The Big Seven

  Chapter 27

  He was off to Seville and Barcelona via Paris early in the morning. His mind was chilled a little by fear and his extra­ordinary independence which was rare in his life. He thought that once you got on a plane you abandoned your usual support system. These odd feelings persisted through a lengthy wait in Chicago and a very long night on the plane to de Gaulle and stayed with him in the transit lounge at de Gaulle. This was a little bit, he was sure, of what it feels like to be an orphan which in a way he was, having lost his parents and wife. A big old boy on the loose in very thin air. He ended up loving the wide comfortable seats in business class and decided to upgrade on the way home. What was he saving for? Not Lent. He was generous in his contributions to the poor and the unemployed and to the Humane Society in honor of his little dog Walter who died so long ago.

  He had always loved dogs, but after Walter he didn’t get another because the chief had ruled that state police couldn’t have their dogs riding with them while on duty. The world is plagued with chickenshit rules. He first greeted the dogs in any home he visited and on walks he said hello to any dog loose on the street or behind fences in yards. Dogs liked it and on future walks they ran out to the fences to greet him. The dogs of the guard dog ilk took longer to warm up but finally managed to wag their tails and smile broadly as dogs do. Marion had an old Lab that never stopped smiling who would sleep on the bank when Marion fished.

  It consoled him in the de Gaulle transit lounge waiting a couple of hours for a plane to Seville that he had packed along Nightwood and Ada, those marvelous books that were intended to help him write marvelously. Thus far it hadn’t worked but he still had a smidgen of faith. Diane had also given him two small volumes of poetry written by Lorca and Machado. Sunderson wasn’t much given to reading poetry, if at all, but Diane had assured him that these two poets would give him the spirit of Spain. He very much wished she was with him rather than entertaining that dipshit Aspenite. He was worried that forty years of writing police reports had permanently corrupted his chance of writing well. Police reports were gibberish shorthand like emails. “Just the facts, ma’am,” as Joe Friday used to say. From reading so much history he knew that the facts alone didn’t do the job.

  He went into a cafeteria and had what he thought was the best salad of his life. It looked ordinary with very good greens but the chef had dribbled small roasted pork bits called lardons all over it, and a poached egg in the middle, and a wonderful tart vinaigrette for a dressing. What a tonic after the awful plane food, doubtless made in a dark basement in Chicago.

  He had a large glass of so-so red wine and reread a letter he had received a few days before leaving. It was from a rich couple he barely knew who lived well on their inheritance from their old timber families that once controlled the Huron Mountains. They had a son as well as twin daughters at the University of Michigan. Both of the girls had joined a strange Buddhist cult and dropped out of the university, any parent’s nightmare. They were hoping since he was now retired he could look into it quietly. Sunderson called Mona to check it out rather than drive all the way to Ann Arbor himself. She would be less noticeable while he might be looked at as a spy. The master of the quasi-Zen group had achieved perfect satori at the Detroit Zoo while listening to a large cage of howler monkeys. Naturally he was inspired and gathered a group of mostly students and those drawn to any religious exercise. Mona called him an asshole on the phone for having her go through an hour of group howling which was an amount of howling from which she would never recover.

  The group howled six days a week and spent one whole day in total silence. Sunderson had no interest in these batshit ninnies beyond the ample reward the parents offered to get their twins back actively into their university studies. In fact the reward offered was equal to his cabin price and would fully restore his blackmail fund. He thought perhaps he could become a world traveler but then the time spent in the transit lounge wasn’t all that pleasant. Mona had teased that he could become a crime novelist and write as his maiden flight “The Case of the Howling Buddhas” and she would help. He allowed himself a gentle fantasy of becoming a famed and wealthy crime writer only he would begin with one called “The Family Down the Road” about the past year of his life. The fantasy descended into shambles when he remembered that despite weeks of effort he hadn’t been able to write a simple essay on violence as a deadly sin. He couldn’t imagine anything harder to do than fail to write. It was exhausting and thus far Nightwood and Ada hadn’t helped one little bit. He had read once that John D. MacDonald wrote several books a year when he was starting out which was beyond Sunderson’s comprehension. Sunderson wondered if because of his career he was overfamiliar with crime and found it boring. It was not so for evil, as he had found with the Ameses, the kind of evil which educated people seemed never to have their noses rubbed in. He had barely recovered from it. Maybe the secret to writing would be to get down all the stories Diane had hated hearing, to make some sense of them.

  Finally he boarded the Seville flight which not surprisingly was full of Spaniards. Across the aisle were two dowdy American schoolteachers chirruping about how expensive Paris was. Sunderson felt confident with the thatch of C-notes in his wallet. He had cashed in five for euros at the Chicago airport but doubted it would last long.

  The red wine put him to sleep and he didn’t wake up until the plane landed in Seville. A cab took him to his hotel, Alfonso XIII, which Diane’s guidebook reminded him was the most expensive in the city. He was comforted to see a large bar in the corner of the lobby. It was past drink time back home. He was embarrassed by the well-dressed men in the lobby who could even button their suits across their tummies which he definitely would never do again. He was embarrassed again in his big room which was elegant beyond anything he had known, and it was two doors down from a suite reserved for the king of Spain when he was in Seville. If he ran across him, Sunderson thought, what would he say? “Hello, King”? He hastily changed his sweaty shirt, washed his face, and went down to the bar. He had one Canadian whiskey which was expensive because of import taxes. He backed away to wine which he found he liked because of the gentleness of its effect compared to whiskey. The bartender spoke perfect English and they talked about politics in the empty bar. The bartender said that his father was a journalist and had been imprisoned by Franco for most of the bartender’s childhood. Sunderson had been eyeing a big ham on the shelf next to the liquor bottles, and the bartender took a big knife and sliced him a number of paper-thin slices, giving him the provenance of the ham. It had the best flavor of any ham Sunderson had ever had. It was made from black pigs that ate mostly acorns in the forest. The olives were also unbelievably pungent.

  Rather than take an intended walk after the drinks he went up to his room for a nap and to wait for the day to cool off. He woke in two hours and failed to recognize where he was. When it dawned on him his brain felt a couple of degrees cooler than usual when he looked out the window. He was in Seville not Marquette. His usual support system had disappeared and good riddance he thought. He was empty at last. What was a support system but an overfamiliarity with one’s life that was ultimately suffocating? Once when Diane was particularly angry with him for drinking too much she gave him an essay on alcoholics written by a famed therapist in Los Angeles. He threw it toward the open side window of his study but missed which made him want a drink. Failure again, this time in throwing. He left it on the floor for weeks to make sure she saw it there, then one evening when she warmed his heart with a rabbit caccatiore he finally read it. It was a rare honest evening. The writer said that the true emotionally crippling factor in the alcoholic was the complete dominance of the self-referential. The drinker was the intense center of his own universe, his perceptions rather lamely going outward but colored utterly by the false core.

  Good enough, thought Sunderson, wandering slowly toward the Guadalquivir River that ran through the center of the city. He hadn’t imagined that hi
s sensibilities were that truncated by a few drinks, then admitted there had been more than a few drinks. It seemed he had to have them. Of course that’s what the article Diane had given him was saying. Nothing is allowed to stand between the drinker and “a few drinks.” After he had arrived he had that expensive whiskey and two glasses of wine. One would have been plenty.

  He arrived at the walkway along the river and saw a lovely girl in a green skirt but she was walking too fast for him to keep up. Her legs were brown and when she sat on the bench for a few minutes her skirt flashed up a bit in the breeze off the river and his heart felt a pang at the bareness of her legs. How hopeless. When does it stop? The Guadalquivir at this point was broad and placid. It occurred to him it was hard to think about yourself while staring at a river. In fact you couldn’t do it. A river overwhelmed the senses, at least they always had with him since childhood.

  He had only once forgotten to respect a river. When they were kids his dad had taken him and Bobby to his own favorite camping spot on the Escanaba River where it was very broad and fast. He and Bobby were told to fish from the bank and Dad went off downstream. Sunderson tried to wade anyway and quickly was swept away in the strong current. Bobby stood screaming and his dad waded out farther and intercepted his struggling body, dragging him to shore and booting him in the ass. After that throughout his trout fishing life he had been a cautious wader. This was close after the dreaded sermon and he naturally thought while tumbling through the water that he was being executed for breaking one of the Seven Deadly Sins. This increased his fright because you could plummet straight to the bottom of the river. Much later in life when Diane wanted him to seek professional help he tried to imagine telling a shrink that the biggest trauma of his life along with seeing Bobby’s leg on the railroad siding was a sermon called “The Seven Deadly Sins.”

  He continued wandering through the afternoon stopping briefly at an art museum until he turned a corner and ran face-to-face into an enormous Velázquez that was featured in one of Diane’s art books. He immediately left the museum not wanting for the first time in his memory to think about Diane. The coolness had remained in his head and it was grand indeed to realize that Marquette, Michigan, wasn’t the center of the world. He liked the new feeling of being nothing, of being empty in the busy world. He had no idea what it meant, if anything, except perhaps that being in a foreign country where everything was a diversion might free the mind of its habits. And what good had his ceaseless thinking about Diane done him? They were divorced forever. What possible meaning could their little affair have? And what did he mean by the word “meaning”? He had no idea. This tongue twister was why he had decided not to go to graduate school.

  He sat on a bench in a lovely little mini park noting that the girl in the green skirt, actually a woman, was sitting across the way. She looked at him angrily as she approached.

  “Are you following me?” she asked.

  “Not in the least. It’s my first day in Seville and I’m just wandering around. I was in the museum for a few minutes then got out.”

  “Why did you stay so briefly?”

  “A Velázquez reminded me of my ex-wife and I had a slight feeling of suffocation.”

  “I understand,” she laughed. “I just got divorced this spring, then quite depressed. My father sent me here as a gift because once when he was depressed he came to Seville and the music got him over it.”

  “Sounds wise. I’m not depressed, maybe a little lost.”

  “I walked past the bar and saw you in there rather early.”

  “Let’s go there now. I think it’s time for a drink.”

  “It’s early for me but I’ll have a sherry with you.”

  He had no idea where they were but she did. They were cordial and talkative. He had his sexual antennae out but sensed nothing. She taught physical education in a boarding school near London. Her recently ex-husband also taught there so she was looking for a new job, not wanting to be in the same workplace. She said he was whinging. When they first married he wanted to be a writer but as a matter of fact, she said, he was too lazy. He liked to drink with his mates and watch sporting events on the telly. Before their marriage when he was still at Cambridge he had won a short story contest.

  “Not enough to coast on,” she said.

  “The world is bursting with failed writers.” Sunderson should have worked on his essay after his nap but pretended that he’d forgotten. It was too pleasant eating a room-service omelet and looking out the window, then heading out for his walk.

  They came upon the hotel from the back and he shook her strong hand with his own. In the bar he ordered a red wine rather than the Canadian whiskey he had been ordering for more than forty years. The idea of wine seemed to go better with this new coolness he felt in his head. The bartender seemed pleased that they had met. He suggested they go see La Lupa that evening, the best young dancer in Spain. She had agreed to meet friends for a late goodbye dinner at 10:00 p.m. but the restaurant was close to the little hall where Lupa was dancing. The bartender made the call and said he had secured the last two tickets. She explained she was going back to London tomorrow. She said she had two more paid nights at the hotel courtesy of her father but she had run out of walking-around money and her English friends were broke. He deftly slid her three one hundred dollar bills from his wallet cache. She was stunned.

  “How do you know I’ll pay you back?” Her voice was flustered.

  “Frankly dear, I don’t give a shit,” he said coolly.

  “You don’t look or dress rich,” she laughed.

  “I’m not. I just had some extra and you might need two more days to have a sherry with me.”

  That was that. Her name was Laurel. Not cute or pretty but handsome. He noticed her strong musculature, most obvious in her arms and legs. Would making love to her be like writhing with another Boy Scout? That didn’t sound attractive. A friend had told him that ballerinas had hard asses. Across the table she looked as if she was deciding something but he didn’t know what. He had a second glass of wine, still less than a couple of Canadian whiskies. His new cool head responded well to wine which was without the dreamy confusion of Canadian whiskey. When he got home he would stock up on something called Côtes du Rhône which Laurel had recommended. It was very palatable to him and not expensive, and he would experiment to see if wine was a suitable permanent substitute for Canadian whiskey. He didn’t care for American cabernets which were syrupy with an aftertaste that resembled taking a small bite of an oak tree.

  They went up to their separate rooms to freshen up for the evening. They had plenty of time before Lupa’s dancing and both wanted another stroll along the river. In his room Sunderson perceived a possible disadvantage to his new cool head. Simply enough, he could see the unchangeable past too clearly. They never should have stopped camping which Diane loved. And he had been too far sunk in the male hoax of fishing and drinking. He couldn’t take time off during his precious vacation from his strenuous detective work to go to France with Diane. She went twice with friends but said it certainly wasn’t like going with someone you loved. In all of this he had been wrong. A greedy beast of his own will. What the fuck was fishing, or drinking, if it destroyed a marriage and the love of a grand woman? He sat down by the window and reviewed the mournful story of his divorce, diverted by the sight of Spain out the window and the errant memory of a college course on the origins of Latin America. He sat drying off from his shower wrapped in a big, expensive towel. Spain didn’t look big enough, out the window of course, to have ruled so much of the world. He rehearsed the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the final driving of the Moors out of the country, Teddy Roosevelt kicking Spain’s ass.

  The doorbell rang. It was Laurel in a beige robe. He quickly dressed and let her in.

  “I thought you might want a snack. I want some olives, ham, and shrimp. Another sherry?”

  He called room
service ordering two dozen shrimp and immediately thinking how expensive they were. He added the wine, olives and ham.

  She was sitting in an easy chair with her robe flopped open and her nightie under the robe open almost to the crotch. The man on the phone said in a surprising American voice that the scampi were a better deal than boiled shrimp. Sunderson said okay. He looked at Laurel’s bare legs with agitation. He had sworn to himself that he would avoid sex in Spain in order to be fresh for Diane when she reached Paris. Laurel told an amusing story about her maiden aunt, her mother’s oldest sister. After World War II the whole family was desperately hungry with little food available in the stores and everything rationed. The aunt began dating GI’s. She was pretty and soon there was plenty of food. The family was embarrassed having figured what was going on, including dozens of rare eggs and fine steaks the soldiers had stolen from the commissary. When the food situation improved after a year the aunt had told her mother she was going to stay a maiden aunt, and that she had had thirty-some “boyfriends” in one year and didn’t want any more sex. One sergeant from Ohio had made love to her five times on his day off and she had fallen asleep at her desk at her office job the next day. The punch line of the story was the aunt had told her mother, “Between morals and food, I’ll take food.”