You tell your folks: Be careful. You tell them not to get massaged by anybody they don't know. Calling them from a pay phone, you tell them to never mess with aromatherapy. Auras. Reiki. Don't laugh, but you're going to be traveling for a long time, maybe the rest of your life.
You can't explain. By now, you've run out of quarters, so you tell your folks good-bye.
3
Our first week, we ate beef Wellington while Miss America knelt at every doorknob and tried to pick the lock with a palette knife borrowed from the Duke of Vandals.
We ate striped sea bass while Miss Sneezy ate pills and capsules from the rattling jars in her suitcase. While she coughed into her fist, and wiped her nose on her sweater sleeve.
We eat turkey Tetrazzini while Lady Baglady toys with her diamond ring. With the platinum band turned around, she talks to the big diamond that seems to sit cupped in her palm. “Packer?” she says. “This is nothing like I've been led to expect.” Lady Baglady says, “How can I write anything profound if my environment isn't . . . ideal?”
Of course, Agent Tattletale's videotaping her. The Earl of Slander holds his tape recorder to catch every word.
A cough-cough, here. A cough-cough, there. Here, a gripe. There, a bitch. Everywhere, a complaint. Miss Sneezy says the air is swimming with toxic mold spores.
A rattle-rattle, here. A cough-cough, there. No one working. No writing getting done.
Skinny Saint Gut-Free, his face was always looking up, his mouth baby-bird gaped open as he poured in chili or apple pie or shepherd's pie from a silver Mylar bag. His Adam's apple bobbed with each swallow, his tongue funneling the lukewarm mess past his teeth.
Chewing his tobacco, the Matchmaker spit on the stained carpet and said this dank building, these dim-dripping rooms, had nothing in common with the writers' colony he'd pictured: people writing longhand, looking down rolled green lawns; writers eating box lunches, each in their own private cottage. Orchards of apricot trees in a blizzard of white flower petals. Afternoon naps under chestnut trees. Croquet.
Even before she started to outline her screenplay, her life's masterpiece, Miss America said she couldn't. Her breasts were too sore to write. Her arms, too tired. She couldn't smell today's veal cutlets without vomiting a little of the crab cakes from the day before.
Her period was almost a week late.
“It's sick-building syndrome,” Miss Sneezy told her. Her raw-red nose, already staying sideways, wiped in profile against one cheek.
Trailing her fingers along the railings and the carved backs of chairs, Lady Baglady showed us the dust. “Look,” she told the fat diamond in her hand, she said, “Packer? Packer, this is not acceptable.”
In our first week locked away, Miss Sneezy was coughing, breathing in the slow, deep notes a pipe organ would make.
Miss America was rattling locked doors. Yanking aside the green velvet drapes in the Italian Renaissance lounge to find windows bricked over. With the handle of her pink plastic exercise wheels, she broke a stained-glass window in the Gothic smoking room, only to find a cement wall wired with bulbs to fake daylight behind it.
In the French Louis XV lobby, the chairs and sofas all cornflower-blue velvet, the walls crowded and busy with plaster curls and scrolls painted gold, there, Miss America stood in her pink spandex active wear and asked for the key. Her hair, an ocean wave of blond breaking in curls and flips against the back of her head, she needed the key so she could go out, just for a few days.
“You're a novelist?” Mr. Whittier said. Even resting flat on the chrome arms of his wheelchair, his fingers tapped an invisible telegram. Veined and chased with wrinkles, the bones of his hands trembled in a constant blur.
“A screenwriter,” Miss America said. A fist on each pink spandex hip.
Looking at her, tall and willowy, “Of course,” Mr. Whittier said. “So write a movie script about being tired.”
No, Miss America needed to see an obstetrician. She needed blood work done. She needed prenatal vitamins. “I need to see someone,” she said. Her boyfriend.
And Mr. Whittier said, “This is why Moses led the tribes of Israel into the desert . . .” Because those people had lived for generations as slaves. They'd learned to be helpless.
To create a race of masters from a race of slaves, Mr. Whittier said, to teach a controlled group of people how to create their own lives, Moses had to be an asshole.
Sitting at the edge of a blue velvet chair, Miss America kept nodding her blond head. Her hair flip-flopping. She understood. She understood. Then she said, “The key?”
And Mr. Whittier told her, “No.”
He balanced a silver Mylar bag of chicken Marsala on his knees, all around him the blue carpet patched and sticky with dark mold. Each soggy patch, a shadow branched with arms and legs. A mildewed ghost. Spooning up chicken Marsala, Mr. Whittier says, “Until you can ignore your circumstances, and just do as you promise,” he says, “you'll always be controlled by the world.”
“And what do you call this?” Miss America says, stirring the dusty air with her hands.
And Mr. Whittier says, for the first of a million times, “I'm only holding you to your word.” And, “What stops you here is what stops your entire life.”
The air will always be too filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.
“But what if something happened? What if we ran out of food?” Miss America says. “You'd open the door then, wouldn't you?”
“But we're not,” Mr. Whittier says, his mouth full of chewed chicken and capers. “We're not running out of food.”
And, no, we weren't. Not yet.
That first week inside, we ate vegetable curry over rice. We ate teriyaki salmon. All of it freeze-dried.
For food, we had green beans sealed in
