The Wanting Read online

  He was peering into their life, digging, driven by his own curiosity. Sometimes he’d go inside the boy’s room and sit on the narrow bed and look around at posters of football players, rock stars with extraordinarily weird posters, pennants from Disneyland—that triumph of technology in pursuit of the trivial. He examined the boy’s toys, his computer games, his books. Young Dennis, it seemed, was very fond of adventure stores, the kind in which the narrative offered the reader participatory choices at the end of every chapter. If you choose to go to the moon, turn to page forty-three. If you decide you’ll stay on Space Base II, go to the next chapter. These books, which Zmia found amusing, suggested that Dennis was imaginative, an active child, but the professor already knew that much about him. A child of high energy, too, if you were to judge from the roller skates, the skateboard, the baseball bat, the framed photographs of athletic activities. All this, as far as the professor was concerned, was very good.

  Now he stood up, rubbing his hands together. He’d call the Untermeyers later. He didn’t have anything much to say. He merely wanted to ask how they were getting along.

  He moved downstairs, still thinking about the boy’s qualities. What it was to have so much energy! So much life! The professor smiled to himself. He sat for a time on the sofa, his short legs crossed, his hands clasped, his eyes shut.

  When the doorbell rang he rose immediately, stepping down the hallway. The girl came inside as soon as he opened the front door. The professor said, “My dear,” and touched the back of her hand, but the girl, ignoring him, went on to the living room. So touchy, Zmia thought. So very edgy.

  She sat down, lit a cigarette. Professor Zmia opened a window. “How are we today?” he asked.

  The girl smoked furiously. Her face was clenched, like a closed fist. She stared at Zmia, saying nothing. The professor shrugged, took his checkbook from the inside pocket, wrote a check, and handed it to the girl, who looked at it as if she were dissatisfied.

  “I should have asked for more,” the girl said.

  “Ah.” Zmia sighed. “You’re unhappy with our arrangement?”

  “Very,” the girl said.

  Zmia sat beside her and held her hand between his own. “Are you very fond of him?”

  “I don’t care about him remotely, but that isn’t the point.”

  “Explain to me, my dear. What is the point?”

  “I don’t feel good about it, that’s all.”

  Professor Zmia studied her pretty face. “You are not really required to feel anything.”

  The girl stood up. She tossed her cigarette into the empty fireplace, watched it smolder. “I’m unhappy.”

  Professor Zmia was silent for a while. The trouble with Americans, he had always thought, was their propensity to have feelings. Emotional currency was the one they most easily squandered, which was why they were forever joining therapy groups or talking with psychiatrists or babbling to anyone who’d listen about their innermost selves. They had not come to realize yet that the self was a transitory phenomenon at best, a shackle to which they imagined themselves bound. Zmia knew how to deal with it in a way the girl would understand.

  He took out his checkbook. “Would a small bonus appease you?”

  “It might,” the girl said.

  “Very well,” and the professor wrote a second check. He gave it to the girl, who took it and smiled.

  “Okay,” she said. “What’s the next step?”

  The professor stood up, hands in the pockets of his tailored pants. He looked across the room at the girl. Her prettiness was really rather bland, he decided, although she had quite a firm body, well proportioned—but he could see it age, he could see how the buttocks would collapse and the breasts sag and the lines develop around the eyes and mouth. But right now she had a marketable commodity—her somewhat serious good looks and her attractive shape. Zmia ran the tip of his dry tongue over his lips.

  “Let us discuss that, Connie. Let us talk it over.”

  The girl shrugged and moved to the sofa. She hitched up her short skirt as she sat, revealing a smooth stretch of tanned thigh, silken flesh that reminded Professor Zmia of how a beach looked when the tide had receded and the moon was burning on the damp sands.

  21

  Lou Pelusi parked his 1970 Eldorado convertible in the street outside Miles Henderson’s home. It was a flashy car in excellent condition and its bright yellow body shone in the late afternoon sunlight in such a way that Pelusi could see his reflection in the metal panels. He patted the car the way a man might his dog, then turned and walked up the pathway to the house.

  Comfortable place, he thought. Victorian. Good state of repair. He had an eye for the value of things because he was the kind of man who haggled over every purchase he made. It didn’t matter that he had more than one hundred thousand dollars in tax-free bonds and a similar sum invested in, of all things, a prototype cow feed—haggling was one of the few human activities that truly excited him. He zeroed in on possible bargains with the sharp, lustful eye of the experienced predator in a singles bar.

  As he rang the doorbell and waited he glanced back at his Cadillac. It looked big and brassy there on the street and he took pleasure in its appearance. He was a man who defined himself in terms of his possessions. Take away the car, the handmade suits, his own remodeled turn-of-the-century home on the other side of town, take away his tax-free bonds and his credit cards and his membership in the Carnarvon Country Club, and what were you left with? A pauper with a medical degree.

  Like most people inordinately attached to their physical belongings, Lou Pelusi lived in the fear that one day—overnight, without warning, like a sudden hurricane—somebody would come and take everything away from him. Consequently, he looked for threats in most situations. He had a highly developed sense of menace. As he stood on the doorstep of the Henderson house he could feel his antennae quivering more than he liked.

  Henrietta Henderson opened the door. A haggard woman with the features of a hatchet, she looked Pelusi over. She looks like a drunk’s wife, Pelusi thought—years of humiliation and anxiety had hardened in her face into self-righteousness.

  “Miles is expecting me,” he said. He stepped inside. The hallway smelled of mothballs.

  “I’m not sure he’s awake,” the woman said. “Sometimes he has a nap in the afternoons.”

  “Nap” was the kind of word that would have a useful place in the vocabulary of a drunk’s wife, Pelusi thought. How could she come right out and say her husband was probably sleeping off a hangover?

  “Why don’t you go in the living room and I’ll see if he’s up?” She pointed to a door. Pelusi stepped into the room beyond.

  Big, comfortable, if you liked the overstuffed look. There were framed diplomas on the walls. Old family photographs. He strolled to the window and looked at his Elgin pocket watch, a 1920 gold timepiece held fucked up in Los Angeles some years back for $25—a real steal.

  The time was 4:20. His appointment with Miles had been for half past the hour. He hoped his early arrival wouldn’t betray the quiet anxiety he felt. As he was tucking his watch away Miles came into the room wearing a gray cardigan that was baggy at the elbows and long khaki shorts that revealed thin legs covered with silvery hairs. His eyes were red, his hair uncombed. Christ, Pelusi thought. He looks worse than ever—if Miles Henderson were a house, he would be condemned.

  They shook hands. Miles Henderson sat down. He let his eye roam all over the room, as if he were searching for hiding places where he might have stashed booze in a drunken stupor. “You sounded vague on the telephone, Lou. What’s going on?”

  Pelusi said, “I’ll come right to the point—”

  “When a man says that to me I know he’s going to beat the bush half to death,” Henderson said.

  Pelusi smiled thinly. There were times when Henderson’s irascibility irritated him. He could be a truculent old fart. “I don’t intend to do anything of the sort, Miles. The fact is, I saw our local sheriff to
day—”

  “Metger? Metger’s a royal pain in the butt.” Henderson found a cigar and, without lighting it, sucked at it. “What did he want?”

  “He asked me a damn funny question.”

  “It’s a habit of his. He’s a specialist in funny questions. What was on his mind?”

  “He wanted to know if I’d run into any devastating medical emergencies lately. That’s the word he used—‘devastating.’”

  “So?”

  “What do you mean so? Doesn’t it strike you as weird that he’d ask a question like that? Right out of the blue? He was fishing, Miles. It was written all across his face. He was on a fishing expedition. What the hell did he mean by devastating medical emergencies?”

  “Goddamn boy asks too many questions,” Henderson said. He rose from his armchair and walked around the room, chewing on the dead cigar. “He’s been nagging me lately too.”

  “How?”

  Henderson stopped at the window and looked out into the front yard. He didn’t answer Pelusi’s question directly. “I know what’s eating him. This baby he’s got on the way. That’s what’s bothering him. The usual prenatal anxieties of the father. Is the kid going to be healthy? Will it have seven toes? Webbed feet? Will it be a hermaphrodite? He’s young and anxious, that’s all. And in that condition he’s vulnerable to extremes of his own imagination.”

  Henderson made a wheezing sound as he turned around. Pelusi imagined the older man’s lungs. They had to be frightful.

  “You don’t need to worry about him, Lou. Your problem is you’re paranoid. Soon as somebody asks you a question, you read about sixteen different meanings into it.”

  Pelusi shrugged this aside. “It was the way he just came right out with the question, that’s all. I wondered if he knew anything.”

  Henderson returned to his chair and sat in silence for a while, studying the design of the rug. “None of us knows anything, Lou. And we’re trained to know such things. So what could this small-town cop understand? Jesus Christ. What could he possibly know when people like you and me haven’t got a goddamn clue?” The old man waved a hand in the air; his voice had a strangely bitter ring. “No explanations, Lou. Just tragedies.”

  Pelusi detected something else in the voice now. A sadness. A weary futility.

  Henderson finally found a match and held it to his cigar. A big cloud of blue smoke enveloped his skull. “We help at birth. We repair broken bones. We write prescriptions. Sometimes, when the circumstances demand it, we cut folks open when they die. But what are we? What the hell are we, Lou? We’re goddamn technicians who don’t understand what the hell we’re doing most of the time and who don’t know the real secret of it all. We scratch surfaces, for God’s sake. And you’re looking at one man who got pretty damn tired of scratching.”

  Henderson leaned back in his chair. His large face, puffy from drink, was an unhealthy gray color. “We don’t know why one person gets flu while the guy in the next house escapes the virus. Something that simple, and we don’t know the answer. We don’t know why one person succumbs to a wretched disease and thousands of others don’t.”

  Pelusi looked at this watch. He was suddenly restless. It bothered him when anyone, especially a fellow physician, pointed out the inadequacies of his profession. It took something away from him, made him uneasy and less valuable in his own right.

  “If I was you, Lou—and that isn’t altogether a pleasant speculation—I’d put Metger right out of my mind,” Henderson said. “What could he possibly know? Let him ask his questions, let him do all the asking he wants—”

  “Miles,” Pelusi said. “You’re not being realistic. What if he wants to …” Pelusi paused, searching for a suitable phrase. “Rock the boat?”

  Henderson laughed. “You’re a scared little man, Lou. Aren’t you a scared little man? Rock the boat! So what?”

  Pelusi felt a flush of blood rise to his scalp. “I’m trying to find the worst possible scenario—”

  “Scenario?” Henderson laughed again. “What a ridiculous word. Scenario. You got any more stupidly fashionable words tucked away, Lou?”

  “Miles, I’m only trying to cover this situation—”

  “And I’m trying to tell you to go home, forget, go play golf, whatever it is a prosperous physician does these days. Don’t worry about Metger. Take a ride in that big pimp mobile of yours. Screw it.”

  Pelusi went to the door, struggling with his anger. He knew that suitable responses would come flooding into his mind later, when they would be useless to him. But right then he couldn’t think of a snappy comeback, a quick insult, a barb. He opened the door and stepped into the hallway, where a grandfather clock ticked solemnly.

  “You know what I wish, Miles?”

  “Tell me, Lou. Treat me to your inner desires.”

  “I wish I had never heard a goddamn word about this whole thing.”

  “Too late, friend,” Henderson said. “Much too late for that now.”

  Hands covered in grease, oil stains inscribed all over his shirt, his forehead smudged darkly from poking around in the engine of the Dodge pickup, Dennis made his way along the bank of the dry wash. A few later afternoon buzzards made patterns in the sky above the trees, flying in the concentrated circles that suggestion carrion nearby. Dennis wiped his hands on his jeans. The Summers had insisted he wash up before going home but somehow he’d managed to get out of that one. Now, satisfied by his oily condition and the fact that he and Dick had actually made the Dodge engine turn over, he slithered down into the wash, kicking up dust and small stones.

  He paused in the arroyo, looking this way and that. As the light faded—slowly, imperceptibly—the woods around him appeared to dwindle, the trees growing closer together. He took a cookie from his pocket and chewed on it; Charlotte had insisted he take a couple home with him. But he didn’t quite feel like going back to the redwood house just yet. What he wanted to do was find Frog, who had held out the shimmering promise of rock and roll. Dennis had been amused by the sight of the man jogging with such a terrified look on his face. He ran like a man afraid of heart seizure.

  The boy moved up the wash, away from the direction of the redwood house. He had already come to recognize various landmarks, seeing differences in a landscape that might have looked monotonously regular to most people. For example, there was a strange twisted pine on the edge of the wash, which was where he would take his bearings when he was heading back from a visit to Dick and Charlotte. When he reached it he paused once more. An odd tree—it looked like it might have been touched by lightning long ago.

  He moved on, scrambling up the bank of the wash. He knew, from what his mother had said, that Frog lived near a stream, which you reached by following the edge of the arroyo. So he kept close to the wash as he walked. He finished the cookie and fished out another from his jeans. His hand encountered the photograph the Summers had given him, which was creased from having been stashed in his pocket. He took it out and gazed at it, wondering how long ago it might have been taken. To his young eyes it looked ancient. Charlotte and Dick appeared happy in the picture, young married people about to embark on a honeymoon. Had they boarded the steamship in the background? He turned the picture over. On the back was the photographer’s name in faded blue ink: J. DURSTEWITZ, PHOTOGRAPHS & PORTRAITS, GEARY STREET, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA. He wasn’t absolutely sure what he was supposed to do with the picture, but he thought it was kind of touching that the Summers had given it to him.

  There was, Dennis thought, something a little mysterious about Dick and Charlotte. It was connected partly with their great age. Dennis thought old age a mystery—you lived that length of time and you must have seen almost everything there was to see, which meant accumulated wisdom and deep secrets and a rich memory. But there was another thing he couldn’t unravel, and that was why they chose to live out here in the isolation of the forest. He’d never asked them and they hadn’t volunteered the information. Why would old people want to live
in such an inaccessible place?

  He ran one greasy hand over his black forehead. The slipping sun poked through the trees. Dennis imagined it was around five, five-thirty, he wasn’t sure. He kept close to the wash, expecting at any moment to come across Frog’s van. The land rose upward a little and he climbed quickly, avoiding the pine branches that loomed around him.

  And then he heard it—the soft slap of water running, little more than a steady background whisper. Through the trees he saw the outline of the VW and he headed down the slope toward it. Frog was hunched over a Coleman stove, concentrating on the food in a skillet. He looked up when he heard Dennis come out of the trees. Whatever Frog was cooking smelled delicious.

  “My man,” Frog said, smiling.

  Dennis liked this welcome—it was cool, laid-back. He approached the stove and gazed down into the skillet, where tiny pieces of meat lay amid sliced vegetables.

  “Out walking?” Frog asked.

  “Yeah.” Dennis sat down. “You said I could visit.”

  “You smelled the food,” Frog said. “Admit it.”

  Dennis’s stomach squeaked. His hunger took him quite by surprise. Only a half hour before he’d eaten two tuna sandwiches Charlotte made, and then there had been all those cookies.

  “I guess the air makes you hungry up here,” he said.

  Frog stood up, shaking one leg, which had fallen asleep. “I’ll put some music on.” He went inside the VW and after a moment the air was filled with the sound of a guy singing Donovan’s Mellow Yellow.

  It had a strange, antique sound to Dennis’s ears. It reminded him of the music his mother sometimes listened to when she was working. He gazed down into the food again, which Frog was stirring with a wooden spoon.

  “Donovan,” Frog said. “I guess that’s before your time, huh?”