She gasps. What is she saying? He watches her, as though faintly amused. “No, Richard, I’m sorry!” Tears are flowing in earnest now: she’s gone too far! This is the expression on her face. She’s in a corner, struggling to get out. “I’m sorry, but—” She wipes the tears from her cheek, and calls once again on her husband, that great and courageous man whom they both admire, whom the whole world admires: “—you’re our last hope! If you don’t help us, Victor Laszlo will die in Casablanca!”
“What of it?” he says. He has been waiting for this opportunity. He plays with it now, stretching it out. He turns, reaches for a cigarette, his head haloed in the light from an arched doorway. “I’m gonna die in Casablanca. It’s a good spot for it.” This line is meant to be amusing, but Ilsa reacts with horror. Her eyes widen. She catches her breath, turns away. He lights up, pleased with himself, takes a practiced drag, blows smoke. “Now,” he says, turning toward her, “if you’ll—”
He pulls up short, squints: she has drawn a revolver on him. So much for toothbrushes and hotel keys. “All right. I tried to reason with you. I tried effrything. Now I want those letters.” Distantly, a melodic line suggests a fight for love and glory, an ironic case of do or die. “Get them for me.”
“I don’t have to.” He touches his jacket. “I got ’em right here.”
“Put them on the table.”
He smiles and shakes his head. “No.” Smoke curls up from the cigarette he is holding at his side like the steam that enveloped the five o’clock train to Marseilles. Her eyes fill with tears. Even as she presses on (“For the last time . . . !”), she knows that “no” is final. There is, behind his ironic smile, a profound sadness, the fatalistic survivor’s wistful acknowledgment that, in the end, the fundamental things apply. Time, going by, leaves nothing behind, not even moments like this. “If Laszlo and the cause mean so much,” he says, taunting her with her own uncertainties, “you won’t stop at anything . . .”
He seems almost to recede. The cigarette disappears, the smoke. His sorrow gives way to something not unlike eagerness. “All right, I’ll make it easier for you,” he says, and walks toward her. “Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor.”
She seems taken aback, her eyes damp, her lips swollen and parted. Light licks at her face. He gazes steadily at her from his superior moral position, smoke drifting up from his hand once more, his white tuxedo pressed against the revolver barrel. Her eyes close as the gun lowers, and she gasps his name: “Richard!” It is like an invocation. Or a profession of faith. “I tried to stay away,” she sighs. She opens her eyes, peers up at him in abject surrender. A tear moves slowly down her cheek toward the corner of her mouth like secret writing. “I thought I would neffer see you again . . . that you were out off my life . . .” She blinks, cries out faintly—“Oh!”—and (he seems moved at last, his mask of disdain falling away like perspiration) turns away, her head wrenched to one side as though in pain.
Stricken with sudden concern, or what looks like concern, he steps up behind her, clasping her breasts with both hands, nuzzling in her hair. “The day you left Paris . . . !” she sobs, though she seems unsure of herself. One of his hands is already down between her legs, the other inside her blouse, pulling a breast out of its brassiere cup. “If you only knew . . . what I . . .” He is moaning, licking at one ear, the hand between her legs nearly lifting her off the floor, his pelvis bumping at her buttocks. “Is this . . . right?” she gasps.
“I—I don’t know!” he groans, massaging her breast, the nipple between two fingers. “I can’t think!”
“But . . . you must think!” she cries, squirming her hips. Tears are streaming down her cheeks now. “For . . . for . . .”
“What?” he gasps, tearing her blouse open, pulling on her breast as though to drag it over her shoulder where he might kiss it. Or eat it: he seems ravenous suddenly.
“I . . . I can’t remember!” she sobs. She reaches behind to jerk at his fly (what else is she to do, for the love of Jesus?), then rips away her sash, unfastens her skirt, her fingers trembling.
“Holy shit!” he wheezes, pushing his hand inside her girdle as her skirt falls. His cheeks too are wet with tears. “Ilsa!”
“Richard!”
They fall to the floor, grabbing and pulling at each other’s clothing. He’s trying to get her bra off which is tangled up now with her blouse, she’s struggling with his belt, yanking at his black pants, wrenching them open. Buttons fly, straps pop, there’s the soft unfocused rip of silk, the jingle of buckles and falling coins, grunts, gasps, whimpers of desire. He strips the tangled skein of underthings away (all these straps and stays—how does she get in and out of this crazy elastic?); she works his pants down past his bucking hips, fumbles with his shoes. “Your elbow—!”
“Mmmff!”
“Ah—!”
She pulls his pants and boxer shorts off, crawls round and (he strokes her shimmering buttocks, swept by the light from the airport tower, watching her full breasts sway above him: it’s all happening so fast, he’d like to slow it down, repeat some of the better bits—that view of her rippling haunches on her hands and knees just now, for example, like a 22, his lucky number—but there’s a great urgency on them, they can’t wait) straddles him, easing him into her like a train being guided into a station. “I luff you, Richard!” she declares breathlessly, though she seems to be speaking, eyes squeezed shut and breasts heaving, not to him but to the ceiling, if there is one up there. His eyes too are closed now, his hands gripping her soft hips, pulling her down, his breath coming in short anguished snorts, his face puffy and damp with tears. There is, as always, something deeply wounded and vulnerable about the expression on his battered face, framed there against his Persian carpet: Rick Blaine, a man annealed by loneliness and betrayal, but flawed—hopelessly, it seems—by hope itself. He is, in the tragic sense, a true revolutionary: his gaping mouth bespeaks this, the spittle in the corners of his lips, his eyes, open now and staring into some infinite distance not unlike the future, his knitted brow. He heaves upward, impaling her to the very core: “Oh, Gott!” she screams, her back arching, mouth agape as though to commence “La Marseillaise.”
Now, for a moment, they pause, feeling themselves thus conjoined, his organ luxuriating in the warm tub of her vagina, her enflamed womb closing around his pulsing penis like a mother embracing a lost child. “If you only knew . . . ,” she seems to say, though perhaps she has said this before and only now it can be heard. He fondles her breasts; she rips his shirt open, strokes his chest, leans forward to kiss his lips, his nipples. This is not Victor inside her with his long thin rapier, all too rare in its embarrassed visits; this is not Yvonne with her cunning professional muscles, her hollow airy hole. This is love in all its clammy mystery, the ultimate connection, the squishy rub of truth, flesh as a self-consuming message. This is necessity, as in woman needs man, and man must have his mate. Even their identities seem to be dissolving; they have to whisper each other’s name from time to time as though in recitative struggle against some ultimate enchantment from which there might be no return. Then slowly she begins to wriggle her hips above him, he to meet her gentle undulations with counterthrusts of his own. They hug each other close, panting, her breasts smashed against him, moving only from the waist down. She slides her thighs between his and squeezes his penis between them, as though to conceal it there, an underground member on the run, wounded but unbowed. He lifts his stockinged feet and plants them behind her knees as though in stirrups, her buttocks above pinching and opening, pinching and opening like a suction pump. And it is true about her vaunted radiance: she seems almost to glow from within, her flexing cheeks haloed in their own dazzling luster.
“It feels so good, Richard! In there . . . I’ve been so—ah!—so lonely . . . !”
“Yeah, me too, kid. Ngh! Don’t talk.”
She slips her thighs back over his and draws them up beside his waist like a child curling around her teddybear, k
nees against his ribs, her fanny gently bobbing on its pike like a mind caressing a cherished memory. He lies there passively for a moment, stretched out, eyes closed, accepting this warm rhythmical ablution as one might accept a nanny’s teasing bath, a mother’s care (a care, he’s often said, denied him), in all its delicious innocence—or seemingly so: in fact, his whole body is faintly atremble, as though, with great difficulty, shedding the last of its pride and bitterness, its isolate neutrality. Then slowly his own hips begin to rock convulsively under hers, his knees to rise in involuntary surrender. She tongues his ear, her buttocks thumping more vigorously now, kisses his throat, his nose, his scarred lip, then rears up, arching her back, tossing her head back (her hair is looser now, wilder, a flush has crept into the distinctive pallor of her cheeks and throat, and what was before a fierce determination is now raw intensity, what vulnerability now a slack-jawed abandon), plunging him in more deeply than ever, his own buttocks bouncing up off the floor as though trying to take off like the next flight to Lisbon— “Gott in Himmel, this is fonn!” she cries. She reaches behind her back to clutch his testicles, he clasps her hand in both of his, his thighs spread, she falls forward, they roll over, he’s pounding away now from above (he lacks her famous radiance: if anything his buttocks seem to suck in light, drawing a nostalgic murkiness around them like night fog, signaling a fundamental distance between them, and an irresistible attraction), she’s clawing at his back under the white jacket, at his hips, his thighs, her voracious nether mouth leaping up at him from below and sliding back, over and over, like a frantic greased-pole climber. Faster and faster they slap their bodies together, submitting to this fierce rhythm as though to simplify themselves, emitting grunts and whinnies and helpless little farts, no longer Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, but some nameless conjunction somewhere between them, time, space, being itself getting redefined by the rapidly narrowing focus of their incandescent passion—then suddenly Rick rears back, his face seeming to puff out like a gourd, Ilsa cries out and kicks upward, crossing her ankles over Rick’s clenched buttocks, for a moment they seem almost to float, suspended, unloosed from the earth’s gravity, and then—whumpf!—they hit the floor again, their bodies continuing to hammer together, though less regularly, plunging, twitching, prolonging this exclamatory dialogue, drawing it out even as the intensity diminishes, even as it becomes more a declaration than a demand, more an inquiry than a declaration. Ilsa’s feet uncross, slide slowly to the floor. “Fooff . . . Gott!” They lie there, cheek to cheek, clutching each other tightly, gasping for breath, their thighs quivering with the last involuntary spasms, the echoey reverberations, deep in their loins, of pleasure’s fading blasts.
“Jesus,” Rick wheezes, “I’ve been saving that one for a goddamn year and a half . . . !”
“It was the best fokk I effer haff,” Ilsa replies with a tremulous sigh, and kisses his ear, runs her fingers in his hair. He starts to roll off her, but she clasps him closely: “No . . . wait . . . !” A deeper thicker pleasure, not so ecstatic, yet somehow more moving, seems to well up from far inside her to embrace the swollen visitor snuggled moistly in her womb, once a familiar friend, a comrade loved and trusted, now almost a stranger, like one resurrected from the dead.
“Ah—!” he gasps. God, it’s almost like she’s milking it! Then she lets go, surrounding him spongily with a kind of warm wet pulsating gratitude. “Ah . . .”
He lies there between Ilsa’s damp silky thighs, feeling his weight thicken, his mind soften and spread. His will drains away as if it were some kind of morbid affection, lethargy overtaking him like an invading army. Even his jaw goes slack, his fingers (three sprawl idly on a dark-tipped breast) limp. He wears his snowy white tuxedo jacket still, his shiny black socks, which, together with the parentheses of Ilsa’s white thighs, make his melancholy buttocks—beaten in childhood, lashed at sea, run lean in union skirmishes, sunburned in Ethiopia, and shot at in Spain—look gloomier than ever, swarthy and self-pitying, agape now with a kind of heroic sadness. A violent tenderness. These buttocks are, it could be said, what the pose of isolation looks like at its best: proud, bitter, mournful, and, as the prefect of police might have put it, tremendously attractive. Though his penis has slipped out of its vaginal pocket to lie limply like a fat little toe against her slowly pursing lips, she clasps him close still, clinging to something she cannot quite define, something like a spacious dream of freedom, or a monastery garden, or the discovery of electricity. “Do you have a gramophone on, Richard?”
“What—?!” Her question has startled him. His haunches snap shut, his head rears up, snorting, he seems to be reaching for the letters of transit. “Ah . . . no . . .” He relaxes again, letting his weight fall back, though sliding one thigh over hers now, stretching his arms out as though to unkink them, turning his face away. His scrotum bulges up on her thigh like an emblem of his inner serenity and generosity, all too often concealed, much as an authentic decency might shine through a mask of cynicism and despair. He takes a deep breath. (A kiss is just a kiss is what the music is insinuating. A sigh . . .) “That’s probably Sam . . .”
She sighs (. . . and so forth), gazing up at the ceiling above her, patterned with overlapping circles of light from the room’s lamps and swept periodically by the wheeling airport beacon, coming and going impatiently, yet reliably, like desire itself. “He hates me, I think.”
“Sam? No, he’s a pal. What I think, he thinks.”
“When we came into the bar last night, he started playing ‘Luff for Sale.’ Effryone turned and looked at me.”
“It wasn’t the song, sweetheart, it was the way you two were dressed. Nobody in Casablanca—”
“Then he tried to chase me away. He said I was bad luck to you.” She can still see the way he rolled his white eyes at her, like some kind of crazy voodoo zombie.
Richard grunts ambiguously. “Maybe you should stop calling him ‘boy.’ ”
Was that it? “But in all the moofies—” Well, a translation problem probably, a difficulty she has known often in her life. Language can sometimes be stiff as a board. Like what’s under her now. She loves Richard’s relaxed weight on her, the beat of his heart next to her breast, the soft lumpy pouch of his genitals squashed against her thigh, but the floor seems to be hardening under her like some kind of stern Calvinist rebuke and there is a disagreeable airy stickiness between her legs, now that he has slid away from there. “Do you haff a bidet, Richard?”
“Sure, kid.” He slides to one side with a lazy grunt, rolls over. He’s thinking vaguely about the pleasure he’s just had, what it’s likely to cost him (he doesn’t care), and wondering where he’ll find the strength to get up off his ass and go look for a cigarette. He stretches his shirttail down and wipes his crotch with it, nods back over the top of his head. “In there.”
She is sitting up, peering between her spread legs. “I am afraid we haff stained your nice carpet, Richard.”
“What of it? Put it down as a gesture to love. Want a drink?”
“Yes, that would be good.” She leans over and kisses him, her face still flushed and eyes damp, but smiling now, then stands and gathers up an armload of tangled clothing. “Do I smell something burning?”
“What—?!” He rears up. “My goddamn cigarette! I musta dropped it on the couch!” He crawls over, brushes at it: it’s gone out, but there’s a big hole there now, dark-edged like ringworm. “Shit.” He staggers to his feet, stumbles over to the humidor to light up a fresh smoke. Nothing’s ever free, he thinks, feeling a bit light-headed. “What’s your poison, kid?”
“I haff downstairs been drinking Cointreau,” she calls out over the running water in the next room. He pours himself a large whiskey, tosses it down neat (light, sliding by, catches his furrowed brow as he tips his head back: what is wrong?), pours another, finds a decanter of Grand Marnier. She won’t know the difference. In Paris she confused champagne with sparkling cider, ordered a Pommard thinking she was getting a rosé, drank gin
because she couldn’t taste it. He fits the half-burned cigarette between his lips, tucks a spare over his ear, then carries the drinks into the bathroom. She sits, straddling the bidet, churning water up between her legs like the wake of a pleasure boat. The beacon doesn’t reach in here: it’s as though he’s stepped out of its line of sight, but that doesn’t make him feel easier (something is nagging at him, has been for some time now). He holds the drink to her mouth for her, and she sips, looking mischievously up at him, one wet hand braced momentarily on his hipbone. Even in Paris she seemed to think drinking was naughtier than sex. Which made her on occasion something of a souse. She tips her chin, and he sets her drink down on the sink. “I wish I didn’t luff you so much,” she says casually, licking her lips, and commences to work up a lather between her legs with a bar of soap.
“Listen, what did you mean,” he asks around the cigarette (this is it, or part of it: he glances back over his shoulder apprehensively, as though to find some answer to his question staring him in the face—or what, from the rear, is passing for his face), “when you said, ‘Is this right?’ ”
“When . . . ?”
“A while ago, when I grabbed your, you know—”
“Oh, I don’t know, darling. Yust a strange feeling, I don’t exactly remember.” She spreads the suds up her smooth belly and down the insides of her thighs, runs the soap up under her behind. “Like things were happening too fast or something.”
He takes a contemplative drag on the cigarette, flips the butt into the toilet. “Yeah, that’s it.” Smoke curls out his nostrils like balloons of speech in a comic strip. “All this seems strange somehow. Like something that shouldn’t have—”
“Well, I am a married woman, Richard.”
“I don’t mean that.” But maybe he does mean that. She’s rinsing now, her breasts flopping gaily above her splashing, it’s hard to keep his mind on things. But he’s not only been pronging some other guy’s wife, this is the wife of Victor Laszlo of the International Underground, one of his goddamn heroes. One of the world’s. Does that matter? He shoves his free hand in a jacket pocket, having no other, tosses back the drink. “Anyway,” he wheezes, “from what you tell me, you were married already when we met in Paris, so that’s not—”