Something to Be Desired Read Free Page A

more, stood and slanted through the small opening Lucien’s father made for her into the night.
    Lucien listened to his father walking around, stopping only for long sighs. Finally:
    “Lucien?”
    “I’m awake.”
    “I’m sorry …?”
    “I’m awake, sir.”
    “How long have you been awake?”
    “Not long,” Lucien said.
    “Lucien, when you were a small boy, I let you have lots of pets, hamsters, rabbits and so on. Do you remember I allowed that?”
    “Yes, sir, I do.”
    “That was so you could learn about animals, about how we are all animals.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And now I want to call Momma.”
    He got the night operator or the morning operator, whichever, and revealed to Lucien’s mother that they were no longer out in the mountains. “Momma,” he said. “I’m with Lucien. We want to come home to you, Momma.” Lucien could not devise an attitude toward this. His father suddenly fell to listening. He repeated “uh huh” a number of times in a deeper and flatter voice. He waved Lucien into the bathroom, then waved the door shut behind him. Lucien leaned on the faucet, turning it microscopically until a drop of water came out, shut it off, and did it again. Then he heard his father call for him.
    When he went into the bedroom the reading lamp was on and his father sat right next to it, weeping, silently with heaving shoulders.
    “What’s the matter, Pop, can’t we go home?” Lucien was scared.
    “It’s not that—” He sobbed for a few more minutesand composed himself carefully. “Art Clancy was shot and killed by his girlfriend,” he sobbed. “In Arequipa, Peru.”
    Lucien’s father had coached him carefully as they walked across town from the motel. They stood in front of their house while his father ran a finger around the inside of his collar, then gave Lucien a quick, conspiratorial nod. He knocked. In a moment the door opened and there was his mother, all dressed up.
    “When’s lunch!” Lucien and his father cried together.
    She looked from one to the other. “That hungry gang of mine,” she said with a warm smile and turned into the house for her men to follow.
    Chili was gone. He knew very well that his mother might have disposed of the small, blue, merry bird; or at least given the bird away, purely on the basic of its Hispanic name. Lucien was sure she pictured Clancy of Peru in his shantung suits, his Corvette and his bad Spanish in a way that made a parakeet named Chili look bad. He already suspected that her greeting was camouflage, so the crack of his mother’s hand against his father’s face came as not much of a surprise. His father just took it. There was little else he could do. Raising his hands in self-defense would have made him a pantywaist in the eyes of his own son.
    “I’ll go,” said Lucien’s father.
    “Where? Peru?” Her long patrician face always looked surprised when she was angry. What many took for astonishment was in fact a prelude to hysterical fury. “You and your Peru!”
    Then Lucien’s father did something very strange andyet wholly characteristic of him: he waved to an imaginary person in the window behind her; when she turned to look, he flattened her with a tremendous blow.
    His father left the room, straight through the French doors into the side yard, where the dog hid in its Tudor house, the chain making an abrupt circuit back into the little doorway as it always did in a family dispute. He sauntered over the high ground beside the lilacs and took a final glance into the living room before retiring to the guest room over the garage.
    Lucien’s mother still lay on the floor, lightly fingering the discoloration around her left eye. “I’m a chump if I don’t call a cop,” she said, using a diction she seldom used unless she was trying to reveal the actual sordid texture she saw in her life. If this had all happened to an acquaintance, she would have said, “She’s deluded if she doesn’t call a policeman.” She slung herself