ISLAND MAMBO
A NOVEL BY
ROBERT BURDETTE SWEET
GLB PUBLISHERS San Francisco
First Edition
Copyright © 2006 Robert Burdette Sweet
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of an electronic recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, translated into another language, or otherwise copied for public or private use, excepting brief passages quoted for purposes of review, without the written permission of the publisher.
Published in the United States by
GLB Publishers
P.O. Box 78212, San Francisco, CA 94107
www.GLBpubs.com
Cover art by the author
Cover Design by the author and
GLB Publishers
Author can be reached at:
r.b.sweet@worldnet.att.net
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
Library of Congress Cataloguing Control Number
2005938689
ISBN 1-879194-58-9
978-1-879194-58-8
First printing March, 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
DEDICATION
In gratitude to
Susan Eastwood, Will Patterson, and
members of Arts Anonymous:
Jodi Sherman
Kelly Harrison
Tess Crescini
Mike Newman
David Stritmatter
Pat Perrone
1
CHRISTOPHER
From Edgar's Chicago penthouse, windows looked down upon
a park swollen with lagoons and bounded by the distant lake. Containing twenty
rooms on two levels, the place had always struck Chris as a manifestation
of Edgar's mind. It seemed to breathe as he breathed, to dream his dreams.
But now the apartment was covered in dust and the heavy
drapes, drawn against the sun, were fading. The Beckstein grand piano remained
closed, as Edgar had left it to revisit his house on the small West Indian
island, never to return.
Is offering yourself to be annihilated by those who admire,
fear, and desire you precisely a murder? Chris has always wondered. Eddy,
I was your friend, but I despised as much as I loved you.
Because minds like Edgar's don't cease with the mere
destruction of the body, Edgar still seems to stalk his vast apartment. I
can see his shadow, there, behind the drapes. Hear his strained laughter.
Chris couldn't shake himself free from the specter of Edgar.
Until the settlement of Edgar's property, there had not
been a footstep in the apartment for one year before the scattering of his
power, his presumptions, and his meticulously selected possessions. Chris
had heard that when Edgar's lack-luster relatives finally entered and squabbled
over rights to paintings, statuary, carved tables and chairs, they bitterly
complained about what they had acquired, saying that the splendor and wonder
intimidated them. As Edgar's own mother, whom he always called by her Christian
name, Charise, finally put it, "You can't divide that man's brains up and
expect yourself to remain unharmed in the process."
On a mahogany table under a painting of a mother and
child purportedly by Rubens (uncataloged, yet possibly authentic) perched
a framed photo of Edgar sporting a severe expression on a seemingly young,
exuberant face. Until his death on the island, he'd remained ageless, with
smooth skin, thin light hair combed coyly forward over a high forehead, and
tortoise-shell glasses in front of biting eyes that were small and unusually
green. The severity of the otherwise agreeable face in the photo was caused
by two slashes of wrinkled flesh between the eyes, just above the rim of
his glasses. They made him look as though he were angry, even enraged, though
the eager smile belied that crack of thunder above his nose.
The contrasting moods of the two floors of Edgar's apartment
caught just this paradox. The strength and the presumption were the masks
his immediate mind presented. The musicality, disciplined insights, extreme
sensitivity, and sexually omnivorous nature were reserved for the upper rooms.
Chris can recall Edgar's hysterically insisting, "At the minimum, an orgasm
a day. A thorough one. One that shakes the teeth. And that takes variety.
Otherwise, you're no more alive than a stone."
The money Edgar had managed to accrue by mercilessly
suing large companies for allegedly stealing his inventions—a machine
that corked wine bottles, a rotisserie that reconstituted the juice in simmering
fowl—was evident to anyone who entered his world. He would motion a
visitor to a high-backed chair, in this instance it had been Chris renewing
his involvement in Edgar's life, and with fingers clicking and voice rising,
Edgar had shouted in reference to a man he'd recently reduced, "I outfoxed
him. But a poor man now, feel sorry for him. Oh, the delicacy of the human
spirit. But I outfoxed him. Get 'em, get 'em! That's how you do it, Chris.
Quickly, shrewdly and without mercy. They'd have none for you." Then with
the fingers of his right hand snapping like castanets, "Oh, the sorrow of
man, the weakness."
Edgar had looked alertly around, eyes ablaze behind his
glasses, as if a welcome adversary were about to emerge from behind his
art-encrusted walls. "And you, Christopher, my friend, always cheating on
yourself, never coming to grips with anything." Edgar snickered happily,
crossed his short legs, tipped his head back. "And now what mess have you
got yourself into? That's what you came to tell me about, isn't it? But let
me remind you, Chris boy, that when we were on that trip in the mountains
together years ago…remember when we'd clambered to the top of that
particularly high peak and I shook my fist at clouds and swore I'd be a
multimillionaire before I was thirty-five? Well, I am. I am!" eyes shut,
fingers snapping.
It was the upper tier of the penthouse that had always
represented to Chris the seemingly frivolous but no less intense Edgar. The
fantastic Edgar. Rooms where fancy and reality met, where dream fed into
hallucination. Each time, as though Chris had never come to call before,
his visit concluded with a tour of the magic, the strangeness of the upper
rooms, where Edgar's smile must still linger. Over the reality? Chris mused.
But did the chambers represent the reality of mankind in general or only
the reality that this man had assumed for himself?
Yet Chris had to admit it was in these rooms that the
dreams of many had collided and broken into a thousand cold-lighted stars.
It was where women and men shattered and embedded themselves in Edgar's body
and his smile. Has Donna been up those stairs? Even after she became my wife?
Of course. And would go again and again…to experience the shattering,
the sense of loss, the dismemberment that Edgar insisted could only mean
a fresh beginning.
Chris and Edgar disrobed in one of the upstairs parlors,
Chris realizing that one did not question this. Large, heavy bathrobes hung
on hooks in the closet. In Edgar's upper mind there was as much pretense
as there was in the lower. The name of the game was not simple sensuality:
the ritual was meant to reveal more than just the body.
Knotting the belt of his blue and orange striped bathrobe,
Edgar spoke, not surprisingly for him, of Johannes Brahms. Without glasses,
Edgar's eyes looked puckered, slitted. A fist of thin chest hair clawed at
the lapels of his robe. "It's never the man," Edgar shouted leading the way
down a hallway, "but what that man orders into being out of this accident
of life. The wisdom of the great Brahms to know not to compose a symphony
until he was fifty. The wisdom to know to burn all scores that were not perfect
before his death. His total subservience of ego to the magnified truth of
artifice."
Chris had watched his friend carefully. Edgar's pontificating
was always spontaneous, stimulated by nothing more than an audience, preferably
composed of a mere one or two persons, seldom more. Edgar's creased brows,
his perpetual grin, his snapping fingers, his shouting in a high, raspy voice
made him appear to be mad. But like a fox? Chris always asked himself.
"I want to know something," Chris quietly intervened
while jabbing a cigarette, unlit, between his lips, his eyes increasingly
mesmerized by Edgar's constant gesturing.
"Ah, friend, we all want to know something." Edgar increased
his pace down the hall, giggling, hands thrust into the pockets of his robe.
"So know this: the world belongs, belongs! only to the humans who see things
as they are!" Edgar continued his long, jerky strides, flinging words at
the ceiling, the walls. "Sex is real, but love is a charged issue; friendship
is a possibility, but dependence a yoke; money is not to buy things," he
stopped to smack the wall with the flat of his hand, "but to make yourself
invulnerable. I need nothing from anyone, so they all fall on their knees
to me and wish to give." As Edgar opened a door at the end of the hall, his
voice fell. "To make one's imaginings real, to make fools believe it with
you, to be art, is to be The Man."
Behind the now open door, he pressed a switch and steam
could be heard escaping throughout the room. The fingers of his right hand
flew up to snap around his ear. "Of course, I had to succeed in getting all
I wanted, because I knew what I was after…as did the great Brahms. Ah,
it's ready, it's ready, my little room is ready. Welcome to purgatory, my
friend. Heaven is our next stop."
Edgar had doffed his robe, letting it fall around his
ankles, and, naked, preceded Chris into the room that was all steam and a
square pool, four feet deep, fitting neatly against the four walls. When
Chris entered, all he could make out was water bubbling from the center and
flowing in quiet circles around Edgar's knees. Edgar was standing at the
far end, his body hairless except for that tangle near his throat and around
his groin, wrapped almost mystically in a whirling cloud.
Is a man his body? Edgar's body appeared to be so simple,
so uncomplicated. He was neither fat nor thin, muscular nor flabby; nor was
he tall, nor particularly short, nor were his genitals notably large or small.
This extraordinary man's appearance was ordinary in every respect.
"Come, come," Edgar crooned, his voice having grown suddenly
calm, "relax and be." He crouched in the water, sweat beginning on his forehead.
"Be one…." Chris feared he was going to demand, ‘With me, with
me!' But Edgar ducked his head and came up snorting, grinning, his frown
leaving him for a moment, his lips glistening. "Be one with yourself. That's
the paradise we long for."
Releasing himself from his robe, Chris stepped into the
water, immersing his body; his heavy jaw suspended just above the transparency,
letting the warmth float his long legs. The length of his thinness was caressed
not by the human hands for which he'd always thought he yearned, but by a
womb-like warmth. "I was going to ask you something back there in the parlor,
Eddy. And it wasn't about how to let the world save me." Chris blinked through
the steam at Edgar who wasn't looking at him. "I know Donna has been here
with you. Before our marriage. But was it often? And has she been here since
we made our relationship legal? Evenings, she goes out some times and I don't
know where. Nor will she say."
Edgar slid further into the water, eyes closed, his right
hand absently stroking his genitals. "That's a sad question," he sighed.
"I'm sorry you have to worry about such things. You've a charming, very charming
and gentle wife." His voice, no longer strained, began to purr. "You're an
unfortunate man, Chris. You know what genius is?" Edgar's eyes flashed while
blinking back drops of water.
"What has genius got to do with my question?" Chris folded
his arms across his chest and drew his knees up toward his chin.
"A genius fits himself into the minds of others. He sees
them through their own mind's eye. He doesn't impose his thoughts or feelings
onto them. Only a stupid and self-centered man would ask such a question
as you did. Am I being too hard on you, Chris? You pretend you need Donna,
but you don't even know that you want her. Want, not need, is the better
course to take."
Chris tried to take that in. "I'm sorry I asked."
Edgar let water flow into his mouth and then leisurely
spat the water out again, like a drowsing fish. "Apology accepted."
The heat was making Chris care less and less…about
anything. Layers of his consciousness lazed, somehow suspended, in the steam
above his head. And he fell to visualizing the room adjoining Edgar's bath
that was tiled in large square mirrors on all of the four walls and ceiling,
centered by a chandelier whose many tiny lights reflected down endless corridors
of retreating brilliance. When you stood in that room, the reality of yourself,
following the bursts of light, repeated down halls of illusory space. And
when you moved, the whole room was your arms, your thighs, your cock—an
irresistible immersion into self. When you collapsed on your back on the
enormous mattress that was stained from the combatants of communions past,
your body floated in a suspension of timeless ether. Lift an arm and the
universe of refraction echoed with your being. Raise a leg and the galaxy
of dimensions reverberated, and you were momentarily a Cronus, ruler of all
you could know.
This was Edgar's furthest, highest mind, where the
stereophonic sounds of Brahms leaked from the mirrors and through your armpits
and groin, heavy and sweet with determination, mathematized realizations,
variation upon variation. The idea of ‘being' made so excruciating that
there could be no part of one's self to protest, mock, or hide.
Then Edgar's reflection encroached upon you. The room
would revolve with Edgar's movements. He would have a chain gripped in his
fists, and a rope or belt to bind Chris' hands, his legs. And the lashes
would feel like caresses, and Chris would see himself stretched among myriad
simulated star clusters, helpless and quivering, not responsible for even
the pain that swelled his back and chest and thighs to a pitch of ego loss.
"For all flesh is as grass," the Requiem of Brahms, the theme gradually announced
by the basses, behind them the timpani throbbing slowly as a heart relaxed
totally unto itself. It had happened before, all of it. To Chris and probably
to Donna, and God knows who else had willingly given themselves up to being
one with Edgar's will. And therefore their own.
Chris stood in the pool, water seeping down his legs,
his muscles tensing. Slowly he shook a fist at the half submerged and whimsical
Edgar. "Not this time, not now, you trickster, you bastard!" Christopher's
head was shaking from side to side, his hair falling black and wet over his
forehead and ears.
Edgar grinned up at him shyly, companionably, patting
at the water that thinly lapped his chest. "Oh, are you leaving? That's perfectly
all right, Chris. It's late. I've got to tell those fool lawyers of mine
what to do early tomorrow. You'd think, wouldn't you, that I'd not have to
write their briefs for them?" Edgar rose to his feet, water cascading from
his body. "Open the door, friend. There are towels on the hook in the hall.
Thank you for rousing us from the ‘suspension of disbelief' one suffers
from my little bath here. But it's so relax…"
Chris interrupted to state firmly, as though for once
while with Edgar he'd finally found his voice, "You're freeing me then. To
return again and hang myself, of my own free will. Is that it?"
Edgar splashed out of the bath and began toweling himself
dry in the hall, his back turned to Chris. "I've got this house, you know,
on a tiny island in the Caribbean. You've never been there, as I recall.
I was thinking of inviting you and a few others to join me for a month. You'll
love it, Chris, when the weather is sub-zero here. There's nothing like it.
Palms and beaches. Postcard stuff. Primitive though. Very. I'd like you to
do something for me there." Edgar yawned over his shoulder while fetching
his tortoise-shell glasses from the robe's pocket and fitting them around
his ears. Chris had remained standing in the pool, still shaking. "Oh, come
off it, Chris," Edgar said flicking a switch to turn off the steam, "don't
take yourself so damned seriously."
"Well, sure, sure," Chris heard himself agreeing. He
reached for a towel, began drying his back. "Donna and I were planning on
Hawaii during my winter break from teaching, but maybe she'll think your
invitation is a better opportunity."
"Yes, Donna should come too."
Why am I accepting this? Merely because Eddy suggested
it? But that's why Donna and I shouldn't accept. Yet it was as though nothing
had ever happened between him and Edgar. Just because tonight nothing had?
It was as though the mirrored room whose door, after all, had remained shut
didn't exist, was only a dimly recalled phantasmagoric occurrence. "Hey,
Eddy," Chris called after Edgar who was already pacing down the hall, "how
about Al and Bea coming too. We've not seen them for a while, and were even
thinking of asking them to join us on the Hawaii trip. Since college we've
all managed to be together at least once a year. Besides, they're as good
friends of yours as we are."
"Of course." Edgar yawned again, fingers fluttering over
his lips before he disappeared into another room shutting the door after
him. "Let yourself out," his voice came muffled from behind the door.
Chris wondered, If I can manage to drag myself out of
here. He proceeded to dry himself slowly. This no-strings-attached,
no-forced-insistence, no-charged-issues attitude of Edgar's—could that
end by being the real trap? Was freedom the actual whip that Edgar used to
such advantage? Ridiculous, he thought, feeling refreshed, purified. Edgar
was only an interesting fellow who played at being Zeus transforming himself
into a swan with trembling wings for those less comprehending, for the Ledas
of this world, which cautious Christopher most certainly was not. As he slipped
on his robe, feeling secure and whole again, he wondered what Bea would have
done in the presence of Edgar's ritualistic exercises. Or Al, what had Albert
done? How nice it was to be like himself, strong and human, bold, jealous,
and possessive like most everyone else.
After dressing, his face still ruddy from the bath, Chris
quickly descended to the lower rooms. Before escaping—he could think
of his departure in no other terms, yet what was it that made him feel a
sense of loss at not giving in again to Edgar?—he paused before the
Eakins painting hanging above the fireplace. It was a nude portrait of Eakin's
wife around age sixty, he guessed, with narrow breasts, all angles and
sharp-boned; the flesh luminous, sensual, as though lighted from within by
a still hungering flame. Chris saluted her, ridiculously and cynically, index
and third fingers tapping his right eyebrow. My God, does it never end, the
desire for the colliding of flesh?
Suddenly, he hankered for Donna and would have brought
her flowers, those most polite of all genitalia, except that the stores were
closed at that hour and Donna might guess he'd been up to no good. He smiled
as he let himself out the front door, remembering to set the lock. Well,
he'd merely been about the business of being curious and alive, only that.
However, had Chris known that, behind the Eakins painting
above the fireplace in the living room, Edgar with uncharacteristic carelessness
stored some of his more intimate papers, he'd not have left without reading
a few. He'd certainly not have gone to the island with Edgar had he read
a very special one dated one week previously. It was addressed to Edgar's
mother, who found it before offering it to Chris, after the fact as it
were—and had Charise been a religious woman, she would have prayed,
not for the soul of her son, but for whoever it was who had finally destroyed
Edgar according to Edgar's plan.
"Was it you, Chris? Was it you?" she would face him with
seething eyes.
Chris would always remember her nibbling a cheese sandwich
at her favorite diner where she'd demanded he meet her. "You who were one
of Edgar's finest friends…the loss, the loss, the waste of my son's
life. May I borrow your pickle? I adore pickles." With an angry flourish,
her lips pinched in a wreath of hectic wrinkles, Charise withdrew from her
purse a page of written material and slapped it on the table, a mimeographed
copy she offered him to keep. "Now, may I loan you Edgar's mind? And may
we never speak of this again. I have never, and never will, bow to anyone's
but my son's wishes. These are, as it turns out, his last speculations. Revealing
as his comments are to me, they should be even more revealing to you. You,
who were there when it happened. Go ahead, look them over while I devour
your pickle. And let my eyes devour you as you read. I want to memorize your
expression. Know that I was surprised by none of it."
"I forgot my glasses."
"Here. Try mine," fumbling through her purse. "Will these
do? Edgar was going through bankruptcy when he wrote this note and invited
you all of you to his island retreat. Did you know that? Few did. Too many
failed lawsuits, would be one reason. Too many corrupt judges. Whatever,
the state my son was in may explain much of what you're about to read."
Unfortunately, her glasses did help enough, and while
sipping too hot coffee that burned Chris's lips, he read trying to concentrate
on keeping his face immobile, his reactions, he hoped, impenetrable.
March 17, 1952
I should feel released, but can't sleep. More and
more trouble sleeping. It's going to be dawn soon. The sparrows are already
at each other: twittering machines. Careful. If I begin to think more and
act less, I'll have doomed myself to mediocrity.
Four of us tonight. One woman. She kept opening herself
wider, all orifices, taking everyone, eyes greedy and gaping at herself in
the mirrors, stuck like a pincushion. Afterwards, she curled herself into
a ball; red, wilted, and sweating. She kept crying out, "Jesus," again and
again, her lips swollen, veins breaking out on her cheeks. She has said she'll
not be back. But I'll give her a week at the most. She'll be our newest Mary
Magdalene with the sweet name of her Jesus always on her cracking lips.
Of course, I've modeled myself on that man who might
actually have lived whom we call the Christ. And Hitler. Admirable, both
of them. So similar. They offered annihilation, release from self, taking
upon themselves the responsibility. You don't trick people, you don't beguile
them, you permit them to give themselves away. Spirituality is the pink cobra
striking the oyster, lipped and wet. Or cobra to cobra, slick and hard.
It's getting light now. I hear cars circling the block
below me. Pigeons shit upon my windowsill and coo. I'm forty-three years
of age and have had enough of it, all of it. There have been too many variations
on the same theme. Johannes Brahms, my cohort, you'd have known when to stop,
when precisely the mind exhausts, angers, and so resists any further
convolution.
Besides, I have become dangerous. I'm waiting now for
my Brutus, my Peter, or Eva Braun. Did he offer her the cyanide saying,
‘Take this in remembrance of me'?
I shall invite a few best friends to my Isle de Grenadine,
those whom I've done most for and therefore those who have the greatest need
to be freed of me. Chris and Donna, certainly, and most likely Beatrice and
Albert? Best to rely on old chums, who go back, back in time. Out of need,
one of them will release me from myself (when freed from the restrictions
of police, courts and inquests) and out of need I will coerce them into it.
But which one will act first? And will it be out of their strength or weakness?
I suspect it will be the one who is weak enough to have fabricated the strongest
pretense, that one who is most to be admired, or that one who does not separate
the face he or she wears from the self who hides behind it.
I must warn my dear black hireling Leonard that we are
arriving. I've not seen Lenny for six months. When I'm there on the island
with him no one else and nothing exists. He envelops me in total annihilation.
I cannot dare him often. With him I cannot speak. I cannot penetrate his
mask. I do not know when he dissembles, if he ever does. Therefore, I can't
see beyond him. He is for me the cage I dare not enter except at cautiously
spaced intervals. He is the danger I inflict upon others. He robs me of power.
Leonard is the thief within whose arms I want to die. But the hand that lifts
against me, it is important that it not be his!
Edgar, man, you water-sack propped by bones, you've already
won the game and you're going to die someday. Quit while you're ahead. Better
to end now while all is well than die slowly when old, to lie pierced by
needles, amber drops sliding down a catheter tube, stinking, friendless,
and afraid.