In a back room of the Red Lagoon, couples danced now. They jerked in a sputter of strobe light, bodies projected at the wrong speed, screened in awkward tableaux by the red, white, red, white flicker.
Recently Lady Red Menelade had built a discotheque, and some thought a brothel, behind the original barroom. Her husband, the manager, had not objected as she proceeded to take possession of the property. Had he not predicted her victory, down to the saltshaker, even before her arrival? Now validated in his fatalism, he gave his time to summer reruns of daytime quiz shows, watching them from his stool by the cash register on a small gray television, games played months earlier so that the deal had long since been made, the password guessed, the final jeopardy wagered. Yet each chance won or lost was here again on the screen, capable of endless repetition. It pleased him to watch the working out of destinies already foreknown and resolved, months, years earlier, as he knew his own had been. He almost never talked with the customers any more the way he used to.
The discotheque was large, dark, and hot. Lady Red had crowded a wide four-sided balcony with cheap tables from which drinkers could look down at dancers. Below were more tables ringing the dance floor, and at either end, a dais—one for the band, one for the two girls, the “go-go” girls, instructresses in gyring: illusions of a partner for those without one. They wore red bikinis splotched with sweat stains, spangled with fringe that had been carelessly, unevenly sewn on, or maybe it had frayed, or maybe night after night, anonymous hands had reached up and stolen a memento of the illusion.
I found an empty table next to the balcony rail, where I could look down on the girls and the customers. I saw Leila and Jennifer Thatcher sitting together. Jennifer was crying and shaking her head. Leila pulled her chair over, put her arm around Jennifer, stroked her hair, stroked her hand, kept nodding as Jennifer talked.
I watched the performers. One was a soiled blonde with too much flesh that was too soft now, even for her big frame, flesh that shook loosely without effort or interest as she moved bored muscles through the jerk, the pony, the monkey, the slide. Her muscles had memorized how to give the semblance, if not of energy, at least of life. When the red filter blinked off, her skin was that chalk white of someone who for years wakes up only when the sun is setting, whose shades may be taped to their runners and are never pulled up. Her eyes stared just above the heads of her customers. They were eyes an indifferent maker of mannequins might have painted on, and nobody was in them. I saw stretch marks on her stomach, and a long green bruise on the inside of her thigh. Joely told me later that she called herself Kim, that she was from somewhere in Arkansas, was thirty-two and divorced twice, and had a seven-year-old boy named Cary. He said she wanted to get to California like Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop, but after watching her a while, I didn’t think she was going to make it.
The other girl was younger, black-haired and thin, and her eyes deliberately did not look at anyone in the room, but instead studied some self-realization that her dancing there either confirmed or demeaned, I wasn’t sure which. She reminded me of someone. Suzanne Steinitz?
No. Jardin. She looked in the strobe light like slides of Jardin changed too quickly. Jardin superimposed over the dancer. I pressed my drink glass against my forehead, stared through it. The dancer blurred, dissolved, merged with Jardin. A black moth with white and silver eyes, Jardin in jagged webs of black silk floated at me in a forest twisted full of black branches and black sky. Small white stars cut into the sky. The moon made a narrow strip of light, and she moved down it. I made a white stone god with a statue’s sightless eyes step out of shadows. He gathered her into him, her black moth wings folded in his white arms. They floated backward silently into the shadows.
“Devin! Hey, Devin! Look who I’ve got here.”
The thin girl snapped her head back and forth. Her hair twisted around her neck, uncoiled like a black lace fan. I jerked away, shaded my eyes, squinted down into shafts of smoke to locate the voice. At a table just beneath me, Ashton Krinkle in his black turtleneck sat with two other men—one of them young and languidly postured, the other much older. I stood up to lean over the balcony and saw the familiar linen suit, the gray hair that needed a cut. He twisted a strand of it against the back of his neck with his forefinger.
“Professor Aubrey!” I called. “Is that you? What are you doing here?”
He waved his hand at me, but with a funny motion, as if he were trying to push me away. He raised himself in his chair. “Hello, Devin, hello. It’s good to see you again. Like all the best literature, the similitudes of life, don’t you think? How have you been?” The voice had its old sure warmth; it floated over the noise of the room and over the embarrassment that pulled at the corners of his mouth.
Ashton smiled at me, “When he said he taught English at Harvard, I told him you were here. And he verified you, Donahue, so I guess you really did go there.”
And I guessed so, really, for the same reason. After I had decided to write poetry, I had become one of a group of students who, in new collections every fall, drew up beside his fire and grew in love with learning what he knew. He wrote thick books of criticism and thin books of poems, and we all had copies of both. In his gold-brown rooms at Pinckney House, we listened to music by men with Italian names, and the fire shine gleamed on rows and rows of books. He had saved me from suspension, too, and warned me against political involvements. Now I wished Verl were there so I could introduce them. How incredible that my past should come to me out here in this citadel of mountains to which I had escaped.
The young man with him crossed, recrossed his legs, smoothed the fold of his trousers. His face was carefully set in petulant ennui. Then I recognized him. Randolph something or other, who was never called that at Harvard anyhow, but referred to as Oscar’s Folly, and at the English Club as Belphoebe, and at the dining hall as the Queen of the Yard. We had never liked each other. And now he was sitting here, incomprehensibly, with my teacher. Why? I didn’t remember that he had been in any of Mr. Aubrey’s classes.
“How are you enjoying your summer in the theater?” Aubrey asked me.
“Very well, sir. It’s a new experience. And you? Are you vacationing? With Randolph Wheeling?”
“Ah,” he smiled in that voice that held for us in each slow syllable all the wise humor we hoped for our own maturities, “a long car trip across my native land. Something I’m ashamed to say I’ve never done before. We New Englanders tend to a defensive insularity, don’t we? So proudly attached to our discomforts.” He tapped the tight noose of his tie. “And then down into Mexico to research some folklore. Perhaps I can rifle a bit of poetry from their past. Plumed serpents in my infirmity instead of one more birch tree sagging with tradition. Rather late in life to be developing a Lawrencian streak, wouldn’t you say?”
I smiled.
“I think,” he had to say, “you might have met Randolph Wheeling in Cambridge?” Randolph acknowledged me with one eyebrow. “He speaks Spanish quite well and kindly offered to help me bargain with the natives for a week or so.”
“I hope it goes well,” I said. “I’ve got a copy of your new book, Fortune and Men’s Eyes. It’s…it’s very fine, sir.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. And you? Have you made plans yet for next year? Ah, well, let me know when you do. Please remember I’d be happy to write a letter for you if you wish.” Then all at once he said they had to be leaving. They planned to travel all the next day, and now it was long past midnight. He doubted they would be back through.
“Good-bye, Devin. Take care.”
“Yes, sir. And you.”
Ashton stopped them at Leila’s table, introduced them. Professor Aubrey bowed and took her hand. They went on, passing Dennis Reed, who was entering the bar. He took a seat next to Leila and pressed her hands in his. I didn’t realize he and Leila had met. Maybe Verl had introduced them. Maybe me. I had forgotten.
“I’m trying to attract your attention,” a voice murmured. I looked up. It was the black-haired dancer. “You were watching me,” she said, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. The strobe light flashed red on the loop of a silver earring.
“I’m sorry,” I said standing up. Now I couldn’t decide whether she looked like Jardin or not.
“Why?” she asked. “Sit down.” And she sat down too.
“Devin Donahue,” I told her.
“My name’s Tanya.”
Tanya told me that she would like a scotch and water, and that she would like me to tell her all about myself.
An hour later, Joely came to offer me a ride home; Leila and Jennifer had already left. “I hope I’ll see you again,” Tanya smiled.
“I’m sure you will,” I smiled back.
“Smooth,” Joely lisped through puckered lips. Then thumping me on the back, he aped a sick look. “What a pity you’re already in mourning for another maid, Donahue. That’s right, isn’t it? Aren’t you already bespoken to your brother’s wife? What a pity.”
Why had I ever shared my secret feelings with such a clod? I didn’t bother to answer him.