The Dream Lover: Short Stories

  But the only trouble with this particular pool is it’s green. The man’s got green water.

  ‘Hey!’ I hear a voice. ‘You come for the pool?’

  I’m only wearing coveralls with AA1 Pools written across the back in red letters. This guy’s real sharp. He comes down the steps from the house, his joint just about covered with a minute black satin triangle. He’s swinging a bullworker in one hand. Yeah, he’s big. Shoulders like medicine balls, bulging overhang of pectorals. His chest is shiny and completely hairless, with tiny brown nipples almost a yard apart. But his eyes are set close together. I guess he’s been using the bullworker on his brain too. I’ve seen him on the TV. Biff Ruggiero, ex-pro football star.

  ‘Mr Ruggiero?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s me. What’s wrong wit da pool?’

  ‘You got green water. Your filtration’s gone for sure. You got a build-up of algae. When was the last time you had things checked out?’

  He ignored my question. ‘Green water? Shit, I got friends coming to stay tomorrow. Can you fix it?’

  ‘Can you brush your teeth? Sure I can fix it. But you’d better not plan on swimming for a week.’

  ‘. . . and this stupid asshole, Biff Ruggiero – you know, pro footballer – he hangs around all day asking dumb questions. “Whatcha need all dat acid for?” So there I am, I’m washing out his friggin’ cartridges with phosphate tri-soda, and all this crap’s like coming out. “Holy Jesus,” says Mr Nobel Prize winner, “where’s all dat shit come from?” Jesus.’ I laugh quietly to myself. ‘He’s so dumb he thinks Fucking is a city in China.’

  I watch Noelle-Joy get out of bed. She stands for a while rubbing her temples.

  ‘I’m going to take a shower,’ she says.

  I follow her through to the bathroom.

  ‘It just shows you,’ I shout over the noise of the water. ‘Those cartridge filters may be cheap but they can be a real pain in the nuts. I told him to put in a sand filter like the one I’m getting. Six-way valve, automatic rinsage . . .’

  Noelle-Joy bursts out of the closet, her little stacked body all pink from the shower. She heads back into the bedroom, towels off and starts to dress.

  ‘Hey, baby,’ I say. ‘Listen. I thought of a great name. Tranquillity Pools.’ I block out the letters in the air. ‘Trang. Quill. It. Tee. Tranquillity Pools. What do you think?’

  ‘Look,’ she says, her gaze flinging around the room. ‘Ah. I gotta, um, do some shopping. I’ll catch up with you later, okay?’

  Noelle-Joy moves in. Boy, dames sure own a lot of garbage. She works as a stapler in a luggage factory. We get on fine. But already she’s bugging me to get a car. She doesn’t like to be seen in the Dodge van. She’s a sweet girl, but there are only two things Noelle-Joy thinks about. Money and more money. She says I should ask Yorty for a raise. I say how am I going to do that seeing I’m already in to him for a $5,000 sand filter. She says she wouldn’t give the steam off her shit for a sand filter. She’s a strong-minded woman but her heart’s in the right place. She loves the pool.

  ‘You look after this pool great, you know,’ Ruggiero says. I’m de-ringing the sides with an acid wash. We cleaned up the green water weeks ago but we’ve got a regular maintenance contract with him now.

  ‘I never realized, like, they was so complicated.’

  I shoot him my rhyme.

  ‘That’s good,’ Ruggiero says, scratching his chin. ‘Say, you wanna work for me, full-time?’

  I tell him about my plans. Tranquillity Pools, the new sand filter, Noelle-Joy.

  I come home early. An old lady called up from out in Pacific Palisades. She said her dog had fallen into her pool in the night. She said she was too upset to touch it. I had to fish it out with the long-handled pool sieve. It was one of those tiny hairy dogs. It had sunk to the bottom. I dragged it out and threw it in the garbage can.

  ‘No poolside light, lady,’ I said. ‘You don’t light the way, no wonder your dog fell in. If that’d got sucked into the skimmers you’d have scarfed up your entire filter system. Bust valves, who knows?’

  Wow, did she take a giant shit on me. Called Yorty, the works. I had to get the mutt’s body out of the trash can, wash it, lay it out on a cushion . . . No wonder I’m red-assed when I get home.

  Noelle-Joy’s out by the pool working on her tan. Fruit punch, shades, orange bikini, pushed-up breasts. There’s a big puddle of water underneath the sun-lounger.

  ‘Hi, honey,’ she calls, stretching. ‘This is the life, yeah?’

  I go mad. ‘You been in the water?’ I yell.

  ‘What? . . . Yeah. So I had a little swim. So big deal.’

  ‘How many times I got to tell you. The pool’s wintering.’

  ‘The pool’s been wintering for three fuckin’ months!’ she screams.

  But I’m not listening. I run into the pool-house. Switch on the filters to full power. I grab three pellets of chlorine – no, four – and throw them in. Then I get the sack of soda ash, tip in a couple of spadefuls just to be sure.

  I stand at the pool edge, panting.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she accuses.

  ‘Superchlorination,’ I say. ‘You swam in stagnant water. Who knows what you could’ve brought in.’

  Now she goes mad. She stomps up to me. ‘I just swam in your fuckin’ pool, turd-bird! I didn’t piss in it or nothing!’

  I’ve got her there. ‘I know you didn’t,’ I yell in triumph. ‘’Cause I can tell. I got me a secret chemical in that water. Secret. Anybody pisses in my pool it turns black!’

  We made up, of course. ‘A lovers’ tiff is the expression, I believe. I explain why I was so fired up. Noelle-Joy is all quiet and thoughtful for an hour or two. Then she asks me a favour. Can she have a housewarming party for all her friends? There’s no way I can refuse. I say yes. We are real close that night.

  OTO

  OTO. I don’t know how we ever got by without OTO, or orthotolodine, to give its full name. We use it in the Aquality Duo Test. That’s how we check the correct levels of chlorination and acidity (pH) in a pool. If you don’t get it right you’d be safer swimming in a cesspit.

  I’m doing an OTO test for Ruggiero. He’s standing there crushing a tennis ball in each hand. His pool is looking beautiful. He’s got some guests around it – lean, tanned people. Red umbrellas above the tables. Rock music playing from the speakers. Light from the water winking at you. That chlorine smell. That fresh coolness you get around pools.

  One thing I will say for Ruggiero, he doesn’t treat me like some sidewalk steamer. And the man seems to be interested in what’s going on.

  I show him the two little test tubes lined up against the colour scales.

  ‘Like I said, Mr Ruggiero, it’s perfect. OTO never lets you down. You always know how your pool’s feeling.’

  ‘Hell,’ Ruggiero says, ‘looks like you got to be a chemist to run a pool. Am I right or am I right?’ He laughs at his joke.

  I smile politely and step back from the pool edge, watch the water dance.

  ‘A thing of beauty, Mr Ruggiero, is a joy forever. Know who said that? An English poet. I don’t need to run no OTO test. I been around pools so long I got an instinct about them. I know how they feel. Little too much acid, bit of algae, wrong chlorine levels . . . I see them, Mr Ruggiero, and they tell me.’

  ‘Come on,’ Ruggiero says, a big smile on his face. ‘Let me buy you a drink.’

  Sol Yorty looks like an ageing country-and-western star. He’s bald on top but he’s let his grey hair grow over his ears. He lives in dead-end East Hollywood. I walk down the path in his back garden with him. Yorty’s carrying a bag of charcoal briquettes. His fat gut stretches his lime-green sports shirt skintight. He and his wife, Dolores, are the fattest people I know. Between them they weigh as much as a small car. The funny thing about Yorty is that even though he owns a pool company he doesn’t own a pool.

  He tips the briquettes into his barbecue as I explain that I’m
going to have to hold back on the sand filter for a month or two. This party of Noelle-Joy’s is going to make it hard for me to meet the deposit.

  ‘No problem,’ Yorty says. ‘Glad to see you’re making a home at last. She’s a . . . She seems like a fine girl.’ He lays out four huge steaks on the grill.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Sol,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know you had company. I wouldn’t have disturbed you.’

  ‘Nah,’ he says. ‘Just me and Dolores.’ He looks up as Dolores waddles down the garden in a pair of flaming-orange Bermudas and the biggest bikini top I’ve ever seen.

  ‘Hey, sweetie,’ he shouts. ‘Look who’s here.’

  Dolores carries a plastic bucket full of rice salad. ‘Well, hi, stranger. Wanna eat lunch with us? There’s plenty more in the fridge.’

  I say I’ve got to get back.

  It looks like Noelle-Joy’s invited just about the entire workforce from the luggage factory. Mainly guys, too, a few blacks and Hispanics. The house is crammed with guests. You can’t move in the yard. This morning I vacuum-swept the pool, topped up the water level, got the filters going well and threw in an extra pellet of chlorine. You can’t be too sure. Some of Noelle-Joy’s friends don’t seem too concerned about personal hygiene. Everybody, though, is being real nice to me. Noelle-Joy and I stand at the door greeting the guests. Noelle-Joy makes the introductions. Everyone smiles broadly and we shake hands.

  I feel on edge as the first guests dive into the pool. I watch the water slosh over the sides, darkening the No-Skid surrounds. I hear the skimmer valves clacking madly.

  Noelle-Joy squeezes my hand. She’s been very affectionate these last few days. Now every few minutes she comes on over from talking to her friends and asks me if I’m feeling fine. She keeps smiling and looking at me. But it’s what I call her lemon smile – like she’s only smiling with her lips. Maybe she’s nervous, too, I think, wondering what her friends from the luggage factory will make of me.

  I have to say I’m not too disappointed though when I’m called away by the phone. It’s from Mr Ruggiero’s house. Something’s gone wrong; there’s some sort of sediment in the water. I think fast. I say it could be a precipitation of calcium salts and I’ll be there right away.

  I clap my hands for silence at the poolside. Everyone stops talking.

  ‘I’m sorry, folks,’ I say. ‘I have to leave you for a while. I got an emergency on. You all just keep right on having a good time. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Bye now.’

  Traffic’s heavy at this time of the day. We’ve got a gridlock at Western Avenue and Sunset. I detour around on the Ventura Freeway, out down through Beverly Glen, back on to Sunset and on into Brentwood.

  I run down the back lawn to the pool. I can see Ruggiero and some of his friends splashing around in the water. Stupid fools. The Hispanic manservant tries to stop me but I just lower my shoulder and bulldoze through him.

  ‘Hey!’ I shout. ‘Get the fuck out of that water! Don’t you know it’s dangerous? Get out, everybody, get out!’

  Ruggiero’s muscles launch him out of the pool like a dolphin.

  ‘What’s goin’ on?’ He looks angry and puzzled. ‘You ain’t a million laughs, you know, man.’

  I’m on my knees peering at the water. The other guests have clambered out and are looking around nervously. They think of plagues and pollution.

  In front of my nose the perfect translucent water bobs and shimmies; nets of light wink and flash in my eyes.

  ‘The sediment,’ I say. ‘The calcium salts . . . didn’t somebody phone . . .?’

  By the time I get back I’ve been away for nearly an hour and a half. She worked fast, I have to admit. Cleaned out everything. She and her friends – they had it all planned. I’d been deep-sixed for sure.

  There was a note. YOU MAY NO A LOT A BOUT POOLS BUT YOU DONT NO SHIT A BOUT PEPLE.

  I don’t want to go out to the yard but I know I have to. I walk through the empty house like I’m walking knee-deep in wax. The yard is empty. I can see they threw everything in the pool – the loungers, the tables, the bamboo cocktail bar, bobbing around like the remains from a shipwreck. Then all of them standing in a circle around the side, laughing, having their joke.

  I walk slowly up to the edge and look down. I can see my reflection. The water’s like black coffee.

  Yorba Linda. It’s just off the Riverside Expressway. I’m working as a cleaner at the public swimming pool. Open-air, Olympicsized.

  Yorty had to fire me after what he heard from Ruggiero. Sol said he had no choice. He was sorry but he would ‘have to let me go’.

  I sold up and moved out after the party. That pool could never be the same after what they had done in it. I don’t know – it had lost its innocence, I guess.

  Funny thing happened. I was standing on Sunset and a van halted at an intersection. It was a Ford, I think. It was blue. I didn’t get a look at the driver, but on the side, in white letters, was TRANQUILLITY POOLS. The van drove off before I could get to it. I’m going to file a complaint. Somebody’s stolen my name.

  Next Boat from Douala

  Then the brothel was raided. Christ, he’d only gone down to Spinoza’s to confront Patience with her handiwork. She hadn’t been free when Morgan first arrived, so he had chatted to the owner, Baruch – as his better-read clients whimsically dubbed the diminutive Levantine pimp – for half an hour or so, and watched the girls dancing listlessly under the roof fans. His anger had subsided a bit but he managed to stoke up a rage when he was eventually ushered into Patience’s cubicle. ‘Hey!’ he had roared, lowering his greyish Y-fronts. ‘Bloody look at this mess!’ But then his tirade had been cut short by the whistles and stompings of Sgt Mbele and his vice squad.

  The day had started badly. Morgan woke, hot and sweaty, his sheets damp binding-cloths. Three things presented themselves to his mind almost simultaneously: it was Christmas Eve, in four days he would be catching the next boat home from Douala and he had a dull ache in his groin. He eased his seventeen-and-a-half stone out of bed and started for the bathroom. There, a hesitant diagnosis set off by the unfamiliar pain was horrifyingly confirmed by the sight of his opaque, forked and purulent urine.

  He dropped off at the local clinic before going into the office. Inside it was cool and air-conditioned. Outside, in the shade cast by the wide eaves, mothers and children sprawled. And inside he ruefully confessed to a Calvinistic Scottish doctor, young and unrelentingly professional, of his weekly visits to Patience at Spinoza’s. Then a plump black sister led him to an ante-room where, retreating coyly behind a screen, he delivered up a urine sample. The clear tinkle of his stream on the thin glass of the bottle seemed to rebound deafeningly from the tiled walls. With a cursoriness teetering on the edge of contempt the doctor told him that the result of the test would be available tomorrow.

  He vented his embarrassment and mounting anger at his office, Nkongsamba’s Deputy High Commission, turning down all that day’s applications for visas out of hand, vetoing the recommendations of senior missionaries for candidates in the next birthday honours and, exquisite zenith of the day’s attack of spleen, peremptorily sacking a filing clerk for eating fu-fu while handling correspondence. He began to feel a little better, the fear of some hideous social disease retreating as time interposed itself between now and his visit to the clinic.

  After lunch his air-conditioner broke down. Morgan detested the sun and because of his corpulence his three years in Nkongsamba had been three years of seemingly constant perspiration, virulent rashes and general discomfort. He had accepted the posting gladly, proud to tell family and friends he was in the Diplomatic Service, and had enthusiastically read the literature of West Africa, searching, with increasing despair, first in Joyce Cary then through Graham Greene right down to Gerald Durrell and Conrad, for any experience that vaguely corresponded with his own. When the cream tropical suit he had so keenly bought began to grow mould in the armpits – a creeping greenish hue eventually encroaching on the butt
on-down flap of a breast pocket – he had forthwith abandoned it, and with it all hopes of injecting a literary frisson into his dull and routine life. But, thank God, he was leaving it all soon, next boat from Douala, leaving the steaming forest, the truculent natives, the tiny black flies that raised florin-sized bites. What would he miss? The beer, strong and cold, and, of course, Patience, with her lordotic posture, pragmatic sex and her smooth black body smelling strangely of ‘Amby’, a skin lightening agent that sold very well in these parts.

  Morgan came home after work. There had been an unexpected fall of rain during the afternoon. The air was heavy and damp, great ranges of purple cumulus loomed in the sky. He climbed up the steps to his stoop shouting for Pious his houseboy to bring beer. There on the stoop table lay his copy of Keats, sole heritage of his years at his plate-glass university. He had come across it while packing and had glanced through it, with nostalgic affection, at breakfast. Now, carelessly left out in the rain, it sat there swollen, and steaming slightly it seemed, in the late afternoon heat – a grotesque papier mâché brick. He picked it up and bellowed for Pious.

  He stood under the cold shower allowing the stream of water to course down his face plastering his thinning hair to his forehead. A startled Pious had received the sodden complete works full in the face and when he scrabbled to pick it up Morgan had booted him viciously in the arse. He smiled, then frowned. The sudden movement, though producing a satisfying yelp from Pious, had done some damage. Pain pulsed like a Belisha beacon from his testicles, now, he was convinced, grown palpably larger. He counted slowly from one to ten. Things were ganging up on him, he was beginning to feel insecure, hunted almost. Only three days to the boat, then away, thank Christ, for good.

  An obsequious, chastened Pious brought him the gin on the stoop. Morgan poured two inches into a glass full of ice, added some bitters and a dash of water. He hated the drink but it seemed the apt thing to do; end of a tropical day, sundowners and all that. It was dark now and unbearably humid. There would be a storm tonight. Fat sausage flies brought out by the rain whirled and battered about him. Ungainly on their wings one landed in his gin and drowned there, straddled on the cubes. His shirt stuck to his back, the minatory hum of a mosquito was in his ear. Crickets chirped moronically in the garden. He would go and sort out that Patience.