Float (15 page)

As Duncan carried a box of lobsters to his mother’s porch, he could hear the crustaceans inside, tap, tap, tapping on their waxed cardboard enclosure, shell rattling against shell as they clambered over one another, dragging strands of seaweed on banded claws. They weren’t happy to find themselves in a box, but even more than that, they, like everyone else, seemed to be on edge over the uneasy weather. After a week of increasing winds, the day had arrived preternaturally calm and charged with unspent energy. The atmosphere was pressing down hard, condensing the air and draining it of oxygen. By noon, the wind had come back, this time blowing in from the ocean like a curved arm, flexing its muscles. The sun seemed somehow closer than it should have been, turning the sky yellow. Waves rose up and started slamming against the beach—spray was being blown up on the lawn. Hurricanes were infrequent visitors to Maine, especially in October, but he was not so sure that this one would give them a pass.

He smiled as he put the box down by the door. An act of nature was just what was needed to prevent Cora from returning home after the party. High tide and its evil twin, flooding, were due to arrive just after the guests. If he was lucky the causeway would wash out as so often happened, trapping the Batten Cove residents in until the water went out. By his reckoning, they would be free at dawn, with a rising sun showing him and Cora the way back to their life and their home, together, hand in hand, wading through the warm tropical waters of marital bliss.

“Run!” A man’s voice sounded from deep inside the house, and Duncan could guess what that was all about. A black sedan was parked in the driveway, its rear window spotted with parking permits from a Boston museum. Poor bastards, they’d driven all this way one step ahead of a storm, and he bet his mother didn’t even let them see the Dodge floor, never mind listen to a lucrative proposal for its removal. He gave the door a shove to get it unstuck, then opened it in time to step back and let the two museum representatives escape. Behind them he saw his mother coming down the stairs with a spinnaker pole, and he closed the door.

“Sorry,” Duncan called after them as they headed to their car. The woman was expertly running in heels, which made him think she’d been down similar roads before. The car doors slammed, and they spun out of the driveway, flinging a storm of marble gravel into the air.

Chandu, who’d been sleeping on a pile of sails under the jumble of lawn furniture on the porch, pulled himself up to a sitting position when a pebble landed on his nose. He was not much of a guard dog. His was of an ancient line meant to pull family members from the sea, not to protect them from museum curators or crooks, all one and the same in his mother’s lights. She yanked open the door and stood on the threshold holding her pole upright by her side. Her eyes had that mean and distant look usually found in sailors too long at sea.

“The nerve.” Her braid flopped in the wind, almost hitting Duncan in the face. “The scavengers snuck in through the living room window.”

The “window” was one of the slender French doors spaced around the many faces of the house. Only entrenched habit brought the family to this boat-hatch of a front door that was so difficult to open, when other alternatives lay unused all around them.

“Mom,” he said. “You have got to stop treating museums like this. We don’t know if someday we might want to call on them about the floor. It’s gotten so valuable, I’m not sure it’s even fair to keep it in private hands anymore.” Left unsaid, but much on his mind, was the incriminating photo that had been hanging over his head all week. He would need pots of money to pay a PR firm for damage control if he had any hope of keeping the business out of Osbert’s hands. If he had to start throwing cargo overboard to stay afloat, it would be nice to know the floor was an option.

“Call them?” His mother bent down to rub Chandu’s head. “Whatever for? It’s not leaving this house any more than I am.”

Duncan was surprised that she was actually acknowledging that fact of her existence. Cora, who so often wondered at his ability to go along with his mother’s self-imposed house arrest as if nothing were the matter—“An untreated mental illness soon becomes a family disease,” as she so often said—would interpret this admission as a call for help. Maybe it was time to start waving his mother in.

“Mom, forget the floor for now. Why don’t we go into town for lunch and leave the cleaning to Mrs. McNordfy?”

“This is no time, Duncan, dear, there’s work to be done.” And with that she turned back inside to continue her pantomime of housekeeping. Chandu followed close at her heel, shaking debris from his thick coat as he swayed along. “It’s a wonderful thing to have company,” she told Chandu. “Forces you to do all those little things.”

“All those little things,” Duncan said to the lobsters. The fall racing season was over, and frostbiting would not begin for a few weeks, so in theory this was repair season for the house, when his mother would draw up elaborate lists of neglected domestic matters, such as caulking cracks and seams with tar, replacing broken panes of glass, and banking the foundation of the house with seaweed for winter insulation. Much was made of the lists, but the chores themselves usually remained words on paper. As far as today’s business of tidying up for the party, there was some progress being made, but not by her, whose idea it was to have it there in the first place. Mrs. McNordfy had been called in and was already doing her job of pushing sand from one room to another with her broom.

Duncan wiped his feet on the sea-grass mat, and the wind lifted the sand into the house as it blew from his shoes. “Good-bye, lobsters,” he said, checking that their box was firmly closed before leaving them on the porch. “See you for dinner.”

Since there was no helping his mother, he wound his way through the house to the kitchen to ask Slocum what needed to be done next. He passed the living room where his mother and Mrs. McNordfy were settling down for a mug-up to hash over the scintillating events of Port Ellery. Duncan stopped at the door of the library and watched Nod, his eyes transfixed on the cool glow of the computer screen, as always. No one was concerned about the party. The house would remain a mess, but Slocum’s friends would probably be too full of rum to notice, and Cora, he hoped, would be too fully absorbed in their reunion.

At the kitchen door, he stalled for a moment to watch Slocum arrange his materials along the butcher-block table, muttering to himself as he caressed the eggplants and patted the grapefruit. He removed a poorly wrapped hunk of meat from a cooler and put it in the refrigerator, leaving a trail of watery blood. No matter. The floor, patterned after decks on a British warship, was painted red to mask spilled blood. It was too dark to see much of anything anyway. The skylight was broken and covered in seagull droppings, and the one window in the room was fitted with a metal grill like a confessional, looking out onto the neighbor’s privacy hedge. The alley in between it and the house created a wind tunnel, the force of which jiggled the glass in its frame.

Against the gray-stuccoed wall was a mead bench from the dark ages—or so said his mother’s cousin Belinda when she’d dragged the weathered arrangement of planks up from the beach many years ago. Duncan sat heavily upon it, suddenly weak from thinking about his meeting with Cora in just a few hours. Mental exhaustion caused him to sink further down until he was stretched out along its length, staring up at the flypaper that swung from the raftered ceiling above.

“You look like a marble knight on a slab, my friend,” said Slocum. He tossed a red grape at him, and Duncan let it roll to the floor. Chandu shuffled over to sniff at it, then declined. “I marinated a green grape in beet juice,” said Slocum. “Great color, huh?”

“Tell me again, Slocum,” said Duncan, thinking of the safe and familiar fryolater meals at Manavilins, “why are we having the party here and not at the restaurant?”

“Romance! Adventure! And now a storm! Couldn’t be better. The dinner will bring you and Cora together, or my name’s not Slocum Statler!”

“You know, you might have asked if it was okay with me to have it here.”

“Wasn’t my idea. The problem started when I called the land line instead of your cell by mistake. For that I blame the jellyfish fumes. The rest, I don’t know. Your mum picked up, and one thing led to another. By the end of our talk, the party was here and she was calling Cora. I guess I thought she’d tell you our plans.”

“I’m nervous, Slocum. It’s been more than six weeks since I’ve seen Cora. She’s angry with me, and I just can’t figure out why or how to fix it.”

“Don’t worry. Nothing that food can’t cure. Every dish is designed to delight the relationship senses. First, the
bêche de mer.
”

“Sea slug?”

“A proven aphrodisiac.” And with this, Slocum lifted a tray out of the cooler and put it on the table. “The recipe called for a filling of pork, cornstarch, and chopped, fried, dried fish, but I ground up my fried calamari instead. It’s dangerous good.”

Duncan sat up to take a look at this monstrosity. On the platter sat a large pale sausage that seemed to slither across the porcelain. “You have to remember,” Duncan said, “Cora is keenly aware of Freudian representations. You won’t be able to sneak anything past her subconscious.”

“Sympathetic magic, my friend,” said Slocum as he tucked the plastic wrap tighter around the phallic object and put it back in the cooler. “I’ll slice it as thin as bible leaves and serve it with my tomato-anchovy butter. You could eat your foot with that sauce. Now look at this.” Out of the same cooler he produced a tray and set it down with elaborate ceremony.

Duncan couldn’t tell what was under the thick layer of gelatin. “This doesn’t look very sympathetic.”

“But it is! The famous
cuisses de nymphes à l’aurore
—the thighs of nymphs at dawn. Little white frog thighs. Traditionally, they’re poached in a wine-and-cream sauce and covered with a champagne aspic. What a bore! So I played with those ingredients a bit, and I think you’ll be very surprised.”

The little legs seemed to tremble under the weight of a dark aspic, and Duncan would indeed be very surprised if they helped to win Cora back. “Does it taste like chicken?”

“Interesting question.” Slocum massaged his stubbly face. “You know, if you fed fish waste to a chicken, the butchered chicken would taste just like frog legs. We should work on it. Faux frog could be a lucrative sideline for Seacrest’s. You know, like fake crab?”

“What’s that?” Duncan stood up and approached a surgical-looking tool on the table.

“My new Crustastun,” said Slocum, picking it up and wielding it like a sword. “It applies a current to the lobster, which anesthetizes and kills it in seconds. Not only is it humane, but it reduces stress and enhances flavor. Did you know that you can taste the emotional state of an animal at the moment of its death?”

“I didn’t know lobster had an emotional state even alive,” said Duncan.

“You need to get out on the water more, my friend. Gérard de Nerval, a famous French lunatic, used to walk his lobster down the boulevard with a pink ribbon for a leash. He claimed they were peaceful, serious creatures who knew the secrets of the sea and didn’t bark. Therefore, we should treat them with the utmost respect when we off them.” Slocum put the Crustastun down and rubbed his hands together. “I was going to keep it a surprise, but I can’t hold it in anymore.” He started rummaging through the boxes on the table and pulled out a plastic bag filled with cherry-red lollypops. “This! This will be my signature dish in the underwater restaurant I’m going to open when the jellyfish money starts rolling in. Baked lobster enrobed in a red lollipop glaze.”

Duncan stared at him. He might have waited too long to recognize his mother’s insanity, but maybe it was not too late for Slocum.

“Listen, Slocum,” Duncan ventured. “I think you should get some help.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ve got Marney coming over in about an hour to prep. Think of it, Duncan, the baked lobster spread open, the insides glistening and dark pink, the outside the red of human blood and sweet desire. I call it … the Lovester!”

Duncan was suddenly overwhelmed by acute nostalgia for the austere Sunday meals of his youth. New England Puritan tradition held that you ate only milk and crackers on Sunday because it was a sin to fill your stomach on a holy day, and even though the Lelands were lawless Unitarians, they had to follow suit because it was the cook’s day off. But instead of crackers, they ate popcorn. The kids had it with milk like cereal, his father ate it with beer in a bowl, and his mother floated some in her mulberry wine.

“Won’t Marney release your Lovesters back to the sea?”

“We made a deal. For every lobster I serve at the restaurant, I donate twenty-five cents to a lobster sanctuary up north. It’s like a carbon offset.” Slocum opened the freezer to reveal a small pagan statue. “Meet dessert! Aphrodite, the goddess of sex, carved of chocolate-oyster mousse and surrounded by waves of salty whipped cream.”

“I thought the Lovesters were dessert.”

“Whoever heard of lobster for dessert? That’s crazy talk.” Slocum closed the freezer and led Duncan to the door. “The Lovester is a deluxe entree. It’ll be a hit in my new restaurant.”

“We shouldn’t be counting our chickens before they’re hatched, Slocum. While jellyfish plastic is very promising, it’s a long haul to the market. It might be years before we’re making money.”

Slocum dropped his arm. “Duncan, friend, I’ve been meaning to tell you about that.”

“About what?”

“About the ‘we’ part.” He paused and twisted his apron with his hands. “I had to sign over the exclusive rights to process the jellyfish to Osbert so he wouldn’t sue me over the soup. You’re such a pal, I knew you wouldn’t mind if I did it to save my ass.”

“What do you mean ‘Osbert’? He doesn’t own a processing plant.”

“No … ” said Slocum, and he averted his eyes. In the air hung the words
not yet
. “That’s the good news. Osbert will probably pay Seacrest’s to do it, so you’ll still make your packet.”