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  After Bathing at Baxter’s

  Stories

  D. J. Taylor

  RACHEL’S

  Contents

  After Bathing at Baxter’s

  Dreams of Leaving

  Summer People

  Taking an Interest

  The Survivor

  Final Payments

  Three Stories from Cook County:

  i) At Brackus’s

  ii) La Grange

  iii) Disturbance at the Heron House

  Seeing London

  Looking for Lewis and Clark

  Saturday Night at the Jenks Motel

  McKechnie’s Diner, 9 A.M.

  Cuts

  Fantasy Finals

  Vivat Rex

  Flights

  Essex Dogs

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  After Bathing at Baxter’s

  For quite a long time – longer in fact than either of them could remember – Susy and Mom had canvassed the possibility of an extended summer vacation. Late at night in the apartment, Mom listlessly fanning the dead air, Sunday mornings coming back from church along the side of the freeway, over long, slatternly turn-of-the-year breakfasts their conversation turned inevitably on the single topic. Sometimes, Susy thought, Saturday afternoons mostly when she lay on her bed smoking and contemplating the rigours of the past week, it was only this activity that gave their lives any purpose, that without the brightly coloured travel brochures, the timetables advising coach journeys to Des Moines and Kansas, life here in Tara City was bereft of meaning. Mom incubated similar ideas, seldom expressed. ‘Nothing keepin’ us here,’ she had once remarked, with uncharacteristic acumen, and then more pointedly, ‘Ain’t as if ya had a career or anything’. It wasn’t. Susy had rather resented the stricture about careers (there had followed an argument on who the fuck did Mom think paid the rent?) but she appreciated the distrust of milieu. Lulu Sinde, who had married a local dentist, reckoned she had put down roots in Tara. ‘Yeah. Like in fuckin’ concrete,’ Susy had retorted, half jokingly. ‘Like I was born here,’ Lulu had said, dimly aware that her husband’s decision to run for mayor demanded a certain patriotism. Susy had not said anything. Driving back down the freeway, past the first strew of advertising hoardings and the neon sign that read WELCOME TO TARA CITY, she had said a great deal.

  Mom and Susy were not people who did things in a hurry. Last time the apartment needed painting it had taken a year for them to decide on the appropriate shade. The installation of a central heating system (two radiators and an immersion – shit, this was Tara) trailed thirty months of low-spirited bickering. It was not to be expected that such a momentous step as removal would be entered into without a period of procrastination. Three years back when they had been on the point of vacationing in Florida Mom had recollected that coach journeys disagreed with her and in any case what was the point in going two thousand miles just so that you could lie in the sun? The picturesque leaflets of Tampa Bay and the virid swamps were consigned to the trashcan. Eighteen months back Mom had floated the idea of staying with Aunt Berkmann in Tucson, had sought and obtained Aunt Berkmann’s approval, had even, with unusual foresight, made arrangements for letting the apartment. Two days after that the fast-food chain owner to whom Aunt Berkmann acted as personal assistant decided to go to Europe. It was, Aunt Berkmann’s letter explained, ‘too good an opportunity to miss’. The episode had annoyed Mom considerably. ‘And she fifteen years older’n him,’ she had remarked, both appalled and envious. Yet Susy thought she detected relief behind the bluster. It was possible to speculate that the late-night poring over guide books, the posters of shimmering Californian beaches, were merely an elaborate piece of camouflage.

  While Mom vacillated, stuck metaphorical toes in water and pulled them out, Susy found her sense of purpose continually resuscitated. Just walking down the main street did that. Tara City had only one function as a population centre. It was a place you moved out of. Doctors fresh out of medical school who thought they fancied a year or two seeing the sights of the mid-west stayed a month and then applied for hospital jobs back east. Ranchers whose social pretensions advised the purchase of a town house took one look at Tara and thanked God they were hoosyar boys from the flatlands. Curiously, this revulsion rubbed off even on casual visitors. The bikers who sneaked in off the freeway and cruised the streets looking for dope and tail saw within a few minutes that they wouldn’t find it in Tara. Licence, even of the home-grown variety, was scarcely encouraged by the row of gloomy bars, the run-down amusement arcade and the single enervated cathouse that made shift as civic amenities. The local weirdos and bomber boys went east if they wanted diversion, to Denver and Castle Rock. There was too much respectability, and too much decay. Reagan-voting, gun-toting, its cinema screens cleared of anything that might cause offence to tender sensibilities, its library shelves relieved of the weight of tomes immoral or unAmerican, its streets populated by Godfearing rednecks just itching to pump lead into the asses of Jews, queers and liberals, Tara City nevertheless harboured more subtle depravities. The niggers were moving in; longhairs, Ricans – ‘yaller trash’ Mom, trained in Southern schools of prejudice, would murmur whenever an Hispanic loped silently towards them down the street. At night the apartment block resounded to the thud of hectic jungle jive. Mom cried a little every time she walked past Trapido’s and saw the Ricans clustering round the green baize tables, monitored the nigger kids drinking Seven-Up on car bonnets. Pa had taken his beer in Trapido’s every day for twenty years, back in the days when the buck occasionally stopped and (as Pa used to say) you could still buy something with it. Distant days, of which Susy preserved only a few recollections: swimming in Tara Greek with Artie Tripp, watching the hippy convoys heading west, coming back across the railway line, Artie Tripp saying as they blundered through the dusky scrub that in ten years they could get married and what did Susy think of that?

  Artie Tripp, Susy had decided – a reflection prompted by a decade’s marginal straying inside her consciousness – was a paradigm of what Tara did to you. Artie Tripp, Susy thought as they sat in McKechnie’s Coffee Piazza, had been talking that shit for eight years. Susy remembered a sixteen-year-old Artie Tripp who had stolen rubbers off his father and driven the latter’s Ford Pontiac with negligent abandon, an eighteen-year-old Artie Tripp who featured as the shit-hot quarterback angling for a football scholarship, a twenty-year-old Artie Tripp who had talked about evading the draft and heading off East, looked across the table at a twenty-five-year-old Artie Tripp who had spent the last nine years working the forecourt of his father’s gas station. ‘Yeah,’ Artie Tripp was saying, as he shovelled ice-cream through mild, uncombative jaws, ‘I told him how it was, you know, politely, that you know I oughta think of changing things. I really gave it to him,’ Artie Tripp went on, giving a swift, nervous little grin, spoon halfway from his plate. Susy gazed out of the window at the clotted high-summer streets, wanting to say like fuck you did Artie Tripp, wishing that Artie Tripp had turned out different. As he approached maturity a strain of nervousness, hitherto unobserved, had proved to be the principal feature of his character. ‘Hell,’ he said, as a blob of ice-cream flicked airily on to the sleeve of the blue sports jacket he wore on afternoons off from the gas station. Susy watched dispassionately. ‘So I guess,’ Artie Tripp went on, still dabbing gingerly at the vermilion stain, ‘I’ll be heading East soon. Pa’s promised to give me a start, like with money and stuff.’ Yeah, like with twenty dollars and you
can kiss my ass, Susy thought. She said: ‘That’ll be nice Artie. Guess I can come and see you sometimes.’ ‘Reckon you can,’ said Artie Tripp, showing his teeth as they walked into the molten sunshine. Five years ago, or even three years ago, the remark would have been enough. As it was, when Artie Tripp half an hour later drove her back to the apartment block she said: ‘You can keep y’fuckin’ hands off. OK?’ Crestfallen yet resigned, Artie Tripp had backed away. Curiously, Susy found that this craven acceptance of her decision only increased her contempt. What else, she wondered, could you expect from a man who had spent nine years tending his father’s gas station, or for that matter from Tara City?

  But then it did not do, Susy thought, to condemn. By condemning others, implicitly you condemned yourself. Arid, airless mornings in the flat, Mom making interminable phone calls to Larry Vosper, Susy leafing through expensive designer magazines, lodged this fact irrevocably in her consciousness. Larry Vosper was a fat, elderly cowboy run to seed who owned a ranch twenty miles west of Tara. This, however, was not the only thing that Susy had against Larry Vosper. There was the fact that he was five foot six and wore built-up high-heeled boots, the fact that his first action when Mom opened the door was to hand her a bunch of carnations and holler: ‘How’s my best girl?’, the fact that after supper he went to sleep in front of baseball games on the TV. Larry Vosper, in short, did not have a great deal going for him. One thing Larry Vosper did have going for him was that Mom rather liked him. ‘When ya get to my age,’ she had once remarked, ‘ya’d settle for a lot worse than Larry Vosper.’ Susy, eyeing the quarter-inch of foundation, the miracles of corsetry stemming a tide of adipose tissue, could believe it.

  And if Mom had Larry Vosper – who had twice proposed to her, once on the sofa after dinner, once during the course of a day trip to Salt Lake (Mom was not averse to coaxed confidences) – Susy supposed that she had her job. That was, if you could call the three days a week she put in at Rosati’s delicatessen a job. Rosati’s delicatessen lay in a grimy sidewalk that ajoined the main street and sold pizza to truck-drivers too shell-shocked to travel the extra quarter-mile that took you to McDonald’s. Trade, inevitably, was bad (there was hardly any trade in Tara that could positively be described as good), the schoolkids and garage hands who slouched in at lunchtime indifferent to the delicate strands of tagliatelle, the pert blobs of tortellini that Mr Rosati arranged with some artistry in his window. ‘Animals,’ he would say, as another trucker sniffed suspiciously at a tray of bubbling lasagna before moving on to finger the discus-shaped pizzas, ‘fuckin’ animals. For Chrissakes. Give those bastards a truffle and they’d probably think it was a fuckin’ meatball.’ Susy, stationed behind the counter in a pinstripe waitress’s miniskirt, blue cap askew athwart her right temple, found these performances acutely embarrassing. Generally they were of short duration and he would disappear upstairs to apply himself with deep loathing to the accounts, leaving Susy to wiggle her backside at exopthalmic bikers and juggle with the change. On one occasion, however, a pasta con funghi of generous dimensions and enviable texture having failed to attract sufficient custom, Mr Rosati had gone outside and thrown it against the side of a passing truck. ‘That,’ he had been heard to remark subsequently, ‘was a fuckin’ art statement.’ In a small way the gesture established him as an ally.

  Summer wore on. Larry Vosper took Mom on a trip to Yellowstone which culminated – Larry Vosper’s shiny estate car having negotiated the winding mountain highway – in a tour of the Vosper ranch. Mom had been impressed. ‘Thirteen hundred head of cattle,’ she reported, ‘a nigger houseboy and ya can walk for three hours and the land ain’t nobody’s but Larry’s.’ ‘Great,’ Susy retorted, ‘Larry Vosper has a nigger houseboy. Is that any reason to haul your ass over there?’ This had been sufficient to silence Mom, but it was not enough to silence the feeling of disquiet. From afar came other signs of the essential instability of the middle-aged. Postcards came from Aunt Berkmann in Amsterdam, Helsinki and Freiburg. Though Susy rather disliked Aunt Berkmann (whom she had once described to Mom as a fat klutz), this itinerary awakened her envy. There was a world out there, outside of Tara City and the hills, in which things happened; a world in which Susy felt, obscurely, she was being denied a role. Susy tried explaining this to Lulu Sinde over afternoon tea in Lulu Sinde’s smart little chocolate box of a house, a house whose portals you were not allowed to cross without wiping your feet. ‘For Chrissakes,’ Susy had said, ‘you never used to be like this.’ ‘Paul says I have to smarten up a little,’ said Lulu Sinde. ‘Like he says it’s a personal and a social responsibility.’ ‘Cock,’ said Susy. ‘No, I agree with him,’ said Lulu Sinde defiantly. It was hard to evoke sympathy from Lulu Sinde, dumbly awaiting the arrival of the dentist’s progeny. ‘And Christ the names of places,’ Susy instructed. ‘You ever realized how weird they are? How’d they get there. I mean, Kentucky, Missouri, Michigan … You ever been there?’ ‘I been to Missouri,’ said Lulu Sinde, curving the palm of her hand over the slight bump of her stomach, ‘yeah with Paul, two years back, I remember, I was awful sick …’ Susy gave it up as a bad job, went home to dream long, comfortable dreams of US road maps in which squat, green-coloured states went on for ever like the squares in a patchwork quilt.

  Halfway through August Larry Vosper bought Mom a plunging black cocktail dress which he wanted her to wear for a party at the Vosper ranch. ‘It’s kinda nice ain’t it?’ Mom asked doubtfully as together they manhandled the stretched fabric into place. ‘You look about a hundred,’ Susy told her and then, relenting slightly, ‘Shit, you look OK. Enjoy yourself.’ That night Susy allowed Artie Tripp to take her to a movie, Christ, just like it was eight years ago and Artie Tripp still the same octopus-handed youth who had tried to get fresh with her in the back of his father’s car. Though she had allowed Artie Tripp to put his hand inside her blouse the expedition was not a success and went unrepeated. Most evenings Susy spent in her room, the view from whose window presented a vista of leprous concrete and cunning piccaninny kids playing baseball, reading Kerouac and thumbing through her record collection. ‘What you doing in there?’ Mom would enquire through the door about once an hour and Susy would reply: ‘Just shiftin’ the stale air around Mom,’ and slide over to the record deck to whip another disc out of its sleeve. Sixties music. ‘Hippy junk’ Artie Tripp used to say in the days when he ventured opinions. The sixties and Susy went back a long way: The Dead; the Airplane; Steppenwolf singing ‘Born To Be Wild’. Susy discovered that the loud electric music cutting through the empty air had a strangely galvanic effect. As the song reached its crescendo she drifted around the room, propelling her limbs with jerky, ataxic movements. At times like these it was possible to imagine that you were seventeen again, smoking dope at weekend parties, screwing Artie Tripp on his parents’ wide double bed with the flock mattress, thinking that any day now Peter Fonda would be sailing over the horizon on a Harley Davidson 950, just waiting to light out with you, engines gunning, into the sunset. The illusion seldom persisted. Christ, Susy thought, sometimes when you were twenty-four and a half years old and your experience ran only as far as Tara City and Artie Tripp then imagining yourself as a biker’s moll was pretty goddamned funny. In fact it was about the funniest thing Susy could think of.

  Saturday was a bad day in Tara City, though it possessed its consolations. Prominent among these was the fact that Mr Rosati let her have the afternoon off from the delicatessen. Things were at a low ebb in Rosati’s. The fans, suspended so uncompromisingly from the ceiling that customers ducked instinctively as they approached the checkout counter, rasped lackadaisically. A monstrous lasagna alla buoni lay unregarded in the window. Two apprentice street hoodlums – baseball caps and wrapround sunglasses – sat drinking 7 Up by the door. Mr Rosati perched by the till, a thin, saturnine Italian with greying hair and a resentful expression. Occasionally he would raise his head and snap his eyes at the lasagna alla buoni, a glance that mingled the pride of the creator with the con
tempt of the entrepreneur … ‘Peasants,’ said Mr Rosati, not looking up as Susy, changed out of the waitress get-up into slacks and a ZZ Top T-shirt, lingered in front of the counter. ‘Better put it back in the cooler,’ Susy advised, ‘sure as hell won’t last in this heat. Hey, you got a match?’ She leaned over the bar, whipped a box out of the bulging shirtfront and lit a drooping Marlboro.

  ‘For Chrissakes,’ said Mr Rosati, a shade more amiably. ‘Buy your own goddamn matches.’

  Taking a rise out of Mr Rosati was an activity from which Susy derived inexhaustible pleasure. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You wanna see me dance?’ Mr Rosati shook his head. ‘Guess I’ll show you anyway.’ Beneath his indifferent gaze she described an inelegant pirouette, hands raised above her head. ‘Waddya think?’ ‘Shit-awful,’ said Mr Rosati. ‘Anyway,’ Susy went on, ‘you owe me twenty dollars,’ ‘Monday,’ said Mr Rosati defensively, eye flickering for a moment over the two baseball caps and then returning to rest on the lasagna alla buoni, ‘pay you Monday.’ ‘Well fuck you,’ said Susy.

  Outside in the street it was appallingly hot, the interior of Rosati’s seen through the green plate-glass strangely aquarium-like. Susy stared back sullenly at the neon sign, experiencing a sudden stab of hate at whichever fate had ordained this monotonous thraldom. Much was made in Tara City of Mr Rosati’s idiosyncrasies which were thought possibly to compensate for more obvious disadvantages. As Susy saw it, she had been taking shit from Mr Rosati for too long. About three years too long. Leaving Rosati’s behind, a blur of green glass and reflected sunlight, she set off in the direction of the main street, past the accumulation of loping mongrels, fat woman in out-of-date frocks and gook kids that were just part of the scenery at this time of the day in this part of Tara fucking City.

  In the foyer of Baxter’s she flashed her membership card at the blonde receptionist. ‘Swimming or solarium?’ enquired the blonde receptionist. ‘Swimming huh? Honey it’s seventy-five degrees in there, the water I mean, so it won’t make much difference.’ Susy nodded, stood a while on the faded red carpet reading the noticeboard, her nose wrinkling slightly at the faint smell of chlorine. Baxter’s gymnasium and solarium represented all that was lustrous and go-ahead in Tara City. When a local politician talked about civic amenities the chances were that he meant Baxter’s. Prompted by a half-hearted public wrangle about facilities, nearly stifled by a committee that had sat for eight years, its funding frozen or misappropriated by a succession of suspicious mayors, Baxter’s had – rather to its own surprise – emerged into the glare of public scrutiny. Nominally it was a sporting club. Which was to say that you paid your fifteen dollars a month and could swim, work out, flap ping-pong balls across green baize to your heart’s content. But the crop-headed youths and the gap-toothed girls who clustered round the bar drinking coke out of plastic cups didn’t come to Baxter’s to play table tennis. No. Baxter’s was a social catwalk. If you were anyone in Tara City – that’s to say if you weren’t a nigger or a pauper or congenitally insane – you came to Baxter’s to see and be seen. Susy had met Artie Tripp there, light years ago when the world was green and Artie Tripp’s Pontiac the nearest thing Tara City possessed to Dennis Hopper’s dirt-bike.