After Bathing at Baxters Read online

  The second thing, much less predictably, was Mr Kopechnie. Two evenings ago he had had the old guy on the phone, breathless and jittery, wanting to know if he could come over. As it happened, Dorfman was booked for the next couple of days, but he’d marked the visit down in his engagement book for the afternoon of the third day with a rare tremor of anticipation. Old people sometimes got weird ideas, Dorfman knew, his experience honed by the memory of Francine’s great-aunt Eulalie, who, dying after years of juleps and cornbread on the Dorfmans’ patio, had left thirty thousand dollars to some longhair community in Wisconsin.

  Back in the luridly-lit front room, Dorfman watched Mr Harris – who, it transpired, worked in air-conditioning – lugubriously engulf a pretzel from a dish offered to him by Mr Fogelberg. ‘Go on,’ Mr Fogelberg exhorted him frighteningly, ‘take two.’ The talk, Dorfman divined with an odd sense of recognition, had turned to the airport, and in particular to the thrice-weekly aromatherapy relaxation class (billed as ‘Smell and Surrender’) conducted by Mrs Fogelberg among the airport personnel. ‘Sure,’ Mrs Fogelberg was saying, stabbing the air with her unlit Merit, ‘the people I feel sorry for are those poor girls. Pilot on a 747, OK that’s a career. Those hostesses now, they’re so blitzed they don’t know where they are. I’ve had girls come to my classes half an hour off a red-eye from Taiwan thinking they were in Baltimore.’ ‘Some hot babes down that aerodrome, OK,’ Errol Fogelberg corroborated in a sinister undertone, laying his hand on Dorfman’s shoulder. ‘Guy I know made out with a hostess was pissing razors inside a week. Doctor reckoned it was some weird kind of Vietnamese NSU the antibiotics hadn’t gotten round to fixing yet.’ Dorfman stared at the hand, which continued to rest inert on his shoulder like a museum waxwork he’d once seen of the Kennedy family in which old grandma Rose extended a white glove towards the brawny upper arm of her eldest son. ‘How’s business?’ he whipped back urgently, determined to throw lardass off the trail. Errol Fogelberg’s dead, submarine eyes tracked back and forth. ‘Fuckin’ less than zero is all. I got apartments down in Sioux City going for under the price of a trailer, and even then it’s only Rican turdbirds want to buy.’ Later they moved to the diner and ate coleslaw salad followed by swordfish steak and bilberry pie. Two huge cylinders, burning at each end of the table, filled the room with a pungent, cloudy aroma. Thai joss sticks,’ Mrs Fogelberg explained. She had dense, hairy forearms that reminded Dorfman of An American Werewolf in London. ‘I find they have a mellowing effect.’

  From the back of the rearside window of the rest room there was a view out over the southern stretch of the reserve runway. Here small craft – Cessnas and De Havilland trainers – jockeyed and manoeuvred over the flat, men in blue overalls manhandled sanitation trucks, security jeeps trundled purposefully towards the control tower. Waking from the snatched, cathartic sleep of mid-afternoon, Dorfman was grateful for this spectacle, the series of small components that guaranteed the efficiency of the larger machine. By his side Ascension slept on, hands gripping his shoulders blindly, like a baby. Naked beneath the thin coverlet, she seemed astonishingly vulnerable, like some rare crustacean cunningly enticed from its shell. Curiously, at these times Dorfman found that he tended to think of Franchie, not the Francine of discarded embroidery samplers and aromatherapy classes, but an older – or rather younger – Francine with whom he had haggled over linseed oil on vacation in New Mexico or squired to drive-in movies down in the corn country back when the world was young. It was weird, Dorfman thought, what time did to people, making thin guys fat (Dorfman had been a hundred and forty pounds when he met Francine), fat guys thin, turning smiling women who favoured sex in hot tubs into joss-stick sniffers and pickle fanciers. Time, which had taken a square mile or two of cornfield and turned it into a metropolis of the air, had in the same grim procession of years turned Dorfman from a butter-haired urchin in sneakers watching a senator unveil a commemorative plaque into a pumice-skinned forty-year-old cheating on his wife with a doe-eyed Filipina who cried over a bad horoscope and carried a picture of John Paul II in her vanity bag.

  There was no doubt about it, Dorfman thought, twitching aside the frail sheet to get a better view of the dense hummocks of Ascension’s torso, time had definitely made him bolder. The Blenheim kit that Mr Kopechnie had given him grew in leaps and bounds. In place of his usual timid dabs of paint, his hour-long stake-outs while paint dried, Dorfman found himself streaking in huge green undulations of camouflage on the upper wings. Then the other night, reversing the convertible into the car-port, Dorfman had caught sight of Enzo Manzoni slouching into the family driveway with a swatch of CDs cradled under his arm. ‘Hey you,’ Dorfman had yelled at a surprisingly loud volume. ‘You play any more of that nigger jive disturbing the peace tonight, I’m gonna bust your ass y’hear?’ ‘Oh yeah?’ Enzo Manzoni, who was three inches taller than Dorfman and pitted so lavishly with acne that the scars might have come from some secret society initiation rite, had sneered back, while sharply skedaddling into the family lair, ‘I tell my old man about you, shithead.’ But, queerly, silence had prevailed throughout the following night.

  To others, though, Dorfman dimly comprehended, time brought only a swift, avenging sword. Mr Kopechnie, found on his back porch two nights ago, had seemed a man transfixed by the crowding years. Dorfman had arrived at the bungalow to encounter a scene which nothing in his previous dealings with Mr Kopechnie had prepared him for: sprinklers turned off (the edges of the lawn were already a parched yellowy-green), the dog gone, Mr Kopechnie a hunched, rickety old guy labouring up from his cane chair like an old ghost. ‘What happened to the sprinklers?’ Dorfman found himself asking, conscious for the first time in Mr Kopechnie’s presence of the dry skin of his calf. ‘Sprinklers?’ Mr Kopechnie looked dazed but somehow devious, as if their absence was part of a cunning masterplan he wanted to explain to Dorfman but couldn’t quite remember. ‘County environmental service team came and fixed a water meter the other day on account of the drought is all.’ Dorfman nodded, swinging the flat executive briefcase against his knee, aware of the sounds brought by the sprinklers’ removal, bugs grinding in the privet hedge, somebody’s stereo system playing classical music in the next house. ‘Thing is,’ Mr Kopechnie said hurriedly, ‘Spence’s back.’ Dorfman raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh yeah?’ Despite never having met Spencer Alberquerque Kopechnie, Dorfman knew all about him, knew about the coke jags and the financial disasters. ‘Broke his daddy’s heart,’ people who knew Mr Kopechnie politely suggested. ‘Sure. Living in a trailer park down in Brownsville with some Rican girl. It ain’t for me that I’m doing this Dorf, you understand …’ Dimly Dorfman perceived that Mr Kopechnie was talking about his life insurance policy. ‘You’re sure about this, Mr Kopechnie?’ he enquired, the unreasonableness of storing up money for some retard who lived on a trailer park with a Rican bedwarmer suddenly flaring up inside him. ‘Sure I’m sure,’ Mr Kopechnie said crossly, no longer, Dorfman realised, Gary Cooper playing an elderly rancher, but like an exceptionally frail grasshopper. ‘He’s my own kin ain’t he?’ Inside the house, where stale air blew over the dusty vestibule, and a huge 1:32 scale model of a Grumann Wildcat hung at chest-height from the ceiling, they stared at the pile of pink forms, stabbed fingers at the lines of small print, collected beers from the chiller and brought them back. ‘It sounds kind of complicated,’ Mr Kopechnie had said mildly, cutting short Dorfman’s explanations of compound interest and accumulated benefit. ‘No sir,’ Dorfman had told him, smirking in spite of himself. ‘It ain’t complicated at all.’ By his side Ascension snuffled wildly and came dramatically awake, pawing at Dorfman’s chest with her tiny hands until he gently repulsed them. ‘Forgive me, yes?’ she said, opening her eyes at last, ‘only I have this bad dream.’ ‘What sort of dream?’ Dorfman enquired, still thinking of the sad, pendulous droop of Mr Kopechnie’s throat muscles. ‘Oh, this bad plane crash, maybe, where everyone get hurt and killed.’ ‘You ever been in a crash?’ Dorfman asked, anxiously pulling on
his pants. ‘A bad one I mean?’ Ascension shook her head. I am a fortunate person,’ she said simply. Dressed and sobered, they regarded each other nervously. ‘Hey,’ Ascension proposed, ‘let’s go up and see the planes, no?’ Dorfman accompanied her along the staircase of chrome and steel in the direction of the gallery, wondering a little at the choice of venue. Ascension usually preferred a coffee diner deep in the bowels of the drome or a saunter down one of the food halls, anywhere in fact where she wasn’t liable to be noticed by one of the other hostesses. ‘You see, Kent,’ she had explained seriously. ‘They are nice girls, but they would be jealous, no, if they know that a man in your position preferred me to them.’ On the square rooftop they watched DC10s disappearing into the afternoon glare. Dorfman frowned at a couple of kids messing with plastic straws. His mind was on other things: Mr Kopechnie; Ascension’s narrow thighs; telling Francine. Looking up he saw tears coursing down Ascension’s plump, doll-like face. ‘What’s the matter, honey?’ Dorfman exclaimed, throwing a fat arm around her shoulders. ‘It is not polite of me to tell you,’ Ascension sniffed, ‘not when you are so good and kind.’ The kids messing with the plastic straws were staring interestedly at them. Dorfman frowned some more. ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘Just relax and tell me about it, OK?’

  Five minutes later Dorfman felt competent to sit some kind of high school paper in Filipino social structures with particular reference to domestic misfortune. Ascension’s mother, Mrs Boyet, was dying, or at any rate dangerously ill. To pay for her treatment, Ascension’s sister – not the one with HIV but one of the hostessing ones – was seriously in debt to a local mafia chief. Further, unspecified, trouble involved a delinquent Boyet cousin named Augusto. Plus the mortgage payments on the family shack in downtown Gobernador de Leon were three months overdue. The cost of rectifying all this, not to mention Ascension’s return ticket home, weighed in at a cool four thousand dollars. Slightly to his own astonishment, Dorfman found himself agreeing to pick up the tab. As he did so he registered what could only be described as a look of veneration on Ascension’s mute, lachrymose face. ‘I know you would do this,’ she explained. ‘You did huh?’ That’s right. Ever since my coffee snack with the other girls this morning I know you would do this.’ Silently she extracted a thin, curling slip of paper from her vanity bag and flicked it across. ‘Fortune cookie,’ she said proudly. Dorfman read: A friend’s generosity will make your day.

  In the office the low hum of air-conditioning drowned out the distant voices. ‘Nice work, Dorf,’ Guyland beamed, all smiles now that the deal was done. ‘You want the commission now, or with your pay cheque?’ Dorfman watched the rank ooze of Guyland’s armpits edge out another centimetre or so. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘OK.’ Guyland smiled again. Facing the wide screens in the corner of the room, two clerks played computer ice-hockey. ‘I’ll fix it,’ he said. ‘Between, you and me there’s only forty grand come in the place this month, so we can sure as fuck use it. Hey, you want to take a vacation or something?’ Dorfman shrugged, a newer, shrewder Dorfman, who wasn’t taking any shit from Guyland or any other of the dorks at ABO. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he temporised. Weirdly enough, Dorfman had already been thinking about it, ever since a phone call from Ascension two nights ago had put the idea in his head. ‘I was thinking,’ Ascension had said, ‘maybe you like to come with me no?’ Dorfman had had a sudden crazed vision of himself gingerly negotiating the tangled corridor of a 747 in mid-flight, honking into one of the grey paper bags, cradled into his seat in a delirium of fear as the landscape banked and shifted beneath him. ‘Go to Gobernador de Leon with you?’ ‘That’s right. Is a great idea, no?’ And Ascension had babbled happily on, about the great time they’d have taking her sister’s kids to the coast and the attractions of Gobernador de Leon nightlife. Brooding over the receiver, as the sound of one of Francine’s New Age relaxation tapes boomed and juddered from the upstairs landing, Dorfman had thought about it, emerging from the half-minute or so’s mental turmoil, with a furious sense of resolve. There were things happening in his life, he realised, gleaming vistas and walkways of opportunity that required of him only the courage to place that first, hesitant foot on the mat. ‘And it would be a way to say thank you, no?’ Ascension hurried on, ‘to say thank you for bringing this happiness into my life.’ Dorfman had just managed to croak his assent and slam the phone down before the sight of Franchie, towel wrapped around her mountainous haunches, en route for the shower had blown this reverie away. Driving back from town along the freeway, the Black Flag tape pounding from the car stereo – somehow he’d gotten back into all that punk stuff – Dorfman found his sense of purpose spectacularly renewed: on course, the flight path mapped out before him, the wide, promising world taking shape beneath his grasp.

  Back home a stench of lavender oil hung over the stairs and five of Francine’s swimsuits – billowing garments like bell tents – dangled from the dryer. Francine lay on the davenport sewing stitches randomly into her embroidery sampler. Without looking up she said: ‘I just got back from Alicia’s, Mrs Fogelberg’s. She’s real worried about Errol.’ ‘Uh huh,’ Dorfman riposted. ‘What he do, lose weight?’ Francine put down the sampler and regarded him with liquefying cow’s eyes. ‘Honey, you wouldn’t make jokes if you could see how upset she is. She said: “He’s fooling around, I know he is”, and when I asked how she knew she said he was always putting the phone down when she came into the room, and there was three cheques at a florist in Sioux City showed up on his credit card in the last month.’ ‘Uh huh.’ Dorfman lowered himself into a chair, thought better of it and hoisted himself out again. ‘That’s too bad.’ Ignoring Francine he stalked off into the workroom, where the Blenheim lay sharp and glistening on the bench. Holding the tail-plane reverently between his fingers, Dorfman whistled. Only the undercarriage and a few pin-head traceries across the transparent dome of the gun-turret and the thing was finished. He wondered if they had kits in the Philippines, and what Ascension might say if in their first trip around the markets of Gobernador de Leon he asked to be taken to a model store. Back in the lounge Francine had the Eagles on the stereo and was singing along to ‘Hotel California’. Dorfman wondered about telling her there and then, slamming in fact after fact like a champ boxer matched against some numbskull contender – Ascension, paradisial afternoons, the long-haul flight to Manila – as she reeled before him, thought better of it. The phone rang in the hall and he slipped out nervously to answer it, only to find Francine already trading lugubrious gossip with Mrs Fogelberg. As he passed on into the kitchen, Francine put her hand over the receiver and whispered: ‘She says she found a packet of condoms in his jacket.’ Dorfman shook his head almost jauntily and went to make himself a bacon and sour cream bagel. For once, he figured, it wasn’t his problem.

  At midnight the phone rang again. Cowering in pyjamas under the haggard glare of the hall light, Dorfman listened to Ascension imparting details of an evening flight two days away. ‘It will be OK no, you and me?’ she suggested, and Dorfman nodded his head, enveloped suddenly in wide, aquamarine spaces where Stuka dive bombers chased and zapped him, and from his bunker on the hillside AirReichs-marshall Goering sent squadrons of Messerschmidt 109s to blow his ass away. ‘Are you OK, darling?’ Ascension wondered, ‘I worry maybe you hang up on me, no?’ ‘Sure I’m OK,’ Dorfman breathed. ‘Fuckin’ A.’ The silence of the night throbbed around him. Back upstairs he found Francine had switched on the light and was flapping abstractedly through a book called Dead Meat: Animals are our Buddies too. ‘Who was that, hon?’ ‘Oh, turdbird Guyland from the office about some resecheduled meeting is all,’ Dorfman lied. Seeing the droop in Francine’s lip he smiled inadequately. ‘You OK?’ Francine shrugged. ‘I just thought it might be Alicia. Only Errol was due back from the realtors’ convention in Chicago, and she said she didn’t know if she could keep her hands off the cleaver.’ Dorfman settled himself unhappily back between the covers. ‘Yeah, well some people overreact.’

  Forty-
two hours later Dorfman stowed the convertible in the airport parking lot, remembering the things he had failed to do. Like telling Francine where he was going (and at present a brief letter left on the kitchen table represented the sum total of his disclosures). Like telling the office. Like even making arrangements for the fucking car. The stub of his airline ticket protruding from the top left-hand pocket of his shirt and a tightly packed handgrip (sneakers, pants, a couple of Hawaiian shirts – it was supposed to be hot out there, OK?) provided no sort of reassurance at all. What was he going to do about the fucking car? As the drome’s front porch loomed towards him he veered off forlornly towards a pay phone in the alcove at the side, praying he’d get the ansaphone. He got the ansaphone. After what seemed like a lifetime, Francine’s voice began on the message, a message about regrets, absences, speaking after the tone and replying at earliest convenience. While it played, Dorfman wondered what he was going to say. In the end he simply bellowed: ‘The car’s at the fuckin’ airport, OK?’, slammed down the receiver and lit out through the airport’s high, welcoming doors. He clock at the entrance to the shopping mall said 8.03. The flight left at 10.15. He’d promised to meet Ascension in the hostess’s lounge at 8.30. In two hours’ time, Dorfman realised, he’d be strapped into his seat while the girls recited safety routines and the control tower lights winked in the middle distance. He’d once asked Ascension timorously: ‘What do you do if somebody freaks?’ ‘Freaks?’ ‘In mid-air, I mean. If someone can’t handle it.’ Ascension had rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, drink, pills. One time, you know, we had a guy shook so much that the co-pilot have to come and hold him down in his seat.’ Dorfman figured that the half-dozen or so Jack Daniels he reckoned on downing before take-off plus a vial of Quaaludes he had in his valise would see him through. But what would it be like at the other end? He’d tried getting Ascension to dilate on social life in the Philippines, only to be rewarded with a series of first grade geography primer out-takes: ‘There are many poor people in my country’; ‘There are many unhappy people in my country’; ‘Many people in my country not like Americans’. That last revelation in particular, was just dandy news. It was 8.06, Anxiously Dorfman started prowling the malls, nodded to the security Joes, bought a cappuccino at the coffee diner and drank it looking in the window of a record and tape store. For a moment Mr Kopechnie’s face floated up into his mind, and he hoped the old guy would be OK, what with Spence back home in the trailer park and waiting to collect. In the distance, beyond wide-frame windows, the sky was darkening. Dorfman watched it with pained, palpitating unease, his guts dissolving into a stew of uncertainty and fear.