“You’re in the wrong occupation,” Sternberg told him. “You don’t know the first thing about driving an automobile. Now either slow down to the normal traffic flow, or find me another taxi.”
The driver responded with grumbling—the words “coward” and “chicken” were mixed in with it—but he also slowed down, and the rest of the fifteen-minute journey was at least bearable.
As they turned in at the motel, Sternberg thought he recognized Ed Mackey on the diving board over at the swimming pool; then the figure dove into the blue water. Sternberg shivered inside his raincoat.
The fare was two dollars; Sternberg gave him two singles and a quarter, and the driver studied the money in disgust and said, “Thanks, sport.”
“I would usually give fifty cents,” Sternberg said, “but I would like to encourage you to enter some different profession for which you might have more aptitude.”
The driver spun away in a cloud of bad temper, and Sternberg carried his suitcase into the office. He’d made his reservation in advance, so that was all right, but then there was trouble finding a bellboy to carry the bag to his room. “Most people have cars,” the desk clerk said, as though Sternberg were somehow at fault in not having one.
Sternberg pursed his lips. He said nothing, but his mind was full of acid comments on the continuing decline of service in America. Every time he came back, it seemed, the country had slid even further into its morass of sullen ineptitude. His little town house in London—2, Montpelier Gardens, S.W.6—was such a haven from all of this arrogant incompetence, it was a pity ever to have to leave it. But, as some unsung philosopher once said, “Don’t shit where you eat.” London was where Sternberg lived, with his plants and his promenades and his piano; he would never work there, never. The United States was where he earned his living, the necessary returns to the charnel house which made the London town house possible.
At last an ill-dressed and ill-dispositioned bellboy was found, and he led the way, carrying the suitcase and room key, out of the office and around the blacktop roadway toward the rooms.
They passed this time closer to the pool. That was Ed Mackey, now climbing up the ladder at the deep end. Mackey swept the hair back out of his eyes, looked over toward Sternberg going by in his raincoat, and waved, grinning. Sternberg touched the side of a finger to the brim of his cap in response, and moved on, leaving Mackey in his wake, standing there dripping beside the pool, hands on his hips, a big grin on his face.
The room was, of course, a plastic replica of an Italian Line stateroom. Sternberg sighed, placed a folded dollar bill in the bellboy’s flaccid hand, and firmly closed the door behind him.
Ghastly. Drinking glasses in the bathroom were encased in little white paper bags imprinted with a message including the word “sanitized.” A similar message was on the paper band bridging the toilet seat. It was like dating a sexual hysteric who can never stop talking about her virginity.
Motel cleanliness is next to motel paranoia; in the closet the hangers were in two sections, separable, so that the part which could be removed from the closet was useless without the part attached to the crossbar. Thus the motel protected itself from those who would rent a room only as a ruse to enable them to steal hangers.
The air conditioner had been on, but Sternberg switched it off first thing, turned the thermostat up to seventy- three, and opened the window slightly. By the time he’d unpacked and de-sanitized everything, the air in the room had a bit of life in it. Sternberg stripped to his boxer shorts, turned down the bed, settled himself comfortably with the pillows behind his back, and opened the Anthony Powell novel he’d started on the plane. It was Magnus Donners he wanted to identify with, but he kept finding his sympathies going to Widmerpool.
Forty-five minutes later the phone rang. It was, as Sternberg had expected, Ed Mackey: “Hello, Lou?”
“Speaking,” Sternberg said.
“This is Ed.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I guess you want to rest up for a while.”
“If possible.”
“We’re gonna have a meeting tonight. I’ll pick you up at nine.”
“Fine,” Sternberg said. “Have a good trip?”
“As good as could be expected,” Sternberg said. “I’ll see you at nine,” he said, to end the chit-chat. He hung up, and went immediately back to his book.
Three
Tommy Carpenter was dreaming. There were chains between the planets, great heavy chains holding them all together, and it was his idea to close the bottoms of the links with plastic and fill the links with dirt and fertilizer and make it all a farm, one huge long farm from planet to planet, with something different growing in every link of the chain: tomatoes, and then roses, and then watermelon, and then marijuana, and then tulips, and then corn, on and on across the universe. And it was such a magnificent idea, all he had to do was tell people and right away they all wanted to help him. A stone groove, everybody together, everybody working on the farm in the sky.
He became aware it was a dream when he heard Noelle calling his name. He frowned and buried his face into the fur and tried to stay asleep; the dream was good, it was really good.
But there was no holding onto it. There never was. Tommy rolled over and groaned and said, “Shit.”
“You awake, baby?”
He felt the road vibration under his back, through the mattress and the fur. He was lying in the back of the Volkswagen Microbus, and the windows showed nighttime outside. Noelle was driving, and had been since four o’clock in the afternoon when he’d decided to flake out for a few hours to be fresh for when they got there.
“Tommy? You awake?”
“Shit,” he said again. “What time is it?”
“Twenty to nine. We’re almost there.”
