On their first night alone together, Anne Cowan has gas, and is the type of modern woman to announce this mid-noir, center candlelight, right as Robert is pushing aside their T-bones. Tonight they’re Clean Plate Rangers, having tested each other’s manners—wrong knife, tines up, napkins on the table—but zilch, he’s certain, could have girded him for this.
“What would you like me to do about that?”
“Nothing, I guess,” she says, “unless you have something. Do you have anything? Phazyme?”
They’re at the El Dorado Bed & Breakfast halfway between Carthage and Sedalia. This alone required some finagling, a detailed fabrication about a meeting Robert had in the area, and even still, it had to be on Anne’s terms. A hotel, for instance, was out of the question, but she’d supposed it’d be all right if it were a B&B, and all right so long as he made steak dinner in the bulking onsite oven, and if they discussed their future over wine, and agreed, if things felt natural, it would be all right to spend the night together, in each other’s arms.
“No, I don’t.”
The room is cramped with enormous tan furniture that can’t come apart nor be lifted, has been here forever, and will stay just as long. A mismatched bedroom set is mixed in with the couch and dining area, so they are as much in the chamber of coition as they are in the kitchen. A ceiling fan is fast over them and turned as bright as it can go, lighting the dumplings of skin beneath her sockets and the start of a unibrow. Her brown velvet dress matches the throw pillows, and soon, she could be between them, if things go all right.
“Can you go down and ask?”
“Down?”
“Yeah,” she says. “The front desk might have some.”
It’s a frivolous mission already, made more fabulous still considering that Robert does have Phazyme tucked in the side pocket of his messenger bag, where he keeps his wallet and pictures of Susan and the boys. He fusses for a moment, deciding whether to put back on his shoes, which require a production to tie, and he’s already gotten comfortable. Plus, El Dorado is carpeted all the way down, thick blue to every baseboard and over each stair. He opens the door to leave.
“No shoes?”
“I’ll just be fast,” he says.
“Do you have a key?”
“You’ll be here, won’t you?”
“In case I’m indisposed when you get back.”
He goes to the dresser where he’s placed the key and holds it up to her before sliding it into a front pocket, then leaves. To his right, a single mother and her children are trying to get into Room 4, but struggling with the key. The little daughter in blush overalls looks at him with credulous misery, and being the generous man he is, Robert walks over to help.
“Let me get this for you, ma’am.”
“It’s not ‘ma’am,’ it’s ‘miss,’” says the boy, who’s older than the girl, and wearing a too-large hat.
“Quiet, James,” she says. Then, “Thank you,” to Robert.
The boy’s got on his stinkface, and when the door comes open, pushes his sister in first then throws a big, green purse at her. The mother is too tired for patience or gratitude, nods at Robert and shuts him out. Through three inches of original oak, he can hear the squeals of the girl at the cruelty of brotherhood and the crash and bang of flung objects.
He takes to the stairs, which threaten a spill when his socks slip on the carpeting. It feels as though there are infinite other carpets beneath it, filled with lint and accidents, dead with beetles and dust mites. At the bottom, beside a tower of ice-blue luggage, a mastiff puppy sleeps on a bath towel beside a dish of water. There isn’t much of a lobby—just a desk in the hallway—and no one is manning the counter. There’s no bell to ring, and once one minute passes, Robert considers going back upstairs and telling Anne he checked, he asked, and she’s out of luck. But without the Phazyme, she might not be all right, may not want to move forward or finish the wine, and he’s not sure when his next chance will be to see her overnight. Keeping waiting, he stares at a poorly composed still life of a gray bagel on a checkered blanket beside a tub of Kraft cream cheese, (two times the size of the bagel), and a plate of anchovies. It is signed Kojak. As Robert’s hope is failing, he hears the desk clerk’s voice in the next room: “I’ll be with you in a minute!”
When the next minute passes and she still isn’t with him, and what felt like a miracle begins to act like something he’s dreamt, Robert follows the voice into the next room—the dining room—to find she had not been talking to him at all, but rather three supermodels sitting with their forearms on the tablecloth, and whispering to each other around an ewer of carnations. All three look up at the same time, and beam in a way that the room fills with daylight, then dims again to the glare of exposed lamp bulbs and extraordinary silence.
“Hello,” he says. “Have you seen the clerk?”
“Nice socks,” says the one with the blond bob.
“Come sit,” says another.
“Guys,” the third whispers, “what are you doing?”
“What?” asks the first. “He could be here for the convention.”
“What convention?” he asks, then again, “Have you seen her? Has she been in here?”
“Come on,” the second one says again, patting the chair beside her.
Robert goes to it and sits there, putting a napkin quickly over his lap, where he fears at the slightest suggestion, blood will flow and all life and comfort will be destroyed.
“I only have a minute,” he says. “I need to ask the clerk something.”
“Are you here to see Dr. Eadburg?”
The one beside him slides her wine past the carnations. He takes a drink and gives it back. Behind them, a fireplace with a grand, white mantel is lined with porcelain lambs and foals. There is a patriotic urn on the end with a newspaper clipping framed above it. An orange map of Missouri is glassed-in above a peacock chair in the corner.
“Never heard of him,” he says.
The three look at each other and take a sip as if making a pact.
“Okay,” the first one says. “We’ll tell you.”
“That’s all right. I don’t mind.”
“It’s important that you know,” says the second. “You’ll find out anyway. Dr. Eadburg is a prophet of God.”
“Is that right?”
“And we’re his wives,” says the third, “or we will be, in Heaven. He selected us three out of everybody in the world.”
“I wonder why,” says Robert. “So, the prophet is right here in El Dorado?”
“He’s at El Dorado.”
“What do you mean ‘at’?”
“He’s being wrongfully held at the correctional facility,” says the second, “for one hundred and seventy years.”
“Oh, I see,” says Robert. “So, he’s a rapist and murderer?”
“How could you say that?” asks the third. “Dr. Eadburg’s mind is God’s mind. His body is God’s body. His schmunt is God’s schmunt. He writes to us. He writes about the snake of Heaven. He loves us, and even if you hate him, he loves you, too. Even you. He’s your prophet. Even you.”
“His schmunt is whose what?”
“All his outcomes are blessings.”
“Him in jail?” Robert asks.
The second one laughs with anger. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” in singsong. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know who you’re talking about or who you’re talking to.”
“We’ll finally meet tomorrow,” says the first.
“You’re going to the jail?”
“It’s the circumstances,” she says. “We can’t change the circumstances but we don’t have to accept them.”
“Can’t he change the circumstances if he’s so God?”
“You have such a rude way of talking,” says the third one. “No wonder you’re here alone.”
The front desk clerk comes in from the kitchen, which, with its doors open, smells up the room with dust and bullion. Though perhaps not Eadburg’s cuppa, she’s nothing to laugh at in an empire waist top, crocheted at the neckline, where her clavicle fades under fat. She’s semi-blond, too, and would be blonder if she bathed, as her hair is parted down the middle and combed into two slick flaps on the sides of her head, shining dark. Her forehead sparkles with grease. She holds reheated frittatas and blackberry scones.
“This is all we had,” she says. “I hope it’s enough.”
Behind her shoulder, another still life is hung. On a red, one-dimensional table lacking the proper parallelograms, two ugly fruits are painted—perhaps mangos—crooked and parted, and appear as a doublet of pelletal breasts. Kojak tried using coffee to stain the background, causing the paper to ripple and scrunch.
“What’s in the eggs?” the second one asks.
“Rabbit and leeks.”
They stick up their chins.
“You think that’s gross, sweetheart?” Robert asks. “Wait until you see the prophet’s ding-dong.”
The first one spits her wine on the tablecloth, tries to stand, but is too frail, appears to have something wrong with her hip, and lands back in her seat with a yelp.
“Can I get you something, Mr. Dunn?” the clerk asks.
“Phazyme?”
All three brides go sage with nausea.
“Right away.”
***
Upstairs, Anne has found Robert’s Phazyme as well as the photos of his kids, and is standing by the bed, leaning on the frame, flicking through them. She isn’t mad, but wants to meet them, thinks they’re “adorable,” that they remind her of her nephews in Salt Lake whose mother was in the hospital all the time with valve disease. Robert says yes, okay, that she can meet them, but first, he needs to know she’s serious, that she’s starting to fall in love, and he lays her bare-ass on the Bargello quilt, has sex with her in an ill way that requires little motion or participation on the woman end, and doesn’t think about Susan or the boys, who are all over the state tonight at sleepovers and other forms of suffering. Gall-slow and knocking, it is the same act as usual—all the culture sucked out of it, all the pageantry—with just the noise of slapping testicles on perineum in a beating extraction.