The Steam-Driven Boy (4 page)

The crowds watched this news with solemn interest, but when it caught up with the present, they broke into cheers.

‘…
IT WROTE, AND THEN
G.
TOOK UP THE CAN AND POURED THE GASOLINE OVER HIMSELF.
H
E ASKED A NEARBY GENERAL FOR A LIGHT, AND THOUGH THE GENERAL WAS A NONSMOKER HIMSELF, HE WAS A GENTLEMAN.
H
IS BUTANE LIGHTER WORKED ON THE FIRST TRY.

‘G.
MADE A LOVELY FLAME, EVEN IN BLACK AND WHITE,
’ it wrote, and then G. took up the can …

A
SYNOPSIS

Book One:
Adrian

Four couples gather at a small seaside hotel for a summer vacation. The hotel is located on an island connected to the mainland by a bridge. On the morning of their arrival, the bridge is washed away by a storm, and they are stranded.

All of them have read the Decameron, and the time is heavy upon them. Instead of relating tales, they elect to make up stories – perhaps true, perhaps not – about the eight of them and their relationships. One person will be delegated each day to chronicle the day’s events, embellish them in any way he pleases and read them in the evening to his companions.

Adrian Warner, the architect, draws the first day. He writes in a blunt, honest manner, such as might be expected from a worker in concrete.

He begins with an account of how his wife, Etta, falls in love with another guest, the ruthless young steel executive, Farmer Bill. Caught by the morning storm, these two take shelter in a cave on the beach. Bill returns her caresses but nor her love. Though she is beautiful, Farmer Bill despises her as he despises his wife, Theda, a dark-eyed beauty who is also the only brewmistress on this continent. He loves only Glinda Cook, a thin, pale Southern girl with a dreamy manner, mouse-brown hair and crooked teeth.

Glinda is not, it is true, happy with her husband, Van Cook the popular columnist. But if anyone is captain of her heart, it is the effeminate, smirking hagiographer, Dick Hand.

That evening at dinner, Van Cook recklessly declares that he loves Mrs Rand, and challenges Dick to a duel. Dick laughingly suggests water pistols of ink and bathing suits.

‘Done!’ Cook cries fiercely.

The duel takes place on the hotel terrace after dinner. Far down the beach can be heard the plaintive notes of Etta’s English horn (a professional musician, she has wandered off by herself to practice). Each of the combatants is given a water pistol loaded with ink the same colour as his own bathing trunks: Cook has red, Hand has washable black. The winner is to be decided by Dolly Hand, a large, raw-boned woman of fifty, said to have once been a drum majorette. Dolly seems utterly uninterested.

Cook fouls intentionally, clinching and squirting red ink in Hand’s eyes. Dick is somewhat of a coward, and fails to score a hit on his
opponent. After a few futile sallies, he contents himself with squirting his ink at Adrian, who is attired in a white dinner jacket. Hand makes several such passes before timekeeper Glinda calls a halt.

When the fight is over, Cook’s fouling becomes evident. He has been hitting in the clinches, and the red ink until now has hidden the blood. Glinda begins to tenderly wipe Dick’s battered face, but he pulls away from her and, giggling, squirts more black ink at Adrian. The architect, angry, leaps to his feet.

‘See here now!’ he cries. Then his face grows ashen as he looks down at the black stain on his jacket.

The others demand to know who won – but Dolly, the referee, cannot be found! She has slipped away during the fight, and someone reports seeing her white-booted figure dragging another woman away down the beach. The sound of Etta’s horn has stopped.

The stains on Adrian’s jacket form letters, spelling ‘I LOVE Y’.

Book Two:
Theda

In his languorous and elliptic style, the sloe-eyed brewmaster reveals that all that has gone before is a lie. Adrian Warner is a bitch and a liar. She has lied about the sex of everyone.

First of all it is she, not her husband Etta, who loves the lady foundry exec, Farmer Bill. Yesterday Adrian pretended affection for him, Theda, only until she persuaded him to fall for her. But today, as Theda puts it, the truth outs.

Passing the grape arbour this morning, on his way to the summer house, Theda hears Adrian confess her love for Farmer Bill. Bill rejects this love, declaring in turn that she loves only the manly Etta. Yesterday Etta seemed to love her too, but today, since his night with Dolly on the beach, Etta seems oddly distracted.

Theda is in a hopelessly false position now, sick with love for a confirmed lesbian. Another surprise awaits him as he enters the summer house. Someone throws arms about Theda and kisses him toughly – it is Etta!

‘Careful you don’t ruin your lip,’ says Theda, squirming away. Etta laughs heartily at his ignorance of music. Confessing that he has been converted the previous night from heterosexuality by Dolly, Etta invites Theda to spend tonight alone on the beach. Sickened, the brewmaster refuses.

Coquettish Van Cook still pursues Dolly, but the big drum major kicks her in the eye at lunch. He appears to flirt instead with her husband, Glinda, a shy Southern boy. Glinda passes Dick Hand a note protesting that he still loves her, and chiding her for her silly infatuation with Van Cook. Theda, who delivers the note, asks her about this.

‘It’s true,’ Dick sighs. ‘I’m a hagiographress, you know. I’ve even offered to prove a saint in her ancestry – anything – but she refuses to even speak to me. Sometimes I wish Dolly and I could change sex. …’

The rest of the day is sultry and oppressive with rage and desire, as
they all sit around the hotel lounge. Farmer spends hours scrawling Etta’s name on the tablecloth, even drawing his profile. Etta glowers at Theda, and tries to tear up his manuscript. In the ensuing fight, Theda loses an ear, which his opponent eats.

Book Three:
Van

With all respect to those who have gone before him, the columnist states that both Theda and Adrian have had their reasons for exaggerating some truths, concealing others. Perhaps it is up to a newspaperman, a dealer in facts, to get at some kind of objectivity about this, as he calls it, ‘love nest’.

He makes no apology about his passion for Dick Hand, but let him cast the first stone, etc., for the truth is, there isn’t a man or woman among the eight who isn’t queer this third day.

The little balding hagiographer, a former goalee for a prominent Canadian hockey team, now loves none but A. Warner. This architect, designer of the well-known Piedmont Tower and famed for his new building principle, the ‘concrete truss’, remains firm in his attachment to 35-year-old steel magnate Farmer Bill. The ironic quadrangle is complete, for Bill, long supposed an entrenched hetero, has conceived love for the narrator. Farmer Bill came to power through a merger between a steel corporation and the molybdenum trust of which he was co-chairman three years ago. He is now married to the former Theda Baker, and has one child, Ebo.

The women also pursue a hopeless path. Theda loves patient Glinda, a gracious Southern lady with a flair for entertaining, granddaughter of the governor of her state. Glinda married your reporter six years ago. They have no children.

Perhaps for this reason she is drawn to the youthful, robust Dolly Hand, who once danced for a living and can still kick high as a man’s eye. Her loves includes spinach, basketball, and Etta Peer Warner, the latter hopelessly. Etta allegedly remains true to her former love, the darkly beautiful, brawny brewmistress.

Although the hotel staff do their best to make everyone as comfortable as possible, they are prisoners and they know it. When, late in the afternoon a plane flies overhead, they all rush out to the beach to wave at it. Passing low, it seems to be flying on out of sight without noticing them. Then as it reaches the mainland, it begins to bank around, coming back for another pass.

Unfortunately it is too low for this manoeuvre. One wing brushes a treetop, and all at once the plane is a mass of flame, pinwheeling along through the forest. It explodes and settles, starting a forest fire on the mainland that rages all night, seen only by helpless witnesses on the island.

Book Four: Dolly

‘I am a drug addict. Do not pity me. I ask only for your understanding.
This illness has been my secret for a long time. Too long…’

Thus begins Dolly’s amazing narrative. She gives the background of the persons present: addicts all. Dick, her Dicky-bird, was once addicted to cocaine stirred into cocoa, though now he lives on reserpine stirred into raspberry brandy.

Etta and Adrian mix thorazine and thiamine, laced with Meretran and Serutan. ‘Pothead’ Van Cook and Glinda move in a dream of Nembutal and Hadacol, Darvon and Ritalin, while Farmer Bill and Theda have long existed utterly without food, taking in only methedrine and methanol.

And of course Dolly herself. Having tried every drug in the vocabulary, she is currently experimenting, mixing drugs and liqueurs, such as benzedrine/Benedictine, such as dramamine/Drambuie … The night gets longer.

Why is it, she wonders, that everyone lies? Wish-fulfilment explains some of it. Van Cook pretended Farmer Bill loved him when the opposite was true. But why does he ignore Theda’s love for him? How can he ignore her attempted overdose-suicide? Can he keep claiming she just wanted to hog the horse?

Alas! If Theda could only love Glinda, things might be far different. Poor little Glinda, seven months’ PG, half blind from Sterno breakfasts, head-over-heels in love with Theda. She even offers to sit with little Ebo, while Theda takes her overdose.

Adrian, after twice being the object of sick Dick’s affections, now returns the favour, but too late. Dick has written a poem to his new love, Etta, comparing the sound of her horn to the clash of waves on the seventh level of his consciousness. Etta tries to use him to get at Dolly, who admits feeling only disgust for the little Serutan-head.

Words crowd in upon Dolly here. She never wanted to be an addict; they told her pot would help her march better, as she led the high school band. It was a lie.

Now she leaves her manuscript for a moment to try to caress Adrian, who is passing in the hall.

Now Adrian’s firm hand adds that he has smashed Dolly in the teeth with her steel baton. It is, he adds, manufactured by Farmer Bill’s corporation.

Book Five:
Etta

As only she and her husband know, Etta is an endocrinologist. In clinically precise terms, she details the events of the fifth day.

Food and water are running low, and sanitary facilities are less than adequate. Etta has divided the remainder of the quinine and insect repellant, and rations it strictly. She tries to make do with a crude first-aid kit, treating Theda’s ear, Van’s eye and the lacerations on Dick’s face. Now a clumsy waiter spills
crèpes suzettes
on Farmer Bill’s lap, inflicting second-degree burns. Then there is Dolly’s mouth requiring dental tools Etta does not have, and Ebo develops diaper rash.

Moving about only before or after the midday heat, the men gather
firewood for nightfall, as well as a few straight boards for splints. The women tear up sheets for bandages. It becomes increasingly hard to sterilize everything, especially in time to deliver Glinda’s stillborn child, but by working night and day, Etta manages somehow, and somehow manages to keep up her journal, too. Glinda is very weak and very ill. Only the hope of Theda’s returning her pitiful love keeps her alive. Etta makes Theda be nice to Glinda.

What a strange thing a woman’s friendship is, Etta thinks. Like the love of a leopard, it is wild, shy and a little hurtful. She means not only Glinda’s love for Theda but her own love for Dolly, who seems to be, poor silly bitch, in love with her own husband.

But are the males less fickle? Today Adrian spurns the love of Dick Hand as resolutely as yesterday he sought it. Dick chases him from copse to copse as they gather fuel. Adrian expresses his concern about Glinda.

‘I don’t care whose child it is,’ he says hoarsely. ‘I’ll marry her, if she’ll have me.’

But Glinda loves Theda, who loves her husband Farmer Bill fiercely. Now Farmer Bill brings in Van Cook, who has collapsed with sunstroke, and there is a new tenderness in the industrialist’s eye as he gazes on the stricken man. Ah, what strange things are our endocrines.

Van Cook whispers in his delirium one name over and over: ‘Etta!’

Book Six:
Farmer

In tough, short sentences, Bill spells it out. He loves Etta. No one else. Others may have time to mess around. Not Bill. He knows what he wants, now, after a lifetime of banging around from one job to another. He wants to paint.

Some say it takes guts to do this, to scrap your life and start all over. It doesn’t. A man does what he has to do, that’s all. Bill has to paint.

It’s like breathing. From the chest. Where the heart is. If a man goes wrong, he might as well rip out his heart and smash it. Bill paints, and it’s right.

He wants to paint Etta nude, maybe in fresco ten stories high, the way he feels about her. What she has doesn’t need a name.

But Etta has a lesbo hang-up with the Southern girl, Gilda, who is mooning over Dolly the Dyke. It’s enough to make a real man puke.