Captain Burger's American Dream

Captain Burger stepped from the red Eldorado convertible and stood for a moment under a magnificent oak tree whose thick branches and sharp metallic-green leaves afforded protection against the heat and glare of the sultry June morning. A sweet fragrance dripped from the leaves, the fragrance of early summer, of promises and memories, of newly awakened dreams. In a direct line from the tree under which he was standing, some 20 or 30 feet farther on, was another exactly like it and beyond that another, and so on for as far as he could see. He imagined an early settler had planted them as a shield for his crops against the violent winds that blew otherwise unfettered across this flat New Jersey plain. What might have once been a farm was now the Cedar Rest cemetery, although there were no cedars in sight, with trimmed hedges beyond the black iron-spiked fence and row upon row of white and gray headstones growing up out of the meticulously groomed lawns.

With a light, almost jaunty step, he strode out from under the tree and crossed the street. The sun was a white diffuse blur in the sky. Under his yellow paisley shirt and in his crotch against the tight pressure of his flowered denims, he could feel the uncomfortable build of perspiration. The sweet leaf smell was now tinged with something chemical. On this side of the street, the landscape was devoid of symmetry, without oaks or even the promise of cedars, a gray swamp of tall dry grass and weeds that stretched several miles across to the Hudson and the New York skyline beyond that.

"Why in hell you want to build here?" his accountant asked the first time Captain Burger indicated interest in the swamp.

"Yeah, C. B., why here?" his regional vice-president wanted to know.

Even Ernie Falucci, his chauffeur and personal bodyguard, who knew his place and never spoke unless spoken to and who certainly never interfered in business matters, felt compelled to add his judgment. "It don't look like much to me, boss."

But Captain Burger had simply smiled with the quiet self-assuring confidence of a man who knows something no one else knows. In this case, what he knew, as a result of information obtained through a private surveillance agency he had hired to wire-tap the local building inspector's office, was that plans were under way to build an international sports stadium on this same road not two miles from his proposed construction site.

By fall of next year, when the leaves were turning gold on the oak trees across the road and the new sports stadium was hosting its first football and soccer season, the new Hackensack Captain Burger, according to his best estimate (and he had an uncanny knack for accuracy in this area), would be serving upwards of 3000 burgers a day, 1,100,000 a year. This would bring his national total in excess of 300,000,000 burgers per annum, a figure that staggered even his imagination and exceeded the wildest and most feverish success dreams of his youth.

He stared out not so much at the thin strips of bright-orange flag that marked his land as at the orange flags in juxtaposition to the dismal, dirgelike panorama of the swamp, seeing in that contrast a tension basic to every dimension of his life: his individual will against the will of the universe. Of all his 301 Captain Burger stands from coast to coast, this one represented a particular symbolic victory, because he had been born in this town, had learned about life on the muddy rat-infested banks of the Hackensack River, had had his ass kicked in more than once by the local punks and bullies. Savoring the sweet taste of a private vengeance, he strode forth upon his land, through the dry rasping grass, over the rubble of beer cans and Coke bottles and tires heaped there by an insensitive and unimaginative public. He traced the perimeter of his property, going from marker to marker, reverently pausing before each one as if he were making a pilgrimage to himself.

There was a reason why he had chosen this particular site, these two acres out of the ten or more miles of swampland that was available to him. It was on this precise spot more than 20 years ago that he had had his first girl, Rhonda Bedminster, a sensuous although flat-chested towny whom he had doggedly pursued to no avail for two years. She had never even given him the benefit of one of the cock-teasing stares she was infamous for in adolescent circles around town. At least not until the night of his 15th birthday, when he stole a brand-new '54 Plymouth convertible out of the A & P parking lot and pulled up to the curb in front of Brogan's candy store, where Rhonda and her girlfriends hung out.

"Where'd you get it?" Rhonda asked him coldly, without so much as shifting a muscle in her body as she leaned sullenly against a parking meter. It was the first time she had ever spoken to him.

"I got it" was all he said.

"I know it ain't yours," she said, scorn dripping from the edges of her every word.

"I'm driving it," he said.

"I bet you stole it."

"If you're not interested," he said with a sharp edge to his voice that he was trying out for the first time, "there's others that are."

And with that she got in, her girlfriends wide-eyed with envy behind the windows of the candy store. He drove directly up to the swamp and pulled the car far enough into the weeds so that it was hidden from the road and without so much as a moment's hesitation, reached down inside her dungarees and grabbed for the first time the secret female treasure he had seen pictures of in magazines. To this moment, he could remember every detail of that night, the way each part of her body felt in his hands, the way the full moon turned the tips of the swamp grass silver. That was the beauty of love. Afterward it burned forever, like a sanctuary light, in the brain. Whenever possible, he let love be the inspiration for his business.

"We got twenty-five minutes to get to the airport," Ernie called to him from the catsup-red Eldorado, the color of 301 aluminum Captain Burger roofs from coast to coast.

As Captain Burger settled into the white-leather luxury of the Eldorado's back seat and as Ernie started the 500-cubic-inch engine, which purred as softly as a kitten, he turned to Miss Burger Queen, the beautiful dark-eyed girl beside him who was sullenly biting off pieces from a stick of sour-cherry gum. He did not see the slightly misty look in her eyes, nor did he seem to notice how the mascara had smeared beneath her left eye, like a bruise.

"I feel very special today," he confided to her.

Miss Burger Queen bunched the gum in her mouth between her tongue and her upper incisors and slowly let it ooze out in a pink pock-marked mass between her lips, where it dangled precariously for a moist fraction of a second before being sucked back inside, out of sight, in one soft fluid intake of breath. All the while, her dark eyes stared blankly back at him.

"Big deal," she said.

She turned away and looked out at the swamp fleeing by them at 85 miles an hour, snapping her gum defiantly because it was the one thing she knew of that would irritate Captain Burger more than anything else.

• • •

Linda Ann Creech, who was chosen Miss Burger Queen exactly one year ago to the day in the first annual Miss Burger Queen U. S. A. contest, waited until the fasten seat belt--no smoking sign went of on Eastern flight 909 to Miami before she left her first-class seat next to Captain Burger and made her way toward the rear of the plane. Several rows back, she passed Ernie, whose balding pear-shaped head was pressed between the colorful pages of Stag Adventures.

She resented Ernie in the same way she had resented her mother: He was always snooping around. For a year, he had been hanging around on the edges of her life like a shadow, perpetuating within her the same sense of uneasiness and irritability that she had run away from home to escape. Wherever they went, Ernie was never more than several yards behind, silent and vigilant, never very resourceful in the inconspicuous role he had been hired to play but faithful, more faithful than the most devoted German shepherd, Captain Burger would remind her whenever she complained. At restaurants he would eat alone at an adjacent table. In hotels he would occupy the connecting suite. In her fantasies she imagined him with a glass to the wall while they were making love. This particular image was so strong in her mind that it forced her to stifle the little moans and cries that normally accompanied her orgasms, an act of repression that was as frustrating to her as stifling the orgasm itself. Once while they were vacationing in Taormina on the eastern coast of Sicily, she was prompted in a moment of unparalleled exuberance to rush naked out onto the balcony of their hotel room with arms flung wide to embrace the sun rising like an ancient god over the Mediterranean. She was at first disarmed and then furious when she noticed Ernie calmly observing her from the next balcony over the pages of Giornale di Sicilia. Unblinking, without discernible lust, his eyes burned steadfastly into her like the tips of two cigars.

"Why is that man always lurking around?" she fumed at Captain Burger, who with great difficulty was trying to decipher his own copy of Giornale di Sicilia.

"He's not lurking," Captain Burger replied. "He's just doing his job. He's necessary for the operation."

"For what operation? What operation?"

"My operation, of course." He said it with the quiet arrogance of a philosopher who does not wish to elaborate (continued on page 166)Captain Burger's American Dream(continued from page 158) upon a self-evident truth. "He protects me."

"They don't assassinate hamburger moguls," she flung back at him. She had learned that term only last week from an article on the hamburger industry that appeared in Time magazine.

"No one is immune from the wrath of a competitor," he informed her, having years before distilled the lessons of history into several handy, easy-to-use maxims, of which this was one.

Linda had almost gotten past Ernie (she thought unnoticed) when he, without lifting his head from the magazine, demanded out of the corner of his mouth, "Where you going?"

"To piss," she snapped at him without slowing down, tossing her head back defiantly. At that moment, the plane lurched suddenly to one side and she found herself being propelled more rapidly than normal down the remainder of the aisle. Her hands slipped helplessly along the smooth gray wall of the rest room; her fingers fumbled for the door latch and as the plane tilted upward, she slid into the small cubicle, where she was wedged uncomfortably between the sink and the toilet. She turned the lock on the door and sat down on the stainless-steel toilet seat, where she promptly reached into her purse, took a lilac-scented tissue from her ten-cent packet and began to weep uncontrollably into it above the steady churning roar of the engines.

She felt cheated. She felt that what was rightfully hers was being unconscionably ripped out of her hands. This was just the reverse of the way she felt last June, when, through the large front window of the Tucson Captain Burger, where she worked not so much because she needed the money, which she did, as to get a few hours' relief from her mother, who never stopped nagging her, she first saw the red Eldorado loom into view like a chariot over the distant rim of the desert. Against the flaming sunset, the car seemed for one magical moment as if it had spilled out of the sun, an extension of its radiance, the only moving thing in the vast lifeless panorama of the desert. Transfixed, she watched it race toward her on the Nogales highway. The angle of the road shifted, the car swung out of the sun, leaving a long white trail of dust in the magenta twilight.

When the car finally came to rest in the parking lot and the tall sandy-haired man emerged from the back seat, she felt a quivering sensation along her spine. Through the glass, she watched him stretch his arms and legs and then stride across the parking lot with a determined, aggressive step that told her he was no ordinary customer. When he came in through the glass doors, there was an aura about him that made her mouth go dry and the palms of her hands feel clammy. In her confusion, she poured French fries into a strawberry thick shake. And then, in the next moment, she recognized him from the gilt-framed portrait that hung above the counter.

At a rosewood-grained Formica-topped table in the corner, munching from a giant bag of fries and sipping an orange float, he spoke with each of the female employees in turn, asking questions about the schools they went to, their family backgrounds, their hobbies and interests. But of the six countergirls, she alone had been given an envelope that contained an airplane ticket to Miami and told that she had been selected as a finalist in the first annual Miss Burger Queen U.S.A. contest. That night, as she watched the taillights of the Eldorado recede into the moonless blackness of the Arizona desert, she felt that she was the luckiest girl in the whole Grand Canyon State.

And two weeks later, when she was chosen Miss Burger Queen by Captain Burger himself out of more than 200 contestants from all over the country and awarded a $25,000 cash prize, her sense of gratitude was overwhelming. She didn't understand why this honor had befallen her. What had she done to deserve it? Before this, she had never won anything in her life, not even a Teddy bear at the church bazaar. She thanked the heavens, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohammed and all the saints and angels she could remember from Sunday school.

In the year that followed, the $25,000 cash prize was the least of the wonderful things that happened to her. Her picture was hung next to the captain's over the counter of every Captain Burger stand in the country. There was a full-color photo spread of her in Pattie, a trade publication for the hamburger industry. She attended the dedication ceremonies for each new Captain Burger; she jetted all over the country with the captain (before this, she had never traveled more than 15 miles from Tucson); she accompanied him on his vacations to Majorca, Taormina, St.-Tropez and Maui. Each day her gratitude grew, boundless, out of control. And then, of course, she fell in love with the captain and she realized with the first pangs of sadness and anticipated regret that she would never be happier in her life.

Someone was knocking on the rest-room door. She tried to stifle her tears, but she could not. They burned her cheeks, were bitter on her tongue. Tonight it would all come to an end. She would be tossed aside like an unwanted crust of hamburger bun.

The knocking on the door was louder, more insistent. Ernie's voice said, "What the hell you doin' in there?"

"Go to hell," she said through her tears. "Go to goddamn hell."

• • •

Ernie had been with the captain for more years than he, Ernie, could remember. He had been through 301 Captain Burger openings, the captain's three divorces and innumerable crises both personal and professional. He knew the captain as far back as the days when his name was Ruggiero Kanarowski, son of old man Kanarowski, for whom Ernie had worked. The old man had owned an auto-body repair shop on a busy highway. For years it had been a one-man operation barely earning enough to support his Sicilian wife and send his son to college; but because he was getting on, he hired Ernie to do most of the heavy work while he limited himself primarily to giving estimates and ordering parts.

The young Ruggiero never showed his face around the shop. Ernie learned, through the old man, that he had married a beautiful girl, the daughter of a college professor from Upper Montclair, and that he had recently bought an abandoned diner out on Staten Island, which he was planning to convert to a hamburger stand as soon as he could accumulate enough capital. Right after that, the old man had a stroke while knocking out a dent in the fender of a Lincoln Continental. He was placed on the critical list at Hackensack Hospital, where he drifted in and out of a coma for almost a month.

During this time, Ernie, as faithful to the old man as he would later be to the son, kept the shop open every day and maintained an honest account of the hours he put in and the work he did. One night, just as he was getting ready to close, a man in a white-suede jacket appeared in the back doorway of the shop. The man stood immobile as a statue, the suede jacket open, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his pants while his sullen eyes took in every detail of the place as if he were seeing it for the first time. When he came inside, he ignored Ernie, or rather looked at him no differently than he looked at the row of wrenches hung neatly according to size on the back wall. Ernie, his face glistening with sweat, his work clothes irreversibly stained with grease and oil, watched him stroll in and out among the deformed automobiles: a '53 Buick with a mangled bumper, a doorless '58 Chrysler, a Cadillac hearse with its radiator crushed in against the engine block. All the while the man, although apparently deep in thought, was particularly careful to keep his jacket from brushing against any part of the cars.

When the man finally spoke, he stood over a pile of bruised metal and twisted chrome, his back to Ernie. "My name's (continued on page 230)Captain Burger's American Dream(continued from page 166) Kanarowski," he said. "This is my father's place."

"I've kept a record of everything--" Ernie blurted out, moving toward the small office in the back to get the books. But the man's voice stopped him.

"Forget it," he said, turning around. His cold blue eyes met Ernie's. "I want you to take the day off tomorrow. I'm going to get this place fixed up."

"But I promised I'd--" Ernie stammered, pointing to the cars.

"They can wait. This place hasn't been painted in twenty years. The front yard needs to be repaved."

That night the shop burned down. When Ernie came to work a day later, there was nothing left but the foundation and several hulks of scorched metal. Surrounded by gas stations on three sides, he stood there broodingly reverent, lunchbox in hand, staring at the charred remains of his place of employment as if it were the sacred ruins of an ancient civilization. Cars raced by on the highway behind him, making a rushing noise like the wind off the Aegean whispering in ghost voices to the crumbling stone columns of the Parthenon. Just then a gray Pontiac pulled off the highway and lurched to a stop alongside him.

"Get in," the young Kanarowski said, leaning across the seat and pushing open the door for him.

At the hospital, Ernie, like a sentinel, stood rigidly outside the doors of the ward while the prospective Captain Burger half crouched, half knelt beside the bed of his father.

"Dad," he whispered into the almost colorless eyes that stared out from the white Sahara folds of the pillow. "Dad, I've got to tell you something important."

The flat gray eyes didn't move.

"Can you hear me, Dad?" He bent closer until his mouth was only inches from the face in which the eyes were lodged like burned-out meteors that had struck the earth. "Dad," he whispered again.

He drew back and waited. Behind him, moans rose from other beds in a tidal wave of human misery. Cries broke out of a nightmare; someone was calling for the nurse. He leaned close to his father again. "The shop's burned down, Dad," he said. "With the insurance money, I want to put up a hamburger stand. It's a dynamite spot because of the highway. Two hundred cars pass by every minute. Twelve thousand every hour. Do you know how many hamburgers that means?"

Breathlessly, he watched the eyes for the slightest possible movement, for the approval he hoped they would give him. But the eyes remained inert. Instead the dry, chapped lips beneath them began to move. The voice was almost inaudible, words hollowed out of dry breath. "How can I work on cars with you in my way selling hamburgers?"

"No, Dad, you don't understand. You won't be working on cars anymore. I'm going to build a hamburger stand there instead."

"Hamburgers?" came the cracked whisper.

"The culinary future of America is in the hamburger, Dad," the son replied, understanding the addictive needs and desires of a generation brought up on the taste of cheap hamburgers, a generation of blue jeans and Volkswagens and Top 40 radio, a generation that thrived on informality and ease, that scorned elegance.

"Hamburgers?" the voice said again.

"Well, cheeseburgers, too. And French fries."

A long time elapsed before the lips began to move again, the words straggling behind like a band of defeated soldiers. "I don't even like hamburgers," the lips said.

Afterward, Captain Burger told himself that he never would have done it if he wasn't certain his father was going to die. And even if his father had lived, he reasoned, he would have made twice as much money managing the hamburger stand as he would have fixing cars. So as soon as the check from the insurance company came, he went out and bought a brand-new Lincoln Continental, hired Ernie as his chauffeur, divorced his first wife, changed his name to Roger Cannon (he wanted something simple and memorable as well as phallic) and built the first Captain Burger.

Seventy-five Captain Burger stands later (at a time when the captain feared an assassination plot by a rival chain), Ernie was promoted to personal bodyguard, serving thereafter in a double capacity. As the years passed and the empire grew, Ernie became more than an employee, more even than a friend. He was a spiritual escort, a latter-day guardian angel into whose hands (Ernie knew) had been placed the custodianship of one of the most important men of our time. Throughout the years, he never once betrayed that trust, never faltered in his devotion. Wives and lovers came and went, friends disappeared, business deals fell through. But Ernie stayed. His callused mechanic's hands gripped the pearl-white steering wheel of the Eldorado with all the intensity and sense of destiny of a navigator in search of the New World, his bald head shining above the front seat like a beacon that guided the captain through the maze of freeways, turnpikes, highways, parkways, side streets, dirt roads and cowpaths that crisscross the American landscape.

Ernie took particular pleasure, his most important pleasure save one, in the fact that he knew things about the captain that no one else knew, that the captain himself didn't know he knew. There was that time, for instance, in New Orleans at the Lake Pontchartrain Captain Burger when the captain told him to wait in the car. As Ernie watched the moonlight ripple across the black water of the lake, a Baptist revival meeting on the car radio, he heard strange noises that at first seemed to be a part of the revival broadcast until he began to suspect that they were, in point of fact, emanating from somewhere inside the Captain Burger stand itself.

Ernie turned off the radio. The noises continued. He climbed out of the car, dutifully approached the front door of the stand and peered through the glass. In the darkness, the neorosewood chairs were stacked on the neorosewood tables. Near the counter, a square of moonlight illuminated the immaculate, orange-tiled floor. He jiggled the door handle. For a moment more, he stared meditatively out across the lake before tracing the noises around to the rear of the stand. There were no windows along the back wall, just the flat, bare cinder block, so he climbed on top of the trash-disposal bin and looked through the small opening that housed the exhaust fan. Between the blades of the fan, he could discern in the dim light of the kitchen the naked bodies of Captain Burger and Lois, his girlfriend at the time. They had climbed into a steel vat of chopped meat, where they were smearing gobs of red meat on each other, their bodies writhing and twisting in a kind of dance as they communicated to each other with animal grunts and groans.

On the way back to the motel, the smell of hamburger meat was so strong that Ernie had to drive with the air conditioner on and all the windows open. It was later that night, after Ernie was well into the second movement of what was to be a three-part nightmare in which Captain Burger was moving menacingly toward him in a dark, unfamiliar room with a perverse grin on his twisted lips and his hands reaching out grotesquely, when Ernie awoke suddenly to find the captain actually was moving toward him in the dark motel room, a perverse grin on his twisted lips, his hands reaching out grotesquely.

"What's the matter, boss?" he asked fearfully into the darkness.

"A wonderful thing happened tonight, Ernie. Lois and I are going to be married."

Ernie snapped on the light over his bed. The captain stood above him, his eyes glimmering the way they did whenever he drank champagne. "That's great, boss," he said. Secretly, Ernie considered women a nuisance. But he considered it his professional responsibility to be enthusiastic. "That's great, boss," he said again, just to be safe.

(continued on page 234)Captain Burger's American Dream(continued from page 230)

The captain went over to the window, where he stared out at the blue shimmering water of the pool. "Marriage is an ordinary thing," he said sadly. "Every day millions of people all over the world fall in love and get married. But I want my marriage to Lois to be different." He turned to face Ernie, his hands shoved into the pockets of the South Sea Blue smoking jacket he had put on after his shower. "I want to distinguish it from my first marriage, from every other marriage. I want the whole world to know what I feel tonight."

It was later that night, after he let Ernie return to his nightmare, after he looked in again at Lois sleeping like a beautiful child in his bed with a tiny piece of chopped meat still lodged in the coils of one ear, as he sat on the edge of the pool and watched the moonlight turn the water a strange, dreamlike green, that he invented the LoveBurger: two heart-shaped patties of beef on a heart-shaped roll. Even the pickle inside, he decided, would be in the shape of a miniature heart.

The next day he ordered 1000 special meat molds and from then on, he paid twice as much for each hamburger roll because of the unique shape. Over each Captain Burger stand he erected a large red heart-shaped sign with the words home of the Loveburger lit up in bright phosphorescent gold. It wasn't exactly the color of Lois' hair, but it was the closest match he could get in neon. He thought of the LoveBurger as a kind of communion. Each time a customer bit into one, it was like sharing his love for Lois. Eighteen months later, at a hotel rooftop terrace overlooking the Roman Forum, the marriage ended. But the LoveBurger remained, a testament to the irretrievable past, imbuing his second marriage with the only kind of immortality it would ever know.

• • •

Ernie raised his fist this time and pounded heavily on the rest-room door. He heard the toilet gurgle, the faucet splash on and off three times, paper towel being torn. He raised his fist again and at that moment, the door opened. Miss Burger Queen took one look at the raised fist, at the square-jowled set of Ernie's face and managed in a fraction of a microsecond to suck back the tears that were still forming in her eyes, harden the lines of her mouth and, dry-eyed and composed, sneer haughtily at him: "Don't you dare, you cretin! You bully!"

She swept past him, past the line of outraged passengers that had formed behind him, past the stewardess who was staring coldly at her from the kitchen. Stewardesses had never been nice to her and she returned their hostility with a venom of her own. Flying fucks, she called them. They're nothing but flying fucks, she said to Captain Burger whenever they did something to annoy her, like offer him a magazine but not her or spill scalding-hot coffee accidentally on her dress.

Captain Burger was staring out the window at the fluffy whipped-cream clouds, thinking about nothing in particular but feeling warm and contented, dreamy in the soft clear light of the sun. He tried to ignore the fact that as soon as she sat down she methodically began to pop Chiclets into her mouth from a freshly opened package, stopping only when the package was empty, when she had broken the cellophane window with her index finger and felt around in the corners of the pack to make sure not one of them had eluded her. He knew she did it, made a ritual of it, because it annoyed him. He tried to dismiss it for what it was, a childish gesture, a petty vengeance.

When she had carefully and systematically assimilated the gum, subdued it to the point where it was one definable wad, she turned to him and insinuated herself like a thorn into his reverie.

"Roger?"

He hated her when she called him that. Why couldn't she call him C. B., like his friends did?

"I don't feel right calling you by initials," she told him once when he tried to correct her. "It's not personal."

"What am I going to do now, Roger?" she asked.

She had put off asking this very question for weeks, because she was afraid of, knew, what he would answer. The worst part of it all was that she didn't regret it, this year she had spent with him, even though she had to give it up now, even though she felt used because she knew deep inside that he had never--not for one of those moments--ever loved her. She would do it again. All he had to do was snap his fingers.

"You can have your old job back," he said absently.

• • •

His suite was on the 14th floor of the Chantilly. From the king-sized bed, his head propped up by two foam-rubber pillows, he saw an infinite sweep of blue sky through the floor-to-ceiling windows. On the balcony, he looked out at the ocean; and when he leaned forward beyond the shadow of the balcony above, he fell into the shattering white glare of the sun, which was directly over him. The view was to the southeast, water as infinite as the sky, toward the islands of the Bahamas, which he could not see but which he imagined he could see floating like lush green memories on the horizon. Island hopping was his third wife's. Regina's, favorite pastime, and in the two and a half years of their marriage, they had hopped their way through them all from Bermuda to Trinidad.

He changed his yellow paisley shirt for a lavender paisley, same design. He put on khaki shorts, tennis sneakers, brushed his hair over one eye, admired his tan in the mirror (a tan he managed to keep all year round by scheduling a weekend in the sun at least once a month), went across the hall and knocked on Miss Burger Queen's door. To avoid unpleasantness later, he had arranged separate suites. After the coronation, Ernie would give her a one-way ticket back to Tucson. That was the agreement. It had all been written down a year ago, in black and white. He knocked again, but there was not even the slightest sound of movement beyond the door, so he strolled down the hall toward the elevator, whistling the 18th variation of Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

In the elevator, the metallic mahogany decor made his whistling sharper and clearer, so he continued with renewed gusto, not stopping when the doors opened onto the lobby, rapt in the ecstasy of the piece, despite the fact that his whistle was shriller now, less melodic, almost frantic in the flat open spaces of the lobby. He kept the tune alive, however erratically, past potted palms and scampering bellboys, abstract bronze sculptures, murals of exploding suns and seething oceans, through the unsympathetic clamor of voices all around him. He reached the crescendo just as he stepped out into the bright sunlight, where he took in the broad clean sweep of Collins Avenue, the palms on either side, the pastel buildings: a water color of the good life.

He followed a path around behind the hotel, past the Olympic-sized pool, the white and blue deck chairs, the tennis courts, under the momentary shade of coconut palms and down the white-stone steps that led to the beach. From the water's edge, with the ocean washing up over his feet, he looked back across the beach, beyond the palms flapping in the wind to the hotel itself, imposing, monolithic, a declaration of man's superiority to nature. He tried to find his balcony out of the hundreds of identical balconies that faced out over the water, but he kept losing count before he got to 14. Then he spotted Ernie, still dressed in his black chauffeur's suit, watching him through binoculars from one of the balconies.

He had stood out on one of the Chantilly balconies with each of his wives, having spent all three of his honeymoons here. To Captain Burger, Miami was not so much a glamorous array of hotels and night clubs as a private warehouse of dreams and memories where, despite the crowds and the noise and the gaiety, he could be alone with himself. With each of his wives in turn, he had watched the sun set and murmured how wonderful, how glorious; and later, sipping banana daiquiries on the balcony, he stared longingly into their eyes, each new pair of eyes replacing the former ones, as the moon rose a pale, forlorn yellow in the dark Atlantic sky.

The Miami moon was his saddest memory. It always seemed to be inflated beyond its capacity, brimming with hope, fragile. The time he came here for his 35th birthday, right after he left his third wife, the moon seemed to him a gaping reminder of the emptiness of his own soul. He and Regina were traveling through Egypt and the Holy Land when they split up. He left her in Jerusalem and went alone on a tour of the mountains of Judaea and the Dead Sea. He found himself transfixed by the pale blue-green color of the sea and, when the guide told them that no plant or animal life could survive there, he wondered how something so beautiful could be so lifeless. When he came home, he flew to Miami for his birthday, where, alone and miserable (even Ernie had left him, gone home to Brooklyn to attend to his dying mother), he walked along the beaches in the moon's cold, fluorescent glare. He realized that, without his having noticed, his life had reached its halfway mark; that at 35, after three marriages and innumerable love affairs, the only thing he had managed to keep alive was his business. He laughed out loud at himself, tasted the bitter irony of his life. He had always prided himself on being a man of foresight and vision, The Man Who Can, as the inscription under his picture read for every Captain Burger customer to contemplate, the man who had constructed a hamburger stand strong enough to resist even nuclear holocaust. Normally, one of his most satisfying fantasies was to imagine himself safe inside his radioactive-proof Captain Burger stand, staring out through the protective glass at the smoking ruins of America and gloating that he alone had been ingenious enough to survive, knowing that beneath him in the special fallout shelter there was enough hamburger meat to keep him alive for 200 years. But the night of his 35th birthday, that fantasy only made him lonelier than he was. Because despite his seemingly undaunted will, he saw the second half of his life stretching out below him like an aerial view of Death Valley.

Later that night, in his sleepless, drunken grief, he wandered aimlessly along Collins Avenue. At the fountain display in front of the hotel, he stopped to watch two girls wading out into the water. They had left their shoes at the edge of the fountain and as they glided through the water, they held their dresses high above their knees. The lights in the fountain were constantly shifting, turning the water pink and blue and lavender as the girls floated there, transformed into shimmering nymphets, more an apparition than reality. Their hair was the silky blonde of fairy tales, their bodies lithe and graceful, their motions as delicate as the pink mist that blew away from the fountains. They seemed mirror images of each other, two angelic sister princesses conjured up out of the lost dreams of his childhood, and they seemed to beckon him with their shy, playful eyes, with the innocent seduction of their dance. He knew they could be no more than 17, yet he felt he was discovering some essence of femininity that had eluded him all these years, some promise of freshness, an uninhibited joy and sweetness that had been denied him in his relations with older women. They had not yet been disillusioned by love, the smooth ivory softness of their faces--bright-eyed and eager--not yet wrinkled by the inevitable cynicism of middle age.

In his rapture, Captain Burger also took his shoes off, climbed the stone rim of the pool and began wading unsteadily toward them, the lights and water spinning around their tempting young bodies (he thought about all the girls in his teenage years who had denied him), their girlish laughter calling him to his future. No matter that when he reached the bubbling center of the fountain the girls were gone, that the flow of their bodies had evaporated to mist, that the melody of their voices became the condescending question of the Chantilly doorman, who stood haughtily at the edge of the pool, watching him: "May I help you up to your room, Mr. Cannon?" No matter: The vision remained and, like most of his visions, became palpable almost immediately in the idea for the annual Miss Burger Queen contest.

As he strolled along the beach in the warm afternoon sun. Ernie following him through the lenses of the binoculars, knowing that at this very moment preparations were under way for tonight's festival, he felt not so much the promise as the guarantee of new beginnings, new horizons. He walked for what he thought was hours, and when he returned at last to the hotel, his hair frizzed out wildly by the salt wind, his tan face flushed by the sun, he found the door to Miss Burger Queen's suite flung wide open, the suite itself looking as if a brawl had taken place. He learned later that she had drunk an entire bottle of Bristol Cream sherry in his absence and then tried to drown herself in the bathtub. When he went in, Ernie was marching around the room, dragging the inert, naked, dripping-wet body of Miss Burger Queen along with him, counting cadence. "Hup, two, three, four. Hup. . . ."

As they careened around the sofa, Ernie and the nearly lifeless Miss Burger Queen came face to face with the captain. Ernie's head, already drooping under the weight of his soggy burden, drooped even further.

"I'm sorry, boss," he said, knowing he was guilty at the very least of having had his binoculars facing in the wrong direction.

• • •

In the Ponce de León Room of the Chantilly Hotel, champagne corks popped like fireworks and balloons drifted through the smoky recesses of a ceiling crowded with chandeliers and streamers. At a table in the center of the room directly beneath the largest chandelier, Captain Burger (in a white-satin tuxedo) sat across from Linda Ann, the prototype of all future Miss Burger Queens, who wore a black-silk evening gown studded with tiny silver sequined LoveBurgers and whose head, from time to time, appeared perilously close to rolling forward into the roast beef au jus. On all sides, he was surrounded by the representatives of his empire, Captain Burger managers and assistant managers from across the country, all wearing laminated heart-shaped identification cards that glowed in the dark and read: Hi! my name is _____. I'm from the _____ Captain Burger.

After his fifth glass of champagne, his attention turned from the crowd and noise around him to the girl he had lived with for the past year, who in a matter of hours would vanish from his life. In the shifting light, her cream-sherried eyes took on a mysterious, angelic glow. She was, he still had to admit, a beautiful girl. In a tender, fleeting moment of reminiscence, he felt sorry it was coming to an end. But he, like the annual Miss Burger Queen, had to abide by the rules he had set up. Upon each of his wives he had heaped too much of his need, his anguish. He had tried to make each of his marriages fill the void of his diverse and paradoxical longings, his insatiable emptiness. The one-year time limit forced him to expect less, take what pleasure he could without worrying about the quality or the quantity of his fulfillment, relieved him of the insidious burden of consequences, the affliction of the future. With the baked Alaska burning blue in the darkness around him, he leaned across the table to the beautiful symbol of the imperfection of all his dreams and whispered with the only kind of gratitude he knew: "Thank you."

At midnight, with the champagne still flowing not so much as a love potion as the promise of a love potion, he sat alone at the end of the ramp as the contestants for the new Miss Burger Queen paraded before him in the red-and-gold simplicity of their Captain Burger uniforms, their faces unspoiled and radiant, their legs flashing beneath the short fitted skirts. Each in turn, they came forward and made their recitation: "I want to be Miss Burger Queen U. S. A. because. . . ." Hair, eyes, voice, smile, legs, movement. There was no detail that he missed. And when he had made his choice, when he had delivered the name of his choice in a sealed envelope to Jackie Cohon, the Hollywood comedian who was acting as master of ceremonies, and as he leaned back to await the coronation, Ernie's thick breath suddenly whispered into his ear.

"She's gone," Ernie said.

"Who's gone?" the captain asked nervously.

"Linda . . . Miss Burger"--Ernie stammered--"nobody knows what's happened to her."

"Never mind," the captain said, once again in control. "I'll do the crowning myself."

With the orchestra playing the second movement of Rachmaninoff's Concert Number Two in C minor, he slowly raised the crown of diamond baguettes above the clear, sensual face of Miss Sherri Miller from the Pikes Peak Captain Burger. Like a drowning man whose entire life is compressed into a single apocalyptic flashback, the faces of all the women he had ever longed for and loved flickered before him for one fleeting moment before dissolving into the new Miss Burger Queen's pale blue-green eyes, which, he noted with a poet's flair for analogy, were the exact color of the Dead Sea.