After the Plague (24 page)

Once I was in, I was presented with an array of choices. There were forty cameras in all, and I could choose among the two bathrooms, three bedrooms, the pool, kitchen, living room and deck. I was working on my third beer—on an empty stomach, no less—and I wasn't really thinking, just moving instinctively toward something I couldn't have defined. My pulse was racing. I felt guilty, paranoiac, consumed with sadness and lust. The phrase
dirty old man
shot through my head, and I clicked on “The Kitchen” because I couldn't go to “Upstairs Bath,” not yet anyway.

The room that came into view was neat, preternaturally neat, like the set for a cooking show, saucepans suspended from hooks, ceramic containers of flour, sugar, tea and coffee lined up along a tile counter, matching dishtowels hanging from two silver loops affixed to the cabinet beneath the sink. But of course it
was
a set, the whole house was a set, because that was what this was all about: seeing through walls like Superman, like God. I clicked on Camera 2, and suddenly a pair of shoulders appeared on the screen, female shoulders, clad in gray and with a blond ponytail centered in the frame. The shoulders ducked out of view, came back again, working vigorously, furiously, over something, and now the back of a blond head was visible, a young face in profile, and I experienced my first little
frisson
of discovery: she was beating eggs in a bowl. The sexy young teen college vixens were having omelets for dinner, just like me … but no, another girl was there now, short hair, almost boyish, definitely not Samantha, and she had a cardboard box in her hand, and they were—what were
they doing?—they were making brownies.
Brownies.
I could have cried for the simple sweet irreducible beauty of it.

That night—and it was a long night, a night that stretched on past the declining hours and into the building ones—I never got out of the kitchen. Samantha appeared at twenty past six, just as the blonde (Traci) pulled the brownies from the oven, and in the next five minutes the entire cast appeared, fourteen hands hovering over the hot pan, fingers to mouths, fat dark crumbs on their lips, on the front of their T-shirts and clingy tops, on the unblemished tiles of the counter and floor. They poured milk, juice, iced tea, Coke, and they flowed in and out of chairs, propped themselves up against the counter, the refrigerator, the dishwasher, every movement and gesture a revelation. And more: they chattered, giggled, made speeches, talked right through one another, their faces animated with the power and fluency of their silent words. What were they saying? What were they thinking? Already I was spinning off the dialogue (“Come on, don't be such a pig, leave some for somebody else!”; “Yeah, and who you think went and dragged her ass down to the store to pick up the mix in the first place?”), and it was like no novel, no film, no experience I'd ever had. Understand me: I'd seen girls together before, seen them talk, overheard them, and men and women and children too, but this was different. This was for me. My private performance. And Samantha, the girl who'd come up my walk in a pair of too-tight heels, was the star of it.

The next morning I was up at first light, and I went straight to the computer. I needed to shave, comb my hair, dress, eat, micturate; I needed to work on my novel, jog up and down the steps at the university stadium, pay bills, read the paper, take the car in for an oil change. The globe was spinning. People were up, alert, ready for the day. But I was sitting in a cold dark house, wrapped in a blanket, checking in on Peep Hall.

Nobody was stirring. I'd watched Samantha and the short-haired girl (Gina) clean up the kitchen the night before, sweeping up the crumbs, stacking plates and glasses in the dishwasher, setting the brownie pan out on the counter to soak, and then I'd
watched the two of them sit at the kitchen table with their books and a boombox, turning pages, taking notes, rocking to the beat of the unheard music. Now I saw the pan sitting on the counter, a peach-colored band of sunlight on the wall behind it, plates stacked in the drainboard, the silver gleam of the microwave—and the colors weren't really true, I was thinking, not true at all. I studied the empty kitchen in a kind of trance, and then, without ceremony, I clicked on “Upstairs Bath.” There were two cameras, a shower cam and a toilet cam, and both gazed bleakly out on nothing. I went to “Downstairs Bath” then, and was rewarded by a blur of motion as the stone-faced figure of one of the girls—it was Cyndi, or no, Candi—slouched into the room in a flannel nightdress, hiked it up in back, and sat heavily on the toilet. Her eyes were closed—she was still dreaming. There was the sleepy slow operation with the toilet paper, a perfunctory rinsing of the fingertips, and then she was gone. I clicked on the bedrooms then, all three of them in succession, until I found Samantha, a gently respiring presence beneath a quilt in a single bed against the far wall. She was curled away from me, her hair spilled out over the pillow. I don't know what I was feeling as I watched her there, asleep and oblivious, every creep, sadist, pervert and masturbator with thirty-six dollars in his pocket leering at her, but it wasn't even remotely sexual. It went far beyond that, far beyond. I just watched her, like some sort of tutelary spirit, watched her till she turned over and I could see the dreams invade her eyelids.

I was late for work that day—I work lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, then come back in at five for my regular shift—but it was slow and nobody seemed to notice. A word on the hotel: it's a pretty little place on the European model, perched at the top of the tallest hill around, and it has small but elegant rooms, and a cultivated—or at least educated—staff. It features a restaurant with pretensions to three-star status, a cozy bar and a patio with a ten-million-dollar view of the city and the harbor spread out beneath it. The real drinkers—university wives, rich widows, department
heads entertaining visiting lecturers—don't come in for lunch till one o'clock or later, so in my absence the cocktail waitress was able to cover for me, pouring two glasses of sauvignon blanc and uncapping a bottle of non-alcoholic beer all on her own. Not that I didn't apologize profusely—I might have been eleven years late with my thesis, but work I took seriously.

It was a typical day on the South Coast, seventy-two at the beach, eighty or so on the restaurant patio, and we did get busy for a while there. I found myself shaking martinis and Manhattans, uncorking bottles of merlot and viognier, cutting up whole baskets of fruit for the sweet rum drinks that seemed to be in vogue again. It was work—simple, repetitive, nonintellectual—and I lost myself in it. When I looked up again, it was ten of three and the lunch crowd was dispersing. Suddenly I felt exhausted, as if I'd been out on some careening debauch the night before instead of sitting in front of my computer till my eyes began to sag. I punched out, drove home and fell into bed as if I'd been hit in the back of the head with a board.

I'd set the alarm for four-thirty, to give myself time to run the electric razor over my face, change my shirt and get back to work, and that would have been fine, but for the computer. I checked the walnut clock on the mantel as I was knotting my tie—I had ten minutes to spare—and sat down at my desk to have a quick look at Peep Hall. For some reason—variety's sake, I guess—I clicked on “Living Room Cam 1,” and saw that two of the girls, Mandy and Traci, were exercising to a program on TV. In the nude. They were doing jumping jacks when the image first appeared on the screen, hands clapping over their heads, breasts flouncing, and then they switched, in perfect unison, to squat thrusts, their faces staring into the camera, their arms flexed, legs kicking out behind. It was a riveting performance. I watched, in awe, as they went on to aerobics, some light lifting with three-pound dumbbells and what looked to be a lead-weighted cane, and finally concluded by toweling each other off. I was twenty minutes late for work.

This time it wasn't all right. Jason, the manager, was behind
the bar when I came in, and the look on his face told me he wasn't especially thrilled at having this unlooked-for opportunity to dole out cocktail onions and bar mix to a roomful of sunburned hotel guests, enchanted tourists and golfers warming up for dinner. He didn't say a word. Just dropped what he was doing (frothing a mango margarita in the blender), brushed past me and hurried down the corridor to his office as if the work of the world awaited him there. He was six years younger than I, he had a Ph.D. in history from a university far more prestigious than the one that ruled our little burg, and he wielded a first-rate vocabulary. I could have lived without him. At any rate, I went around to each customer with a smile on my face—even the lunatic in tam-o'-shanter and plus fours drinking rum and Red Bull at the far end of the bar—and refreshed drinks, bar napkins and the bowls of pretzels and bar mix. I poured with a heavy hand.

Around seven, the dining room began to fill up. This was my favorite hour of the day, the air fragrant and still, the sun picking out individual palms and banks of flowers to illuminate as it sank into the ocean, people bending to their hors d'oeuvres with a kind of quiet reverence, as if for once they really were thankful for the bounty spread out before them. Muted snatches of conversation drifted in from the patio. Canned piano music—something very familiar—seeped out of the speakers. All was well, and I poured myself a little Irish whiskey to take some of the tightness out of my neck and shoulders.

That was when Samantha walked in.

She was with two other girls—Gina, I recognized; the other one, tall, athletic, with a nervous, rapid-blinking gaze that seemed to reduce the whole place and everything in it to a series of snapshots, was unfamiliar. All three were wearing sleek ankle-length dresses that left their shoulders bare, and as they leaned into the hostess' stand there was the glint of jewelry at their ears and throats. My mouth went dry. I felt as if I'd been caught out at something desperate, something furtive and humiliating, though they were all the way across the room and Samantha hadn't even so much as glanced in my direction. I fidgeted with the wine key
and tried not to stare, and then Frankie, the hostess, was leading them to a table out on the patio.

I realized I was breathing hard, and my pulse must have shot up like a rocket, and for what? She probably wouldn't even recognize me. We'd shared a beer for twenty minutes. I was old enough to be her—her what? Her uncle. I needed to get a grip. She wasn't the one watching
me
through a hidden lens. “Hart? Hart, are you there?” a voice was saying, and I looked up to see Megan, the cocktail waitress, hovering over her station with a drink order on her lips.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, and I took the order and started in on the drinks. “By the way,” I said as casually as I could, “you know that table of three—the girls who just came in? Tell me when you take their order, okay? Their drinks are on me.”

As it turned out, they weren't having any of the sweet rum drinks garnished with fruit and a single orange nasturtium flower or one of our half dozen margaritas or even the house chardonnay by the glass. “I carded them,” Megan said, “and they're all legal, but what they want is three sloe gin fizzes. Do we even have sloe gin?”

In the eight years I'd been at the El Encanto, I doubt if I'd mixed more than three or four sloe gin fizzes, and those were for people whose recollections of the Eisenhower administration were still vivid. But we did have a vestigial bottle of sloe gin in the back room, wedged between the peppermint schnapps and the Benedictine, and I made them their drinks. Frankie had seated them around the corner on the patio, so I couldn't see how the fizzes went over, and then a series of orders came leapfrogging in, and I started pouring and mixing and forgot all about it. The next time I looked up, Samantha was coming across the room to me, her eyebrows dancing over an incipient smile. I could see she was having trouble with her heels and the constriction of the dress—or gown, I suppose you'd call it—and I couldn't help thinking how young she looked, almost like a little girl playing dress-up. “Hart,” she said, resting her hands on the bar so that I could admire her sculpted fingers and her collection of rings—rings even on her
thumbs—“I didn't know you worked here. This place is really nice.”

“Yeah,” I said, grinning back at her while holding the picture of her in my head, asleep, with her hair splayed out over the pillow. “It's first-rate. Top-notch. Really fantastic. It's a great place to work.”

“You know, that was really sweet of you,” she said.

I wanted to say something like “Aw, shucks” or “No problem,” but instead I heard myself say, “The gesture or the drink?”

She looked at me quizzically a moment, and then let out a single soft flutter of a laugh. “Oh, you mean the gin fizzes?” And she laughed again—or giggled, actually. “I'm legal today, did you know that? And my gramma made me promise to have a sloe gin fizz so she could be here tonight in spirit—she passed last winter?—but I think we're having like a bottle of white wine or something with dinner. That's my sister I'm with—she's taking me out for my birthday, along with Gina—she's one of my roommates? But you probably already know that, right?”

I shot my eyes left, then right, up and down the bar. All the drinks were fresh, and no one was paying us the least attention. “What do you mean?”

Her eyebrows lifted, the silky thick eyebrows that were like two strips of mink pasted to her forehead, and her hair was like some exotic fur too, rich and shining and dark. “You didn't check out the Web site?”

“No,” I lied.

“Well, you ought to,” she said. The air was a stew of smells—a couple at the end of the bar were sharing the warm spinach and scallop salad, there was the sweet burnt odor of the Irish whiskey I was sipping from a mug, Samantha's perfume (or was it Megan's?) and a medley of mesquite-grilled chops and braised fish and Peter Oxendine's famous sauces wafting in from the kitchen. “Okay,” she said, shaking out her hair with a flick of her head and running a quick look around the place before bringing her eyes back to me. “Okay, well—I just wanted to say thanks.” She shrugged. “I guess I better be getting back to the girls.”