The Water-Method Man

  'Ja? A Zorn-Witwer!' a man with thick glasses says. 'A 'fifty-three? A 'fifty-four?'

  'Ja? A 'fifty-four!' Bogus cries, turning to the man. 'It had an old gearshift that slid in and out of the dash; it had holes in the floorboards - you could see the road moving. It had lumpy upholstery ...'

  He stops, seeing several Hawelka customers observing his excitement. 'Well, where is he?' Trumper asks the man who knows Zorn-Witwers.

  'I knew the car, was all I said,' the man answers.

  'But you've actually seen him ...' Bogus turns back to the girl.

  'Ja, but not in a while,' she says, and the boy she's with gives Bogus an irritated stare.

  'How long since you've seen him?' Bogus asks her.

  'Look,' the girl says, annoyed. 'I don't know any more about him. I just remember him, is all ...' Her tone silences those around her.

  Trumper stares at her, disappointed; perhaps he begins to sway, or else his eyes roll, because a high-bosomed, thick-maned girl with neon-green eyeshadow catches his arm, pulling him down to her table.

  She asks, 'You have problems?' He tries to pull away, but she coaxes him more gently. 'No, seriously, what is the problem?' When he doesn't respond, she tries him in English, even though he's spoken German all along. 'You have troubles, do you?' She trills the word 'troubles' in such a way that Bogus sees it floating, like a written word: Tttrrrubbles.

  'You need help?' the girl asks, returning to German.

  There's a waiter near them now, darting nervously. Trumper remembers that the waiters at the Hawelka always seemed fearful of tttrrrubbles.

  'You sick?' the waiter asks. He takes Trumper's arm, causing him to strain against the girl's grip and drop his laden suitcase. It makes an unlikely clank, and the waiter backs off, awaiting the explosion. People nearby eye the suitcase as if it's stolen or lethal, or both.

  'Please, just talk to me,' says the neon-green girl. 'You can tell me everything,' she claims. 'It's all right.' But Bogus gathers up his suitcase, looking away from this fierce female ... who would make a fine Den Mother for some Erotic Club.

  Everyone stares while Trumper checks to see if his fly is closed. He distinctly remembers removing a condom ...

  Then he's out of there, not quite escaping the prophecy of the strange bearded fellow in black near the door. 'It's around the corner,' says the prophet with such conviction that Bogus shudders.

  He turns out on the Graben, cutting toward Stephansplatz. It wasn't around that corner, he reassures himself, thinking that the prophet must have been speaking figuratively, which is the safe and sneaky way all prophets speak.

  He means to look next for Merrill in the Twelve Apostles' Keller, but he loses his way and ends up in the Hohner Markt, all of whose wooden vegetable and fruit stands are tarpaulined for the night; he imagines the venders asleep under the canvas. The place looks like an outdoor morgue. The Twelve Apostles' Keller always was a bitch to find.

  He asks a man for directions, but it's clearly the wrong person to ask; the man just gawks at him.

  'Kribf?' he says, or something like that. Trumper doesn't understand. Then the man makes certain odd motions, as if reaching into his pockets for smuggled watches, fake meerschaum pipes, dirty pictures or a gun.

  Bogus runs back to Stephansplatz and up the Graben. Finally, he stops under a streetlight to read his watch; it's past midnight, he's sure, but he can't remember how many time zones he's crossed since Iowa, or even if he's thought about this before and already corrected his watch. It says it's two-fifteen.

  A well-dressed woman of uncertain age comes toward him on the sidewalk, and he asks her if she has the time.

  'Sure,' she says, and stops beside him. She is wearing a rich-looking fur coat, with her hands in a matching muff; and fur boots, with heels, which she shifts. She stares at Trumper, puzzled, then extends her elbow to him. 'It's this way,' she says, a little annoyed that he hasn't taken her arm.

  'The time?' he says.

  'Time?'

  'I asked, "Do you have the time?"'

  She stares, shakes her head, then smiles. 'Oh, the time - what time is it?' she says. 'The hour, you mean?'

  Then he realizes that she's a whore. He's on the Graben, and the first-district prostitutes cover the little streets off the Graben and the Karntner Strasse at night.

  'Uh,' he says, 'I'm sorry. I don't have the money. I just wondered, did you know what time it is?'

  'I don't have a watch,' the prostitute tells him, looking both ways along the street; she doesn't want to discourage a potential customer by being seen with Trumper. But no one's around except another prostitute.

  'Is there a pension near here?' Bogus asks. 'Not too expensive.'

  'Come on,' she says, and walks off ahead of him to the corner of Spiegelgasse. 'Down there,' she points to a blue neon light. 'The Pension Taschy.' Then she walks away, heading down the Graben toward the other prostitute.

  'Thank you,' Bogus calls after her, and she waves her muff over her shoulder, exposing for a second one ungloved, elegant, long-fingered hand with winking rings.

  In the lobby of the Pension Taschy are two other prostitutes who have stepped in out of the cold and stand stamping their boots, slapping their pink calves together. In the light of the lobby, eyeing Trumper's long-traveled mustache and suitcase, they don't bother to smile.

  From the window of his room at the Taschy, Trumper can see one side of the mosaic roof of Saint Stephen's Cathedral, and also watch the whores clicking down his street to catch a late bite at the American Hamburger Spa a block up the Graben from Spiegelgasse.

  At this apparently late hour the prostitutes are bringing few customers to the Taschy, where they're provided with a few dozen rooms on the second floor. But Trumper can hear them guiding men through the halls below him and see them escorting men down the Spiegelgasse sidewalk to the lobby.

  One by one, the men depart alone, and Trumper hears the flushing of the second-floor bidets. It's this late-hour plumbing that makes him bold enough to ask Frau Taschy if he can take a bath. Reluctantly she draws him one, then waits outside the bathroom while he splashes about - listening, to make sure I don't draw another drop.

  Bogus was ashamed of the color of the bath water and hastily pulled the plug, but Frau Taschy heard the first thick gurgle and from the hall cried that she'd attend to the cleaning up. Embarrassed, he left her his ring to scrub, but couldn't help noticing the slight catch in her breath when she viewed it.

  Frau Taschy had been pleasant enough when he'd registered, but as he stepped clean and chilled into his room, he noticed she'd done more than turn down his bed. His suitcase had been opened and the contents were neatly arranged on the broad window seat, as if the Frau had taken a careful inventory in preparation for an outstanding debt.

  Though the room was unheated, he felt drawn to sit down for a moment at his new typewriter and try out all those funny umlauts. He wrote:

  My room at the Taschy is three floors up, one block down Spiegelgasse from the Graben. The first-district whores use the place. They are first-class. I stay with nothing but the best.

  Then Frau Taschy interrupted him, reminding him of the lateness of the hour and that his typing was noisy, but before he could ask her what late hour it was, she crept off. He heard her pause on the stair landing, and when she descended he resumed his typing:

  Frau Taschy, an old hand at estimating a lodger's fate, can decipher pending doom from rings left in bathtubs.

  Then he typed three lines of German diphthongs and attempted to write the typing-test sentence about the quick brown fox and the lazy dog, using only umlaut vowels. Or was it a lazy frog?

  Listening for Frau Taschy, he heard another bidet flush and remembered the whores. He wrote:

  In Vienna, prostitution isn't simply legal; it's both aided and controlled by law. Every whore is issued a sort of license to practice, renewable only with regular medical check-ups. If you're not a registered prostitute, you can't legally be one.

/>   Merrill Overturf used to say, 'Don't ever buy until you see their safety stickers.'

  Just as officially, uncertain hotels and pensions in each district are licensed to handle the trade. Prices are supposedly fixed for both hotels and whores, and the first district has the youngest, prettiest and the most expensive of them. As you move away from the Inner City, the whores in the outer districts grow older, uglier and more economical. Overturf was fond of remarking that he lived on a fifteenth-district budget.

  Then Bogus got bored with writing and went to his window and watched the sidewalk. Below was the whore with the fur coat and matching muff. He tapped the double-pane window and she looked up. He turned his face back and forth in the window for her to see, trying to catch just enough light from his night table to show her who he was, thinking that from below he must resemble some embarrassed exhibitionist not quite daring to hold still.

  But she recognized him and smiled up at him. Or she smiled out of habit, recognizing him only as someone simply male, summoning her inside. She pointed up to him and wagged her finger; again he saw the bright, bejeweled hand. When she started for the door, Trumper tapped fiercely on the glass: No, no! I'm not calling you inside. I was just saying hello ... But she looked as if she took his wild tapping for excitement, and she actually skipped, tossing her face up to him. From a distance he couldn't see a trace of her make-up; she might have been a flirting cheerleader agreeing to a ride home after the game.

  He thumped out into the hall, still wearing his towel; it rose over his navel when he straddled the stairwell and caught the draught of the closing lobby door below. He recognized the woman's hand on the banister, sliding up to the first landing. When he called down to her, her head jutted out of the stairwell and she looked right up his skirt, giggling like a fresh girl.

  He shouted, 'Nein!' But she moved up another landing, and he shouted, 'Halt!' Again her face darted into the stairwell space and he pinched his towel together with his knees. 'I'm sorry,' he told her. 'I didn't mean for you to come up.' Her mouth turned down at one corner, causing sudden crow's feet to delta from her eyes; now she looked in her thirties, perhaps forties. But she kept coming.

  Trumper stood like a statue, and she stopped a step below him, breathing in short, perfumed gasps, the outdoors cold still radiating off her clothes, her face nicely flushed. 'I know,' she said. 'You only wanted to ask me the time?'

  'No,' he said, 'I recognized you. I just tapped on the window to say hello.'

  'Hello,' she said. Now she exaggerated her breathing, leaning on the banister, growing older in front of him, just to make me feel especially bad.

  'I'm sorry,' Bogus told her. 'I don't have anything to give you.'

  She stared at his towel and touched the corners of her mouth. She really was quite lovely. In the first district, they often are. Not so whorish; more elegance than burlesque. Her coat was nice; her hair was simple and looked clean; her bones had taste.

  'Really, I would like to,' Bogus said.

  Again she stared cruelly at his towel, and said - too sweetly, playing a mock mother to him - 'Put some clothes on. Do you want to catch a cold?'

  Then she left. He followed her nice hand along the banister all three flights down, then padded back to his typewriter; he was about to command his keys to be lyrical, to make some unembarrassed statement of self-pity, when he was interrupted by one more flushing bidet below, and by Frau Taschy scratching outside his door. 'No more typing, please,' she said. 'People are trying to sleep.'

  People are trying to screw, she meant. His typing disturbed their rhythm or their consciences. But he didn't touch his funny foreign keys; they could prepare their lyrics overnight. Looking down on Spiegelgasse he observed the whore he'd twice misled arm in arm with another prostitute, headed for a coffee break. He thought about how the years must be for them, pacing young and glittering along the Karntner Strasse and the Graben, then moving out, district by district, year by year, past the Prater amusement park and along the dirty Danube, getting mauled by factory workers and technical high school students for half the fare they had once charged. But it was at least as fair as the real world, perhaps fairer, because the district you ended up in wasn't always a predictable downfall, and in real life you couldn't always choose a glittering beginning.

  Out the window, Bogus watched the ringed woman with her muff - once more the cared-for hand animated her talk with another whore; her hand snaked out in the cold, brushed something off the other woman's cheek. A speck of soot? A tear turned to ice? Some smudge made by her last mate's mouth?

  With envy, Trumper regarded this careless, real affection.

  Trumper went to bed, lying rigid until he had warmed a spot. He heard a bidet flush and decided he could never fall asleep to that lonely music. He danced nude across the room, retrieved his tape recorder from the window seat and scurried back to bed. Fumbling through a box of tapes, he found his 110-220 converter, plugged in the earphone jack, and clutched the earphones to his chest to warm them. 'Come in, Biggie,' he whispered.

  REWIND.

  PLAY...

  23

  Taking it Personally

  (Fade in: A medium shot of the Pillsburys' boathouse, exterior, and the ramp leading down to the ocean. Cuthbert Bennett is scraping down an old rowboat like the ones whaling men used, and Colm is helping him. They're talking animatedly to each other - presumably Couth is explaining the algae, kelp, barnacle and crustacean world stuck to the boat's bottom, but there is no sync sound. The voices are Ralph Packer's and Couth's)

  RALPH: Let me put it another way: I mean, you're living with his wife and child. Has that put a strain on your friendship with him?

  COUTH: I think it must be very hard for him - but because of what he feels for her, that's all. It's hard for him to be around her and the boy now. It's got nothing to do with me; I'm sure he's still fond of me.

  CUT.

  (In the Packer studio, Bogus speaks [sync sound] into camera)

  BOGUS: I couldn't be happier about who she's living with. Couth is an absolutely wonderful person ...

  CUT.

  (The boathouse again, with Couth and Colm, voices-over)

  COUTH: I know I'm very fond of him ...

  RALPH: Why didn't the marriage work?

  COUTH: Well, look, you should ask her that, really.

  RALPH: I just meant, you must have an opinion ...

  COUTH: Ask her. Or him ...

  CUTBACK.

  (In the studio, Bogus speaks [sync sound] into camera)

  BOGUS: Shit - ask her!

  CUT.

  (On the deck in Maine, Biggie is reading a storybook to Colm. There is no sync sound; the voices-over are Biggie's and Ralph's)

  BIGGIE: Did you ask him?

  RALPH: He said to ask you.

  BIGGIE: Well, I'm sure I don't know. I know that even if I knew why it couldn't change anything, so what does it matter?

  RALPH: Who left whom?

  BIGGIE: What does it matter?

  RALPH: Shit, Biggie ...

  BIGGIE: He left me.

  CUTBACK.

  (Bogus in the studio)

  BOGUS: Well, she asked me to leave. No, actually, she told me to ...

  CUT.

  (Biggie is sitting with Colm and Couth around an outdoor table under a large umbrella set up on the Pillsburys' dock. It is a deliberately formal, stilted scene, and the three of them look distrustfully at the camera. There is sync sound; Ralph [offstage]is interviewing them)

  BIGGIE: I had no idea he was going to stay away, for so long, I mean ...

  COUTH: She had no idea where he was, even.

  BIGGIE (Looking hard at the camera, speaking to Ralph angrily): You knew more than anyone, you bastard. You knew where he was going - you even helped him! Don't think I don't remember ...

  CUT.

  (Ralph Packer in the editing room of his studio, running film strips through a machine. Other strips clipped to rods overhead hang down all around him. There is
no sync sound)

  RALPH (voice-over): That's true ... I knew where he was going, all right, and I helped him to leave. But he wanted to leave!

  (He pushes the heavy splice lever of the machine down emphatically)

  CUT.

  (The first in a series of still photographs. Bogus and Biggie in an Alpine Village, leaning against a strange old car and smiling at the photographer. Biggie looks sexy in her stretch ski clothes)

  RALPH (V.O.): He went back to Europe, that's where he went. Maybe he was nostalgic ...

  (Another still: Biggie and Bogus clowning in a big rumpled bed, the covers pulled up to their chins)

  RALPH (V.O.): He never made it clear why he went to Europe, but he mentions this friend he had ... a Merrill Overturf.

  (Another still: a strange-looking fellow wearing a weird hat is sitting in an old Zorn-Witwer, '54, grinning at the camera out his rolled-down window)

  BIGGIE (V.O.): That's him, all right. That's Merrill Overturf.

  CUT BACK.

  (The table and umbrella on the dock. With sync sound, Biggie speaks into camera)

  BIGGIE: Merrill Overturf was absolutely crazy, completely mad.

  CUTBACK.

  (Bogus in the studio [sync sound])

  BOGUS: No! He wasn't; he wasn't crazy at all. She never really knew him like I did. He was about the most sane person I've ever known ...

  CUTBACK.

  (In the editing room, Ralph raises the splice lever and looks through more film strips)

  RALPH (V.O.): It's very hard to get anything very concrete out of him. He takes it all so personally. He can really be uncooperative sometimes ...

  (He chomps the splice lever down again)

  CUT.

  (Sync sound. A dazzling series of stage lights are set up outside the closed bathroom door in Tulpen's apartment. Inside the bathroom a toilet flushes. Kent moves into frame, waiting in ambush at the bathroom door with a big microphone in his hand. Bogus opens the door, zips up his fly, looks up surprised into camera. He is angry; he bats Kent aside and glares at camera)