drink once I tell them what I’m drinking, and we’ll grin about how different that is from their Miller Lite or Seagram’s and Seven, and it’s a moment I love and try to extend any way I can, this man at my table, his hand in the air like a man, making an order for a woman he is in the process of saving. And though he won’t make a move that night or offer his number or his card—if he has one—or ask for mine or really stay at the table when his friend at the bar signals that it is time to go, when I look up at him for the last time, keeping my head down, our eyes will meet and I will see it: the house is going up.

  Of course he’ll know where to find me the next Thursday night, same table. This time he’ll come alone and we’ll have a heart-to-heart; rather, he
’ll have a heart-to-heart and it will be all so high school, him leaning over the table, his eyes moist, meaning every word: the big things he’d always wanted to do, I mean not just drivers, even if he’s a judge or a chemist, the things he’s been kept from, the tragedy of time, of compromise, of—really—marriage. I’ll listen without moving. It’s terrifically poignant, let me tell you. Once in a while a song will come on the jukebox, “Stand by Your Man,” or “Fools’ Parade,” and I’ll sigh and let him know that the music has affected me, and I’ll see the look in his eyes triple. Eventually he’ll fall silent having said more to me in two hours than he’s said in years and then he’ll ask if I want to dance. I’ll shake my head. The line: I’m not a girl who really dances. You should see him swell to hear this. Then, depending on my mood—if I’m up for hurrying things—I’ll ask if it’s okay if we get out of here. “I mean, could we just sit in your car for a while?”

  Once you’ve sat in his car, it’s a done deal. He’ll want to do something. What I let him do is kiss me once and then I shake that off and hold his hand in both of mine. No one has done that for him in years. You hold a man’s hand in both of your hands for ten minutes and he’ll love you forever. That is what love is. I sit there and hint, faintly, at how hard things are for me, but how optimistic I am about tomorrow, and then I’ll kiss him quickly on the cheek and get out of his car and into mine and drive home.

  The rest is rote. I’ll send him a note—to his office—during the week thanking him for taking the time to talk to me, to share his feelings, saying that his being open meant so much to me. His wife isn’t writing him notes anymore and he’ll call and want to see me right away. And it’s funny, but when you do see him, it won’t be sex. I either bring him here or we go to a motel, and either way, there’ll be a lot of pacing. The sudden charge of being alone in private will drive him mad. He’ll want to dive for me, but he respects me too much, and besides, he’s my savior, my hero. See how simple it all is, how simple men are? Oh, we’ll end up in a clinch, again some agony right out of high school, where he’ll get a couple of layers past the slip or camisole in absolute wonderland at such things, all that lace, and him so steamed up, he’ll never get to skin. It’s so goofy, him standing up quickly and tucking in his shirt, and me on the bed propped up on one arm, and now I’ll show him a little cleavage, and I’ll look as serious as I ever have looked serious and I’ll try to smile, but what I’ll say is: “I want to see you again. I need you. No, never mind, go on, go home. I’ll be all right.” By this time he will have come over to the bed and I’ll level with him. “I’m a girl who doesn’t do this,” I’ll say. “But I want you again. All of you. I feel so funny, but: I need it.”

  And so it goes. You’ll give him some little presents and he’ll buy you a couple of expensive things that make you wonder, a thousand-dollar watch and a real nice Walkman, and you’ll teach him new sex tricks for a month or two until his wife finds out. It always takes the wife longer than I planned. Where is that girl? But oddly enough, it won’t matter to my guy, because, you see, he loves me. He’s not up for five bad scenes and ten months of therapy. This marriage is over. Kids and all. So much for Fido, the tennis club, every single thing that has kept him from being all he could be.

  This is a tricky period for me. I’ll tell him that we’d better not see each other for a while; it’s only good sense. He’ll take a room somewhere and call me five times a day. I feel guilty, I’ll say. I’m confused. Meanwhile, I’ll cruise his neighborhood waiting for the moment which got me into this whole deal. I mean, I’m happy all the while, I’m happy right now, I’m naturally a happy person, but I’m not really happy happy until I see the FOR SALE sign stabbed into the front lawn.

  The house goes up. They have to deal with the realty, some tired schoolteacher, dry as old bread and dumb as a stick, and they have to think: seven percent. This stranger who can’t speak grammatical English—a person who must have bored her classes to death for years without end in social studies—is going to get seven percent of our house.

  And then they have to divide the possessions, think about all the stuff they’ve brought into the house for years and years—it goes miles beyond the stereo and houseplants; there are roomsful.

  Later, six, ten weeks, after I’ve let him know that there is no way I can continue with him, that to be a “homewrecker” is more than I can bear and that I’m sure he’s better off without me—I am, after all, just a damaged soul floating through the universe. After he’s history, I’ll drive by his house again. Sometimes I’ll go by the garage sale; there she is, the wife, with four aisles of their lives spread in the sun. She won’t know me. Maybe I’ll buy something, a little wall mirror or a little hibachi for the terrace. If there’s a box of tapes, I’ll buy a cassette or two for my new Walkman.

  I don’t gloat. I do what I do. But I get a rush in these weeks, the aftermath. I love to drive by and just read the FOR SALE sign again. On the dry days of fall, it swings sometimes in the wind and I slow to hear the creaking. A healthy tuft of grass grows around the post like a hairy halo. The house is now empty, and the whole yard takes on a dusty, wild look, vacant. It could use a little water, but, of course, the mower, a red Toro with a grass catcher, that’s long gone. That will never cut this grass again.

  And between men sometimes I simply drive, float the neighborhoods at twilight before I go to the bar, and I admire the smooth blue lawns shimmering under the wheezing evening sprinklers and I watch the yellow squares of windows light against the night, maybe a porch lamp will illuminate a flagstone terrace. I love that. Flagstone. There is nothing that speaks of marriage more than well-laid flagstone and a short stone wall. I drive slowly past these formidable homes and I see the FOR SALE signs on every block. There is nothing, not even flagstone, that can prevent a house from going up.

  WHAT WE WANTED TO DO

  WHAT WE WANTED to do was spill boiling oil onto the heads of our enemies as they attempted to bang down the gates of our village, but, as everyone now knows, we had some problems, primarily technical problems, that prevented us from doing what we wanted to do the way we had hoped to do it. What we’re asking for today is another chance.

  There has been so much media attention to this boiling oil issue that it is time to clear the air. There is a great deal of pressure to dismantle the system we have in place and bring the oil down off the roof. Even though there isn’t much left. This would be a mistake. Yes, there were problems last month during the Visigoth raid, but as I will note, these are easily remedied.

  From its inception I have been intimately involved in the boiling oil project—research, development, physical deployment. I also happened to be team leader on the roof last month when we had occasion to try the system during the Visigoth attack, about which so much has been written.

  (It was not an “entirely successful” sortie, as I will show. The Visigoths, about two dozen, did penetrate the city and rape and plunder for several hours, but there was no pillaging. And make no questions about it—they now know we have oil on the roof and several of them are going to think twice before battering down our door again. I’m not saying it may not happen, but when it does, they know we’ll be ready.)