The Hotel Eden(20)

“Paul,” she says, and his name again jolts Ruckelbar. She goes on, “Marjorie spoke to me.”

“I’m glad for that, Clare.”

“She’s a good girl, Paul.”

“Yes, she is.”

There is a pause and then Clare adds the last. “She misses her father. She said that today.” Ruckelbar draws a quick breath and sees his truck like a ghost ship drift up front in the window. He lifts a hand to the boy in the truck. What he sees is a figure caught in the old yellow glass, a man in there. Ruckelbar thought everything was settled so long ago.

He turns off the light before he can see what the image will do, and he grabs his keys and the camera. Outside, the boy has slid to the passenger side. When Ruckelbar climbs in the boy says, in a new voice, easy and relaxed, “Nice truck. It’s in good shape.”

“It’s a ’62,” Ruckelbar says. “My dad’s truck. If you park them inside and change the oil every twenty-five hundred miles, they keep.” He puts the camera on the seat. “This was in your sister’s car.”

The boy picks it up. “Cool,” he says, hefting it. “This is a weird place,” the boy says. “Who painted it blue?”

Ruckelbar is now in gear on the hardtop of Route 21. He looks back at Bluestone once, a little building in the dark. “My father did,” he says.





ZANDUCE AT SECOND





BY HIS THIRTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY, a gray May day which found him having a warm cup of spice tea on the terrace of the Bay-side Inn in Annapolis, Maryland, with Carol Ann Menager, a nineteen-year-old woman he had hired out of the Bethesda Hilton Turntable Lounge at eleven o’clock that morning, Eddie Zanduce had killed eleven people and had that reputation, was famous for killing people, really the most famous killer of the day, his photograph in the sports section every week or so and somewhere in the article the phrase “eleven people” or “eleven fatalities”—in fact, the word eleven now had that association first, the number of the dead—and in all the major league base-ball parks his full name could be heard every game day in some comment, the gist of which would be “Popcorn and beer for ten-fifty, that’s bad, but just be glad Eddie Zanduce isn’t here, for he’d kill you for sure,” and the vendors would slide the beer across the counter and say, “Watch out for Eddie,” which had come to supplant “Here you go,” or “Have a nice day,” in conversations even away from the parks. Everywhere he was that famous. Even this young woman, who has been working out of the Hilton for the past eight months not reading the papers and only watching as much TV. as one might watch in rented rooms in the early afternoon or late evening, not really news hours, even she knows his name, though she can’t remember why she knows it and she finally asks him, her brow a furrow, “Eddie Zanduce? Are you on television? An actor?” And he smiles, raising the room-service teacup, but it’s not a real smile. It is the placeholder expression he’s been using for four years now since he first hit a baseball into the stands and it struck and killed a college sophomore, a young man, the papers were quick to point out, who was a straight-A student majoring in chemistry, and it is the kind of smile that makes him look nothing but old, a person who has seen it all and is now waiting for it all to be over. And in his old man’s way he is patient thrugh the next part, a talk he has had with many people all around the country, letting them know that he is simply Eddie Zanduce, the third baseman for the Orioles who has killed several people with foul balls. It has been a pernicious series of accidents really, though he won’t say that.

She already knows she’s not there for sex, after an hour she can tell by the manner, the face, and he has a beautiful actor’s face which has been stunned with a kind of ruin by his bad luck and the weight of bearing responsibility for what he has done as an athlete. He’s in the second thousand afternoons of this new life and the loneliness seems to have a physical gravity; he’s hired her because it would have been impossible not to. He’s hired her to survive the afternoon.

The day has been a walk through the tony shopping district in Annapolis, where he has bought her a red cotton sweater with tortiseshell buttons. It is a perfect sweater for May, and it looks wonderful as she holds it before her; she has short brunette hair, shiny as a schoolgirl’s, which he realizes she may be. Then a walk along the pier, just a walk, no talking. She doesn’t because he doesn’t, and early on such outings, she always follows the man’s lead. Later, the fresh salad lunch from room service and the tea. She explores the suite, poking her head into the bright bathroom, the nicest bathroom in any hotel she’s been in during her brief career. There’s a hair dryer, a robe, a fridge, and a phone. The shower is also a steamroom and the tub is a vast marble dish. There is a little city of lotions and shampoos. She smiles and he says, Please, feel free. Then he lies on the bed while she showers and dresses; he likes to watch her dress, but that too is different because he lies there imagining a family scene, the young wife busy with her grooming, not immodest in her nakedness, her undergarments on the bed like something sweet and familiar. The tea was her idea when he told her she could have anything at all; and she saw he was one of the odd ones, there were so many odd ones anymore willing to pay for something she’s never fully understood, and she’s taken the not understanding as just being part of it, her job, men and women, life. She’s known lots of people who didn’t understand what they were doing; her parents, for example. Her decision to go to work this way was based on her vision of simply fucking men for money, but the months have been more wearing than she could have foreseen with all the chatter and the posturing, some men who only want to mope or weep all through their massage, others who want to walk ahead of her into two or three nightspots and then yell at her later in some bedroom at the Embassy Suites, too many who want her to tell them about some other bastard who has abused her or broken her heart. But here this Eddie Zanduce just drinks his tea with his old man’s smile as he watches the stormy summer weather as if it were a home movie. They’ve been through it all already and he has said simply without pretension. No, that’s all right. We won’t be doing that, but you can shower later. I’ll have you in town by five-thirty.