Barbara.
'I didn't.'
'It's not your fault.'
'I didn't poison it,' David yelled, that dark hurt look all over his face.
'I didn't say you did,' Harry yelled back and started laughing.
'But I wouldn't do it to you,' David screamed. 'Don't you understand? I'll never do anything to you again. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'
Joel shut the door.
It was after the war. It was a strange time. People's nerves were all shot to pieces. Harry stood and embraced his son who wept ecstatically on his chest.
'Oh God,' he said. This was not an Actor. This was his son, in pain. He could feel the pain as keenly as any he had felt in Mrs Dalton's hospital. And he knew something like jagged glass was slicing at his son and hurting him, not some little boy's cut finger, but some great gaping wound. 'I didn't think you were poisoning me,' he said.
'I didn't. I didn't.'
'No, no, I know.'
Everywhere the world seemed full of wounded.
'I had you put away. I had you committed. It was me.'
Harry heard him and believed him but it no longer mattered. It was the nature of Hell that Captives were made to hurt each other.
'It doesn't matter,' he said, 'I don't mind. I forgive you.'
Somehow the forgiveness seemed too off-hand to David who had yearned for something stronger. His father under-estimated him. He would not imagine, for a second, that his son had spent five thousand dollars of his own money, had taken risks, been more businesslike than Joel. His father did not know him.
'So tell me,' Harry was saying, 'about this job.'
'You're disappointed?'
'No, not at all.' And it was true. He was even pleased that his son would not be a doctor. Doctors in Hell did evil work. He was pleased that his son wore a well-cut suit and that he could choose a maroon tie like that and wear it with a soft blue shirt. He liked the way his son held a wine glass and when he poured wine, as he did now, that he turned the bottle in his hand as he finished pouring so that it would not drip. His son was emotional, too full of pain, but that was probably a good thing too and it seemed more honourable to be like Nurse than to be like Mrs Dalton.
David did not know how to tell him about the job. Looked at in one way the job did not sound very splendid at all. The idea of a Sales Representative for the Hughes Poker Machine Company did not exactly glitter in anybody's mind. It involved driving around the suburbs in a car and learning how to drink and not get drunk. But it was also a foot in the door of the da Silva organization. They had marked him, they hinted, for something big and it did not occur to him that what they had in mind was training for management in the organization's legitimate businesses. It still hadn't.
It was the bigness he wanted to talk about, the ill-defined promised land of his future where he would not be afraid any more and where there was South America, New York, wide rivers, a future as dazzling and complicated as a Persian rug. And in its magical pattern there was now a new element, a new glow, a cast of a golden colour which suffused everything, the source of which was a character in a book he had read half of and would never finish. He was not interested in what happened to Jay Gatsby. He was only interested that Jay Gatsby should exist. And in all his dreams about the future he had added this element of Gatsby with his big house, alone, looking across the bay at night to the island of East Egg and the woman he loved. Yet in his dream, in its pinkest most sensitive comer, there was not a woman across the water at all: it was Harry Joy.
'So tell me,' Harry said again, 'tell me about the great job. Do they give you a car?'
To his eternal chagrin David told his father all about the car. He told him all the boring, predictable everyday details about the car. He even described the damned upholstery. And he talked about his salary, his boss, the machines he sold.
'Wonderful,' Harry said, 'wonderful.'
It was difficult not to be cross with him for being so excited at all the most banal things. This was nothing to be proud of. This was a car. A fucking Ford. These were things to be dis-gusted with, reasons to throw him out of the house. These were not reasons to be sitting there smiling and nodding.
This was dross, dreck, brown paper camouflage.
Yet they talked about this damned job for two hours, through two bottles of wine and now, as the second bottle finished, David teetered on the brink of telling him.
'Well,' Harry said. He yawned and leaned back.
It was not yet too late.
'I think I'll go to bed.'
'O.K.,' David said clenching his fist, 'Goodnight.'
And sat alone with all those old dreams of Vance Joy's which have become such tawdry baubles that you might expect him, shortly, to abandon them completely. Yet he isn't going to give them up (these eyeless teddy bears) and they will finally lead him on to the Espreso de Sol and up to Bogota, to a job as a waiter, to a wife called Anna, to his wife's brother's red Dodge truck, to the unlikely occupation of truck driver, which he will accept disdainfully, acting out his disdain by driving the muddy mountain roads from Bogota dressed in an immaculate white suit.
Unknown to himself he became the romantic figure he had always wished to be, someone to swagger through one of Vance's stories with a cane beneath his arm.
On the road of crippled trucks and miserable towns, his perfect cleanliness seemed almost magical.
'What will happen,' they asked, 'if he has a flat tyre?'
'He never has one.'
There were no saints' medallions inside his truck. They looked to see. Perhaps he was a Communist. One day in the town of Armenia two nuns, coming upon him suddenly, crossed themselves.
Then one night in the wet time of the year the long chain of stories he had so innocently begun brought a visitor to his door. His wife, now six months pregnant, was in bed asleep and he received the visitor alone.
The man at his door was short and dark, a man with such a dark beard shadow that David felt immediately sorry for him and, had he been receiving him in a restaurant, would have put him in a back table with his back to the window. The man had a long droll-looking jaw, small wire-framed spectacles on an almost Semitic nose, and very short hair. He had broad shoulders but he shrugged them humbly.
He would not conduct his business in the doorway and forced, with a curious mixture of will and humility, David to invite him in. They sat in the kitchen. He refused a beer but accepted a coffee, holding his square hands around the tiny cup and speaking with a thin voice.
David Joy found himself being asked to smuggle arms into the mountains. It was not put so clearly. It was circled around, prodded at, kicked, and in the end there was no doubt that the bulky wrapped unnamed thing their conversation kept brushing against was that.
He began by adopting a superior air with the man but could not, for some reason, maintain it. Even the shrugging humility of his visitor seemed, at the same time, arrogant.
Was he a spy? A provocateur.
'Why do you come to me?'
'That is your truck downstairs? You wear a white suit?'
'Yes.'
'We have no money,' the man said it softly as if this might be a compliment, an inducement, an advantage. It was ludicrous.
'I'm a businessman. I only work for monei'
The man smiled and shrugged. 'We have no money.'
'I work for money.'
He dipped his head. 'We have none.' And smiled.
'You wish me to work for nothing?'
'We did not think you would let us down.'
