Sunburn (16 page)
“We’ll check the Marseilles papers for July of ’69,” Lea said. “If we find nothing, I’ll drop the whole thing.”
I think that was the last time that Lea and I gave ourselves a chance with each other. I somehow knew that if we verified the truth of Mike’s story, then she would go with him. How long she might stay, I didn’t know, but it was as though she were giving the life she had known with me one last chance before passing it by for another one—a new one of more risk and passion.
Of course, that again was only how I felt. Did more risk and more passion mean less substance? There were people who contended that those two elements made up that whole part of life worth living. To me they seemed naive and outdated.
For over three hours, we turned the reels and watched the columns of print roll in a green haze before our eyes. I had to stop and look up often because of eye fatigue, but Lea sat immobile, calmly turning the reel and scanning the screen in front of her.
“Here,” she said finally. “Look here.” And there was the small article that corroborated Mike’s story perfectly. A girl of eighteen named Sharon Barrett had disappeared, according to her boyfriend, Michael Barrett. They were both Americans, traveling abroad. There followed her description, and all the rest.
“So it’s true,” she said. “You see.”
I shook my head. “Come on, let’s go home.”
Halfway back to Tossa, when we hadn’t spoken at all, she touched my arm. “You really could help us, Douglas. Don’t close yourself off from me.”
The lights were on, though it was not yet evening. I drove very slowly through the fog. I realized that I could not close myself off from her.
She was already gone.
Twelve
It seemed to Mike lately that he was spending all his time either sitting by himself in the bar after it had closed or meeting Lea at a café and walking someplace, saying nothing, united but undeclared, waiting for someone to make the first move toward intimacy or toward Marseilles. What would Douglas do? Would he try to come along? No. It was clear he wasn’t wanted, and he was smart enough to see that. It crossed Mike’s mind that he might become violent, but violence had never scared him. It was so unnecessary in this case, anyway.
Now he sat in the bar and looked around. He’d tidied it all up. The lights were out, and only some streetlights from outside kept the place from pitch darkness. Occasionally someone would pass, or rather weave by, outside, and sometimes small groups could be heard singing or fighting, but mostly it was quiet. A tall, half-empty glass of gin and tonic sat on the table in front of him. He desperately wanted to talk to someone, someone not from this esoteric world of resort Spain. His resolution to act on what he’d thought had been the driving force of his life had come for all the wrong reasons. But even that wasn’t clear to him. At least he was moving in some direction now, not drifting.
He downed his drink and stood up. His mind was clear. He normally drank lightly, and the one he’d just finished had been only his second or third drink since he’d come on. Walking behind the bar, he took a gin bottle and three smaller bottles of tonic, put them in a carry sack, checked around to make sure that the bar was well locked up, and walked out to the street.
Back in his apartment, he turned on the small light next to his bed and poured himself a glassful. The window in the room, which had been open continually since he had moved in, now suddenly let in too much of the cold. He got out of bed and went to close it, but the shutter was jammed. Figures, he thought. Just what I need tonight. He had a fur-lined leather jacket in his closet, and after giving up on the window, he got it and draped it over his shoulders when he got back into bed. He’d been in the middle of studying some chess problems in a book Tony had given him, but after a minute of looking at them, he knew that chess was the farthest thing from his mind.
God, it was cold! These
pensións
weren’t equipped for the winter. There was no heat, and he hadn’t had the foresight to get an electric heater, although with the window stuck open it wouldn’t have done much good anyway. He thought of getting up and going to see Victor. Even if it was four in the morning, he knew the singer would be up. He wondered why Victor stayed around so long. They’d stopped paying him after the season ended, but he still played every night, like it said in the song, for drinks and tips. But he didn’t really feel like talking to Victor. They weren’t friends that way. Didn’t really talk about anything. When you got down to it, they only passed the time. Seems that’s what everybody does here, he thought. Except me and Lea, maybe.
pensións
weren’t equipped for the winter. There was no heat, and he hadn’t had the foresight to get an electric heater, although with the window stuck open it wouldn’t have done much good anyway. He thought of getting up and going to see Victor. Even if it was four in the morning, he knew the singer would be up. He wondered why Victor stayed around so long. They’d stopped paying him after the season ended, but he still played every night, like it said in the song, for drinks and tips. But he didn’t really feel like talking to Victor. They weren’t friends that way. Didn’t really talk about anything. When you got down to it, they only passed the time. Seems that’s what everybody does here, he thought. Except me and Lea, maybe.
He lit a cigarette and poured more gin into his glass. It was that goddamn mood that had gotten him into all this. Playing his song that night up at Sean’s, and then Lea coming around the next day. It was funny, he thought. All this time he’d lived on his own, not really bothered by how everybody else was. He was used to things being how they were with Victor, or with Tony, or Sean, or anybody else for that matter. Hold things in. That was fine. It was the way it ought to be. But maybe not. There was that night after he’d quit the gun business, and something had wanted to get out. He had had to get something out, and there had been nobody there but himself. He shook his head.
Ought to slow down on this gin, he thought. Then he smiled and poured some more.
And what had happened up there at the fort? Here’s this woman I don’t know at all and suddenly I’m out of control.
He really needed to sort things out. They might at least have another blanket in the room somewhere. He looked at the glass in his hand, and put it down by the bed table. Enough. Getting out of bed, he grabbed his pants and put them back on. In a minute he was dressed, sitting on the side of his bed, looking out through the open window. He remembered back to high school, of all things. Hadn’t he had some friends then? People to talk about things with? At least it had seemed so. Fleming and he had been friends. Thinking back, he realized that mostly they’d talked about girls and football, but there had been other times. That time when Fleming’s parents were getting divorced and he’d stayed over with Mike for two weeks. They’d talked a lot then. And, now that he thought of it, there’d been lots of nights with Sharon, sitting up and bullshitting about things they cared about. He knew he could reach Fleming by mail. He was sure his mom still lived in the big house in Belle vue. He could write to him there in care of her. Maybe that would help. He had lots of paper, and maybe it would clear things up for him, too. He felt a little dizzy, but poured himself a short one anyway, then sat down on the bed with the pad on his knees, his back propped against the wall, and began to write.
Dear Flem,This may be the most unexpected letter you ever got, but still it’s one I’ve got to write, and I can’t think of anybody else who ought to listen. I’m writing it care of your mom, as you can see, and hope that she gets it to you before too long. I suppose, really, that it’s stupid to write, and I don’t expect you to write back. Hell, I don’t even know if you’re still alive, or if you’re married and have three kids, or what. Still, it’s not exactly that times are hard with me right now. Fact is, I’m working steady and have lots of money and free time and plenty to eat and drink. But I’m in a pretty bad state of confusion and think maybe that just setting things down will help clarify things. So if you’re hassled with your own life, or whatever, you don’t even have to read this. I just have to write it.I’m living, as I guess you can tell by the stamp, in Spain, and right at this minute it’s not the sunny place it’s hyped up to be. I’m sitting on my bed having a drink and it’s the middle of the night, when I should be asleep. For the last—let’s see, how long now?—I don’t know, I’ve been here awhile, working tending bar and a few assorted other things to keep me busy. Since I don’t know if there are censors reading mail here, I won’t go into whatever they were, but it’s been interesting.Probably you heard from my folks when I didn’t come home that summer all about the story with Sharon and me. It also probably sounded like it couldn’t happen, but it did, and since then, I’ve been more or less trying to get it together enough to find her, but it takes connections and money. Also, there’s the point that I don’t even have a clue as to where she is or what she’s been through. I assume she was sold into slavery—God, it still sounds unbelievable to me after all this time—since that’s what the cops in France seemed to believe. At least her body never turned up. For a while, the main thing the frog cops wanted to know was whether we dealt heroin, and how do you go about proving you don’t? Anyway, they treated me pretty well, but they pretty much gave up on Sharon. For a while, I suppose I went crazy, but after traveling and the Nam, kind of mellowed out enough to get a plan going.Well, all that’s really neither here nor there. I finally arrived here in Tossa, and went to work, and got used to living again. I mean living without this guilt and sense of loss. I don’t know if time just made it all seem, after all, hopeless, or if I really stopped caring about finding her, or what. What would we do together now? Where the hell do they even take white slaves? Half of me—no, more than half—came to believe that she was killed and somehow just buried and never found, or dumped out at sea, or any of a number of things. Gradually, she just receded.But the thing was, I’d set myself on a way of acting that was based on this need to find her. I should also say that while I might write this as though I saw the light in a matter of weeks, what we’re talking about here is years. And by the time it had really ceased to matter, I’d become obsessed with this image of myself as a seeker, as someone who had to find something, and even though now that something didn’t make much sense, there was this backlog of five years of actions that seemed to reinforce it, at least for me. Needless to say, all of that made it harder to admit, even to myself, what I had really come to believe, which was that there was nothing to look for.I say to myself, “I’m only twenty-five. That’s not old. Why don’t I start living, and forget Sharon?” But something in me just wouldn’t go along with it. I still remember her so well it’s scary. Finally, I came to
know
that she was gone, and gone for good, but still the old feelings wouldn’t let me go. I was really more possessed than obsessed, and maybe what I needed was to get exorcised.But I’d developed this new way about me. I don’t . . . Well, what brought it on was this feeling that I was completely on my own, and didn’t want to depend on anybody again for anything. I don’t know if you remember me as being exactly gregarious, but it seems to me that I was friendly enough when I was younger. Well, that pretty much stopped, and it was funny to notice it, because I didn’t feel any different. I just acted harder, and became quiet. I just stopped talking. I don’t know why, really. Felt I was safer, maybe. I
was
dealing with some real assholes there in Vietnam for long stretches of time, let me tell you. I didn’t trust anybody, though always, to myself, I thought I was the same.All that acting tough, though, eventually got internalized, I suppose, because I noticed that people stopped being friendly to me, and, in fairness, I have to say I never cared that much. I just did my work, and kept to myself, and nobody seemed to give much of a shit, so I didn’t either.But see, the whole thing was building on itself, and didn’t have much to do with me. I mean, sure, it was me all along, but not really. Does that make any sense? The “real” me was still old Mike Barrett who liked to sing and goof around and who fell so completely in love with Sharon. I mean, it didn’t make sense to me that I could love somebody that much and then turn around and become such an unfeeling son of a bitch. But I stuck with acting that way. It was, after all, the way I was.Then a while ago, I quit working with some people, and it was like all of a sudden the “real” me had had enough. I wanted to talk to people and have some fun. You know, just not take everything so damn seriously. But still there was this Sharon thing inside me, and I’d gotten so used to being quiet, almost sullen, that it just didn’t seem to be working. I was, in fact, getting to be almost happy all the time, but never acted like it, and I felt like a phony in spades. I just didn’t know how to act carefree. Still don’t, I suppose. And there was all the feeling about Sharon I couldn’t ignore. You want to know the truth? This is the first time, and I mean right now, that I’ve been able to say she’s dead, or at least gone. Maybe this letter was the right thing to do after all. It’s good to have some idea where you’re coming from.So here I was, not even able to admit that I wasn’t feeling so bad, and man, I’m telling you, dying of loneliness. And now we come to this exorcism and all that it’s led to.
He put down the pen and shook his head to clear it. Fleming would think he was an idiot, but then what did he care what Fleming thought? He’d probably never see him again in his life. He got up to pee, taking his drink with him. He was getting drunk, but the kind of drunk where he felt exceptionally lucid. No longer was he concerned with how many times he’d reached for the gin. Now he only wanted to finish the letter. He felt that at last he was getting somewhere. It was a start, this writing, getting at how he felt.
He came back to the bed and arranged his coat again over his shoulders, yawning. His breath hung in the air in an opaque cloud for a second. Must be the coldest night since I’ve been in Spain, he thought. He shivered, brought the bottle to his lips, and took a short sip.
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