Ghost Lights (21 page)

He finished peeing, washed his hands and picked up a shell that looked like a snail shell, except huge and spotted. There were also stripes. It was attractive. Inside, it was shiny.

He placed it back on the shelf.

The drink was treating him well. No doubt it had been mixed quite strong. They fooled you with the toucan. You thought: child’s play, and swigged heartily. Then you were drunk. But he should not complain, not even to himself. It was what he had intended, after all. He had already made the decision. From now on he would be a man who drank. He would stop short of chronic impairment, though. That was the trick; you had to learn to drink the correct amount. It was said two glasses of wine a day improved your health. Surely three could not do it too much harm, in that case. He could become an oenophile. That was the name, if he recalled correctly, for wine lovers.

Wine-loving assholes. Because let’s face it, a wine lover was basically an asshole. Like a cigar lover. The word
connoisseur
, in general, was a synonym for asshole.

If it was up to him, connoisseurs of all kinds would be audited on a regular basis, their files tagged and them personally harassed by the Service until forced to surrender their assets. They would be targeted for audits on a non-random basis, if it was up to him. Wine, cigars, old cars, all pastimes of the genus
Assholus
.

It wouldn’t be wine, not for him. The point was, he could have three drinks a day and cultivate new fields of knowledge. He could keep more secrets, possibly lead a secret life with secret leisure pursuits. But what kind of secret life could he lead?

Before, when he found out about Susan, he had wanted to lead a secret life to get back at her. Now he wanted one for a different reason: his own pleasure. Excitement.

He picked up his glass. He still had to get drinks.

Because the life he had currently, he reflected, climbing the stairs, was insufficient. It was quite simply inadequate. At a certain point, you had to insist on quality.

A woman he once knew, who lived down the street from them, had said frequently, “I’m going to exercise my rights as a consumer.” She had said this often. Then she would call a mail-order catalog, for instance, and complain about a substandard product she had purchased therefrom. She would receive bulk samples of things, or luxury items free of charge—bribes from companies in exchange for refraining from litigation, which she threatened often.

When she was his neighbor he had frowned on this behavior of hers, which seemed cynical and opportunistic. Susan had thought it was funny, but he had frowned upon it. Now, however, he felt a certain grudging admiration.

“Cognac,” he said to the bartender beside the pool. He could barely hear his own voice. It was loud now. There was music, coming from who knows where. He did not see Brady or Cleve. There were more people now also. It was as though, alone in the bathroom, he had slept for hours by himself while on the other side of the wall the crowd swelled and gained momentum. Kind of a Sleeping Beauty thing. “G&T.”

“What’s your gin, sir?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s not for me. Whatever you want to give him.”

Two women dancing near him wore hairy coconut-shell bikini tops. He had never thought he would see that, outside a movie context. The shells did not look comfortable. They had to be chafing. Your average breast was not a good fit for half a coconut shell. The breasts would have red circle marks on them, like glass rings on a coffee table.

Maybe he should work on Casey, with regard to the phone-sex problem. Sure, she was an adult, but adults made poor choices all the time and she was no exception. Maybe he should press her harder to go to college. She was still young enough. Was it wrong of him to let her choose her own path? She was his daughter. And she was only in her twenties. And she was doing phone sex. She was going down the old phone-sex road. Where did that road lead? That road was a dead end.

It was all very well to be accepting. Acceptance had its place. But maybe he was shirking his duty. Maybe he should plead with her, or threaten. Did Susan know? She did not, was his suspicion. Maybe he should talk about it with Susan. Maybe they should formulate policy. Of course, he had just told Casey he was fine with it. The downside of drunkenness. But it was true, in a way. That is, he was fine with the sex aspect, in a sense. What sense? Well, in the sense that he could admit his daughter was a female, and—

OK, so he was fine with it in the sense that he could ignore it, if he tried, or maybe chock it up to youthful mischief, risk-taking, or perversity, or also possibly a nihilistic, self-abnegating impulse Casey had been known at times to embrace. But he was not fine with the whole career dead-end thing. Would she feel amused and fulfilled doing phone sex at fifty? No she would not.

When he got home he would hunker down with Susan. They would devise a phone-sex strategy.

•

“
W
hat the hell happened to you?” asked Brady, when Hal approached with drinks in hand, finally. He already had a new one, and was talking to a pretty girl. Cleve the lawyer was not around. “You fall in?”

Brady’s sharpness and his focus were on Hal, yet Hal sensed it was for the benefit of the pretty girl. She was half Brady’s age at the most and quite elegant, with her black hair swept up on top of her head in a chignon style Hal’s mother had favored. This, he realized, was why Brady had driven fast to the party.

He put down the cognac and G&T on a table, the better to drink his own whiskey. Behind Brady, against a vine-covered wall, people in skimpy bathing suits were blindfolded and playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, shrieking with laughter. He drank the whiskey; Brady was leaning in close to the girl, plying her. He was trying to get her to sleep with him. Hal could not hear what he was saying, nor did he want to.

But his whiskey was already gone.

He grabbed up the extra G&T surreptitiously, without Brady noticing, and moved away from the two of them, toward the taped-up banner of the donkey. Tails hung all over it, willy-nilly. He stood there sipping and watching as a plump woman in a tiny, ill-advised purple thong approached, giggling. She was being roughly steered, almost pushed in fact, by a large man behind her who held onto her shoulders. She raised a braided donkey tail, her arm wavering.

“Colder, colder, warmer, colder,” chanted other men in the crowd. But they were toying with the woman. They misdirected her and then they laughed.

Abruptly the large man turned her toward the pool, and she stepped forward. She screamed as she fell. But then seconds later she resurfaced, sputtering and annoyed, tugging at her blindfold as laughter resounded. Hal stepped away, thinking maybe she had let it happen—there was something about her, something irritating—but also touched by sadness.

At his elbow was a young man with a brush cut in wet swimming trunks, toweling his buff body.

“Pathetic, isn’t it,” said the young man.

Hal felt called upon to defend the woman.

“She’s the victim,” he said. Possibly slurring.

“That’s what I mean,” said the young man, and shrugged on a T-shirt. “They’re pathetic. Not her.”

“Oh. Yeah,” said Hal, though in fact it was all of them.

“You know anyone here?” asked the young man.

“No one I want to talk to,” said Hal. “You?”

“Same,” said the young man. “I’m on leave, I don’t live around here.”

“You in the army or something?”

“Air Force.”

“I was just with some Marines,” said Hal. “Or something like that. Coast Guard. Green Berets. Shit, military-type guys, what the hell do I know. In the jungle.”

“Yeah?”

“Down south, on the Monkey River,” said Hal, nodding.

“No shit,” said the Air Force guy. “Me too!”

“Get out,” said Hal. Was the guy playing him?

“Serious,” said the Air Force guy. “We did a raid on a guerrilla camp.”

“A raid? You mean like—”

“I’m a pilot.”

“So you mean like a bombing raid? A—dropping bombs on them?”

“Limited airstrike. Yeah. Cluster bombs.”

“Cluster bombs?”

“CBUs.”

“Don’t we—I mean don’t we have to declare war or something?”

“Hey. Just following orders. My understanding through the grapevine, this was a War on Drugs operation.”

Hal felt dazzled. Water splashed up from the pool onto his back, and people were still shrieking. He thought for a second he was back by the river, exhausted. Was it his fault? Bombing Mayans . . . but maybe they weren’t Mayans at all, maybe they were drug kingpins. He gazed down at the drink in his hand; he had mixed tequila, whiskey and now vodka. It was dizzying.

“There you go,” said the pilot, putting a hand on his back and moving him. “Guy was about to stick a tail on you.”

“You mean on this side of the border, right?” asked Hal.

“Wanna get some food? I’m starving.”

“Sure,” said Hal, but he felt unsteady. “They have shrimp puffs.”

“There’s a whole table. Follow me.”

At the table there was a surfeit of food. The pilot picked up what looked like a kebab.

“Is that meat? Does that look like meat to you?”

“I think so,” said Hal, bending to look at it.

“I think so too.”

He put it back.

“What,” said Hal, “you don’t eat meat?”

“Vegan,” said the pilot.

“A vegan bomb-dropper,” said Hal. He drank from his glass. It was almost empty. He put it down on the table.

“Best thing for you,” said the pilot. “Too much dairy clogs the arteries.”

“You don’t get anemic or anything?” asked Hal.

The pilot was piling fruit onto a plate, fruit and corn-on-the-cob and bread.

“You should eat too,” he said to Hal. “You look like you need it.”

“I’m not used to drinking,” admitted Hal.

“Here, take that,” said the pilot, and handed Hal his plate. “Sit down. Dig in.”

The vegan pilot was looking out for him. Why? It was a mystery. Kindly people were crawling out of the woodwork, lately—vegan pilots and German women. Nice people and nude people. In fact there was definite overlap. Did being nude make people nicer? Quite possibly. The inverse was certainly true: putting on Kevlar vests, body armor, etc., made you more willing to go around shooting people. It might also be the case that nice people were more willing to be nude. Chicken or egg question, really.

But then technically the vegan pilot had just been on a cluster-bombing sortie, so maybe he was not so nice. A wolf in vegan’s clothing.

Hal carried the plate to a table and sat. The bread was good, though there was no butter on it. He would prefer it with a pat of butter. He took a bite of the corn, also. Then the vegan cluster-bomber was back with him.

“So this bombing, did it, you know, kill people?”

“The bombs were anti-personnel, so yeah, that would have been an objective. I didn’t do any follow-up though, I was in and out, that was it.”

“You don’t feel bad about that? Killing?”

“It’s not ideal. But we all kill,” said the vegan, and forked up a piece of roasted red pepper.

“Not
people
,
” said Hal.

“Of course we do,” said the vegan.

“Me personally?”

“You eat other people’s food.”

“Not following you.”

“People who need it more than you do and die for lack of a pound of corn. It’s what we all are, isn’t it? Killers. I mean, all that life
is
is energy. The conversion of fuel. And we take it all. A quarter of the world’s resources for what, five percent of its population,” said the vegan. “That’s us.”

He patted his mouth carefully with a paper napkin and raised a glass to his lips. It looked like bubbly water.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Hal. “Talk about oversimplified.” He should drink water too, to clear his head. He looked around for a dispenser.

“Yeah well,” said the vegan. “Arithmetic is simple. That doesn’t make it wrong.”

This kind of discussion was pleasing only in a work environment, and only when it dealt directly with taxation. In a party setting it was unwelcome. Hal had the feeling of being caught in a trap by the vegan. Maybe you had to be careful of vegans. The vegan menace.

Although the vegan still seemed friendly. He spoke in a soft, moderate tone.

“Come on,” said Hal weakly. “You’re talking about what, middle-class lifestyle? At worst it’s manslaughter. It’s not murder. It’s not like flying over a jungle and cluster-bombing Mayans.”

But the buttery corn was slipping out of his grasp. It was devious and slippery.

“Manslaughter or murder, the guy still ends up dead,” said the vegan. “Does it matter to him how the killer rationalized?”

“Where’d you get that water?” asked Hal. He also needed a napkin.

“Right over there,” said the vegan, pointing.

Hal made his way to the table with the water. He was leaning over an array of light-blue bottles when an elbow struck his ribcage.

“You’re married, right?”

It was Cleve, with a woman hanging onto his arm.

“Oh hey, I got you that cognac,” said Hal, nodding confusedly, and looked around for where he’d set it down.

“Because the guy you’re talking to?”

“He claims to be a pilot,” said Hal. “With the Air Force. He talks like an earnest grad student though. Do you know him?”

“He’s a pilot. Yeah. But he’s also a flaming faggot,” said Cleve. “What, you didn’t notice? He’s probably hitting on you.”

“I’m old enough to be his father,” protested Hal weakly, but Cleve was already clapping him on the back with a smirk.

“Just a babe in the woods,” he said, and moved off.

There was still butter on Hal’s fingers, or maybe vegetable oil. He reached for the top of a stack of paper napkins and wiped his fingers, then picked up a bottle.

When he sat down again beside the vegan he looked at him differently, applying a This Man Is Gay filter. He remained unsure, though. The vegan was buff, clean, and ate politely, but there were straight men like that.

“You know Cleve?” asked the vegan.