The Hotel Eden: Stories (18 page)

The bell sounded and Mitchell was still in his robe. David Bright had come forward to wrestle, but Mitchell waved a hand at him,
just a minute
, and poured something on the back of his hand and then snorted it, blowing the residue at the fans. He laughed again, a demented laugh, just like Mephistopheles, which I saw him play at the University Playhouse, coiled his robe, forgot something, unrolled it, removed a syringe, laughed, threw the syringe at the fans, rerolled his robe, and threw it in David Bright’s face. David was so surprised by the unfair play that my brother, Dr. Slime, was able to deliver the illegal Elbow Drill to his kidneys. Then while David staggered around on his knees in a daze, removing the robe from his head, Dr. Slime strutted around the ring eating drugs off the mat and waggling his tongue and eyes at those at ringside. From time to time, he’d stop chewing and kick David Bright about the face. The crowd was pissed off. They had rushed the ring and now stood ten deep in the apron. Mitchell could have walked out onto their faces.

He was milking it. I’d seen him do this one other time, in
Macbeth
, running the soliloquies to twice their ordinary length because he sensed an audience with a high tolerance for anguish. Now he knelt and took something from his sock and then snorted it. He leaped in frenzied drug-induced craziness, lest anyone forget he was a maniac, a drug fiend. He whacked the woozy David Bright rapid-fire karatelike blows. He was a whirling dervish.

Then while David Bright still tried to shake off his drubbing and climb to his feet, something happened to Dr. Slime. Something chemical. He kicked David Bright, knocking him down, and raised his arms, his fingers clenched together in (what my female neighbor told me was) his signature attack, the Crashing Bong, and prepared to bring it down on David Bright, ending a promising career. Then Dr. Slime stopped. There he was, mid-ring, his arms up as if holding a fifty-pound hammer, and he froze. Then, of course, he began vibrating, shaking himself out of the pose, his head trembling sickeningly like a tambourine, his hands fluttering full-speed. He began to jerk, drool, and grunt.

His demise couldn’t have come at a worse time. David Bright, our brightest star, suddenly came to and stood up. He looked mad. The rest of the match took ten seconds. David Bright, who must have outweighed Mitchell by sixty pounds, picked him up like a rag doll, sorting through his limbs like a burglar, finally grabbing his heels and beginning to spin him around and around like the slingshot that other David used.

Betsy was on my arm with both her hands and when David Bright let go of Mitchell and Mitchell left the ring and sailed off into the dark, she screamed and jumped on my back to see where he landed. We couldn’t see a thing.

The crowd was delighted and David Bright took three or four polite bows, curtsies really, and humbly descended from the light. Betsy was screaming her head off: “You beasts! You fucking animals! I’ll kill you all!” Things like that. Things that I would have loved to hear her cry for me.

I was crazy to go find Mitchell or his body or who was responsible for this heinous mayhem and file felony charges, suit, something, but Betsy was broken down, screaming into my shirt by now, and I held her and said
There there
, which is stupid, but I was so glad to have anything to say that I said it over and over.

The auditorium emptied and finally we ended up sitting, worn out, in our seats in the empty corner of the room. My good friend the Proud Brothers fan disappeared and then returned with two yellow T-shirts and gave them to me. “Here,” she said. “Glad to meet you. You two are welcome to the club if you can make it next Friday.”

I looked down at Betsy, her face wrecked, and I felt my own blood awash with the little chemicals of fear and anger. And love.

“You got the right spirit,” the girl said and turned to leave.

We couldn’t find Mitchell. We went back through both of the entrances the wrestlers had used, finally running into the school janitor, who simply said, “They don’t stay around not one second. They get right in the motor home.” He left us alone in the dark corridor.

“Why would he do this?” she said. “Why would he get hooked up with these sleazoid sadists?” She was as beautiful as worried girls get late at night in an empty school.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, find out!” She said this as an angry order, and then caught herself and smiled. “We’ve got talk to him, get him out of this.”

“Save him,” I said.

“What are you saying?” She tilted her head, focusing on me.

“Nothing.” Then I decided to go on. “It’s just … Betsy, I saw him strutting around that ring, playing that crowd.”

“And?”

“And: he loved it.”

Betsy folded her arms. “He loved having his neck broken.”

I wanted to say, Listen, Betsy, it’s art. It’s all worth it. I had some new information on this subject, having witnessed the Delsandros wrestle, having witnessed their soaring struggle, and having had my heart in their hands, I was a new convert, but what could I say, some guy who is Aunt Dorothy every night in a bakery? I said, “Let’s not fight.”

She shook her head at me a minute, a phrase in body language that seemed to mean
you pathetic man.
And then we prowled the vacant corridors of Granger High School for a while, from time to time calling, “Mitchell!”

We went into the second-floor girls’ room, because we could see the light under the door, and inside she turned to me and said, “Oh hell.” It was a four-stall affair, primarily public-school gray with plenty of places to put your sanitary napkins. I could see the back of Betsy’s beautiful head in the mirror. There was an old guy standing next to her and when I spoke I realized he was a screwed-up baker out of town for a night with his brother’s girlfriend. He looked in serious need of a blood transfusion, exercise, good news.

“Dr. Slime?” I said to the stalls.

“What a night,” Betsy said. “It doesn’t matter. He’s gone.” She leaned against the counter and folded her arms. “He told me I should tell you my news.”

“Good, okay,” I said, leaning against the counter too and folding my arms. We stood like that, like two girlfriends in the girls’ room.

“I’m going to L.A. Next week. I have some interviews with agents and two auditions.”

“Auditions?” I said. I am a baker. It is not my job to catch on quickly. I looked at her face. She was as beautiful as any movie actress; with her mouth set as it was now and the soft wash of freckles across her nose and her pale hair up in braids, she looked twenty. She was smart and she could sing. “You’re going to L.A. You’re not coming back here.”

“No, I guess I’m not,” she said.

“Does Mitchell know?”

“Mitchell knows.

“How hurt is he?”

“That would be a stupid question, wouldn’t it, Doug? Don’t you think?”

I took my stupid question and the great load of other stupid questions forming in my ordinary skull out of the girls’ room and through the dark hallways of Granger High and out into the great sad night. The parking lot was empty and I stood by the red scooter as if it were a shrine to the woman I loved, I ached for, in other words Betsy, who now walked toward me across the pavement, and who now, I realized, wasn’t exactly my brother’s lover anymore, a notion that gave me an odd shiver. I was as confused as bakers get to be.

“How certain are these things you’ve got out there?”

“How certain? How certain is my staying here, singing jingles for the next ten years? Come on, Doug: I want to be a singer.” She mounted the scooter and waited.

“You are a singer, Betsy. The best. I love your singing. And so, this is your move, right?”

She nodded.

“And it’s worth Mitchell?”

She started the machine and the blue exhaust began to roil up into the night. It wasn’t a real question and she was right not to answer. Through the raining flux of emotions, worry about Mitchell, love for Betsy, the answer had descended on me like a ton of meringue. I knew the answer.
It was worth it.
It’s funny about how the world changes and how art can turn the wheel. I had seen the Delsandros and I had seen my brother, a talented person, an artist, fly through the air to where I knew not, but I knew it was worth it. To be thrown that way in front of two thousand people, well, I’d never done it and I never would, but I know that Mitchell even as he squirmed through the terrific arc of his flight thought it was worth it. That’s what art is, perhaps, the look I had seen on his face.

Is this clear? I was annoyed to my baker’s bones at these two people and I wanted them to be mine forever. But they were both flying and I was proud of that too. I then climbed on behind my lost love, a woman who sings like an angel and drives a scooter like the devil, that is, Betsy, and I kissed her cheek. Just a little kiss. I wasn’t trying anything. “Let us go then,” I said, “and see if we can find our close friend Dr. Slime.”

W
E WERE FINE
. We were holding on to a fine day on the fine Green River in the mountains of Utah five hours from Salt Lake with the sun out and Toby already fishing, when his mother, Glenna, said, “We’re sinking.” She had been a pain in the ass since dawn. I wanted nothing more than to argue, prove her wrong, but I couldn’t because there was real water in the bottom of the raft. You’re supposed to leave your troubles behind when you float a river, but given our histories, that was a fat chance.

We were that strange thing: old friends. I’d known Glenna since college; she had been Lily’s roommate and there was a time when we were close as close. She had been an ally in my quest for Lily. We’d had a thousand coffees at their kitchen table and she’d counseled and coached me, been a friend. Then after college she had married my pal Warren, which had been her mistake, and I had not married Lily, which had recently (twenty-two days ago) become mine. Warren had not been good to Glenna. His specialty was young women and he used his position as editor of the
Register
to sharpen it. She had grown embittered to say the least, and I wanted now simply to cut that deal—old friends or not—call her a sour unlikable bitch and get on with the day my way; if I had known that she was going to be the photographer for the news story I was writing, I’d have stayed in town.

She had her suitcase—something that has no business even near a raft—balanced on the side tube, and she held her camera case aloft in the other hand. It was dripping. The suitcase made me mad. I was just mad. Glenna had been to Lily’s wedding a month (twenty-two days) ago. She had talked to Lily. Now I could see the water over the tops of her shoes in the deep spaces where she stood. It was not common to tear a raft on the gravel, but it happened. I looked downriver for a landing site. The banks were both steep cutaways, but there was a perfect sandbar off to the right side, and I paddled us for it.

After the three of us dragged the raft clear of the water and unloaded the gear, spreading it out to dry, I set Toby at the downstream point with a small Mepps spinner and went back to repair the raft. Glenna was sitting on her suitcase, checking her camera. Her god damned suitcase. Warren had assigned me the story and her the photographs. “Floating the Green”—it would run in Thursday Sports.

I was trying not to think. I had taken the job to get out of town and because I needed the money. Warren said the photographer would pick me up at four a.m., and there in the dark when I saw Glenna’s ’70 Seville, the same car she’d had at school, my heart clenched. We had all spent a lot of time in that car. And I knew she’d seen Lily. Twenty-two days. If I had been ready, been able to commit; if I had been thirty percent mature; if I had not assumed being more “interesting” than Lily’s other dates would keep me first, then I might not have been standing on a sandbar with my teeth in my lip. Did I want to ask Glenna a few questions? Does Lily miss me? Has she said my name? Where should I send her tapes? Yes. Would I? Hey, I had a raft to fix, and as I said, I was trying not to think.

Now sitting on her suitcase on a sandbar, she stretched and reached in her bag for another Merit, which she lit and inhaled. “How’d he talk you into this one?” she said as smoke.

“He mentioned the beauty of nature.” I waved up at the sunny gorge, the million facets of the exposed cliffs. “The clear air, the sweet light…”

“Bullshit, Jack.”

“The money, which I need.” I flopped the raft upside down. There were a dozen black patches of various sizes on the bottom, but I could find no new hole. Using my knife, I tested the edges of all the old patches, and, sure enough, one large one was loose. “What about you? You don’t need another photo credit.”

She pointed at Toby where he fished from the edge of the sand. “I’m here because you know how to do whatever it is we’re going to do and you can show it to Toby in some semblance of man-to-boy goodwill and something will have been gained.” She flipped the butt into the Green River. “About the rest, I could give a shit. If Warren wants me out of town so he can chase Lolita, so be it.”

I bent to my work, scraping at the old patch. I peeled it off and revealed a two-inch L-shaped tear. I wiped the area down and prepared my own new patch with the repair kit while the sun dried the bottom of the raft. I didn’t like that phrase
so be it
. There’s gloom if not doom in that one.