The Hotel Eden(60)

“I’ll be a junior,” I said.

“I’m a senior at Penn,” she said. I nodded, my mind whipping around for something clever. I didn’t even know where Penn was.

“Great,” I said. I started up the stairs.

“Yeah,” she said, turning. “Great.”

I drew the dolly up the carpeted stair carefully, my first second story, and entered the bedroom. It was dim in there, but I could see the other cylinder beside the bed and a man in the bed, awake. He was wearing pajamas, and immediately upon seeing me, he said, “Good. Open the blinds, will you?”

“Sure thing,” I said, and I went around the bed and turned the miniblind wand. The Arizona day fell into the room. The young woman I’d spoken to walked out to the pool beneath me. She took her shirt off and hung it on one of the chairs. Her breasts were white in the sunlight. She set out her magazine and drink by one of the lounges and lay facedown in a shiny green bikini bottom. I only looked down for a second or less, but I could feel the image in my body.

While I was disconnecting the regulator from the old tank and setting up the new one, Mr. Rensdale introduced himself. He was a thin, handsome man with dark hair and mustache and he looked like about three or four of the actors I was seeing those nights in late movies after my parents went to bed. He wore an aspirator with the two small nostril tubes, which he removed while I changed tanks. I liked him immediately. “Yeah,” he went on, “it’s good you’re going back to college. Though there’s a future, believe me, in this stuff.” He knocked the oxygen tank with his knuckle.

“What field are you in?” I asked him. He seemed so absolutely worldly there, his wry eyes and his East Coast accent, and he seemed old the way people did then, but I realize now he wasn’t fifty.

“I, lad, am the owner of Rensdale Foundations, which my father founded,” his whisper was rich with humor, “and which supplies me with more money than my fine daughters will ever be able to spend.” He turned his head toward me. “We make ladies’ undergarments, lots of them.”

The dolly was loaded and I was ready to go. “Do you enjoy it? Has it been a good thing to do?”

“Oh, for chrissakes,” he wheezed a kind of laugh, “give me a week on that, will you? I didn’t know this was going to be an interview. Come after four and it’s worth a martini to you, kid, and we’ll do some career counseling.”

“You all set?” I said as I moved to the door.

“Set,” he whispered now, rearranging his aspirator. “Oh absolutely. Go get them, champ.” He gave me a thin smile and I left. Letting myself out of the dark downstairs, I did an odd thing. I stood still in the house. I had talked to her right here. I saw her breasts again in the bright light. No one knew where I was.

Of course, Elizabeth Rensdale, seeing her at the pool that way, so casually naked, made me think of Linda and the fact that I had no idea of what was going on. I couldn’t remember her body, though, that summer, I gave it some thought. It was worse not being a virgin, because I should have then had some information to fuel my struggles with loneliness. I had none, except Linda’s face and her voice, “Here, let me get it.”

From the truck I called Nadine, telling her I was finished with Scottsdale and was heading—on schedule—to Mesa. “Did you pick up Mr. Rensdale’s walker? Over.”

“No, ma’am. Over.” We had to say “Over.”

“Why not? You were supposed to. Over.”

The heat in the early afternoon as I dropped through the river bottom and headed out to Mesa was gigantic, an enormous, unrelenting thing, and I took a kind of perverse pleasure from it. I could feel a heartbeat in my healing burns. My truck was not air-conditioned, a thing that wouldn’t fly now, but then I drove with my arm out the window through the traffic of these desert towns. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Should I go back? Over.” I could see going back, surprising the girl. I wanted to see that girl again.

“It was on your sheet. Let it go this week. But let’s read the sheet from now on. Over and out.”

“Over and out,” I said into the air, hanging up the handset.

Half the streets in Mesa were dirt, freshly bladed into the huge grid which now is paved wall to wall. I made several deliveries and ended up at the torn edge of the known world, the road just a track, a year maybe two at most from the first ripples of the growth which would swallow hundreds of miles of the desert. The house was an old block home gone to seed, the lawn dirt, the shrubs dead, the windows brown with dust and cobwebs. From the front yard I had a clear view of the Santan Mountains to the south. I was fairly sure I had a wrong address and that the property was abandoned. I knocked on the greasy door and after five minutes a stooped, red-haired old man answered. This was Gil, and I have no idea how old he was that summer, but it was as old as you get. Plus he was sick with the emphysema and liver disease. His skin, stretched tight and translucent on his gaunt body, was splattered with brown spots. On his hands several had been picked raw.