Cable Harbor by Donald Bowie

Author:Donald Bowie [Bowie, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Untreed Reads
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Flash Donahue’s Cable Harbor house had not been substantially altered since it was built in 1908. The house was a pyramid with shutters. It was four stories tall, and it had a still-active dumb waiter running from the basement kitchen to the second floor butler’s pantry. All six fireplaces were of Carrara marble. All five bathrooms had been finished with Italian and Portuguese tiles. When a tile loosened, Flash hired a tile man from Portland who knew how to work with foreign shapes and sizes to glue it back in. Thus the house and Flash herself were maintained: what dried out and loosened was smoothed back into shape by a specialist from the city.

Despite the maintenance it received, Flash’s house was slowly fading inside and out. The oriental scatter rugs and the chintz-covered chairs in the living room had all gone predominantly pink; their original colors had been made anemic by summer after summer of sunlight. And the house’s gray shingles and green shutters had a patina that suggested an old photograph. The absence of modern alterations contributed to this effect too; approaching Flash’s house was like turning a page in an old album: suddenly it was years ago, and everything in the landscape was stiff and mute.

George Hanson approached Flash’s house with resignation. He hated having to deal with old women; all he could think of when he was around them was a bunch of sick canaries chirping in a cage—with a purple dress thrown over it. Hollowness and warbling, feeble scampering, frail arms, bird shit. It aggravated George every time he saw one of them with her white head barely as high as the steering wheel of her Cadillac. But they had money and they spent it, even though their hands shook writing out the check. So George had to be nice to them; he had to put on his gray butler’s coat and list canapés in a loud voice. He had to listen to their instructions and smell their cabbage breath.

It annoyed George that Marjorie hadn’t come along. Here she’d been bitching about the fashion show coming up and now when he wanted to finalize things with the old bag she said she had to spend the morning following up on some bullshit she’d dug up at the town clerk’s office yesterday. Women. It was no wonder men died younger. They either drove you nuts with their mouths…or they used their bodies. And their bodies could make you so crazy you blacked out…almost. At least this old bag Donahue couldn’t give you a hard-on; old ladies had that much going for them—lift one of their purple dresses and what were you going to see: probably that the bottom of the bird’s cage needed cleaning out.

George rang Flash’s doorbell. The bell sounded castrated. A maid opened the door. She had a nasty expression on her face; she looked as though she had no intention of letting George get so much as a glimpse of the hallway unless she had no choice in the matter.

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