Picturing Will (13 page)

Sulking, and feeling sorry for himself that the phone call would have to wait until Mel woke up, he curled into one of the chairs by the air conditioner and flipped through the coloring book he and Spencer would work on the next day. This one was about animals in the zoo, which meant that Spencer wouldn’t be very interested and that he would do most of the coloring. Spencer really only liked dinosaur coloring books.

While Haveabud showered, Will and Spencer watched TV. Commercial TV was but a paltry thing to Haveabud. He thought with appreciation of all the bars of soap wrapped in paper in motel bathrooms as he lathered up—those thin rectangles whose outer wrapping is always damp by the time you remember to take the cover off before you turn on the water. Everywhere, right now, people who had never met were spiritually united in scraping wet paper from bars of soap, reaching out to put the wad on the sink, or flicking the pieces onto the bathroom floor. All those things were downright ritualistic in America, yet one rarely paused to realize one’s own place in such domestic traditions.

Haveabud’s wife bought French milled soap at $7.50 a bar, $72.00 a box. Several dollars’ worth of free suds were the result of buying soap in groups of ten. The good thing about the soap his wife bought was that each bar was individually wrapped in pleated paper with a small silver seal at the top—a handy thing to throw into one’s pocket for a little gift during an afternoon rendezvous with one’s lover, and so much more appreciated than flowers. What woman would not blush carrying a bunch of flowers into a hotel? And if you brought flowers to a woman at home she inevitably had them, because she had thought of flowers along with anointing the bedside lamp with patchouli oil and spreading brand-new designer sheets on the bed. A bar of soap was perfect because it showed a woman that you were thinking of her body. There was no telling whether a woman wanted to smell of sea breezes or of
muguet des bois
, so perfume was a bad choice, but the bars of soap had a delicate scent that anyone would like. But ah! Those little bars of Camay in motel bathrooms! The gluey bars of Neutrogena, like dried honey. And the infrared bathroom lights as magnificently warm as the sun on a perfect day. The too-small towels the motel provided made you pat, not rub, so that it seemed you were commending every part of your body. Life was always an adventure if you adapted to circumstances. How sad it must be for all those travelers who wanted familiar smells, the mattress of optimal hardness, windows that opened onto their backyards, instead of parking lots where cars of all colors and shapes were lined up for your inspection and delight. You could find out under what circumstances your fellow human beings would brake; what puns and slogans moved them; whether they thought women should have control of their own bodies; what national parks they had visited. With careful inspection, you might be able to see which bumper sticker was applied
first
, so that their feelings about abortion could be understood as pre-Yellowstone or post-Yellowstone. Who would not be tempted to imagine a composite portrait of the driver who kept an eye out for falling rocks, while also asserting that gun laws were already too restrictive? Some car owners wore their hearts on their sleeves by sticking decals of peace signs and endangered species on their bumpers. Their vanity license plates were effusions of the soul, succinctly expressed; the cars’ colors the ones they loved but were too embarrassed to wear. Four-cylinder, six-cylinder, fuel-injected dreams, all lined up to educate and provoke and titillate, and what did people do but close the curtains and turn on the tube in order to hear Ed McMahon enthuse about Alpo and Johnny Carson reel off the list of the night’s guests.

A set designer could not have done a better job in assembling this particular motel room, Haveabud thought. Ochre shag carpeting stopped a foot short of the heating unit below the casement window, where a yellow-slatted Venetian blind dangled. The drawstring curtains were imprinted with fish and squid and what Haveabud took to be sand sharks, all in perfectly spaced configurations that would never be found in the ocean: tentacles like witches’ gnarled fingers dangling at regular intervals and, interspersed in the empty spaces, mysterious sperm-shaped bits of yellow that might have been millions of worms lost simultaneously from fishing poles, or simply abstract shapes whose own erratic pattern was meant to aesthetically unite enemies of the sea.

Haveabud had once read an article that said many motels deliberately offered something for everyone, and nothing to offend. That was the explanation for pole lamps, shag carpeting, sunburst clocks, laminated-wood wood, and desks (who had a desk at home?) with neatly placed blotters and a top drawer filled with postcards of the kidney-shaped pool. The bed linen was stretched as tightly as a tambourine; lotions and potions in the bathroom smelled vaguely of gardenias; the Sani-Wrapped drinking glasses and the toilet seat with the paper band would bring back memories of the Fourth of July as the sash was snapped away or the glass was pulled from its plastic wrapper like a crackerjack.

The more impersonal and immutable the room, the greater Haveabud’s pleasure: the walls that could be wiped clean if you stumbled with your drink; the carpet that always absorbed quickly; the red light that blinked silently on the telephone like the beacon from a lighthouse.

Haveabud emerged from the bathroom in his undershorts, with the little towel balanced on his shoulder like an epaulet. Will was sitting on the shag carpeting, watching a car race, and Spencer was trying to master the one-armed push-up. When he got it down, Haveabud was going to cast him in one of his upcoming videos (a late-night treat for partygoers whom Haveabud chose to bring home) as a midget fingerpainter who had become the rage of the New York art scene.

“Are we going to have pizza tonight?” Spencer asked.

“I thought some Belon oysters with a white Chassagne-Montrachet,” Haveabud said. “Perhaps followed by some carpaccio and a lingonberry soufflé for dessert.”

“Pizza,” Spencer said, not looking up.

“Sourdough bread with caviar-dill butter and yellow pepper gratinée,” Haveabud said.

“We want real food,” Spencer said.

“That’s what my wife cooks me for dinner,” Haveabud said. “Don’t you feel sorry for me?”

“Yes,” Spencer said.

“So: more pizza to cleanse the system. With nitrite-loaded crispy bacon, or pepperoni that may contain a small percentage of insect larvae and animal hair?”

Spencer stopped trying to do one-handed push-ups. “You’re gross, Uncle Haverford,” he said.

Will got up and walked next door to see if Mel was awake. He was not. He was snoring, though he must have awakened at some point, because now the air conditioner was on low. Will looked for another few seconds, then pulled the door closed. “He’s still sleeping,” Will told Haveabud glumly.

Haveabud’s idea was that they take a swim in the pool. If Mel woke up and joined them, fine, and if he didn’t, they would call the desk and see if there was a pizza place that delivered.

ELEVEN

S
pencer wore red trunks with silver studs at the waist that made him look as if he were wearing a Western belt. He wore an ankle bracelet that some admirer had given his mother. Since an ankle bracelet was not her style, it would have been impossible to explain to her husband, so she had it fastened around her son’s ankle, the way whores tattoo themselves in private places, or women carry lovers’ pictures behind their children’s pictures in their lockets. Spencer simply thought of life as a huge adventure in which he would be presented with unexpected gifts, sworn to secrecy about things that were for him, at best, enigmatic, and expected to intuit the moment’s truth from his mother’s expression. It was not a mode Spencer ever got clear on, so he developed the habit of suspending judgment and always found himself hoping that things would turn out for the best. Only an adult—in particular, his mother—could issue the final verdict, whispered the last thing at night, or delivered solemnly, with the implication that they were coconspirators and that outsiders must not be privy to their superior knowledge. What created anxiety in Spencer was not his mother, or the here and now, but an ultimate question, a question that no amount of research had turned up a clear answer to, but that was truly one of the essential mysteries of all time: What happened to the dinosaurs? Clearly superior, known to be of gigantic size and to have voracious appetites, high energy, and impressive abilities, the dinosaurs had just disappeared one day, as if they had always been the small-scale two-dimensional creatures of cartoons and coloring books who could be as easily dismissed as parakeets were when the cover was dropped over their cage. Was it possible that, as a protest against the current situation on earth, they had willed themselves gone? Could life have simply become, for the dinosaurs, an existential errand—time passed until the inevitable moment of extinction? Eat a few lizards, dive in a pool, snap up an insect. That might have been their version of eating a nightly pizza. There was a way in which Spencer knew that he and his family and friends were just passing time.

Spencer had nightmares—possible scenarios that explained the disappearance of the dinosaurs: a big-bang theory of doomsday in which clouds emitted choking blasts, and lizards, subjected to horribly contaminated food, in turn poisoned the Compsognathus, so they fell like rain, as helpless as puppets taken from the hand. Right now, this very minute, they should be devouring their prey. The planet, in spite of the media’s constant update on its urgencies and its future, was at a standstill as far as Spencer was concerned—constantly vulnerable until the mysteries of the Mesozoic world were solved.

So they were headed south, to have a bit of fun along the way and to deliver Will on a mission of importance—a visit to his father and stepmother. They were as inconsequential as dust. If the dinosaurs had been wiped out, suddenly and for all time, what was so important about this mission? How should they think of themselves as rational, energetic, even superior creatures when the brightly lit buttons of the Coke machine could be glowing a message that signified their imminent annihilation? How, in short, could anything be trusted when something as calamitous as the mass extinction of dinosaurs had transpired, and when all that remained was conjecture, idle speculation, TV cameramen filming scale models of the earth before the great disappearance? What if they erected a monument to extinct dinosaurs in Washington, D.C.? What if the few token dinosaurs in the museums were taken outdoors, and others recreated full size? What if all those bones, scales, and teeth were laid out in a line across the mall?
Then
would people know what had vanished from the planet? Why commemorate wars when no war could have been as deadly and complete as whatever broke over the heads of the dinosaurs? What was
extinct
supposed to mean? That it was beyond people’s dreams?

Will had worn his navy-blue boxer shorts into the pool. Haveabud said no one would notice that he was not wearing swim trunks, and Will was still at the age when he believed whatever adults said about things like that.

Spencer, holding his breath, dove toward the bottom of the pool, then rose to the surface to tread water. Haveabud started to instruct Will in the dead man’s float, demonstrating it himself with a buoyancy that made him appear more object than human.

Will sat on the edge of the pool, dangling his feet in the water. He was thinking of how exposed the pool seemed—a flat expanse of water that except for minor disturbances of the surface might have been a mirror reflecting the blue, blue sky.

Haveabud and Spencer were slick seals, and Will was waiting on the sidelines to applaud. That was the way it was when you performed publicly: You always owed the viewer an act that would please. It was why Will and Wag liked their tent’s interior: because inside they could be themselves, on guard only against the possibility of some mother-anthropologist who would disturb the tomb. Being suspended in water and hiding in a tent were both a lot of fun, but the sheets enclosed you better than the water did.

Swishing his feet in the water, Will was biding his time as he waited for Mel to wake up. Mel and Haveabud were nothing alike: Haveabud talked a lot, and Mel was much quieter; Haveabud loved to buy souvenirs, which he thought should be put in a time capsule, but Mel only bought mints for everyone when they left a restaurant and postcards to send to Jody. Though Will did not know Haveabud’s life story, he knew that Haveabud’s mother made him nervous and he hated it when she visited him in New York. Haveabud said his mother lived in Siberia. Mel said Haveabud’s mother lived in Cincinnati. The night before Will left on this trip, Jody talked to him about Haveabud. She told him that Haveabud liked to act wild, and that usually the easiest thing to do was to try to get into the spirit of things. It was obvious to Will that his mother made an effort to be nice to Haveabud. She was back in Mel’s apartment, working on photographs that would be shown at Haveabud’s gallery. Haveabud was like a wild boy in a sandbox, she had told him, but he had a way of tossing up things that were very important. Will had not understood that she was making an analogy; in the car, he had asked about Haveabud’s sandbox and gotten a very strange look. Something about that puzzlement had let him know he should not ask more.

Will was thinking about his mother because Haveabud had been floating face-down and holding his breath for so long that his mother would have made him come up for air. As a younger child, when he first saw a metronome, he had cried with frustration. Now he was a child swinging his foot in the water as his older, more accomplished friend explored the depths and Haveabud tempted fate, and Mel sank deeper into his dreams.

Haveabud swam over to Spencer and lured him to his shouldertops. He moved around, in the area of the pool where his feet could still touch the bottom, bouncing Spencer on a bumpy ride. Water rose to Spencer’s chin when Haveabud crouched. The water poured off him as Haveabud rose again. Will was offered the same ride, but he didn’t want it. Finally, to prove to Haveabud that he was in the spirit of things, he went to the shallow end and floated on his back. That didn’t last long because it was too bright to keep his eyes open, staring at the sky, and too strange a feeling to float with them closed. Wag had sent him a drawing of his neighbor’s pool, which he could use any time he asked permission. His mother had told him that no matter who gave permission, he was not to use the pool unless an adult was present. He wondered who that adult would be. It would be a little strange to see Mrs. Vickers without his mother. He knew they missed each other but that his mother was less sad than she might have been because of the exciting things that were happening with her photographs and with Haveabud. Will looked at Haveabud and Spencer, giggling, just as Haveabud went all the way under, and Spencer swam free and kicked to stay afloat. Will thought it must be very sad to have your real father gone all the way to Europe. His mother had told him that Haveabud was so nice to Spencer because he was sorry Spencer’s father had run away, and because Spencer’s stepfather had no interest in him. Wayne was
his
real father, but Mel seemed more like his father. He wished that Mel could stay in Florida with him. He looked back at the motel, where two people were taking suitcases out of their trunk, arguing. Their words weren’t audible, but it was obvious from the way they moved that they were angry. Will toe-hopped into deeper water and did the breaststroke, pulling himself up on the other side. He and Wag had taken swimming lessons together two summers before. He could hardly wait to be in the swimming pool with Wag.