VACANCY & ARIEL

Exhilarated, Cliff starts to pour another drink, then decides he’ll have that drink with Marley. She gets off at ten—he’ll take her out for a late supper, somewhere nicer than the Surfside, and they’ll celebrate. She won’t know what they’re celebrating, but he’s glad now that he didn’t burden her with any of this. He trots down the stairs and out into the warm, windless night, into squeals and honks and machine gun fire from the arcades, happy shouts from the Ferris wheel, now lit up and spinning, and the lights on the miniature golf course glossing over its dilapidation, providing a suitable setting for the family groups clumped about the greens. The bright souvenir shops selling painted sand dollars and polished driftwood, funny hats and sawfish snouts, and the sand drifting up onto the asphalt from The World’s Most Famous Be-atch (as an oft-seen t-shirt design proclaims), and the flashing neon signs above strip clubs and tourist bars along Main Street, the din of calliope music, stripper music, tavern music, and voices, voices, voices, the vocal exhaust of vacationland America, exclamations and giggles, drunken curses and yelps and unenlightened commentary—it’s all familiar, overly familiar, tedious and unrelentingly ordinary, yet tonight its colors are sharper, its sounds more vivid, emblematic of the world of fresh possibility that Cliff is suddenly eager to engage.

Chapter 9

IT’S A GOOD week for Cliff and Marley, a very good week. There is no recurrence of demons, no witches, no bumps in the night. Jerry is furious with him, naturally, and threatens to fire him, but he has no leverage—the job is merely a pastime for Cliff and he tells Jerry to go ahead, fire him, he’ll find some other way to occupy his idle hours. He works on the book and is surprised how easily it flows. He hasn’t settled on a title yet, but anecdotal material streams out of him and he’s amazed by how funny it is—it didn’t seem that funny at the time; and, though he’s aware that he has a lot of cleaning up to do on the prose, he’s startled by the sense of bittersweet poignancy that seems to rise from his words, even from the uproarious bits. It’s as if in California, those years of struggle and fuck-ups, he realized that the dream he was shooting for was played-out, that the world of celebrity with its Bel Air mansions and stretch limos and personal chefs masked a terrible malformation that he hated, that he denied yet knew was there all along, that he didn’t want badly enough because, basically, he never wanted it at all.

The relationship, too, flows. Cliff has his concerns, particularly about their ages, but he’s more-or-less convinced himself that it’s all right; he’s neither conning Marley nor himself. He can hope for ten good years, fifteen at the outside, but that’s a lifetime. After that, well, whatever comes will come. It’s not that he feels young again. His back’s still sore, he’s beginning to recognize that he needs more than reading glasses, but he no longer feels as empty as he did and he thinks that Marley was spot-on in her diagnosis: he was lonely.

They make love, they go to the movies, they walk on the beach, and they talk about everything: about global warming, the NBA (Marley’s a Magic fan; Cliff roots for the Lakers), about religion and ghosts and salsa, about dogs versus cats as potential pets, about fashion trends and why he never married, and veterinary school. Cliff offers to help with the tuition and, though reluctant at first, Marley says there’s a well-regarded school in Orlando and she’s been accepted, but doesn’t know if she’ll have enough saved to go for the fall term. Cliff has major problems with Orlando. There’s no beach, no ocean breeze to break the summer heat, and he dreads being in such close proximity to the Mouse and the hordes of tourists who pollute the environment. Rednecks of every stamp, the blighted of the earth, so desperate in their search for fun that they make pilgrimages to Disneyworld and commingle with one another in a stew of ill-feeling that frequently results in knuckle-dragging fights between hairy, overweight men and face-offs between grim-lipped parents and their whiny kids. But he says, “Okay. Let’s do it.”