“The information isn’t conclusive,” Mildred said. “It’s like one of those minor diseases, however painful to the victims, that don’t seem to merit research money. The British Psychoanalytical Journal said the problem — perversion, condition — has existed in two thousand cultures, mostly among alpha-type, aggressive, successful males who have the time, money, and inclination. It doesn’t appear connected directly to the Lolita complex which borders on pedophilia. In my own practice I’ve noted that it pretty much comes down to the unlived life. Last year I treated a prominent banker who ran off with his granddaughter’s seventeen-year-old babysitter for a couple of days.”
Jung yelped, having managed to get his nose stung by an insect. He growled and clacked his teeth, then rubbed his nose. Julip stooped to comfort, pointed at the bugs, and said “No.” Then she turned to Mildred. “My old boyfriends said that they were too busy when they were young and they’re making up for lost time.”
“Frankly that’s lame, self-indulgent. Ask them why they’re the minority who feel compelled in that direction. Naturally, we’re all pulled toward what excites us, and your friends — an artist, a photographer, and a writer — are members of a group that are renowned whiners. They think they’re historically entitled to misbehave. They’re incredible fantasists and they sit around dreaming up what will make their dicks hard. This is just a vague outline. I’d have to talk to them.”
“What excites you?” Julip was taken aback by her own boldness and added, “You don’t have to tell me.”
“Men with high foreheads, big hat sizes. Intelligence. A stupid man is like a garden slug to me. I always loathed the blandness of athletes. Nullities, organs with perfect teeth.” Mildred was laughing. “And I like men who wear Mennen Skin Bracer!”
*
Back at the house after they had said goodbye, Mildred pressed several hundred dollars on her. She didn’t want Julip to have to ask her “asshole boyfriends” for money. Now in the car, at a stoplight, Julip searched deep in her bag for the needle-nosed pliers she used to attach dog tags to collars. It worked on the radio volume, so no real harm was done.
In truth, she hadn’t listened carefully to what Mildred had said — when you like someone you rarely question your motives for liking them. For instance, she did not question the fact that the Boys were heels, slobs, whiners, perverse, or simply “jerk-offs,” as Marcia observed when she met them, though there was the troubling notion that they all shared the boozy sentimentality of Julip’s dad. At least they weren’t mean-minded like so many of her dad’s rich clients, one of whom had stuck a finger in her when she was nine, then swore her to secrecy. She hadn’t told anyone because her parents were having their own troubles at the time. Beyond all the principles and explanations there was an actual, intensely messy world revolving and she felt her main job was to get Bobby out of prison, whether he deserved it or not.
At the motel the same fungoid room clerk passed her a new volume of Krishnamurti with a flower pressed in it — in apology, he said.
She stared at him with curiosity as the fluorescent lights buzzed in the after-midnight stillness. “Thank you,” she said. “I see you’re taking the high road.”
She quickly walked off before he could ask a question. The high road was Marcia’s idea for when men gave you books or flowers, while the low road was lingerie, dope, money, or a direct question. The lack of uniqueness was certainly dreary, she thought, tossing the book on the dresser. She quickly shed her clothes for a shower, her skin prickling with fear when she was sure she heard someone in the bushes outside her window. She affected nonchalance though she was stark naked, turning lazily to the phone and noting the drapes were parted a crack when she had left them tightly closed. She dialed the desk to confirm her suspicion that no one would be there, let it ring a half-dozen times, hung up, then strolled toward the crack in the drapes, pausing to look at her left tit as if it possessed the mystery of life. She was buying time to prepare a line, but settled for screaming, “Get out of here, you dumb cocksucker,” then opened the drapes to see the desk clerk stumble backward and sprint toward the office. She waited a couple of minutes, noting that Krishnamurti looked a lot like the drawing of Kahlil Gibran on a book a junior-college instructor had given her. Ted had given her Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, which was even more mysterious though less likable than Emily Dickinson. She dialed the desk again.
“Village Inn. May I help you?” He was still breathless.
“I called the cops.”
“Oh, please …”
“I didn’t call the cops. Just kidding. But my brother’s getting out of Raiford prison next week and he’s going to cut off your nuts for starters. Good night.”
With that accomplished, she turned to her pre-bedtime poem:
It’s such a little thing to weep —
So short a thing to sigh —
And yet — by Trades — the size of these
We men and women die!
Quite a puzzle, she thought, deciding that it meant if you can’t weep, you’re so much dead meat, plain and simple.
There was an urge to enter Jung in her dog notebook and diary but the day’s events would have taken a whole night of writing. She dozed off, waking at three A.M. to the slightest of noises. She had neglected to turn out the lights and the room looked garishly stupid and there was a note under the door. She read:
Please forgive me, I guess it was just love at first sight. I won’t bother you again. I hope you don’t tell your brother anything as consider me vanished.
Fred (desk clerk)
*
It was a strange, wakeful night, her imagination seemingly electrified by the details of her life, and a fresh anger emerging from the fact that her father had simply been killed rather than committing suicide. Within her vertiginous state it was the only clear principle: it wasn’t that her dad didn’t want to see her again, he just got run over, a traffic fatality. He was drinking and so were the teenagers. The real torment now was what to do about Bobby and whether he was sufficiently sane for life on the outside. And would the prosecutor, the judge, and the Boys, as they were known in Key West, agree to psychiatric treatment rather than prison. She couldn’t very well ask the victims for Bobby’s treatment money, which left a single option. She turned on the light, looked up a number, and dialed, though it was only five A.M. The achingly familiar voice was sleepy.
“Hello?”
“Is this my onliest mom in the world?”
“Julip, I tried to call you yesterday.”
“Prove it.”
“That’s easy. Your kennel man said you went to Florida to try to get Bobby out of prison. Is that smart?”
“What do you care?”
“If you only called to insult me, I can hang up.”
“Sorry. Why did you call me yesterday?”
“My employer wants to send you to college.”
“Why call him your employer when you’ve been fucking him for years?”
“I forbid you to use the f word.”
“Beg your pardon, ma’am. Would he mind using that college money to send Bobby to a nice place for the brain damaged? He’s what they call delusional.”
“He always was. I could ask about the money.”
“Please do. Another small item is why did you tell me Dad committed suicide when he got run over by some drunk teenagers?”
“I didn’t tell you he committed suicide.”
“You said he did himself in.”
“I don’t recall that.”
“Bullshit. Why did you wait until I was away at Marcia’s to send him to the clinic, with your boyfriend paying the bill?”
“Mr. Stearne loved your father. You might remember that your father worked for him for ten years.”
“That doesn’t get you off the hook.”
“Your father became impotent from his drinking. I hadn’t had any affection in a long time.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“Mr. Stearne couldn’t keep him on unless he dried out. He pitched over on the dinner table in front of the governor. It was easier on you not to be there.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“Julip, I’m just a human being.” Her mother’s voice was now quavery. “You’ll be in my prayers. Good night.”
“Hold on a minute. I don’t want to be in your prayers. I want you guys to pony up some money for Bobby’s treatment.”
“I’ll do what I can. Anything for my family. And Julip, don’t ruin your life being pissed at me.”
“I never heard you swear. Actually that’s a good thought. Thank you. Meanwhile, I’ll call you in a few days from Key West. And I want you to promise me one single thing.”
“Yes, dear.”
“Next time my dad dies, can we have a funeral? Don’t just send a lacquered box full of ashes.”
“That’s not funny, Julip.”
“No shit,” she said, slamming down the phone, damp, exhausted, but relieved.
She slept then, a deep, unbelievably sweet sleep, until the phone woke her four hours later. It was Mildred, who said she’d thought Julip might sleep in, and wanted to offer to come down and help if things got too difficult in Key West. Julip thanked her, agreeing with Mildred’s notion that Julip had been through a nightmare for two years. “No shit,” Julip said again, and they both laughed, hanging up in unison. With the click of the receiver she remembered a lovely dream she had been having. Her piglet the Labrador had eaten had become half piglet and half the bear that died under the porch, wonderfully alive in a blueberry marsh in Wisconsin. When she looked at the animal closely its eyes were her father’s. What good luck, she thought.
*
Meanwhile, a full day’s drive to the south, in Key West, the Boys were getting a late start on the day’s fishing. After ten days of their annual tarpon outing they were collectively in a fit of deep lassitude. Arthur, the painter, said it was no fun anymore and maybe it never was. Charles said of course it was fun, maybe they were just getting too old to carry on the kind of misbehavior that had become, after fifteen previous trips, traditional. Ted, a circuitous brooder, offered an even half-dozen reasons why they were not having as much fun, including the prevalence of AIDS but excluding the obvious one that Julip wasn’t there, as she had been the past two years, at least nominally with Charles. Nothing could follow up the sheer excitement, the nightmare, of being shot the year before and then talking about it, but that soon passed at their favorite bars — Key West has always been a town of Cuban and white-trash passion, and the wounds the Boys bore from the .22 shots were minuscule indeed.
They were, in fact, “mostly nice,” as Julip described them to the Wisemans, though mostly harmful to themselves. In their mid- to late forties, they felt the malaise of that period no deeper than other men but were considerably more dramatic about it than all but a few. Some on the outside thought it was a testament to the depth of their friendship when it was revealed that all of them had been seeing Julip rather than simply Charles, who had met her first and brought her down to Florida. After Bobby’s trial, at which their appearances were perfunctory, they had gone trout fishing in the Wind River area of Wyoming and worked it all out, though they remained far from having a good laugh. More out of fatigue than wisdom they had, in any event, decided to banish the shooting from everyday consciousness.
But on that particular morning things hadn’t gone well. The previous evening they had eaten massively, and drunk the same, in pursuit of three secretaries from Cleveland, one of whom had called Ted “Gramps” in jest, which had sent him home in a snit where he did two medicinal lines of coke and drank a half bottle of whiskey watching the late movie. Arthur and Charles came home in exhaustion at four A.M., maintaining that they had “sort of” gotten laid but were too bleary to sort out the details.
A scant three hours later Charles had woken them for fishing. It was unthinkable to miss the big spring tide that was arriving mid-morning, the kind of tide that brought fresh schools of tarpon out of the Gulf Stream. But when they picked up their sandwiches at Herman’s they ran into an old gay friend with a Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion on his neck, and back in the car Arthur began to weep. Ted made a misdirected attempt to comfort him by saying the free lunch was over for everyone. Arthur, though a vastly successful painter, was not the least bit interested in reality, and Ted’s comment made him densely maudlin. Soon after, on their way out of Garrison Bight in the skiff, Charles decided to break the oppressive ice by stalling the boat and letting the last of the outgoing tide carry them under the bridge, at which point he yelled “Bang!” the shout echoing up against the bridge framework.
Ted and Arthur shuddered, then screamed in anger at Charles. It was here that Bobby had ambushed them with his .22 semiautomatic exactly one year before. Charles had taken one shot in the thigh before he had the immediate sense to dive overboard and hide behind the boat’s transom. Ted and Arthur had scurried around trying to hide behind each other and the skiff’s small console, taking two shots apiece, with only Ted’s knee requiring any relatively serious medical attention. Now, depending on his mood, Ted walked with either a slight or a pronounced limp. Way back in college he sometimes limped for no reason, and now he had one. Charles’s little joke, however, brought hung-over outrage from Arthur and Ted.
“It’s the anniversary of our near-death experience,” Charles said. “I thought we should lighten up.” He opened a small cooler, revealing a bottle of Cristal and an eight-ounce tin of beluga. “A snack for later,” he added, and Arthur and Ted perked up a bit.
*
In truth, Julip wasn’t particularly pretty or classically handsome, certainly not overwhelmingly so, but she was alive. This isn’t a solipsism, because most people aren’t alive, other than in a technical sense. The recurrent theme of androidism is so ubiquitous because it has a basis in fact. Julip was vivid, immediate, and almost involuntarily filled out her life to its limits, moment by moment, with a rare amount of emotional energy. Ted had told her she was one of the very few blood banks in a world of hemophiliacs, which she had thought over carefully to determine if it was vaguely romantic or another one of his asshole comments. If Ted didn’t have a few drinks, a Quaalude, or three hits of a joint in his system, he was an encyclopedia on the subject of melancholy. Once in New York Julip asked why, since he was so apparently successful, he didn’t act successful, rather than moping around unshaven in old clothes. His eyes brimmed with tears and he rushed to the mini-bar of their hotel suite.
Before she left the motel in Tallahassee, she called Frank back home to make sure the setter bitch had arrived out in Bismarck. He said yes, also that her mother had called, and Marcia had left a number in Palm Beach, which Julip wrote down. She knew Marcia wanted to go see Bobby but didn’t think this meeting of nut cases was a good idea at present.
In her car she checked the road atlas and swore when she saw that Raiford was a detour, but she had promised Bobby his childhood bait box. While the car cooled off she stood against a fender, checking the contents of the box: marbles, tiny arrowheads, the marriage license they had concocted for him and Marcia, a neatly folded treasure map of Ecuador ordered from Argosy, a small photo of Bobby and Marcia they had taken of themselves in one of those machines, with Marcia’s bare tits and tongue sticking out. Marcia’s mother was Julip’s father’s sister, dead since Marcia was ten, from an alcohol-related car accident in Georgetown where, Marcia pointed out, it was hard to get up that much speed. They had decided early on that a dead mother and Julip’s were pretty much the same thing.
On the way to Raiford, near Starke, Julip would have been amused to see Charles’s skiff staked off Ballast Key and the Boys sharing a single plastic spoon for the beluga and toasting the good life with champagne. This time it was Ted who broke into tears while Charles and Arthur stared off at the pearlescent horizon, dense with heat and humidity so that they were all wet with sweat without even moving.
*
; It went rather gracefully with Bobby after an awkward moment with a very old guard who looked up while inspecting Bobby’s bait box and said, “These guys are all kids.”
“What do you mean?” Julip asked out of curiosity.
“Look at these marbles. And a treasure map. They all got their box of stuff and dirty pictures. That’s all I mean. Criminals are just kids. They didn’t want to grow up and be responsible prison guards.” He laughed at this, and passed Julip through the door, wishing he could give her a goose in the butt. In addition to her being vivid, all the years of working bird dogs with her father and on her own had given Julip an improbably shapely body. While tuning up dogs in the last month before the grouse season opens, it was nothing for her to walk a dozen miles a day over rough landscape.
Bobby was delighted with his treasures, sorting through them, studying the treasure map as Julip explained her plans. He nodded with a smile. “So I got to admit I’m nuts. That’s the bottom line?”
“Yes. What’s so bad about admitting you’re nuts?”
“Nothing. After you left the other day, Dad told me to admit I’m nuts if it’ll get me out of this place.”
“May I ask how he talks to you?”
“Not in a human voice. He talks in the voice of an animal.”
This answer made her nervous, after her dream in the motel. “Marcia’s in Florida. She wants to know if you’ll see her if she comes to visit.”
“My so-called wife. Tell her she can visit if she brings a nude picture. A wife’s obligated to do that. She’s probably cheating on me.”
“I’m sure you remember the divorce. You had Marcia sit in the pup tent and you circled the tent three times saying, ‘I divorce you.’”
“We’re still married in the eyes of God. Remember Methodist Sunday school? That’s what they said. If she doesn’t bring a nude photo, tell her to forget it. I’m horny as a goat. Remember old Martha’s goat that used to blow itself?”