The Big Seven (27 page)

“I’m not. I just had some extra and you might need two more days to have a sherry with me.”

That was that. Her name was Laurel. Not cute or pretty but handsome. He noticed her strong musculature, most obvious in her arms and legs. Would making love to her be like writhing with another Boy Scout? That didn’t sound attractive. A friend had told him that ballerinas had hard asses. Across the table she looked as if she was deciding something but he didn’t know what. He had a second glass of wine, still less than a couple of Canadian whiskies. His new cool head responded well to wine which was without the dreamy confusion of Canadian whiskey. When he got home he would stock up on something called Côtes du Rhône which Laurel had recommended. It was very palatable to him and not expensive, and he would experiment to see if wine was a suitable permanent substitute for Canadian whiskey. He didn’t care for American cabernets which were syrupy with an aftertaste that resembled taking a small bite of an oak tree.

They went up to their separate rooms to freshen up for the evening. They had plenty of time before Lupa’s dancing and both wanted another stroll along the river. In his room Sunderson perceived a possible disadvantage to his new cool head. Simply enough, he could see the unchangeable past too clearly. They never should have stopped camping which Diane loved. And he had been too far sunk in the male hoax of fishing and drinking. He couldn’t take time off during his precious vacation from his strenuous detective work to go to France with Diane. She went twice with friends but said it certainly wasn’t like going with someone you loved. In all of this he had been wrong. A greedy beast of his own will. What the fuck was fishing, or drinking, if it destroyed a marriage and the love of a grand woman? He sat down by the window and reviewed the mournful story of his divorce, diverted by the sight of Spain out the window and the errant memory of a college course on the origins of Latin America. He sat drying off from his shower wrapped in a big, expensive towel. Spain didn’t look big enough, out the window of course, to have ruled so much of the world. He rehearsed the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the final driving of the Moors out of the country, Teddy Roosevelt kicking Spain’s ass.

The doorbell rang. It was Laurel in a beige robe. He quickly dressed and let her in.

“I thought you might want a snack. I want some olives, ham, and shrimp. Another sherry?”

He called room service ordering two dozen shrimp and immediately thinking how expensive they were. He added the wine, olives and ham.

She was sitting in an easy chair with her robe flopped open and her nightie under the robe open almost to the crotch. The man on the phone said in a surprising American voice that the scampi were a better deal than boiled shrimp. Sunderson said okay. He looked at Laurel’s bare legs with agitation. He had sworn to himself that he would avoid sex in Spain in order to be fresh for Diane when she reached Paris. Laurel told an amusing story about her maiden aunt, her mother’s oldest sister. After World War II the whole family was desperately hungry with little food available in the stores and everything rationed. The aunt began dating GI’s. She was pretty and soon there was plenty of food. The family was embarrassed having figured what was going on, including dozens of rare eggs and fine steaks the soldiers had stolen from the commissary. When the food situation improved after a year the aunt had told her mother she was going to stay a maiden aunt, and that she had had thirty-some “boyfriends” in one year and didn’t want any more sex. One sergeant from Ohio had made love to her five times on his day off and she had fallen asleep at her desk at her office job the next day. The punch line of the story was the aunt had told her mother, “Between morals and food, I’ll take food.”

“That’s a wonderful story,” Sunderson laughed.

“So I was thinking in the bar that if you want me, why not? With that money I feel a bit obligated.”

“Well don’t feel obligated. Of late I’ve messed up my life with sex. Younger women and all that. Plus I’m meeting my ex-wife in Paris. I don’t think repairs are possible but I’ll try.”

“You still love her. How sweet.” Laurel covered herself a bit.

“Yes.” For some reason this made him defensive, and he walked over, knelt, and went down on her for a long time. She was multiorgasmic and he felt proud as a peacock. She pushed his head away finally and said, “English men rarely do that.” He stood and she blew him expertly. The doorbell rang just as he came off. He started to fall backward but she caught him in her strong arms. He stumbled into the bathroom. She wiped her mouth on the bedspread and answered the door. It was room service with their snacks on a little rolling table.

Sunderson came out of the bathroom a little shamefaced with his khaki shorts in disarray. It was his room and he should have answered the door but people become nitwits post-orgasm so he had fled. Was he cheating on Diane now? What they had done wasn’t sex in Bill Clinton’s opinion but what was it, table tennis? The word
Parcheesi
came to him but he didn’t know what it meant.

They were quite happy with the food especially Sunderson with the copious amount of garlic on the scampi. They dozed for an hour with Laurel naked. It was warmish but she didn’t want the air conditioner on because of the noise it made. At one point Sunderson got up for a glass of water and stood at the end of the bed staring at her. He had a book of memories from his sexual life and he would mentally photograph his lovers for recapture later. The mind fully concentrated is a great photographer, he thought. He also liked to sniff the air because that also could be remembered. It wasn’t a long book but it was fun to resort to during boring stretches fishing or driving or watching an inane sporting event on television of which there were many. You had to pay careful attention to the smallest physical oddities. He had never cared for nude photos in magazines or any kind of visual pornography. Everyone looked dead to him whereas the mind could re-create the living woman.

When they were having the first drinks of the evening he stuck to red wine. It occurred to him that there was a bit of a time bomb in the jolts of whiskey that made him not truly notice what was going on in life even if it wasn’t much. He was very slow to accept any change in his life but this one seemed to have possibilities. There was the problem that few bars in the U.P. carried drinkable wine but he rarely went to a bar anymore and there was always cold beer. He had read in some dipshit self-help book that Diane had given him that change brought more oxygen into your life which he could certainly use.

The bartender, by name Alphonse, warned him not to look at Lupa directly and especially not to exchange any looks because she was reputed to be a witch. This startled Sunderson who didn’t think people believed in such things any longer. He was going to ask but then the bartender and Laurel began to talk about Spanish poetry about which she knew a great deal. She had boycotted Spain all of her life because of the murder of Lorca but then last year she bit the bullet and went to Granada where on a steep hillside near the city she visited the site of the assassination. She said she had wept. The bartender was visibly angry and said goddamn Franco had stolen his boyhood. Laurel felt that the murder of Lorca was like killing the last hero on earth.

For Sunderson the performance was nearly unendurable. Before Mexico he hadn’t been all that familiar with flamenco except in college a boy down the hall had a Carlos Montoya record he played very loud and sometimes Sunderson would stand outside the door for a few minutes and listen. For the performance the hall was small and the guitarist very loud. They were in the third row and several men danced first. Their movements seemed implausibly violent but graceful. Then a very small man with a huge voice sang a passionate song that Laurel translated in a whisper in his ear: “My life has been full of love, suffering, and death but that is all we humans have on earth if we live well and honestly, love, suffering, and death.” Sunderson’s mind agreed if his body did not. The guitarist increased in volume and out came La Lupa from the wings at top speed. Now Sunderson was hearing the music in his spine and felt her movements in his swollen heart. He had told Laurel he’d keep an eye on his watch so she wouldn’t be late for her dinner but he forgot everything. When it was over he noted that Lupa had danced for an hour and he wondered if she had a body of steel. Toward the end, because she was backlit, you could see tiny droplets of shiny sweat fly off her hair. He was emotionally exhausted and he had tears in his eyes when they filed out. He noticed he was damp with sweat and despite the bartender’s warning when Lupa had looked at the crowd with almost a glare in her eyes he allowed his own to brush hers with a glance. She had something more than beauty. He had never seen a woman who inspired such awe. He frankly didn’t care if he was bewitched or haunted by her. He certainly wouldn’t forget her.

He walked Laurel to the restaurant to see her friends. He was invited to eat but he didn’t feel up to chatty company. He quickly drank a big glass of delicious Priorat and was on his way. He passed the hotel and continued on to the river because he saw that there was a big moon and wanted to see the reflection in the water. He sat on a bench for at least an hour staring at the moon buried in the river. Maybe he could see Lorca’s shadow in the Guadalquivir he thought. Laurel said that he loved this river.

Back at the bar which was busy he had a wine nightcap and the bartender looked at him and said, “I can tell you stared into her eyes, you fool,” and laughed.

“I’ve always been a fool so why stop now.” Sunderson shrugged.

He had lunch with Laurel the next day before catching an afternoon train for Barcelona. They didn’t make love again. He invited her to Marquette later in the summer saying he would pay the ticket. She said she would think it over, thanking him for the gesture. It occurred to him belatedly that Diane might be jealous. He admitted that he had fallen a little bit in love with La Lupa.

“She would kill you in a week,” Laurel laughed.

“I don’t care,” he said without a smile. That chilled the air.

After lunch he walked two hours to dispel his unrest. Why didn’t he make love to this woman? Maybe he caught a moon infection whatever that was. He was pleased he had checked his ticket that morning because he awoke with no idea he was going to Barcelona that day. Normally he overplanned everything. The long walk and a shower helped. Maybe you can walk out of one life and into another. He liked the idea and swore, as he often did with resolutions, to walk a couple of hours every day.
Let’s see if I can keep this one
, he thought.

Chapter 28

He wanted to doze on the wonderful train but didn’t want to miss anything. He bought a small bottle of wine, a demi, in the club car. He had also bought a nice color guidebook to Barcelona at a used-book table outside the Seville train station. There was a lot of information about an architect named Gaudí. Diane had owned a book about this man but he had never looked at it for more than a few moments. What intrigued him is how the Spanish people had commissioned so many works by this crazy man. It could never have happened in the U.S., a meat and potatoes place compared to Spain. Of course maybe the man wasn’t crazy, just inspired to do something different. He was delighted to figure out by the maps that a Gaudí cathedral was being built near his hotel. He thought that they had stopped building cathedrals on the backs of the poor in the Middle Ages, a Catholic trick. Probably current workers were paid well.

He loved the logic of the olive orchards they were passing through, clearly something grand about an olive orchard. Diane had given up on butter in the home in favor of olive oil though he had demanded butter for frying fish and for corn on the cob. His doctor thought butter was worse for America than drugs.

His seatmate pointed out a bull ranch and Sunderson stared long and hard at these fighting creatures, Miura bulls. They looked baleful indeed as if they would be glad to attack the train if there weren’t a big fence parting them. For a college term paper on Hemingway he had read the author on bullfighting. He found him needlessly technical as if to say, “You will never know as much as I do,” but then he had never been curious about the sport. At the movies once he had seen a short film about it but he had liked best the stirring music that accompanied it. At the farm once Grandpa had shot a steer in the head with a pistol and then he and Sunderson’s father had gutted it. It was a cold, snowy November day and the guts steamed. They hung up the carcass with a rope and pulley to the rafters for a couple days to make it taste better. Sunderson had had quite enough of the process and didn’t watch them cut it up for freezing. He had liked this particular steer and had petted it as a calf and nothing seemed fair because it wasn’t meant to be.

Despite his best intentions he dozed off and they were suddenly in Barcelona. He had been dreaming about La Lupa and felt the music again buzzing in his spine. He took a cab to the hotel, loved the room and once again found it too expensive. It was far too late to be angry at his travel agent. Besides Diane or Mona had probably done it on purpose. There was a nice sundeck and he drank a small bottle of red wine from the minibar, noting that it was eighteen euros for which you could get totally drunk in Munising.

He continued his train nap waking in a slightly frightened state thinking that far more scary than the Miura bulls was the possibility that Diane would find out he had written nothing, rediscovering that he was a fraud. He ordered room service coffee, got out his tablet, and sat at a desk. He had left Diane’s notebook at home because it was too nice. The small passages he had copied out from Djuna Barnes and Nabokov didn’t fire him up. They made him want a drink which was
verboten
before the work starts but okay near the end of the session, he had decided. He reminded himself that though Faulkner drank a lot he had also written well for decades. Sunderson tore out his only page, crumpled the paper and made a good shot in the corner wastebasket. He started again.

Cain rose up and slew Abel, a preposterous murder between the first two brothers on earth, the sons of Adam and Eve. The violence was over jealousy. We shall see as the pages pass (note to self: awkward!) how the Seven Deadly Sins, so central to human life, play off each other and never seem to act alone. We shall also see that they are somewhat connected to sex. Needless to say Cain and Abel weren’t sisters. In natural history the two mountain rams noisily butting heads aren’t females. Males often seem to be hardwired for violence especially in the natural world but where else are we? Whether you believe it is historically accurate or not, the Old Testament is a bloodbath. I’ve always thought a mistake was made when man separated himself too radically from the natural world. Even Shakespeare said “We are nature too.” The true revolution brought about by Christ was to deliver a theology of love rather than bloodletting. But banded together with the power of politicians, the Caesars of this earth, the bloodletting resumed and flourished down to our time. A professor in college insisted that during World War II there were millions of German Lutherans who persisted in thinking of Germany as a Christian nation. I wonder how many millions of the opposing troops died with a prayer on their lips for the defeat of the enemy. Soon after the Civil War we resumed our extermination of the American Indians, a holocaust in itself in that when we arrived there were thought to be as many as ten million Indians and by 1900 American Indians numbered a scant quarter of a million.

Sunderson bolted for a drink. Fuck history, he thought. His central lacuna in history had been our Civil War and the so-called Indian Wars. He could not bear either and had wondered how so elegantly intelligent a man as Shelby Foote had managed to do so. When he was still planning on taking a master’s degree, before the police force and fishing won, he had hastily read Foote so that he wouldn’t be empty-headed on the Civil War during his interview.

He was diverted by the memory of his mother’s father Fritz who had a wretched farm near Trenary and a small inheritance from his parents in Chicago. They were adoptive parents as his own had drowned in the
Eastland
disaster, a cruise ferry that tipped over at the docks and drowned 844 off on a company picnic, including all the members of twenty-two different families. Fritz had found out that his real name was Olaf and most of the drowned were Swedes. Fritz didn’t get out of Chicago until he was fifty and made his way to the far north to become yet another unsuccessful farmer. Sunderson’s mother had been miserable on the farm with its outdoor toilet until she met his father at a dance in Trenary. She was eighteen and they were married in a month. Youthful photos of his mother were quite attractive but she went downhill fast in Sunderson’s opinion. Fritz was a cranky old goat who had started his family very late. When Sunderson was a little boy Fritz would take him fishing on a nearby lake all the while singing World War I songs in a horrid, cracked but very loud voice.

Over hill, over dale

As we hit the dusty trail

And those caissons go rolling along.

Or “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” which Sunderson learned to loathe in the boat. Sometimes another boat approached them to see if there was a problem what with all the “shouting” and the insulted Fritz would yell “I was singing.” Many years later, Sunderson learned that caissons were wagons carrying ammunition. He had never figured out Tipperary because Mona had found an Internet piece on Tipperary that still didn’t say where it was. Evidently “a long way to Tipperary” meant a long way from a train stop. His dislike of the computer intensified. He was still to be an antique and who cared? He would never know the number of Russian prostitutes in Madrid. Marion showed him pictures and they were too beefy for his taste.

Sunderson recalled another song Fritz would sing in a mournful voice while fishing, “There’s a Vacant Chair in Every Home Tonight.” When you said “send a prayer for our boys over there,” likely many people did send a prayer over there. His father used to rant about how the demolishing of the Warsaw Ghetto could have been prevented. He recalled that four hundred thousand Jews died there, a number of dead that is not easily comprehended. Each of the four hundred thousand was
one
to somebody. This seemed key to his essay.

On the elevator he questioned once again how we bore up under our own history except by remaining ignorant of it. No wonder he became a detective and alcoholic and a late-blooming sex maniac. He recalled one professor who quoted Dostoyevsky as saying, “I believe that to be too acutely conscious is to be diseased.”

On the floor below his own a Spanish woman he thought to be in her fifties came on the elevator. He nodded and she said “Good afternoon” in Spanish and smiled. You couldn’t imagine anyone more tastefully dressed and he felt his tired old worm turn.

He nearly ordered a whiskey by mistake then backed away into a glass of house red which was good enough. He quickly drank several glasses and then the attractive, stocky barmaid gave him a glass of water which should ordinarily be drunk first so that you don’t drink alcohol out of pure physical thirst. He asked the barmaid about a nontourist restaurant in the area saying that he was only moderately hungry then guessing that tourists by the dozens must request “nontourist” restaurants as if they were up to something shameful. She spoke good English and considered out loud a dozen places before they settled on a seafood tapas place. She drew him a map and he was off.

The place was crowded but he found a spot at the end of the bar next to a short, plump man with a stack of a dozen plates in front of him. Diane had described the protocol to him and he ate four plates of
pulpo,
octopus, in a row adoring the flavor. He broke into this string with a single plate of ceviche, pickled fish, then went back to the octopus thinking he might be the only man from Marquette who loved it. The man next to him introduced himself as a journalist and said he hadn’t realized that Americans loved
pulpo
. As they talked he admitted he had spent the last two years of Franco’s power in prison. He said that his wife had divorced him and now he was raising a son by himself while the wife kept the daughter. “At least I got him,” he said, pointing to a pudgy little boy sitting on the floor intently reading a comic.

By the time Sunderson left Barcelona two days later and three days early for Paris he felt more than a trace of panic. The point was never say you’re going to write something until you’ve already done it. In writing good intentions are apparently crippling. By going to Paris early he had a realization that he was one of tens of thousands of Americans who have traveled to Paris to become writers. Maybe only hundreds. He would stay in a nice hotel rather than eating stale bread in a garret for all that mattered. He had liked Barcelona very much but that first day he had walked himself into painful shin splints. After a sleepless night he had bought himself a pair of puffy walking shoes at a sporting goods store. That helped. There’s something in cement that doesn’t love a foot. He could walk for hours pain free on the soft forest floor but then recalled the same thing had happened when walking in New York City before his back had been blasted by a baseball bat. The afternoon of the second day he talked to the concierge as advised by Diane and she found a retired architect with an air-conditioned Mercedes to drive him around in the nerve-dulling heat. The architect took him first to see a group of geese wandering around the yard of an old cathedral. Sunderson then told the architect that he was mostly interested in seeing all the works of Gaudí. This was partly so he could talk about it with Diane and also, though he had never had a trace of interest in architecture before, because Gaudí fascinated him. The Sagrada Família gave him vertigo and he watched the men working at the top of the spires and wanted to yell, “Get down from there!” They gave him a palpable ache in his stomach. Even monkeys have a fear of falling, he thought.

They went to a park on the north side of the city where Gaudí had lived and had his studio. He liked this way of commemorating the dead. The house was small and tasteful, surrounded by greenery that seemed to intrude into the house. He could not imagine a lovelier place to live and thought of building such a house back in the woods next to a river. Not to write in but just to
be
in his coming old age.

He went back that evening and ate himself silly on octopus and drank far too much wine. He reminded himself you could get drunk on wine just like whiskey only it took longer and the transition from sober to drunk was gentler. He had tipped the concierge twenty bucks for the architecture ride and changing his reservations for the flight and his hotel in Paris. He felt temporarily like a big shot but then the fear of writing began to nag him in the lobby. She seemed insulted that he was leaving early but he said that he had an important meeting in Paris. He liked saying it as if he were in a movie.

The morning flight was a little turbulent and unpleasant because of a thunderstorm. What an asshole way to travel, he thought. Up in the air but out of contact with birds and beasts.

At de Gaulle he headed for the restaurant to have his salad with
lardons
and a poached egg and, of course, a glass of red. At the hotel he broke into a cold sweat when he was escorted to the same room where he and Mona had made love. In college he had a friend, a literature major, who quoted a French poet, René Char, as saying, “Don’t live on regret like a wounded finch.” See the bird fly around with a broken wing. He hastily smelled the sheets to see if he could detect Mona from that long ago. Ho, stupid. Likely the worst move of his life, and here he was reliving it. Oh well, it was easy to forgive himself, too easy in fact. He was bad but then so was she. He couldn’t imagine her not doing what she wished. He was trying to pretend that he didn’t remember the beauty of her ass. She was clearly a punishment, all in all, from the first few times he could see her through the window of his study, cavorting in her nude yoga poses. He never doubted that he loved her but this was love as a disease afflicting his life, the way it used to be described in the pre-Romantic period. He wondered what would happen if she were here right now and decided he could behave on wine but likely not on whiskey. Wine seemed not to leave you so bereft of your senses. In the wine store down the street from the hotel and the Odéon he had picked up bottles of Gigondas and Domaine Tempier. He thought about changing the room but was confident he could overcome the memory.

He opened the Gigondas hastily because of his tension over Mona and drank deeply from the water glass. This was technically illegal as he hadn’t written anything yet, just arranged his papers and ballpoint, the long yellow legal tablet he wrote on. He looked at the passage from Djuna Barnes, supposedly there to help him.