elephant trunks dior: the sea is not free

They drive up the thin, winding roads of Palos Verdes along the Pacific coast. Their view is as clear as their thoughts until obscured by the town's palm trees, planted in the hope they will grow with the value of their new homes. A long-term plan that is detrimental to George’s short-term plan: stay on the right side of the road. They’ve rented a Jaguar, but British driving regulations don’t align with Percy’s mental state or U.S. law.

“I’ve always wanted to live on the equator,” says Bell Moon. “Exactly on the equator, but look at this ocean. Right lane, George, right lane!”

“Bloody hell!”

They swerve to the right. The tires screech.

“So, this is the real, right side of the road, America?”

“It is the only America, George. Here, I’ll hold the steering wheel, and you look out my window. Do you smell that, George?”

Percy clutches his bowler cap. He can no longer wear it because he has squeezed, pulled, and pressed it for the last 24 hours. He’d like to make a suggestion, “Perhaps we should concentrate on driving?” but Bell replies to everything he says with “Perhaps you should mind your own business back there! There are reasons for our present seating arrangement.”

“The ocean?” asks George.

“It’s called Freedom, George. Smell it.”

“We have the ocean in London.”

“In England, you have a sea. That is not freedom.”

“How is it not?”

“It is true,” says Bell. “I am a man of the world, as we have collectively agreed, but deep in my heart is Tulsa soil. No Irish estate or Hindu river will ever take that away from me.”

His blue-and-white-dot ascot makes him look more like Laurence Olivier than Charles Pollard Olivier, and thank God. His tweed jacket is heavy, but so is the breeze. He keeps his window down. George needs freedom up the nostrils. Born in the East End of London, this Bow Bell has accumulated decades of charcoal, the rations from the Second World War that coat his lungs. His exterior is devolving. Sideburns are the future, but he seems more chimp-like every time Bell looks at him. Percy tries to get between them for a look, but Bell elbows him whenever he leans between their headrests.

“Back, you Tudor.”

Percy squints.

“Let’s not say things we cannot take back, Bell.”

“Percy! Are you squinting at me?”

Percy recoils.

“No, sir! Absolutely not.”

Bell squints at Percy.

“Ok, then.”

They pull up to Edgar Loeb’s house. Not much has changed. The 1949 Maroon Lincoln Cosmopolitan Sport Sedan is parked. The lengthy driveway weaves beside the Second Style Victorian Mansion, Edgar claims, is the real inspiration behind House by the Railroad by Edward Hopper. There is no railroad here, nor could there be. The road up this giant rock has more turns than a Patricia Highsmith novel, and the new homeowners contain just as much anti-semitism.

“A lot more Asian’s, isn’t there?” says Bell. “The old man must be doing pretty well.”

Asian gardeners wash the maroon sedan in bow ties, suits, and white aprons. They are done watering rare fruit with names as exotic as the imported plants. The oranda goldfish are fed and swim in a stream that runs through the yard and empties into a pond behind the home. Water falls like Japanese calligraphy.

“Well, I’ll be an Abraham Lincoln nickel,” says George.

“Well said,” chimes Bell. “That’s good American vernacular, George.” He looks in the rearview mirror. “If only everyone could learn good American in America!”

Percy presses himself into the corner of the back seat. His hat has spun in his hands 304 times, and it is torn. He sweats. He’s dressed for England or New England, not the South Bay, where he was promised breezes that are constantly denied to him. Bell says they need to sweat the bullshit out of him, and keeps his windows up.

The front door opens and out comes Mrs. Loeb. The American flag temporarily covers her, but she’s a cat in a paper bag, and out of the stars n’ stripes in no time. She waves.

“I always forget she’s expecting someone,” says Bell.

They walk to her on flat stones across the dark green grass. She cannot wait for them, but does not move; they come to her, while her body contorts into all sorts of strange shapes, physically manifesting that she can wait no longer.

She wears red lipstick. Her hair is blonde and pulled into a bun. She wears high-waist turquoise trousers and a cow-pattern shirt. It is the most reprehensible American get-up Bell has ever seen, and it takes all the America within him not to show it on his face. He smiles. She smiles, followed by a nonchalant George, and a sweating Percy, who is trying to breathe.

“Bell, baby!”

Mrs. Loeb leaps into his arms because Edgar does not wear cologne. Bell holds her, and she thinks he is strong, though anyone next to her aging husband, nearly 70, would be. She is a handful at 40. Well equipped, thinks the lads.

“Look at you, Bell. What is that? Don’t tell me. Hermès?”

He brings her hand to his lips and kisses her knuckles.

“A gift from me to you.”

Her eyelashes flutter. She turns away, but that is only because she has nearly ripped off her clothes. She turns back.

“Bell Moon, may I say you certainly know how to make an entrance.”

“You may say that, anytime, Elizabeth.”

He is aware not to remind her that she is married. She puts on a pair of red sunglasses and reluctantly leaves the scent of a man who’s come a distance from Marcel Boussac’s home.

“George!”

He tips his fishing cap.

“Ello.”

George smells like the sea, or is it just the front yard that always smells like the ocean? She likes that he wears one color, traditional royal blue, unaware that he has worn the same clothes for five days, and Percy… She isn’t sure what to do. He’s shaking and sweating. Looks like he just fell asleep after days of walking, only to be woken after 45 minutes. How is it, she thinks, that Bell has no five o’clock shadow.

“Because I am not aware of time in your company.”

She gushes. Percy is waiting for a hug, but she trots back to the front of the line.

“Go on, everyone. Edgar is in the study. You all know where it is.”

Bell lets George and Percy pass him for a quick moment with Mrs. Loeb.

“Depending on what transpires in the study, perhaps you will have time to join me for a cock…tail, down at San Pedagiiano’s?”

She leans on her tippy-toes and graces his ear with her cheek. She whispers, “You bring the cock, I’ll bring the tail.”

Bell’s grin, for which there is no defense, is on full display.

“That can be arranged.”

“Excuse me,” says Percy. “But Mr. Loeb awaits.”

They both roll their eyes at him.

“I’d better do what I’m told,” says Bell.

She smirks.

“Everything you’re told.”

He and Percy walk on the hex tile flooring, with new wooden cabinets and fine furniture. Everything he will hear about at San Pedagiiano’s. The study doors are open, and the sound of a thousand mosquitoes curls around the entrance corners. The study is a jungle. Plants on the desk, bookshelves, and tables. Bell suspects he hears a thousand mosquitoes, but it is only Mr. Loeb writing in his ledger. Everything within this man wants to yell in a thunderous baritone. Still, he remains at his desk, almost blending into the mahogany behind him like some inherited grandfather clock that is too big to toss. His hair is white, short, and receding. His ears have never stopped growing, and he has his readers on. His jacket is somewhere, and Bell suspects George has never seen him without one. He slaps his desk, and his head rises from his fortune with the gaze of a rich tortoise.

“Bell Moon! How about a scotch?”

“I say, about time I was offered a refreshment. Look at poor Percy here. He’s parched because he thought he could kidnap me.”

Edgar slaps the desk again. “Ha!” and holds out his hands. “My boy. You know, there was no other way to prevent you from going to Singapore.”

Bell walks around the desk and hugs the old man.

Percy is on the other side of Edgar, waiting like a little bitch while George walks around the room, looking at various photographs, diploma’s, awards, books, plants, and odd nick-knacks that remind him of some off the beaten path second hand store full of Queen Victoria’s secret belongings.

“You tricked Percy pretty good, didn’t you?” asks Loeb.

Edgar’s eyes were something not to be looked at too long. Blue, but a gathering storm with its own weather patterns, laws of nature, and rules, which Bell suspects is similar to or less than what is going on in his heart and brain. “The eyes are windows to the soul,” said the last Maitre d’.

“What makes you think that, Mr. Loeb?”

“He’s waiting to ask me if he can go home.”

Desperate to show that he is his own man, Percy walks away like an available free agent, mimicking George.

“Where do you think you’re going, Percy? Come back this instant!” demands Edgar.

Percy scuffles back.

“Yes, sir?”

“Three drinks. You know where the bar is. Care to join us, George?”

“Aye.”

“Sit, sit, everyone.”

They do.

“This isn’t a goddamn horse race, is it, George?”

“I have not noticed if it is, sir.”

Their voices couldn’t be more different. Whereas Bell has his transatlantic accent, Edgar was born before “All that bullshit.” George’s East End cockney is submerged in underworld activity, whereas Mr. Loeb’s voice is gruff, American, and welded in Northern Ohio. His parents came here from Sweden and farmed. Edgar left as soon as he could and never said goodbye, or even thought about it, making a dollar by running around Cleveland until he got on a train and found oil. He has never said where, and no longer owns the company. He sold it and has more money than the City of Los Angeles. He claims to be the last person to hear Michael Cassius McDonald speak, an influential crime boss, political boss, and businessman based in Chicago who ran gambling dens and brothels. “There’s a sucker born every minute. That’s what he repeated.”

He points at George, displaying momentary youthfulness that is his last, gone forever.

“But you would.”

“Aye.”

His long, bony finger goes down the ledger, an elephant’s trunk of bone, searching, smelling the books.

“It’s time, isn’t it, George?”

George’s default expression is a heavy curiosity that borders on inner-city stupidity.

“What is, sir?”

Edgar removes his readers and wipes them with a handkerchief on his desk. To Bell, Edgar has revealed a gun.

“Three scotches,” announces Percy, somehow keeping the noise to a minimum, despite holding a tray and shaking. “Neat, like everyone likes.”

“Likes?” asks Edgar. “It’s what I prefer, you Piccadilly Palare. There’s something you understand.”

He wears his torn boiler cap and sets down the tray on Mr. Loeb’s desk. Mr. Loeb flips the tray. Neither Bell nor George moves while glass and liquor are in the air. Their hands are identical. Crossed over the other. Patient.

“What the hell is this shit, Percy? Does my desk look like a goddamnn saloon? Like a pub, you pube?”

The screws that hold Percy’s life together are loose. His jaw is a mess, and he barely mutters, “No…sir,” with the uncertainty of the outer rim of the upper class. His family has lost a lot. They once had a crest.

“Get us four drinks, and take a nip before you hobble back over here.”

Percy isn’t even leaving the room. He’s at the bar cart in the corner that he wisely does not move. It is parked under prosthetic leaves that hide volumes of Raymond Dart’s work and discoveries—books about the Taung Child and the scientific racism of Sir Arthur Keith.

“Where was I?” asks Loeb. “Ah, yes.”

He drags his nail beside the ledger. It sounds like chalk.

“Exactly what I suspected. You owe me money, George.”

The accused sits up. Bell can hear him but retains his cool.

“For wot?”

Loeb’s eyes, the little hurricanes, dart over at Bell, seeking approval, but also sarcastically thanking him.

“Four scotches,” announces Percy, rosy around his dimples. “My wife makes me a toddy now and again when I’m a bit under or if the weather is a bit harsh after five. The boys…”

Loeb grabs the 50-pound bust of Henry Ford on his desk and throws it at Percy’s head, cracking his skull before he hits the ground. They watch him convulse for one minute until he stops. Only Bell received his drink. He knocks it back and announces, “This isn’t what I signed up for.”

George blows his head off. Mrs. Loeb screams, “What was that?” and the sound of her bare feet taps against the tile on her way to the study. She is freaked out, but relieved to see Bell, unharmed.

“Why would George do a thing like that at a time like this?” asks Bell Moon.

Her husband has not taken his eyes off him since she came into the room.

“Do you sleep with my wife, Bell?”

Bell spins his empty glass. He holds it up and looks through it.

“Why?”

“She tosses and turns in her sleep. I hear her. ‘Oh, moon. Moon, yes. That…’”

“I’m not fucking your wife, and where was Percy fetching scotch before a busk of Henry Ford hit his head?”

Edgar’s weary face is easy to miss as he reaches for the loaded weapon.

“What’s that?”

“I said...”

Bell stands and throws his scotch glass at Edgar Loeb. Elizabeth instinctively runs toward her husband, but slows down in the haze of Bell Moon’s cologne. She looks at its owner, and he says, “Dior.”

She smells him one last time as her husband screams into the hands covering his bloody face.