16. SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE

                                           aka "SPUKHAFTE FERNWERKUNG" *
                                                                                                    A. Einstein

19 ~ 21 April 2009

Despite the spectre of being sucked into an undertow of treacherous memories, Solitaire decided, two weeks after Em’s death, to accept her cousin Gillian’s invitation to visit her and her husband, Alec, in Hawaii.

                                               A PHOBIC CONUNDRUM

In the process of mulling it over, however, Solitaire made a shocking discovery:  she was afraid to travel alone.  She who had ventured throughout much of Southeast Asia as a young reporter and in the years since then had lived all over the world was now afraid to hop on a plane for Hawaii. More than that, she was actually fearful of leaving her house.  This was an insupportable situation. Solitaire wondered if the condition were typical;  did other men and women, finding themselves eternally (as far as one knew) severed from their mates, suffer this sense of disabling dislocation, too?   

All her life, or for as long as she could remember, Solitaire had been afflicted with claustrophobia and now, it turned out, she was on her way to developing full blown agoraphobia, as well.  This meant that not only was she was afraid of getting locked into her house, she was also afraid of getting locked out.  She realized that she must immediately conquer at least one of her ridiculous phobias.   What if she were suddenly to decide, at 30,000 feet over the Pacific, that she had to leave the plane?

A case of Acute Claustrophobia

  Or what if she were to decide upon landing that she could not leave the plane?  She could only imagine the humiliating, not to say, bizarre, scene with airport security that might result.

 What to do?

                                      SELDOM DO WE KNOW FROM WHICH QUADRANT                                                                                                    

                                                         THE ANSWER WILL COME

In this particular instance, the solution to Solitaire's dilemma was provided, unexpectedly and  inadvertently, by a casual acquaintance, a woman named Constanze Salcedo, whom she had met at a quantum physics discussion group.  A what?  One might think that Solitaire's participation in such a group was the stuff of comedy -- and one would be right.  Whatever bodega of the human brain God had designated as a storage depot for such items as protons, photons, futons, neutrinos, and so forth, was, in Solitaire's skull,  a tiny chamber of homely horrors occluded with rubber bands and quarks and paper clips and -- yes! --- bits of string, all paddling sluggishly in a stagnant pool of black matter.

 But Solitaire, in fairness, did not attend these meetings for her own mental betterment, but for Em's.  As she watched him retreating further each day into the fortress of his mind, she felt impelled to pull him out, to spark up his synapses and force him to reconnect with others of his ilk, persons who spoke with affection of waves and particles, argued exuberantly about nonlocality and uncertainty and quantum entanglement, and took turns reading aloud, chuckling now and then, from the works of Brian Greene or Dr. Feynman.

These small, convivial gatherings were held every Tuesay afternoon on the terrace of Constanze's villa until, one day, she married Neville Castleton and moved into the Castleton family hacienda, whereupon the venue  changed from mountain-top terrace to river-valley verandah.

In the days since Em’s death, Constanze had repeatedly invited Solitaire to come and sojourn at her ranch.    

“Stay as long as you like,” she urged.  “Bring your dogs.  I’ll be away for a month.”

So who was Constanze Castleton?  Solitaire was essentially clueless.  What little she had heard was based on idle and malicious gossip.

                                                         THE BACK STORY

There were those in the Old Pueblo -– though Solitaire was not one of them –whose contention it was that Constanze Salcedo had married Neville Castleton for his money and his name.  Why else, they said, would she have "taken up" with a man twenty years her senior?   Salcedo, incidentally, was the surname of Constanze’s second husband, an alleged “drug lord” who had been gunned down in a shoot-out in a town called Ruby.  When Constanze married Neville she dropped the “Salcedo”  -- “like a hot burrito,” according to a number of her friends -- and became Constanze Castleton. 

“Constanze Castleton ...  tres chic,” Crystal sneered, pronouncing the first word as though it were the Spanish numeral “three” and the second as though it were a small chicken.  

 “The problemo is," said Crystal, "that her name was never Costazi  or whatever.  I went all through Rincon High with that high-falutin’ phoney and her name was plain old Connie van Keuykendal. “

“What's so plain about that?" said Solitaire.  "Anyway, Constanze told me she was named after Mozart’s wife, from whom she is distantly descended.  A dubious distinction, by the way.  Though some say Frau Mozart was much maligned."

Constanze Weber Mozart

“Distantly what?  Who?”

Crystal, who described herself as a natureopathic aesthetician, had a salon in the golf resort of Cielo Verde where she tendered the usual international services:  French nails, Swedish massage, Brazilian wax job, Thai two-hander, Hawaiian lomi-lomi, etc.

Crystal gave Neville a mani/pedi every Monday morning and a haircut every Wednesday afternoon.

The subject of who paid for what and who had more money than whom was a source of unending fascination and speculation among the local citizenry.  There was a general consensus, especially among the friends of Neville’s former wife, Marjorie, that it was Neville who had the bulk of the boodle and Constanze who was after it.  It was Solitaire’s opinion, on the other hand, that all three of them were loaded, one way or another, but that it was, in fact,  Marjorie, whose family was in rum, candy bars and (formerly) slaves, who probably led the league.

“It was always Neville’s money,” Crystal insisted.

  “If that’s the case,” Solitaire countered, “then how is it that Constanze had that magnificent villa up in the hills long before she married Neville?”

Crystal, who was giving Solitaire a "Sea of Cortez Algae Scrub"($85), paused in her ministrations to give her supine client a playful kidney punch.  "Drug money," she said.

The irony, from Marjorie's perspective anyway, was that it was she who, when Neville fell ill, had hired Constanze to be her husband's nutritional planner and spiritual (California-Buddhist) guru.  She was to provide positive emotional support, relieve him of stress through yoga-breath, mindfulness and meditation.  She did all that, and possibly more.  Within the year, Constanze and Neville were living together.


                      WHAT ON EARTH COULD MARJORIE HAVE BEEN THINKING?

Constanze was a raving beauty.  She was tall and full-breasted, shaped like the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, (minus two of the four arms) with an exotic cast to her features and dark, long hair cascading in drifts of ringlets over her shoulders.  Her clothes were not to everyone's taste, perhaps, but there was no denying that she had her own "look"  -- a belted and booted, long-skirted style popularized by a shop called The Cowboy's Sweetheart.  At home of an evening, she favored saris and sandals and bangles and bells that jingled and jangled gently in an aura that fairly glimmered as she swayed.  Her demeanor was calm and beneficent and her voice so melodious, so soothingly modulated that a man had to lean in very close to hear whatever uplifting spiritual prattle she might be imparting.  The simple message on her voice mail  was murmured with such genuine feeling that one would have to have been the most jaded cynic  to have doubted for even a moment her exhortation to:

                                                       "Have a really beautiful day!"

 It should be noted in passing that Marjorie, too, was an attractive woman with her own distinctive style and persona, but she was tart and tendentious, and too smart for her own good.  She was also twenty years older than Constanze.

Not only did Solitaire like Constanze, she was definitely in her debt, for she was one of the few people who had been kind to Em when he was dying. She brought great pots of scarlet hibiscus to brighten up his hospital room and Solitaire never told her that Em had contracted MRSA while he was in St Joseph's Hospital and that therefore, although he had been allowed through hospital staff carelessness to become infected with  staphylococcus bacilli, referred to scientifically as "Super Bugs" by medical personnel, he was not allowed to be contaminated with plants and flowers that might be bearing aphids or thrips.  

Solitaire had been to Constanze's villa, but not to the recently remodelled hacienda about which she had heard so much.  So, with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation, she accepted.  It would be a test run.

                                                  IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOWS

It was late afternoon when Solitaire arrived. The shadows were long, but the breeze was still warm and the top was down on her convertible. The poplars and cottonwoods growing along the river bank trembled overhead and their leafy sussurus rustled in counterpoint to the ecstatic scraping of the cicadas.  Lying on the back seat, the dogs gazed up with expressions of mild wonder at the sunlight flickering in the trees high overhead.  She wondered what they were thinking.

“Thinking?” Em would have laughed.  “Thinking?”

Just before they reached the ranch, the road became a series of S-curves, the unpaved surface so thick and slippery with a top layer of caliche that the car seemed in danger of hydroplaning and she thought what a nightmare it would be in a flash flood during the summer rains. 

In fact, it was only the previous August that Marjorie Castleton, then still married to Neville, but in the painful process of separating, came within an inch, a literal inch, of drowning.   With characteristic determination, (and distracted, she later said, by her marital problems), she ignored an evening downpour and a large sign -- a sign that she herself had ordered to be placed at the river-crossing -- that said:

DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED

and foolhardily forged across this very wash, which only moments before had been dry.  Almost immediately she found herself looking at a wall of muddy water roaring towards her.  In that instant, she knew she was in serious trouble:  the car engine stalled, the vehicle turned sideways and, totally out of control, swept along on the rushing waters of the Santa Cruz.  Luck was with Marjorie, however.  A willow tree, bent low over the water, snagged the car and held it in its branches, but Marjorie nearly reversed her luck by opening the door in an attempt to escape, at which point the water rushed in, filling the car before the door, under tremendous pressure, inexorably shut with the windows up and Marjorie trapped.  The water had nearly reached her nose when a neighboring rancher, Hector Pratt, thinking it strange to see two headlights where there should have been none, walked out to investigate and pried Marjorie out of her Lexus with a crowbar. 

 

 "The woman's a nitwit," Hector said ungenerously.  "What the hail was she doing there, anyway?  She  knows better than that -- she's lived here all her life."

"That's what she gets for driving a Japanese junk car," said Solitaire's mother.  Lavinia had never forgiven "the Nips", as she called them, for imprisoning her during World War II.  "Those wretched people incarcerated me for three whole years and never even apologized!"

"Is that a pun?" Solitaire asked.

But the monsoons were still three months away and the Santa Cruz River was no more than a trickle.  A family of Gambel quail, the tiny new-born chicks already tricked out in their perfect little headdresses fluttered through the dust, cheeping and flapping behind their vigilant parents over the rocks and ropes of thick white caliche that coiled at the base of the cottonwoods.  

Emerging from the cienega onto a road beside a horse pasture, Solitaire drove by fields of tall grass, dark gold in the setting sun and studded with mesquite and stands of black oak.  Two bay mares were grazing, their tails and manes waving in the wind.   She could feel her own hair blowing back, cooling her neck.  The road took her along the side of the hacienda and around to the back where there was a four car garage and a barn and a grove of silvery eucalyptus.

Constanze had told Solitaire that Ramon, her foreman, (she called him “her” foreman, but in fact he had worked for the Castletons for many years) would be waiting for her and that she should collect the house keys from him.  Ramon looked as though he had been sent over from Central Casting; tall, slim, with a trim mustache, he was the image of Cesar Romero, who for years had played the role of the Cisco Kid, as well as other gay caballeros and archetypal latin lovers.  There were differences:  Romero lived with his mother, Ramon with his wife.  Having given Solitaire a quick once-over and tour of the villa, he left for home, climbing into his pickup truck with his two
spotted cattle dogs in the back and saying he would return early the next morning.  When he had gone, Solitaire prowled around on her own.

The old ranch house had undergone a complete makeover by Constanze and her decorator.  No expense, as they say, had been spared.   Even before Constanze and Neville were married, major demolition and reconstruction had begun.  Oldtimers were scandalized. 

“What’s her hurry?”  they said.  “She must think he’s going to snuff it pretty quick and she wants to get everything all tied up and in her name before he does.”  Indeed, by employing round-the-clock Mexican crews, and personally supervising them, the work proceeded with amazing rapidity, despite the fact that virtually every architectural feature was constructed to order on a scale at least one-and-a-half times normal  and therefore had to be specially ordered and made by hand.

The eighteen monumental granite columns, for example, that supported the colonnade, looked as though they could easily have supported the roof of King Ashurbanipal’s palace at Ninevah.  They had been made near Guadalajara and shipped up to the U.S. border by train, after which they were unloaded and sent by huge flat-bed trucks to the ranch.  With characteristic generosity, Constanze told Solitaire that if she, too, wished to order several mega-tons of columns she had only to say the word and Constanze would include them in her next shipment.

The furniture, too, was massive, and hugely expensive,  pillaged by Constanze and her decorator, Anselmo Pantaleón, in a series of lightning strikes around Latin America, or purchased from the elegant antiquarians, Holler and Sanders, in Nogales.  And yet this seemed oddly fitting because the villa was redesigned, not for two people, and certainly not for one, but precisely for one-and-a-half people! 

The cavernous master bedroom was draped with heavy brocades, the walls hung with tapestries and faux Zurburán paintings; shadowy illumination was provided by polychrome wood santos made into lamps, and high, coffered ceilings of ebonized mesquite loomed far above.  Solitaire left the room, thinking how brave it was of Constanze to sleep there, and knowing, too, that she herself would never be able to spend as much as five minutes in that bed because she would never find her way out of it.

Neville's bedroom was a small white box clearly modeled after a cell in a Trappist monastery.  It contained a narrow wooden pallet,  a plain chest of drawers, a thorny black crucifix that was part of the decor, and an IV drip that was not.  Solitaire left her overnight bag, removed the rolling drip bottle, and walked out onto the verandah.  At the far end of the colonnade, a ghostly figure in white swayed toward them.  The dogs, who were bowling like dust balls along the  length of the verandah, braked to a stop, and growled at the apparition.  It was Elena, who had been Neville's caregiver, in a long white Mexican dress and carrying a brace of hurricane lamps.  "You might need these," she said.

The two women leaned on the balustrade, mesmerized by the water cascading into the pool, the  lengthening shadows, the flickering lamplight.  From somewhere nearby came the the hoot of a horned owl and the sounds of mourning doves going to roost.

“It’s magnificent,” Solitaire said.

“Magnifico, si,” Elena said.  “Pero muy triste.”

 Elena was a sacral/cranial practitioner hired by Constanze to give succor to poor Neville whose cancer-ridden bones were so brittle that if you hugged him too effusively he would recoil, gasping with pain.  But it was a long time since anyone had been allowed to hug Neville, effusively or otherwise; even a peck on the cheek seemed hazardous, the bones so sharp it was like kissing razor blades.

Neville suffered from relentless insomnia.  So Elena spent the better part of the late afternoon preparing Neville for sleep.  Around four o’clock, Ramon carried him out to the verandah and laid him gently on a massage table, where to the sound of falling waters and Farsi love songs, Elena  unblocked his chi with acupuncture and reflexology, alternately heated and cooled his weary bones with warm black stones and iced white river stones, smudged him with burnt sage and turkey feathers (eagle feathers were illegal), drizzled clarified butter into his eyes, and basted his crispy sun-roasted skin with essence of amber and lavender. After two hours Ramon carried him back to his cell  and laid him gently on his monastic bed.  At which point, Neville was so blissfully knackered he could have slept through Austerlitz.  In December, the day before his 89^th birthday, Neville died.

The two women ate supper in the kitchen.

“Where are you going to sleep?” Elena asked nervously.

“In the small bedroom.”

Elena grasped her arm.  “You can’t do that!”

“Why ever not?”

Elena looked over her shoulder, then whispered hoarsely, “Because Neville died in that bed!’

“Well he can’t very well hold that against me,” Solitaire said.

"Who knows how the dead think?  ...  what grudges they may carry?"

"Wait a minute...  Are you saying that Em's shade might be angry if I slept in another dead man's bed?"

"Perhaps." Elena shuddered and looked over her shoulder again.  "I think you should come home with me."

Solitaire, while tempted, knew that it would defeat the whole purpose of this sleepover were she to yield to her cowardly impulses, so she thanked Elena and refused.

Soon after Elena's departure, a storm moved in, the first lightning bolt struck, and the power failed.  It was a hell of a show.  Thunder crashed, branches thrashed, the wind howled and sheets of rain lashed the window panes. The house creaked and groaned, the dogs woofed and growled. At last the storm moved off, grumbling.   The leaves of the sycamores and gum trees dripped, the horned owl hooted, coyotes yipped, the house settled and sighed, the dogs whimpered and whined.

Fully clothed, Solitaire lay on her back on her cenobitic cot, still as a stone sculpture on a sarcophagus, arms folded across her chest, afraid to move for fear she might disturb the dead or dislodge one or both of the small dogs pressed against either leg.   She felt as though she were entombed in a medieval catacomb.

She lay wide-eyed until first light, at which point she stretched cautiously and the dogs stretched and the three of them yawned and blinked.  Then Solitaire sat up and looked at her watch….5.07…

“Okay, guys,” she said, pulling on her boots,  “we’re out of here!”

The three of them bolted from the bedroom and raced through the kitchen, where she tossed the house keys on the counter.  Dashing through the mud room, they surprised two marmalade cats at their morning toilette, the cats vaulting with wide-eyed agility from litter box to window sill.

Running out into the rising sun, they leapt into the car and as they drove down the road beside the pasture, the mares, excited, galloped with them, kicking up their heels.  The river had abated but she could see from the detritus how high the waters had risen.  Within the hour they were back in Tucson and she was on the phone with her cousin Gillian, then with Hawaiian Air, and then with her friend Melissa who agreed to stay with the dogs.

That same evening she packed her bag and got into bed and as she lay there waiting for sleep, she was wrapped in a haze of dozey contentment and self-congratulation, knowing that she had vanquished at least one of her two phobias.

Never again, she thought, would she allow herself to be so timid, so fearful just because she was solitary and single.  So she was single; so what?

Solitaire was in that elusive moment of descending sleep, eyelids dropping insistently,  when she heard a knocking on her bedroom door -- four sharp raps of knuckles on wood.   Then the door swung slowly open and she saw the tall figure of a naked man silhouetted against  the light.  Frozen in terror, she sat stock still.  Without moving her head, she glanced down at the dogs; although they had woofed and growled incessantly the previous night, now they did not stir, but lay curled in their beds like pea pods.  The figure, too, remained motionless, hips akimbo, right arm raised and braced against the door frame.   At last, Solitaire reached out and turned on the bedside lamp, and when she did she saw that the door was indeed open, but that there was no one there.

Fu                            and

Chu

SEMPER  FIDO

_____________________________________________________________________


*"Spukhafte fernwerkung!" scoffed Albert Einstein, thus denouncing the controversial theory of "quantum entanglement," or "action at a distance," which seeks to explain electromagnetism as the interaction of two bodies vastly separated in space, despite the absence of an intermediating agent or mechanism.  Similarly, it posits that human bodies do not necessarily have to touch in order to interact.          
      It was in 1935 that Einstein, along with his colleagues Podolsky and Rosen, presented a paper (the EPR Paradox) refuting the theory as "bosh."  As everyone knows, this disparagement led to the epic dust-up between Einstein and Bohr, sometimes known as The Copenhagen Catastrophe,  in which Bohr attempted to bolster his argument by applying, ironically, Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity,  to which Einstein countered that information could not be propagated at speeds faster than the speed of light. He then stuck out his tongue and gave a Bronx cheer, a moment that was famously captured for posterity on the Box Brownie of a Princeton passerby.
      Thus was the whole world of physics thrown into a cocked hat until the 1960s when John Bell, by applying Einstein's own theories, as well as theories of nonlocalities, inequalities and hidden variables, suggested that so-called hidden variables could be ruled out.  Moreover, "quantum entanglement" could not be used because resultant ambiguities of photon A (or B) would cause the wave to collapse.

   
      (Footnotes culled from Solitaire's quantum physics discussion group notebooks.)  

15. "OH TIME ENOUGH WHEN THE BLOOD RUNS COLD ..." *

At a truck stop in a hellhole called Cabazon, Solitaire had once come close to having a nervous breakdown.  In 1969, driving through the night with her cat Stokely from Tucson to LA to confer with a divorce attorney after four delirious days of marriage in Puerto Vallarta to someone named Raul, she had lost her inner compass and become disoriented.  Attempting to appear composed, she walked blindly into the next truck stop, sat at the counter on a revolving red leatherette stool and fought down an insistent urge to scream.  Instead, she went to the pay phone on the wall and rang up her friend, Rosy, a psychiatrist in Brentwood with whom she was planning to stay.

"If you think you're having a nervous breakdown," he said, "you're obviously not.  I suggest you order a piece of cherry pie, then find a room where you and Stokely can spend the night, and drive the rest of the way in the morning."

"Why cherry?"

"All that cornstarch tends to have a calming effect, slows the metabolism."

So Solitaire had the cherry pie and Rosy was right;  it was so egregiously disgusting with its cornstarch center and cardboard crust that it brought her to her senses. But it had been a near thing.

Now, some thirty odd years later, as she and Em sped through town on the I-10, past casinos, dinosaur parks, slots, pin ball and bingo parlours, she glanced over at Em and saw to her surprise that a river of ruby red blood was spewing from his left nostril.  The color, which was the color of burgundy in a crystal goblet with sunlight streaming through it, was achingly exquisite -- as though it were being pumped straight from Em's heart.

Pulling into a ramshackle roadside eatery next to a gas station, she tried to extract Em from the car, whereupon his legs buckled and he fell to his knees beneath a tattered palm, the lifeblood pouring into the sand where he knelt like a wounded matador, unable to rise despite their combined efforts, until a grizzled, baggy-eyed trucker loped up, grabbed Em under the arms, hauled him into the coffee shop and shoved him into a booth, at which point the waitress, whose name tag identified her as "Kelly Jean," took over.

With folded arms she sized him up and said, “That’s quite a gusher you got there, Mister.“  She shoved a fistful of paper napkins into Solitaire’s hand.  “Press down on the top of his nose while I get some ice.”

Solitaire had never, except in films, seen an oil gusher, but the pumping action, the vigour and volume, seemed metaphorically accurate.

For what may have been twenty minutes or eternity, Em, who was on a blood thinner called Coumadin, continued to bleed until Solitaire feared he would hemorrhage to death through the nose in the middle of the Mojave Desert.  Kelly Jean, meanwhile, brought them bags of ice, glasses of iced-tea, egg-salad sandwiches, and a relentless re-supply of napkins.  The ice leaked and the blood dripped and before long their booth looked, as Em later said, like the Battle of the Bilge:  little wads of bloody paper and balls of scarlet Wonderbread converged, covering the surface of the formica table and floating like soggy islets in a pink-tinted lake of Lipton’s shoaled with repulsively rosy mashed-up egg yolks.  At last, the blood flow slowed and stopped, presumably clotting and scabbing over at the source, and with many expressions of gratitude, they went on their way, Em clutching a fresh sheaf of napkins thrust upon him by Kelly Jean in farewell.

They drove towards the California-Arizona border with the sun sinking behind them. Solitaire glanced frequently over at Em, who was dozing, his head against the rest and angled toward his wife, a halo of grayish-brown curls rusted by the sunset.  He blew in and out with a kind of snuffly sound and each time he exhaled a bubble of blood slid forward just to the entrance of his nose, peeped out, and then, while her own breath hung fire, was sucked back inside like the tide.   In the course of time and repeated iterations, each nostril became delicately framed with a thin ruby crust. 

When they reached Blythe on the state line, it was still light, which was too bad because Blythe was one of the eyesores of the North American continent, beating out even Cabazon and Parker and Bullhead City – well, maybe not Bullhead City -- by a slim but quantifiable margin. 

 Solitaire had hoped they would reach Phoenix by nightfall, but obviously they were not going to make it. “I suppose we ought to spend the night here,” she said, eyeing Blythe with aversion through the dust-caked, insect-strewn windshield.

“Anything but that,” said Em.  “Let’s push on.”

By the time they reached Quartzite, the last streaks of turquoise had gone from the sky and night had dropped like a stoned crow.

 It was palpably black and noisy as hell, fences twanging, gates banging and the wind gusting and whooshing around; only the stars were silent and cold as ice chips in the whirling firmament.

The car’s headlights barely penetrated the darkness. “Where in hell are we?” she said.

“’I think we are in rat’s alley where the dead men –‘”

"Belay that!" she said.

A dim light bulb swaying on a power line threw shadows across a flapping wood sign that read :

                                    Quartzite Yacht Club & Grill

                                           Guest Acommodations

A second sign, depending by a chain from the first, announced:

                                                No Vacancy

Solitaire felt a wave of relief when she saw that sign.  In the first place, the so-called “accommodations” were actually small, grimy aluminum house trailers that bucked and whinnied in the gale.  She thought the interiors were sure to be a dismal, dangerous, sand-swept mess, with giant Mojave rattlesnakes coiled around the base of the toilet bowl, whiling away their winter hibernation in a semi-stupor while they sleepily digested a two-foot-long rat that had carelessly strayed within the radius of the rattler’s heat-seeking apparatus.  That’s if there was a toilet bowl, which she doubted. 

Secondly, she had a very bad feeling about this “Club;” she thought they were in a Coen Brothers movie and that something untoward and unspeakably horrid, like being stuffed head-first into a wood chipper, was bound to occur.

           

“Back to Blythe?” she squeaked.

Em grunted.

They pulled up in front of a Worst Western motel on the main street and Solitaire, who feared the desk clerk would think they had been on a killing spree and deny them a room, opened the trunk and tugged a clean shirt out of Em’s suitcase, but he would have none of it.  He said he would shower before he went to bed but right now he just wanted to eat because they hadn’t eaten since they left the ship and that was about ten years ago and he was ravenous, damn it, ravenous.

So they walked into the lobby in their blood-splattered clothes (Solitaire, too, had splotches of blood on her pale blue t-shirt) and the desk clerk, whose batteries had burnt out many moons ago, regarded them with his dead eyes that did not flicker even when Em gave their names as Mr. and Mrs. C. Barrow. 

Solitaire laughed and Em said, as he always did, “I like a woman who laughs at my jokes.”

“You’ll have to pay in advance,” the clerk said.

“As a reward,” Em added, “I’m going to wear my Ralph Lauren windbreaker so I won’t embarrass you in front of the town toffs.”

They walked next door to a steak house, where Solitaire was so affected by the blow-back of burnt Herefords, that she literally staggered.

“How about Chinese take-out?” she said.  “They always have terrific egg-drop soup in these remote villages.”

                       

“I have to replenish my blood supply.”

Em had a steak the size and heft of a proverbial catcher's mitt, preceded and followed by several Bombay Sapphire martinis (who said they weren't sophisticated out here?) and Solitaire, after careful perusal of the sacrificial offerings on the menu, ordered a baked potato.

"It certainly is busy here," Solitaire observed to the waitress, Margie-Jean.

"Of course it is," Margie Jean said, looking surprised.  "It's the weekend of the Rattlesnake Wrangler's Tournament."

"Tournament?"

"Sure, folks come from all over and they go out in the desert and see how many rattlers they can wrangle and they put them in a burlap sack and tomorrow night they milk the venom and --"

"And where do they keep them?"

"Mostly in their rooms.  They're supposed to keep them in their trucks, but it gets awful cold out there."

"Do they ever escape?"

"Not too often."

Pets Welcome

The atmosphere in the motel room was, despite the proximity of the desert, suffocatingly fetid, suggestive of snakes slithering about in the rank, mildewed undergrowth of the swampy shag rug.  

Em, still fully dressed, was splayed out on the disgusting quilt.  Unable to find a thermostat, Solitaire telephoned the clerk, who said they didn’t use the AC during the winter “season,” but that the swamp-cooler was operational.  She flicked the switch and a large metal box high in the wall behind the bed thundered into action, rumbling through the room like a Soviet tank through Red Square.  The dry-wall partitions shook and crackled ominously, followed by a snowfall of plaster .  Em sat up abruptly.     

“Is it May Day?’  he asked, brushing patches of paint and plaster dust from his navy blue Ralph Lauren windbreaker.

                       

Around midnight, another massive nosebleed occurred.  Once a deep sleeper, now a non-sleeper, Solitaire, lying rigid, wide-eyed and fully dressed on the bed, detected the onset as an Icelandic farm dog sniffs out a forthcoming volcanic eruption.  She could actually hear Em’s blood begin to gurgle like magma through his sinuses during a gasping hiatus in the swamp-cooler’s respiratory system.  She ran to the bathroom and fetched a small ragged towel, ignoring a hand-printed sign on the mirror that read, rather touchingly:
                                   "PLEASE DO NOT WIPE YOUR BOOTS
                                   AND BIKES WITH OUR TOWELS."

To which reasonable request, someone -- presumably an irate biker -- had scrawled in reply:

                                   "oh yeah -- how about my ass?"

              

 “Good thing I replenished my blood supply,” Em observed.

“I would have said just the opposite,” Solitaire replied.

She was up and out with the car loaded before five a.m.

 It was bitingly cold and beautiful, the air so clear and the light so luminous, hovering delicately on the horizon, that one could count every skeletal power pole all the way across the crystalline sands back to the vanishing point.  Or was she the vanishing point?

“What about breakfast?”  Em said.

“What about it?”

"It's free."

"Have you seen it?"

Around midday, in heavy truck traffic and blowing dust, she started steering over to the right, looking for the highway exit ramp that would take them north to Scottsdale.

“What are you doing?”  Em frowned.

“Looking for the exit to Fifty-seven.”

“What for?”

“I’m taking you to the Mayo Clinic.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Em –“

“Forget it.  Just take 10 to El Paso and don’t stop ‘til you pull into our garage.”

“Em,” she said in her most persuasive please-darling-be-reasonable voice, “you’ve got to see a doctor.”

“Not now!” he replied in his most recalcitrant save-your-breath unreasonable voice .  “All I intend to do now is to get into bed – my own bed.”

And so they drove south, dodging dust devils and strips of peeled rubber and clumps of tumbleweed down the I-10, past Tucson, branching towards Nogales on the I-19, into the arched Spanish entry at Tubac, and through the wrought iron gates that led to their garage.

Em stripped off his clothes, showered, and changed into a clean T-shirt and shorts whilst Solitaire kept up a running prayer that his clotted nose would not unclot.  He fell asleep instantly.  Two hours later she woke him to say that she was going to see her mother, who seemed to be hysterical about something, and then she was going to stop at the neighbor’s to collect the dogs.  She would be back in exactly one hour and a half.  Meanwhile, he was to keep his cell phone with him at all times and if he had to leave the bed he was to take it with him.  “Promise me!”

“I promise,” he said, adding, “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

Returning on the stroke of five, Solitaire walked into the bedroom to find Em lying face down and immobile on the floor beside the bed.   “Oh my God!  My God! “ she screamed and ran to him, certain, in the stillness,  that he was dead.

“I’m okay,” he said in a quiet voice.   “I’m alive. “

He was only half right: he was alive, yes, but not okay.

“The cell phone fell on the floor and I was reaching for it –“

Within twenty-four hours, he was in the ICU at the Mayo Clinic, having been dispatched there by ambulance.  

As the paramedics lifted the gurney into the back, she took Em's hand and he looked down at Solitaire and smiled. 

“Aloha,” he said.

14. WORSTWARD HO! *

And so they left the Sandwich Isles.  Heading up the broad Kauai channel from the port of Nawiliwili, the SS Oahu Princess rounded Kuhuku Pt. on the north coast of Oahu and steamed toward the mainland.

On the way out to the islands, Solitaire had set their various timepieces back an hour each night, a ritual she found gratifying, as though the Gods, in their careless fashion, had inadvertently granted them a daily dividend of discretionary living.

Freya:  Goddess of Eternal Youth

"One of Freya's Golden Apples," Solitaire gloated.  "Free!"

“There are no free apples,” Em said.  

Now, as they turned towards California sometime after midnight on the 30^th, they set their clocks ahead and Solitaire begrudged the Gods the loss of that hour.  

The nights, though technically shorter, were still sufficiently long and harrowing, and Em was by no means in the clear.  He was now on daily prednisone and while his lungs seemed slightly less congested, his body still moved in a curiously heavy way, as though his arteries were lined with lead.


Solitaire, herself, felt both enervated and jittery.  Dr. Craig was good enough to remind her that the Hawaiian Islands were the most remote land mass on the planet.  There was, he remarked, a midway point where a passenger in extremis could not be rescued by helicopter.  A point of no return!  Jesus!  Just thinking about it made her heart race.  She opted to bag her exercise classes on the homeward-bound journey and focus instead on Swami Derek’s “Mid-day meditation” series.

Swami Derek:  AFTER Meditation

Swami Derek:  BEFORE Meditation

She decided, further, not to tell Em about the no-rescue zone, or the meat locker.  But then, during another sleepless night while she was pumping Albuterol up his nose and taking his blood pressure every five minutes and begging him not to die, he said he might as well die here as anywhere, and anyway, he added ruminatively, he’d always found burial-at-sea aesthetically appealing – so clean, so unencumbered, so … well, so Shakespearean –

“Shakespearean?”

He squinted at her suspiciously, as though she were already deep in the throes of Alzheimer’s. “Surely you get the allusion …”

“I assume you mean Ariel's song: ‘Full fathom five thy father lies;
                                                       Of his bones are coral made;
                                                       Those are pearls that were his eyes…’
... and so forth ...”

“Right,” said Em, more amiable now that she had redeemed herself.

So then she felt compelled, honor-bound in effect, to tell him what Dr. Craig had divulged to her, namely that the cruise ships didn’t do burial-at-sea anymore and that there would be no lovely flags and leis and buglers, but they would just toss him into cold storage along with enough meat for 20,000 meals, give or take a few thousand – and only his body bag to keep him warm.

“Cold storage?”

“I could have it wrong – maybe it’s the freezer.”

“Freezer?  That can’t be right.  You can’t just willy-nilly perform cryogenics –

“It’s hardly that.”

“—however primitive -- without prior permission.  They’d have the pants sued off them.”

“By whom?”

“By youm.  You.  I hope.”

In the event, this news flash changed Em’s outlook dramatically.  He now said that were he to die at sea– God forbid -- Solitaire would have to give him her solemn oath that she would throw him overboard because he damn well did not want to be stowed for the duration of the voyage in the meat locker, let alone freezer, with a slew of short ribs, fat backs, pork bellies, slabs of beef and mutton chops. 

When Solitaire rashly (and not without malice) related this ghoulish exchange to her mother, Lavinia replied, “Don’t be ridiculous, darling, no one eats mutton anymore.  Not even the Aussies.”

Solitaire told Em that she would do her damnedest to carry out his wishes, but she didn’t see how to accomplish it.

“You could push me off our verandah and no one the wiser.”

“Easy for you to say.“  She pointed out the existence of a protective barrier that ran along the deck half way up to the railing..  “There’s no way I could possibly lift  –“

“… a dead weight over it?”

“Are you trying to be amusing?” she asked.

"Probably."

“Well, stop it.”

Em thought.  “You’ll have to find someone to help you.”

“Great.  How about the Captain?”

“How about the steward? “

“Maynard?”

“ Naturally, you’ll have to pay –“

“And pay … and pay … and pay … for the rest of my life.  Are you daft?”

“You’ve got a point.”

She wished to God she had insisted that they disembark in Honolulu.  They could have stayed with the Baxters at their beautiful home in Kahala.   Especially since the Baxters were going to be traveling in India for a month.  It would be heavenly.  Like being in Heaven without God, as someone had once said to her.

                                                         A GOOD PAIR

On the day the Oahu Princess docked in Honolulu, Solitaire left the ship and, with Em safely tucked up with a little light reading  (The Collected Plays of Henrik Ibsen; the Complete, Annotated Edition),

Ibsen completes 27th play

took a faux trolley car from the Matson Lines’ Pier Seven to the Aloha Clock Tower.

There, in the small Maritime Museum, she looked at old picture postcards of Duke Kahanemoku and his huge wooden surfboard on Waikiki beach; pretty haolis from California driving through sugar cane fields in big Packard touring cars; King David Kalakaua and Robert Louis Stevenson sitting in wicker rocking chairs on the Iolani Palace verandah; and press photos of arriving movie stars and other celebrities --  Cary Grant and Doris Duke, Bing Crosby, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Shirley Temple and her parents.

Gertrude and Alice enroute to The Islands

 She bought numerous postcard replicas and then took a taxi up to Makiki Heights where her friend Nicole Baxter worked two days a week as a volunteer docent at the small but elegant Museum of Contemporary Art.  Solitaire had known Nicole in an earlier incarnation as the wife of a dentist in Newport, Rhode Island.  They had since divorced and Nicole had married a professor of South Asian history who taught at the East-West Center. 

They strolled around the terraced gardens beneath pale poincianas and dark green and copper-leaved mango trees, the verges splashed with scarlet and yellow hibiscus  and red ixora and the city lying at their feet and beyond it the glittering Pacific.  From there they drove to the Manoa Valley in the old part of Honolulu, passing the Punahou School where Lavinia and her sister Lilibet had boarded (Lavinia hating every minute of it) and St. Clement’s Episcopal Church where her grandparents had been married and both girls baptized and confirmed.

Over lunch, Nicole told Solitaire that Bill would be retiring from his teaching position at the end of the year and that they would, with regret, probably leave Hawaii and move to Switzerland where her family lived and where she had a condo. 

Switzerland? To live?  Solitaire gazed around her.  The Waioli Tea Room was an old white frame bungalow built up off the ground in the tropical style with sagging floors and overhead fans, and a wide verandah that looked out into a lush tangle of ferns and impatiens and elephant ears, blue ginger and birds-of-paradise that grew in the Manoa Valley in glorious profusion.  She could hardly believe that anyone of sane mind would trade this Eden for the crag-bound, snow-blasted, wind-whipped wintry torment of the Swiss Alps.

Barely stifling a gasp of incredulity, she bleated “But why?”

“Because,” Nicole replied, “we’re so far away from everything.”   By “everything,” of course, she meant France.  In fact, Nicole had grown up in Algiers; nevertheless, and geography notwithstanding, she seemed to Solitaire the very quintessence of French chic – the cut of her clothes, her hair, her figure, her throaty voice and discerning taste.  On the way to her house, they stopped for a walk in Kapiolani Park and Nicole told Solitaire that she walked through the park with her husband, Bill, to his office every morning.  On the weekends, they hiked and sailed. They were completely compatible and she was happy in a way that she had never been during her first marriage.

While they were walking a man approached them, wanting to know the best way to get to the Bishop Museum.  When Nicole told him, he did not depart, but lingered, chatting them up.  When the two women strolled away, he stood looking after them.  Observing him with a quick sideways glance, Nicole tossed back her head in her flirty way and laughed.

 "You see," she said, "age doesn't matter. Trim ankles and a good pair are all a woman needs.”

 Solitaire thought this might well be true of Nicole; but, as a general rule, she rather doubted it.

Around five o’clock, they picked Em up at the ship and the four of them dined on the terrace of the New Otani overlooking the beach at the base of Diamond Head.  But what should have been an idyllic evening was a disaster. Em, morose and puffy, scarcely spoke; Solitaire, anxious, chattered nervously; the Baxters, so obviously brimming with health and happiness, did their best to play the role of convivial hosts, but failed.  Even Nicole with her sophistication and savoir faire was non-plussed; she kept gazing at Em, searching vainly for the urbane diplomat she had once known in Newport. When the Baxters took them back to the Matson pier, Em immediately turned and in the unforgiving glare of the security floodlights trudged slowly back into the ship; but Solitaire stood at the foot of the gangplank for a final false moment, merrily waving goodbye as the Baxters drove off in their snazzy Mercedes convertible. She did not begrudge them their joy; she merely envied it.

Solitaire had occasion to recall that day in Honolulu when, about a year later, shor before she and Em moved up to Tucson, she had a telephone call from Nicole.  Bill had just died from a malignant brain tumor.  It had happened with terrifying speed.  One month he was there -- handsome, fit, content; the next month he wasn't.  "I didn't even have time to help him," she sobbed.  But there was one thing she had been able to do for him:  in the week before his death, she had called some of their friends and they had come over and carried Bill out to the pool and eased him into the water.  "I don't know if he even knew where he was, but he looked so happy there, floating on his back and smiling like an angel."

MAUI

The island of Maui, where the ship anchored offshore the day after their stopover in Honolulu, had to make do without their presence.  Em never left his bed, while Solitaire spent the major part of the day in a deck chair, reading William Boyd’s ravishing The Blue Afternoon whilst peripherally eyeing a parade of orange tenders plying back and forth between the ship and Lahaina town , the old whaling port with its backdrop of lime green hills. 

KAUAI

In Kauai, Solitaire decided to get off the ship.  She and her late father had once lived on their sailboat in Nawiliwili harbor for nine months, a gestation period sufficient to produce considerable discontent on both sides.  Still, she loved her father and in his memory she would once again traverse the old stone pier and walk the dusty path beneath the casuarina trees where they had lugged fifty-pound blocks of ice and wrestled them into their borrowed dinghy. A purist, he had abominated the use of electricity aboard sailboats.  Also suitcases, printed fabrics, fire arms and plants.  It was like dealing with U.S. Customs.

Leaving Em in bed reading Das Kapital, she walked down to the departure lounge and signed up for the bus tour to Waimea Canyon.  Imagine her amazement when she discovered that the rustic old stone pier had been hideously transformed into a mile-long slab of concrete upon which three elderly wahines in muu-muus danced a listless hula to the accompaniment of a loudspeaker blaring, "Lovely Hula Hands." 

Several hours later, Solitaire said to Em: ”Guess who was on the tour today?” 

“Elvis Presley?  Leon Trotsky?  Amelia Earhart?

Amelia Gets Lei'd

 Do his initials begin with Adolf Hitler?  Is he smaller than a bread basket?  Bigger than a biscuit?  Madder than a March –“


 “Oh shut up for heaven’s sake!  … Gerald!”

“Gerald?”

“The Weird Widower from West Vancouver.”

He mulled it over briefly, then fairly shouted with elation.  “That's it!  That’s  it!  Your accomplice.”

“My accomplice in --?”

“In body disposal.  Land fill, you might say."”

“But … but he’s a complete dunderhead.”

“So what?  No one says you have to be Enrico Fermi to toss a corpse overboard."

"But what about blackmail?  Will he want money?  Sex?”

“Both, I should think. “

Already, Solitaire could feel the steel grip of manacles around her wrists and hear the clang of the cell door at Tehatchepi State Women's Prison.  Like Lizzie Eustace, accused of stealing her own diamonds, Solitaire would be accused of a crime she didn't commit; only in her case she would be tried for murder and executed.  And no one would ever believe that her husband was already dead when she dropped him in the drink.

“No, she said firmly, “I’m not doing it – not even for you.  Anyway,” she said, “you don’t look to me like someone who’s going to die imminently--"

"Don't give up hope -- there's still time."

"-- therefore I think the question of Gerald is entirely academic.”

Em regrouped, gathering his forces. "‘Oh time enough,’” he intoned in his Welsh-bard sing-song, “’when the blood runs cold and I lie down but to –‘  That reminds me – I haven’t had a nosebleed since we’ve been on this cruise. “

“Must be the salt sea air.”  In Arizona, the air was so dry that Em, who was on blood-thinners, was subject to frequent nosebleeds.

“Ah, the sea, Anna – the sea!”  Em moaned.  Of course, no one younger than 108, with the exception of Solitaire, would know that he was doing his impression of the actor George F. Marion as the Swedish captain of a coal barge discoursing on the perils of the deep with his daughter, the hard-drinking, threadbare, but still gorgeous prostitute, (Greta Garbo), in Eugene O'Neill's tedious melodrama, "Anna Christie."

 The cruise was two-thirds over – eight days down and another five to go.  Solitaire recalled reading an article in the Times about a woman who lived year-round aboard the QE 2; she had thought the idea enchanting, and perhaps she would again some day, but right now she found it nightmarish.  The very prospect of another “formal night” -- a night of skulking shame-faced down gangways in mufti, shying away from the accusatory stares of fellow passengers -- made her heart sink.

When they hit the open sea, however, they were energized.  During those last few days and nights at sea, they read, went to lectures, watched an auction of atrocious pictures, and walked for miles around the deck.  Two and-a-half times round, she learned, equaled one mile; and passengers were expected to promenade in the same direction –clockwise?  Counter-clockwise?  She couldn’t remember.  “It’s like intermission at the Vienna Opera,” she said to Em.

On their last evening they put into port for three hours just south of the U.S. border on the Baja peninsula.  They were only there because of some legal technicality and passengers were not allowed to disembark.  Em and Solitaire stood at the rail and watched as a huge wobbly red sun sank into a carmine sea and a white moon climbed out of the Mexican particulate (dust, burning garbage, old tires, marijuana) to rise over the black Ensenada hills.

           

Early the next morning they arrived in San Pedro, docking at the same pier from which they had sailed two weeks earlier.  While Em was disbursing gratuities to Manley, Diosdado et al, Solitaire stood on deck watching the ship tie up and various personnel come aboard, among them a vigorous matron of middle age and strapping proportions who was greeted by various members of the crew.  As she watched her, Solitaire was stunned to realize that she had arrived before at this same pier in San Pedro.  It was 1945 and she was standing on the deck of the troop ship on which she had crossed the Pacific, waiting to disembark -- an undersized skinny child with blonde pigtails, dressed entirely in hand-me-downs -- dress too big, jacket too tight and high-top tennis shoes with the toes cut out -- when a broad-girthed woman walked up to her and handed her a package.  A present from the Red Cross, she beamed, a pair of new shoes.  Solitaire sat on the deck then and there and put them on -- brown, lace-up Oxfords that were a little too large (but everyone agreed she would soon grow into them) and very ugly.  Solitaire, however, did not think they were ugly; had they been Cinderella's glass slippers or Dorothy's red shoes, she could not have been more thrilled with their beauty.  She saw them now in her mind's eye, and smiled.

"What are you smiling about?" Em asked.

"Oh nothing much," she said.  "Just happy you're alive, I guess."

He put his arm around her and they left the ship and took a cab to the car rental office, where they set off in a Honda Civic and, venturing at high speed onto the San Diego Freeway, immediately went in the wrong direction.  Solitaire tried to meditate as Swami Derek had taught her, but she had not yet attained that state of grace on her path to Enlightenment.

    

_______________________________

 * Samuel Beckett