After Bathing at Baxters: Stories Read online

  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.

  In the women’s changing room Susy traded gossip with Lulu Sinde who was glumly cramming her breasts into a somewhat otiose bikini top. ‘Jesus,’ said Lulu Sinde, ‘my tits are swelling up, I can feel it. Hey, waddya think?’ Susy prodded the profferred torso without interest. ‘I guess you have to accept that sort of thing.’ ‘I guess you do,’ said Lulu Sinde, squatting her rump on a nearby radiator while Susy changed into her one-piece bathing costume. ‘Christ. The heat. I nearly passed out out there on the sidewalk. But Paul said I ought to take some exercise: I guess he was right.’ ‘I guess so,’ said Susy, wanting to say: For God’s sake shut up about your fucking husband. Together they walked through the chlorinated footbath towards the swimming pool.

  The pool was deserted, apart from a couple of kids torpedo-diving off the springboard at the far end: twenty yards of calm, sticky water. Susy swam a couple of lengths on her back, dived downwards to touch the palms of her hands on the bottom, rose to the surface. Lulu Sinde was wading resentfully through the shallows, hands clasped over her stomach. ‘Hey,’ she called, ‘d’ya think it’s showing?’ Susy dived, swam three or four strokes under water to end up within clutching distance of one of Lulu Sinde’s bolster thighs. ‘Hey,’ said Lulu Sinde nervously, several hundred cubic feet of water away, ‘be careful.’ Susy relinquished the fistful of flesh, wondered about upending Lulu Sinde, thought better of it, contented herself with directing cascades of water in her direction. ‘You be careful d’ya hear?’ squeaked Lulu Sinde. Susy floated on her back, gazing skywards at the scalloped overhang of the ceiling, remembered long-ago excursions to Baxter’s, a fourteen-year-old Lulu Sinde shrieking in terror because Artie Tripp had threatened to snatch off her bikini top, drinking coke with Lulu Sinde, short-skirted and expectant in the bar, Lulu Sinde saying she thought she was pregnant and was her father going to get mad or wasn’t he? As the water swirled and receded above her head, the lineaments of the pool veering jaggedly in and out of focus, Susy contemplated a Lulu Sinde whose pregnancy was indubitable, legal and approved and felt a swift, sharp pang of regret. ‘Paul said I ought to take care,’ Lulu Sinde confided from the pool’s edge and Susy twisted and dived like a versatile eel down into the murky water, wanting to get away from Lulu Sinde, from Lulu Sinde’s foetus, but most of all from this disturbing, unheralded vision of the past which the two of them had managed to engender.

  It was this image that remained afterwards in the changing room as Lulu Sinde conjectured that she might be about to throw up, persisted as she declined Lulu Sinde’s offer of a drink (‘just a coke you know’) and strode out into the sunlight. Outside Baxter’s the street was empty, apart from a Rican on a skateboard and, on the far side, a fat cadillac with white-wall tyres. For some reason, probably the mental activities of the past half-hour, this prompted Susy to think contemptuously of Artie Tripp. As she watched, the car’s engine revved and in an elegant semi-circle it came to rest beside her. Rather to Susy’s surprise Artie Tripp leaned out of the window.

  ‘Hiya Suse,’ he said. There was an odd jauntiness in his manner that Susy could not remember having seen before. ‘Like the car?’ ‘Sure,’ said Susy, ‘sure I like it.’ ‘Well get in,’ said Artie Tripp easily. He was wearing his blue shirt and a white BMX biker hat. There was a suitcase, Susy noticed, lying on the back seat. ‘So where are we going?’ asked Susy warily as they bowled down the High Street (Please God, am I dreaming? Artie Tripp in a Cadillac?), one eye on Artie Tripp, the other on the clouds of dust that swarmed out on to the sidewalk. ‘Out East,’ said Artie Tripp. ‘Out East?’ ‘Like I said,’ he went on, ‘I couldn’t take that shit from the old man any more.’ They flashed past Trapido’s so that the nigger kids scrabbling in the dirt scuttled for safety, watched wide-eyed as they passed. ‘You want to get out?’ Artie Tripp asked. Susy shook her head. Afterwards she was only able to remember it as one would a scene from a film: the empty street, the girl turning to meet the car, and beyond (fire over the guns and explode …) the open road and Artie Tripp, his enormous forearms resting on the steering wheel, beside her.

  Subsequently, if you had asked Susy to recall the details of what passed in the ensuing weeks (and Mom at least made the effort), they would have existed merely as single, isolated images: sharply focused snaps pulled at random from an interminable roll of film: standing on the hills above Baton Rouge watching the Mississippi stream away towards the Gulf; an open-air concert at Jefferson where they walked airily through the fringes of the crowd as the evening sky turned the colour of blue velvet; driving through Alabama at night with Artie Tripp continually falling asleep at the wheel and having to be nudged awake, until in the haggard light of dawn they hit Montgomery and crashed out in the back seat of the car in the middle of a municipal car-park.

  Crackling, moving pictures: with soundtrack. Susy saying freedom is the road, Springsteen singing ‘Born To Run’ out of the car radio above the din of the freeway, Artie Tripp getting mad with a bullet-headed Arkansas straw-chewer who had given Susy the eye in Little Rock, Susy in a diner call-box outside of Nashville saying to Mom that honestly it was OK honestly it was and Mom not saying anything at all and finally hanging up and going out to be comforted by Artie Tripp who put his arms round her and hugged her while families in Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses looked on with prurient interest.

  And always the road – the wide, eight-lane Missouri highways, winding mountain motorways that took them out of Colorado and into the wheatfields beyond, tiny Godforsaken dirt tracks that snaked along parallel to the freeway and you could travel for hours without sighting another vehicle – going on for ever, south and east to the Ocean.

  So where did they go in these weeks of late summer and early fall? Eastwards of course. ‘So what’s so fuckin’ great about California?’ Artie Tripp had demanded. Through Cheyenne and across the South Platte towards Kansas. Late August found them in Oklahoma, cruising on towards the Ozark mountains, the view from the cadillac window a bewildering mixture of flat fields and undulating hills, of movement and inanition, of things going on and things not happening at all. At Clarkesville they fell in with a hippy convoy heading north towards the Lakes where there was supposed to be a free festival in the spring. Susy had wanted to go with them, finding in the buckskin-clad babies, the karma-chewing docility, something that transcended simple curiosity, but Artie Tripp dissuaded her. They left the hippy camp one morning in September, waved on by a regretful crowd of long-haired children. A week later they were in New Orleans, holed up in a cheap motel while they went on day-trips to Breton Bay
and Grand Lake. The day they went to Grand Lake it rained – the first time it had rained since Tara City – and Susy stood looking at the sky in disbelief.

  Throughout these days of ceaseless travelling, this frenetic dash from the northwestern corner to the southeastern extremity of this great nation of theirs, the question of motive remained curiously unresolved. Two weeks, three weeks into the journey Susy could not have told you for what purpose the grey cadillac sped eastwards through field and town and mountain, could not have told you at dawn where they would fetch up at dusk. Artie Tripp remained strangely taciturn. ‘Reckon on making Tulsa this evening,’ he would remark as they unfurled stiff limbs from about each other in the grey, early-morning light, the prelude to long, abstracted silences and the consultation of road maps. It did not occur to him as necessary to explain the provenance of the cadillac, just as it did not occur to him to reveal its ultimate destination. Sometimes he talked about getting a job in the East, ‘New York, Chicago, someplace – I got references.’ At night Susy, watching the intense, white body purposefully gyrating above her, occasionally wondered if he were a little mad, wondered whether nine years on the gas station forecourt had done something weird and irrevocable to Artie Tripp’s (admittedly negligible) mind. But then the sixteen-year-old Artie Tripp had begun to recede from vision, so much so that Susy often found it safer to pretend that he had never really existed.

  From the outset Susy had always incubated a sneaking suspicion that it wouldn’t last. They started off staying in halfway decent hotels, whose receptionists eyed the ‘Mr and Mrs Arthur Tripp’ that Artie signed with a flourish in the visitors’ book with tolerant disdain, progressed to roadside motels full of teenagers balling their girlfriends and glassy-eyed English tourists (the pound was having a bad time against the dollar that summer). Late September found them holed up in grubby rooms above freeway diners where the hum of car engines could be heard outside the window until dawn. Artie Tripp said nothing about this decline in the quality of their accommodation. It could not be that he was running out of cash. The twenty dollar bills, Susy noted, still flicked across the station forecourt when they stopped for gas. Oddly, or perhaps predictably, it was only at gas stations that Artie Tripp became talkative. ‘Look at the dumb bastard,’ he would grin, as the garage hand lurched towards the car, ‘Well he can kiss my ass goodbye.’

  October, as they turned northwards and New York became not just a speculative talking-point but a possibility, a real-live name up there on the distance boards, the weather broke. Baltimore remained in Susy’s mind as a confused impression of wet concrete and endless avenues of dripping trees. In Baltimore they had an argument, a grinding night-long argument at the conclusion of which Artie Tripp told her how he had come by the money and the cadillac. ‘All of it?’ questioned Susy incredulously. ‘You mean to say?’ ‘Uh huh’ said Artie Tripp proudly. ‘A week’s takings outta the till. What the fuck? He owed it me.’ ‘Christ,’ said Susy, thinking of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, ‘some fuckin’ wild man you turned out to be.’ ‘I got a hundred dollars left,’ said Artie Tripp nervously. ‘It’ll last till the end of the month.’ His hair, which was wet and had not been barbered since leaving Tara City, hung limply down either side of his face. ‘You can give me twenty dollars to see me home,’ said Susy, ‘to see me home, because this is where I quit.’ Though it was the last thing she expected Artie Tripp handed it over without a murmur. Susy checked out of the hotel at first light, trudged in tears through the moist streets to find a Greyhound bus depot. Although it had been possible to predict that it wouldn’t last and that Artie Tripp wouldn’t last, nothing else in her whole twenty-four and a half years had ever made her feel this sad.

  Tara City, glimpsed through the rain-streaked window of a Greyhound bus early one leaden Sunday morning, did not seem outwardly to have changed. Inwardly Susy, checking off the features of the main street against the mental kaleidoscope of the last two months, found it had shrunk: that Trapido’s, display-case for so much local éclat, was no more than a glorified dime store, that Baxter’s – outside whose porch it now seemed impossible that Artie Tripp had ever lingered – was no more than a second-rate sports club. Walking into the apartment Susy found Mom and Larry Vosper sitting together on the sofa, a spectacle so unusual as to defer more obvious questions and explanations. ‘So what’s he doing here?’ Susy enquired, examining Larry Vosper’s brilliantined hair and stacked boots. ‘We’re getting married next month,’ said Mom. ‘Anyhow, he’s got a right to be here.’ ‘Susy baby,’ said Larry Vosper, Adam’s Apple working up and down his throat like a tomahawk. ‘Eat shit,’ said Susy. For the rest of the day she refused to speak either to Mom or to Larry Vosper. It was not, when you thought about it, a particularly auspicious homecoming.

  In Rosati’s delicatessen the warm reek of overcooked spaghetti rose impenitently to the ceiling. ‘Shit,’ said Mr Rosati quietly as Susy slammed a plate down on an adjacent table, ‘that ain’t no way to serve an order.’ ‘You wanna see me dance?’ said Susy, twitching her ass at him. Mr Rosati shook his head. It was curious, Susy reflected, considering the past week, the way in which things changed, how, bolstered by external camouflage, inner mechanisms simply ground to a halt. Mr Rosati was an altered man, his window bereft of exotic pasta, himself resigned to dispensing pizza to undiscriminating gooks. There had, it transpired, in Susy’s absence been a regrettable incident in which Mr Rosati, disgusted by public indifference to a stupendous canneloni alla Campagnola had pushed a customer’s face into a plate of lasagna and been bound over to keep the peace. Susy thrust her head close up to the till. ‘Hey,’ she told him, testing this newfound good nature, ‘you owe me twenty dollars, remember?’ ‘For Chrissakes I remember,’ said Mr Rosati. Just as there had been other changes, small yet significant, to the complexion of Rosati’s delicatessen, so other aspects of the known world had not escaped alteration. Lulu Sinde, unable to contemplate the rigours of parturition, had had an abortion. Aunt Berkmann, jilted by her lover in favour of a Swedish hotel receptionist had returned from Europe (‘and serve her dam’ right’ in Mom’s opinion). Susy felt that in some way her return was a small example of the past fighting back in the face of present assaults, that while accepted matter-of-factly it possessed deeper implications. ‘About fuckin’ time,’ Mr Rosati had said, but there had been a painful gleam of recognition in his eye. ‘Shift your ass over there,’ he shouted as Susy, stirred from rapt contemplation, heaved a plate crosstable into the midriff of a waiting diner. Obscurely the thought comforted her. Outside the rain rattled on the windows. ‘OK. OK,’ Mr Rosati was saying. Susy thought for the last time of Artie Tripp, framed in the doorway of Baxter’s, the gleaming Iowa cornfields, before turning to consider the more pressing details of Mom’s wedding suit, the expression on her face half fretful resignation, half dreamy content.

  Dreams of Leaving

  The walls of the studio had been whitewashed a fortnight ago and the raw scent of ammonia still hung in the air. Fuchs unscrewed the cap of the zoom lens and snapped a fresh reel of film into place. Mr Van Oss said: ‘OK. So give us the fuckin’ works, whydoncha.’

  Someone switched on the arc lamp, drenched the room in pale-white light. ‘Fuck those asshole bulbs,’ said Mr Van Oss. Somewhere in the background a fan began to rasp. The two girls, one black, one white, who had spent the last five minutes shivering behind the canvas screen, removed their robes and began listlessly to belabour each other’s rumps with dull, heavy slaps. The smoke from Mr Van Oss’s cigarette wreathed their breasts, hung in dense clouds over the camera. Fuchs tried to shoo it away with his hand.

  Fuchs had seen it all. Guys and girls. Guys and guys. Girls and dogs. Brawny dykes romping in thigh-high bracken. Banana shots. Fladge. He had graduated from taking twenty-dollars-a-reel pictures for the kind of magazines Mr Van Oss thought ‘there ought to be a fuckin’ law against’ to a staff job on a Brooklyn glossy called Cocksure and thence to Mr Van Oss. ‘And you can cut out that back-str
eet crap,’ Mr Van Oss had told him, when he had suggested a few variations on the usual display of Technicolor pudibunda. ‘Jeez, do you think I’m some kind of fuckin’ pervert? That stuff with cripples, it’s depraved, it’s for sickos. What sells this magazine is class.’

  Fuchs snapped a few pictures. The white girl, having finished chastising her partner, allowed her breasts to be fondled while emitting gusty sighs. The bodies clinched, broke apart, came together again. ‘OK, OK,’ said Mr Van Oss impatiently. ‘OK. So you had the hors d’oeuvre. So make with the fuckin’ main course.’

  Fuchs sometimes wondered why he took this sort of picture for this sort of magazine. For Mr Van Oss was not classy. The studios up at Staten Island or on the Bronx were classy, where the models arrived in Bentleys, had stockbroker boyfriends and cooled you out if you made a pass at them. Moreover, Fuchs found the sight of so much female flesh, so freely available, strangely unnerving. Fuchs had tried telling this to Ellen. Ellen had dismissed this as ‘just what a porno photographer would say’.

  Fuchs tried to stifle the yawn of boredom that rose in his throat. Before him the two girls began to lick each other’s goose-pimples. ‘Yeah, OK,’ said Mr Van Oss. The white girl, spreadeagled like a starfish, writhed in simulated ecstasy. Her nipples, Fuchs reflected, looked like coathooks. He remembered the conversation he had had the previous night with Ellen, at the end of which Ellen had announced her intention of leaving ‘this whole motherfucking east-coast asylum’ and by implication Fuchs as well. This conversation had been calculated to impress Fuchs with a sense of his own insignificance. Oddly, it had left him almost jubilant. He had felt so good, he remembered, he could have reached out and pummelled the sky.

  The girls were by now amusing themselves with a curved, ebony dildo. Fuchs trained his camera on the black girl’s hand as it caressed, without interest, her partner’s mottled thigh. ‘Fuck it,’ said Mr Van Oss. ‘Cut.’ The girls disengaged, looked at him sheepishly. ‘Waste my fuckin’ time, whydoncha,’ said Mr Van Oss bitterly. He looked suddenly woebegone. ‘OK. Same time tomorrow.’ There were, Fuchs reflected, good days and bad days. This had been a bad day.