Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (9 page)

“That's right. She was rich, too, I can tell you that. Whirlpool bath, champagne, she drives a black Jaguar. It's not the first time I've been picked up in a supermarket, mind you, but today was the best.” I looked around his little bachelor bungalow. It wasn't nearly as cluttered and chaotic as I had expected. In fact, it was pretty plain, a high school debate team plaque was propped up on the mantle next to a dime-store picture of The Fonz.

“When I was in Nam . . .”

“You were in Viet Nam? Maxine never . . .”

“Oh yeah. Special Forces. I was at Ashair when it was overrun in '65. That was some bad shit, let me tell you. I lost twenty-six buddies in two days. ‘One more GI from Vietnam, St. Peter; I've served my time in hell . . .' That was some bad shit. In a monsoon,
man, you know what I mean? The place was one blazing ammo dump. I didn't know who I was shooting at. You just squeezed the trigger and kept on squeezing ‘til you woke up dead or alive
somewhere
. They cleaned our clocks.”

I didn't know what to say but I was fairly certain therein lay the secret to the distant relations with the members of his family. I couldn't help but sympathize with Todd, even though I sat that war out in college and felt a little guilty now. I've got nearly perfect relations with his parents and his sister and he can't see them. It really broke my heart to think of what must go through his dreams at night. “Maxine never told . . .”

“Oh you know women. She wants to pretend it never happened. You say Bien Hoa to her, you say Bong-son, An-Khe, she thinks you're ordering Chinese food. You say Death before Dishonor and she thinks you're taking a nap before dinner. What do they know? Tell me that, huh, what do they know?”

“And what about your father, can't you talk to him at least?”

“My father thinks I should sell new cars, just like him. Don't worry about it, Jake. I'm doing all right. Hey, look on the bright side. What about today, huh, what about that beautiful broad today? My life isn't so bad, it just isn't what
they
want it to be. So to hell with them is what I say. I've got my own life.”

“I wanted to ask you about that, about what you're working on now.”

“It's top-secret for the moment. But when the patent comes through you'll be the first to know, Jake. You're okay, you know that. You're okay. I think I'm going to strike it big on this one, and maybe I'll even let you in on a piece of the action. There
should be enough for everybody. The folks will stop griping then, you wait and see. Money, the great healer, right?”

“I suppose so, Todd. I'm sure everything will change when they see what you've been up to. I think you're just a bit of a mystery to them, that's my opinion.”

“Say, you want to watch a
Kojak
re-run with me? It's on in a couple of minutes.”

“Thanks anyway, Todd, but Maxine will be wondering where the hell I am.”

“Women. Sure. Hey, thanks for dropping by. It's about time.”

“Yeah, let's stay in touch, buddy.”

When I got home I couldn't help it, I was really mad at Maxine. “Give the guy a break,” I said, “after what he's been through.”

“What the hell are you talking about,” she said.

“I mean, it's a miracle the guy's alive and you and your damned parents can't even treat him as if . . .”

“Just what in the hell are you talking about, Mr. Know-it-all?”

“Christ, Maxine, have you ever been shot at? Have you ever had twenty-six of your buddies killed? What do you think I'm talking about?”

“Frankly, my dear, I haven't a notion of what you are referring to. Is this something to do with Todd? What did that asshole tell you to get you so riled up?”

“Vietnam, for Christ's sake, what the hell do you think I'm talking about?”

“Todd? Are you out of your mind?”

“Yes, Todd, in Vietnam, what do you think . . .?”

And that's when Maxine started to laugh. She laughed doubled
over, clutching her stomach. “Todd? Vietnam?” She couldn't stop laughing long enough to talk. I was completely confused as to what was going on now.

“Stop laughing, damn it. Stop it.”

“Oh you poor boy, you poor, stupid boy.”

“Stop it. What are you talking about? Stop it now, damn it.”

She tried to stop, she put her hand over her mouth, but squeaks and howls continued for another minute until I forced her to sit down and talk straight to me.

“Come on, what's going on now, you can't do this to me.”

“The closest Todd ever got to Vietnam was Boston. You
actually
believed him? I can't believe it.”

“Todd wasn't in Vietnam? Are you kidding me? Why would he tell me that whole story of 26 buddies . . .?”

“Todd has never done
anything
, get it through your head. He's a pathological liar, a completely pathological liar. It started when he was very young. He's an extremely lazy and boring person, that's a terrible thing to say about one's brother, but it's true. We've just given up on him, we don't talk about him because there's nothing to say, except that he lies and never does anything.”

“Then that woman today at the supermarket . . .”

“Woman? Are you crazy? The little twerp is a virgin, I'll swear to that.”

“He just sits in there and watches television?”

“You got it, buster. That's the complete picture. He's just boring and he lies to cover it up. But nobody believes anything he says, nobody but you.”

I thought about this last utterance of Maxine's. I thought
about it all night. In fact, I couldn't sleep. I kept dreaming of the raid on Ashair, all that pain and gore, but then I would switch and think about that incredibly sexy lady at the supermarket, “I can polish better than that,” she said, over and over. It was not such a bad life, and I liked Todd better than ever. He fascinated me, and I wanted to get to know him.

A
lexandra Huntington—known to her friends as Alex—was a painter whose specialty was nude self-portraits. At thirty-nine she was still a handsome woman, dark, of medium height, thin-boned without an extra ounce of meat. Having never been married, she had a lot of thoughts about herself. Despite her olive skin, she was pure-bred British upper-class. She was widely traveled, at home in Paris or Rome or, indeed, Tanzania. And she was a woman of ideas. Many of her lovers had been writers and intellectuals, professors, and she prided herself on picking up at least one good idea from every affair. She could talk for ten minutes on any number of lofty subjects.

More than a few of Alex's affairs had been with married men. And in her own analysis, she had comported herself with the utmost sophistication and moral equanimity. Her solution in each case was to make friends with the wife, to be as open, gentle and non-threatening as possible. The wives would quickly discover in her a true friend, one who did not want to steal their husbands, just borrow them from time to time. In fact, more often than not, after several months of vigorous sexual use, the friendship with the wife would begin to take precedence over the borrowing of the husband. Then, inevitably, there was the question of the next step: should the two women actually make love with one another, even though neither was lesbian by nature. By the time
this question had arisen, the husband had usually moved on to a new mistress, and was just as happy to let the women forget him and pass the time solving their own quandary.

So, in a sense, she was attaching herself to families. Often there were children, and Alex gladly accepted the role of surrogate mother. She took the children on outings to museums and zoos, bought gifts of clothing for them. Their real mothers couldn't help but be grateful. She would become a known figure, an important family friend, to all the in-laws. A few might have suspected an unusual arrangement, this attractive woman always visiting, never married herself; but Alex would soon have them charmed into trusting her as if she were a real family member.

When she did return to her own apartment her first action was to undress and stand before her mirrors—she had several arranged in a half-circle—and study her body from as many angles as possible. Her absorption in the examination would increase as she poured herself numerous glasses of scotch. She held her breasts with both hands and seemed lost in a trance, oblivious to time. Would Time sneak up behind and ravage her? Was she immune? Was she an exception? She liked to flirt with these thoughts but had ways of escaping them if they became too grim. Her paintings hinted at these dark thoughts, she liked to think. Their intention was far more than to capture fleeting beauty, she was a deeper person than that.

One affair that haunted her, that raised certain questions about her character, was with a Hungarian violinist in Toronto. He was married and had a family, but they were back in Budapest, and so there was no question of a menace. Emil was an
eager and imaginative lover, and Alex immediately felt he had been created especially for her. They made love at least twice a day in the first months of their relationship. She went to all his concerts and sat in the audience with pride and lust in her heart, knowing he found her desirable and worthy of his hands, his mouth, his whole body and mind. She would even secretly arouse herself during the concert, and experienced orgasms on more than one occasion. This was the life she had been preparing for herself all along: Culture, good looks, and continual sexual satisfaction, even ecstasy.

One night, after making love, she told Emil about the orgasms she experienced watching him perform in the concert hall. “Really,” he said, “just watching me? I must be very good. Perhaps you aren't the only woman in the audience experiencing these climaxes. Did you ever think of that?” And then he bit her neck, and they wrestled in the sheets until they both desired to make love again.

This was without question the happiest time in her life. She did several life-size canvases of Emil in the nude. They joked. He requested a larger penis, and she obliged. He suggested she make his tongue into a lascivious serpent in honor of his superb cunnilingus technique, and she, with delight and laughter, again complied. And the hands, the hands should be as soft and sensual as velvet or silk, in honor of the endless pleasures they had given to every inch of her olive skin.

But then something unimaginably tragic occurred, something even too hideous and ironic for novels or cinema. It was a night in February, the coldest of the year. The apartment was cold.
They had called the landlord and he had said he was doing everything he could, but repairmen were on call and it would be several hours before he could promise more heat. Alex and Emil had made love once, but they were still cold. They had lit candles and warmed their hands over the flames. They had drunk one bottle of wine between them, but Emil wanted more, or better yet, he wanted cognac. Alex told him he was a fool if he thought he was going out into the freezing night air just for a bottle of cognac. But, secretly, it was an example of what she loved most in him, his impetuosity, and so she let him go.

But he was gone for more than an hour. The city was dark and there was no traffic and certainly no pedestrians. He had found the liquor store, some eight blocks from their apartment, but had somehow gotten lost on the way back. Not badly lost, just a wrong turn that took him several blocks in the wrong direction. The air burned the skin, burned it as if a blow-torch was aimed at him just inches away. He hurried, thought of Alex, thought most of all of the cognac, how good it would feel.

Alex threw her arms around him when he finally opened the door. “My god, I was worried. Quick, get your shoes off. Put this blanket around you.” She tried to warm him up as fast as possible. Emil joked and demanded a large tumbler of cognac.

They woke the next morning with sizable hangovers, having finished the entire bottle. Neither could remember the end of the evening. Emil had a rehearsal at ten and Alex planned to stay home and paint as it was still way below zero outside.

Around 10:30 the phone rang. It was Emil, he sounded strange
and had trouble speaking. “Something's wrong,” he said over and over, and then couldn't find words to describe what it was that was wrong. “I have to come home, I'll be home in half-an-hour.” “Okay, I'll be here. Emil, what is it? Can't you tell me what it is?”

She had never seen him so dispirited. He paced the apartment, rubbing his hands together, unable to speak. “Are you sick?” she asked. “Do you want something for your stomach? Is that it? Are you still hungover?” But he was remote from her; for the first time since they had met she couldn't reach him. He responded to none of her usual ploys.

Finally his nerves exhausted him and he crawled into bed and pulled the blankets up to his chin. Alex sat nearby in a chair and stared at his face, his whole head really, and then she herself began to have terrible thoughts: at odd moments, his head weakly rolled to the side, Emil resembled John Keats on his deathbed as painted by Walter Severn.

About five o'clock that afternoon she called a doctor-friend of Emil's, a Hungarian emigrant by the name of Otto Pick. She told his secretary that it was an emergency.

Otto arrived at the apartment a little after six, his concern for their emergency could be seen in his demeanor. Usually a friend of quick wit and immense charm, he now moved to Emil's bedside and spoke in almost hushed tones. Alex could tell him only of Emil's return from rehearsal, his nervous pacing, his unwillingness to tell her what was wrong.