THE TRAP Page 4

  Pat looked thoughtfully at Liv. “Yes, it is.”

  “It certainly is,” Liv said quickly. “I saw you the day before yesterday at the post office. You were talking to Walter McKenzie.”

  The two dogs were suddenly underfoot again, worrying their ankles. “Oh, indeed I was,” Claire said. “Listening to one of his yarns, if I remember it correctly. Never even saw you.” Her mouth crumpled in consternation. “And you alone all summer. You must think me a perfectly dreadful neighbor.”

  Liv suppressed the desire to tell Claire not to fuss. She was grateful Claire was a dreadful neighbor. The last thing she wanted to do with her summer was listen to Claire’s dramatic monologues on her bitch’s female problems.

  Instead she did some more lying. “Of course I don’t,” Liv reassured her. “Travis and I just had a very quiet summer. You know how it is with a four-year-old.”

  Claire, who had never had children and hadn’t the faintest idea how it was with a four-year-old, nodded wisely.

  “I can’t believe you manage this party every year and still stay calm,” Liv continued.

  Claire smiled contentedly with the stroking—and a generous quantity of gin and Valium.

  Liv felt Pat’s curious eyes on her and looked around quickly. Terry Breen, six-foot-five and tonsure gleaming, was easy to pick out of the herd. She elbowed Pat.

  “There’s Terry. We’d better go say hi.”

  “Excuse me,” Pat said, and abandoned Liv.

  Liv squeezed one of Claire’s plump hands in hers. “Thanks for having us,” and followed Pat.

  Claire fluttered vaguely, her dogs pogoing around her ankles, and drifted back into the general melee.

  Liv found herself alone in the crowd. After three years’ summering on Nodd’s Ridge, most of the faces were familiar to her. She had begun to match the faces with the names on the sign at the junction of the cottage road and Dexter Road. But she didn’t really know any of them. The season was too brief. People didn’t neighbor all that much. Why should they? They came here to get away.

  It was a largely middle-aged to elderly population, with the Russells, the Breens, and the Spellmans representing the first infiltration of the Baby Boom. The three younger couples drifted together, though they saw one another only occasionally during the short summer.

  Liv groped her way to the table the Spellmans and Breens had claimed. Arriving earlier, they had eaten their fill, evidenced by a minor wasteland of paper plates, napkins, and plastic utensils on the table. The two wives had settled, deep in conversation, at the end. Pat joined Mike Spellman and Terry Breen.

  Mike hugged Liv eagerly. A Californian who brought his deep tan with him to Nodd’s Ridge each summer, he had been through several kinds of sensitivity encounters between divorce from his first wife and his current marriage. His enthusiasm for hugging and touching was always disconcerting to Liv, who had grown up among people embarrassed and afflicted by feeling, who rarely touched one another, except in anger. She had come to be able to touch her children and Pat, but was still profoundly uneasy at the casual touch of acquaintances and strangers.

  Terry paused long enough in demonstrating his backhand to Pat to smile and say hi. His wife, Linda, and Mike’s wife, Barrie, heads bent close, glanced up together. They fluttered fingertips and made ephemeral, embarrassed smiles at her, and with undue haste resumed their interrupted conversation. Mike frowned at them, cast a worried, apologetic smile at her, and turned back to Pat and Terry.

  Liv sat between the men and the women, at the unoccupied end of the table. She wondered what weighty subject enthralled the other women—children? Barrie had a two-year-old girl by Mike, and her stepchildren, the teenaged boys Mike called the Twinkies, every summer. Terry and Linda had a fifteen-year-old girl. Or perhaps they were discussing career-wife-motherhood conflicts. They both worked with their husbands: Linda a senior attendant training new stews for the airline whose wide-bodied jets Terry flew; Barrie the head surgical nurse in the university teaching hospital where Mike was head of pediatrics. It might be anything—antiques, prevention of massive coronary in type-A males, the total famine of designer labels in any shop within fifty miles of Nodd’s Ridge.

  Pat’s hand fell on her shoulder. “Want a drink?” Before she could answer, he squeezed her gently and disappeared in the direction of the bar. Terry Breen went with him, talking excitedly and laughing a lot.

  Mike sat down next to her. “How are you, babe?” he asked, and squeezed her thigh. It was his bedside manner, intimate, total concentration on the patient, but distinctly Papa Bear, warmth without sex.

  “Just fine,” she said easily, and squeezed his thigh. “What about you, doc?”

  Mike glowed, delighted at being answered in kind.

  Liv was embarrassed at herself for mocking him. She ought to know better by now. Mike Spellman didn’t have a sarcastic bone in his body. She was almost sure he didn’t have any sense of humor either, which unexpectedly didn’t make him grouchy or gloomy, but rather curiously, almost relentlessly cheerful. She didn’t hold it against him. Her own sarcastic streak brought her little pleasure. And she had begun to think she had lost what little sense of humor she had once possessed. At least Mike had a sunny nature by way of compensation.

  “We’ve been worried about you,” Mike said.

  “Oh?” Liv braced herself.

  “Yeah. I tell you it was a real relief to see you two here tonight. Is everything okay again?”

  Liv was excruciatingly aware that Mike’s hand had fallen over hers on the table.

  She summoned up a smile for him. “I don’t know.”

  His hand on hers tightened and his face sobered appropriately.

  “Jesus,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do, just call. It helps to talk sometimes. I know, babe, I’ve been there. You want to talk to Uncle Mike, you just say so. We’ll take a canoe out on the pond and have a picnic, a nice bottle of wine and some cheese, over on the island. How’s that sound?”

  “You’re sweet,” Liv said.

  Mike looked up and beamed. “Pat!” he said. “I’ve been making a date with your wife.”

  “Can’t trust that man a minute,” Barrie said cheerfully.

  Terry Breen, juggling a stack of paper plates loaded with roast pig and potato salad, a nosegay of plastic forks in his breast pocket, roared delightedly. Linda forced a constipated smile.

  Pat, drinks in hand, inserted himself between Liv and Mike. “Better rush it, then,” he said. “We’re out of here Sunday afternoon.”

  “Shit,” said Mike. “How about Saturday?”

  Liv shrugged apologetically. Mike was downcast.

  Terry Breen slid a paper plate of greasy meat in front of her and handed her a fork.

  “Thanks, Terry,” she said automatically.

  He winked at her. “Struck out, hot shot?” he asked Mike.

  Mike patted Liv’s shoulder. “You get a minute, call.”

  Nodding agreeably, to close the subject, she tasted the drink Pat had given her: white wine, tepid and oversweet. She put it down. The combination of wine and aspirin would keep her up all night. She had enough problems sleeping.

  “So what kept you from paradise all summer?” Mike asked Pat.

  Barrie looked up at Liv and just as quickly looked away, Linda just straight through her, as if she weren’t there. Liv felt a sudden, surprising surge of amusement.

  “Work,” said Pat. “What else? Shooting a movie.”

  Respectful silence indicated he had impressed them all.

  “L.A.?” Mike asked. He was comically surprised when Pat answered, “Nope. Louisiana.”

  “Louisiana?” Terry repeated. He loomed over them, a beer in one hand. Splaying one big hand on the table, he bent over it to shove his face into Pat’s. “You spent the summer in Louisiana? Louisifuckingana?”

  Heads turned in the crowd around them. Linda hissed softly at Terry. He ignored her.

  Liv wondered when Terry had gotten start
ed and how much he had had.

  “Louisifuckingana,” he said again, in wonderment.

  Pat laughed. “Yeah. Louisifuckingana. Down in the Bayou. Which had the juicy role of the Big Bad Jungle. Bayard Rohrer’s the director. Scott Kinsella is the male lead.” He dropped the names casually.

  “Scott Kinsella!” Barrie Spellman squealed.

  The table had become the center of a larger group. People around them were listening avidly.

  By herself at the edge of the crowd was Miss Alden, of an uncertain age, a little stooped but not enough to perceptibly diminish her six feet of height. At last year’s Labor Day barbecue, notable for her absence, Pat had remarked that Miss Alden, who held the Douglas MacArthur Chair of Military History at Harvard, had apparently inherited the General’s wardrobe as well, for she habitually wore riding boots and crisp khaki trousers and shirts and did not vary her costume for social events. A measure of contempt showed in the stance she assumed: hipshot, with her gnarled hands clasped over the gold head of the cane planted directly in front of her. She did not seem to really need the cane; Pat insisted that, like her military-style clothing, it was a prop. But tonight, Liv thought, Miss Alden was really leaning on it. Her large head was thrust slightly forward of her body, like that of a predatory bird. Dark, feverish eyes outlined in kohl dominated her pale, nearly fleshless face despite the prominence of her nose—a haughty, exotic beak. Her skin seemed hardly more than a layer of paint and powder over the mask of the petrified bone. Her skull was turbaned, like a gypsy’s, in a black silk scarf, showing enough forehead and temple to suggest severe loss or total absence of hair.

  “What’s it about?” Terry asked.

  Pat grinned at them boyishly.

  “It opens in ‘Nam,” Pat said. “Americans trapped in a firefight calling fire in on themselves.”

  Liv studied the bugs swimming in her paper cup of wine to hide the irritation she felt with Pat for using ‘Nam, which implied the first name familiarity of those who had been there. Bayard, the director, did, too. All the men associated with the movie did. The only one of them who had actually served there was Jesse Rideout, the sound man, who had been a medic. He was a big gentle black man, who favored faded MASH T-shirts and sung scat under his breath while he worked. He was a Coptic Zionist who smoked marijuana, which he called Ol’ Red Eye, like it was tobacco. It did not seem to affect him at all.

  During her single, midsummer visit to the set, Liv heard him talk about Vietnam only once, and that was after hours, in the motel bar that had become a crew hangout for the duration. Scott Kinsella and Pat had gotten into an argument about the war, one of those futile expositions of cliché to which Liv had listened for years.

  Kinsella rapped the mug of his beer chaser on the table. “We were never allowed to fight to win,” he declared.

  “Eisenhower warned us not to get into an Asian land war,” said Pat. “That kind of war can’t be won. The Chinese have been trying and failing to subdue Cochin China for a thousand years. The Japanese couldn’t do it. The best French forces got their asses whipped there, too, you know.”

  Kinsella dismissed the history of Cochin China with a shrug of his meaty shoulders. “The Frogs haven’t won a war in a hundred years,” Kinsella said. “Hitler rolled right over ‘em, didn’t he?”

  Jesse Rideout, who was half-Cajun French, laughed softly.

  Liv Russell recognized Jesse Rideout’s laugh. It was the amiable rueful sound her father made when he had to suffer a fool.

  Though it hurt to talk, sudden rage loosened Liv’s tongue. “We dropped eight hundred thousand tons of explosives on South Vietnam in one year, the same amount of explosives we dropped on the entire South Pacific during World War Two,” she said bitterly. “That’s what you call holding back?”

  Kinsella looked at her from across the table. “We should have nuked the little bastards,” he said.

  “Come on, Scott,” Pat protested.

  “He means it,” Jesse Rideout said. “He don’t know what it means. But he means it.”

  Scott glared at Jesse. “Goddamn right I mean it.”

  “When you there?” Jesse asked softly.

  Kinsella looked uncomfortable. “I was exempted,” he said.

  Too old, Liv thought, looking at the creped skin around Kinsella’s eyes that was always made-up for the camera. She smiled.

  Kinsella turned on her.

  Pat jumped in to defuse the tension. He leaned across the table, his eye alight. “What was it like, Jesse?”

  Jesse was quiet a moment. “The people was real little, like kids,” he said. “I always felt like Uncle Jesse. I could understand ‘em on account of they spoke French, not just like Cajun French, but close, you know, with a real pretty accent. That way I picked up Vietnamese. It was a lot like home, like here. I liked it. Met my wife there.”

  No one had known about the Vietnamese wife. Pat and Liv exchanged uncomfortable glances, both wondering if this movie was in some unspoken way offensive to Jesse. How had he felt seeing the Japanese girl, Terry Shore, who played the doomed May, naked and seemingly dead upon the chopper’s rotor blades?

  Kinsella snorted, reaching for his whiskey. “Maybe you should have stayed there, you felt so at home.”

  Jesse smiled at him. “Maybe I should have, Mistah Kinsella,” he said, and there was the faintest mockery in his voice. He got up out of his chair with a measured grace that made Scott Kinsella flinch for an instant, as if he thought Jesse was going to reach across the table and take him by the throat and shake him. But Jesse only looked at Kinsella with scornful, bloodshot eyes, and turned his broad back to leave.

  Liv and Pat went back to the depressing little room in the cement block motel that had been Pat’s home all summer. On the inadequate bed, with its worn acidic green whipcord spread and broken-backed mattress, they made love for the first time in several weeks, though Liv was in the last day of her period, and she bled, inadvertently and to her deep embarrassment, upon the sheets. Naked in the suffocating heat of the Louisiana summer night, they tried to sleep, but the bed seemed to grow smaller as they shifted and turned, trying to find the right position.

  In place of sleep, Liv imagined that this was how Jesse Rideout’s nights in Saigon had been. The heat of the night tenting the whole world, the night sounds of the city coming in through the louvers at the glassless windows from the street below, the Vietnamese-accented French of the bar girls going home in the pre-dawn, something like the French she heard outside their door in the morning, when the motel maids began their day’s work. She imagined Jesse Rideout and his Vietnamese wife, as small as a child, asleep on whatever passed for their bed, a mattress on the floor, or perhaps they had a real bed, left over from the colonial days, with a mosquito net like a cloud of marijuana smoke over them. Perhaps there was a darkening spot of menstrual blood diluted with semen on the sheet beneath them. Though the sun had not yet risen, the new day’s heat weighed on her when she rose to take her fifteenth and sixteenth extrastrength aspirin in twenty-four hours.

  If Kinsella was over age, Bayard the director, all the young actors who played vets (including Pat, who as well as writing the screenplay had taken a cameo role and died early in the movie), half the crew, in fact, were in the right age group for Vietnam service. But they had all been safely tucked away in college. As she had. It was a war she had hated, hated still, but she felt, a decade later, an unexpected burden of guilt because working-class kids had died there while she and her friends, white and all right, smoked dope, screwed each other enthusiastically, and took their moral pulses daily.

  ‘Nam. She knew it wasn’t guilt that suddenly blossomed into ‘Nam flashbacks for every name male actor in every action film made in the last few years. It was just macho convenience—real men had been, of course, to ‘Nam, been scarred, and come back home. To smoke dope, screw endlessly and to no end women who had never been where they had been and so could never understand, the sexual intimacy not just nullifying but actua
lly widening the wall of experience between them. Their moral pulses were stopped at the instant, flashing back on them while they slept or tried to screw or encountered stress; they remembered, or almost remembered, the terrible things they had witnessed. Witnessed, never done. In ‘Nam. In the movie ‘Nam.

  “Incredible losses, but there are survivors,” Pat continued. “Some of the survivors think they were set up by the Vietnamese girlfriend of their sergeant, who was badly wounded in the firefight. They execute her. The rest of the movie is ten years later when the sergeant, who knows it wasn’t his girl and wants to avenge her and the guys who got killed, stalks the survivors all over the country to execute them. ‘Course they’re all combat vets, trained killers, and they’ve stayed in touch. He only gets one or two before the others are alerted. Then they fight back.”

  Pat stopped to sip at a can of beer. Everyone was quiet, waiting for him to go on.

  “Do you want to know what happens next?”

  They all groaned and there was a chorus of “Yes, yes!”

  “Well, that would be telling,” Pat said. “You’ll have to go see the movie.”

  There was another explosion of laughter and protest.

  “Jesus,” Terry Breen said. “That was great.”

  “What’s it called?” Barrie asked.

  “Firefight.”

  “I love it,” Linda said.

  “Me, too,” said Barrie.

  “When’s it out?” Mike asked.

  “Christmas, I hope,” Pat said. He stood up and stretched.

  “What was it like working with Kinsella?” Barrie wanted to know.

  Pat launched into a story about the actor that Liv had heard in a previous, cruder version earlier in the summer. Pat had revised it to make Scott look cleverer and himself more the butt.

  Liv toyed with the strips of cooling meat on her plate. A hard clawlike hand dropped on her shoulder.

  “Room for me?” Miss Alden asked.

  Liv nodded and moved over. Disposing her cane crisply to one side, Miss Alden lowered herself onto the bench next to Liv. At the other end of the table, Linda and Barrie shot uneasy glances.