Going For a Beer

  “Oh Gott, Richard! Not now—!”

  She’s right, it doesn’t seem the right moment for it, but then nothing has seemed right since she turned up in this godforsaken town: it’s almost as though two completely different places, two completely different times, are being forced to mesh, to intersect where no intersection is possible, causing a kind of warp in the universe. In his own private universe anyway. He gazes down on this lost love, this faithless wife, this trusting child, her own hands between her legs now, her hips still jerking out of control (“Please, Richard!” she is begging softly through clenched teeth, tears in her eyes), thinking: It’s still a story without an ending. But more than that: the beginning and middle bits aren’t all there either. Her face is drained as though all the blood has rushed away to other parts, but her throat between the heaving white breasts is almost literally alight with its vivid blush. He touches it, strokes the soft bubbles to either side, watching the dark little nipples rise like patriots—and suddenly the answer to all his questions seems (yet another one, that is—answers, in the end, are easy) to suggest itself. “Listen kid, would it be all right if I—?”

  “Oh yes! yes!—but hurry!”

  He finds the cold cream (at last! he is so slow!), lathers it on, and slips into her cleavage, his knees over her shoulders like a yoke. She guides his head back into that tropical explosion between her legs, then clasps her arms around his hips, already beginning to thump at her chest like a resuscitator, popping little gasps from her throat. She tries to concentrate on his bouncing buttocks, but they communicate to her such a touching blend of cynicism and honesty, weariness and generosity, that they nearly break her heart, making her more light-headed than ever. The dark little hole between them bobs like a lonely survivor in a tragically divided world. It is he! “Oh Gott!” she whimpers. And she! The tension between her legs is almost unbearable. “I can’t fight it anymore!” Everything starts to come apart. She feels herself falling as though some rift in the universe (she cannot wait for him, and anyway, where she is going he cannot follow), out of time and matter into some wondrous radiance, the wheeling beacon flashing across her stricken vision now like intermittent star bursts, the music swelling, everything swelling, her eyes bursting, ears popping, teeth ringing in their sockets—“Oh Richard! Oh fokk! I luff you so much!”

  He plunges his face deep into Ilsa’s ambrosial pudding, lapping at its sweet sweat, feeling her loins snap and convulse violently around him, knowing that with a little inducement she can spasm like this for minutes on end, and meanwhile pumping away between her breasts now like a madman, no longer obliged to hold back, seeking purely his own pleasure. This pleasure is tempered only by (and maybe enhanced by as well) his pity for her husband, that heroic sonuvabitch. God, Victor Laszlo is almost a father figure to him, really. And while Laszlo is off at the underground meeting in the Caverne du Roi, no doubt getting his saintly ass shot to shit, here he is—Rick Blaine, the Yankee smart aleck and general jerk-off—safely closeted off in his rooms over the town saloon, tit-fucking the hero’s wife, his callous nose up her own royal grotto like an advance scout for a squad of storm troopers. Its not fair, goddamn it, he thinks, and laughs at this even as he comes, squirting jism down her sleek belly and under his own, his head locked in her clamped thighs, her arms hugging him tightly as though to squeeze to juices out.

  He is lying, completely still, his face between Ilsa’s flaccid thighs, knees over her shoulders, arms around her lower body, which sprawls loosely now beneath him. he can feel her hands resting lightly on his hips, her warm breath against his leg. He doesn’t remember when they stopped moving. Maybe he’s been sleeping. Has he dreamt it all? No, he shifts slightly and feels the spill of semen, pooled gummily between their conjoined navels. His movement wakes Ilsa: she snorts faintly, sighs, kisses the inside of his leg, strokes one buttock idly. “That soap smells nice,” she murmurs. “I bet effry girl in Casablanca wishes to haff a bath here.”

  “Yeah, well, I run it as a kind of public service,” he grunts, chewing the words around a strand or two of pubic hair. He’s always told Louis—and anyone else who wanted to know—that he sticks his neck out for nobody. But in the end, shit, he thinks, I stick it out for everybody. “I’m basically a civic-minded guy.”

  Cynic-minded, more like, she thinks, but keeps the thought to herself. She cannot risk offending him, not just now. She is still returning from wherever it is orgasm has taken her, and it has been an experience so profound and powerful, yet so remote from its immediate cause—his muscular tongue at the other end of this morosely puckered hole in front of her nose—that it has left her feeling very insecure, unsure of who or what she is, or even where. She knows of course that her role as the well-dressed wife of a courageous underground leader is just pretense, that beneath this charade she is certainly someone—or something—else. Richard’s lover, for example. Or a little orphan girl who lost her mother, father, and adoptive aunt, all before she’d even started menstruating—that’s who she often is, or feels like she is, especially at moments like this. But if her life as Victor Laszlo’s wife is not real, are these others any more so? Is she one person, several—or no one at all? What was that thought she’d had about childhood? She lies there, hugging Richard’s hairy cheeks (are they Richard’s? are they cheeks?), her pale face framed by his spraddled legs, trying to puzzle it all out. Since the moment she arrived in Casablanca, she and Richard have been trying to tell each other stories, not very funny stories, as Richard has remarked, but maybe not very true ones either. Maybe memory itself is a kind of trick, something that turns illusion into reality and makes the real world vanish before everyone’s eyes like magic. One can certainly sink away there and miss everything, she knows. Hasn’t Victor, the wise one, often warned her of that? But Victor is a hero. Maybe the real world is too much for most people. Maybe making up stories is a way to keep them all from going insane. A tear forms in the corner of one eye. She blinks (and what are these unlikely configurations called “Paris” and “Casablanca,” where in all the universe is she, and what is “where”?), and the tear trickles into the hollow between cheekbone and nose, then bends its course toward the middle of her cheek. There is a line in their song (yes, it is still there, tinkling away somewhere like mice in the walls: is someone trying to drive her crazy?) that goes, “This day and age we’re living in gives cause for apprehension, /With speed and new invention and things like third dimension . . .” She always thought that was a stupid mistake of the lyricist, but now she is not so sure. For the real mystery—she sees this now, or feels it rather—is not the fourth dimension as she’d always supposed (the tear stops halfway down her cheek, begins to fade), or the third either for that matter . . . but the first.

  “You never finished answering my question . . .”

  There is a pause. Perhaps she is daydreaming. “What question, Richard?”

  “A while ago. In the bathroom . . .” He, too, has been mulling over recent events, wondering not only about the events themselves (wondrous in their own right, of course: he’s not enjoyed multiple orgasms like this since he hauled his broken-down blacklisted ass out of Paris a year and a half ago, and that’s just for starters), but also about their “recentness”: When did they really happen? Is “happen” the right word, or were they more like fleeting conjunctions with the Absolute, that other Other, boundless and immutable as number? And, if so, what now is “when”? How much time has elapsed, for example, since he opened the door and found her in this room? Has any time elapsed? “I asked you what you meant when you said, ‘Is this right?’ ”

  “Oh, Richard, I don’t know what’s right any longer.” She lifts one thigh in front of his face, as though to erase his dark imaginings. He strokes it, thinking: well, what the hell, it probably doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, anyway. “Do you think I can haff another drink now?”

  “Sure, kid. Why not.” He sits up beside her, shakes the butt out of the damp towel, wipes his belly off, hands t
he towel to her. “More of the same?”

  “Champagne would be nice, if it is possible. It always makes me think of Paris . . . and you . . .”

  “You got it, sweetheart.” He pushes himself to his feet and thumps across the room, pausing at the humidor to light up a fresh smoke. “If there’s any left. Your old man’s been going through my stock like Vichy water.” Not for the first time, he has the impression of being watched. Laszlo? Who knows, maybe the underground meeting was just a ruse; it certainly seemed like a dumb thing to do on the face of it, especially with Strasser in town. There’s a bottle of champagne in his icebox, okay, but no ice. He touches the bottle: not cold, but cool enough. It occurs to him the sonuvabitch might be out on the balcony right now, taking it all in, he and all his goddamn underground. Europeans can be pretty screwy, especially these rich stiffs with titles. As he carries the champagne and glasses over to the coffee table, the cigarette like a dart between his lips, his bare ass feels suddenly both hot and chilly at the same time. “Does your husband ever get violent?” he asks around the smoke and snaps the metal clamp off the champagne bottle, takes a grip on the cork.

  “No. He has killed some people, but he is not fiolent.” She is rubbing her tummy off, smiling thoughtfully. The light from the airport beacon, wheeling past, picks up a varnishlike glaze still between her breasts, a tooth’s wet twinkle in her open mouth, an unwonted shine on her nose. The cork pops, champagne spews out over the table top, some of it getting into the glasses. This seems to suggest somehow a revelation. Or another memory. The tune, as though released, rides up once more around them. “Gott, Richard,” she sighs, pushing irritably to her feet. “That music is getting on my nerfs!”

  “Yeah, I know.” It’s almost as bad in its way as the German blitzkrieg hammering in around their romance in Paris—sometimes it seemed to get right between their embraces. Gave him a goddamn headache. Now the music is doing much the same thing, even trying to tell them when to kiss and when not to. He can stand it, though, he thinks, tucking the cigarette back in his lips, if she can. He picks up the two champagne glasses, offers her one. “Forget it, kid. Drown it out with this.” He raises his glass. “Uh, here’s lookin’—”

  She gulps it down absently, not waiting for his toast. “And that light from the airport,” she goes on, batting at it as it passes as though to shoo it away. “How can you effer sleep here?”

  “No one’s supposed to sleep well in Casablanca,” he replies with a worldly grimace. It’s his best expression, he knows, but she isn’t paying any attention. He stubs out the cigarette, refills her glass, blowing a melancholy whiff of smoke over it. “Hey, kid here’s—”

  “No, wait!” she insists, her ear cocked. “Is it?”

  “Is what?” Ah well, forget the fancy stuff. He drinks off the champagne in his glass, reaches down for a refill.

  “Time. Is it going by? Like the song is saying?”

  He looks up, startled. “That’s funny, I was just—!”

  “What time do you haff, Richard?”

  He sets the bottle down, glances at his empty wrist. “I dunno. My watch must have got torn off when we . . .”

  “Mine is gone, too.”

  They stare at each other a moment, Rick scowling slightly in the old style, Ilsa’s lips parted as though saying “story,” or “glory.” Then the airport beacon sweeps past like a prompter, and Rick, blinking, says: “Wait a minute—there’s a clock down in the bar!” He strides purposefully over to the door in his stocking feet, pausing there a moment, one hand on the knob, to take a deep breath. “I’ll be right back,” he announces, then opens the door and (she seems about to call out to him) steps out on the landing. He steps right back in again. He pushes the door closed, leans against it, his face ashen. “They’re all down there,” he says.

  “What? Who’s down there?”

  “Karl, Sam, Abdul, that Norwegian—”

  “Fictor?!”

  “Yes, everybody! Strasser, those goddamn Bulgarians, Sasha, Louis—”

  “Yffonne?”

  Why the hell did she ask about Yvonne? “I said everybody! They’re just standing down there! Like they’re waiting for something! But . . . for what?!” He can’t seem to stop his goddamn voice from squeaking. He wants to remain cool and ironically detached, cynical even, because he knows it’s expected of him, not least of all by himself, but he’s still shaken by what he’s seen down in the bar. Of course it might help if he had his pants on. At least he’d have some pockets to shove his hands into. For some reason, Ilsa is staring at his crotch, as though the real horror of it all were to be found there. Or maybe she’s trying to see through to the silent crowd below. “It’s, I dunno, like the place has sprung a goddamn leak or something!”

  She crosses her hands to her shoulders, pinching her elbows in, hugging her breasts. She seems to have gone flat-footed, her feet splayed, her bottom, lost somewhat in the slatted shadows, drooping, her spine bent. “A leak?” she asks meaninglessly in her soft Scandinavian accent. She looks like a swimmer out of water in chilled air. Richard, slumping against the far door, stares at her as though at a total stranger. Or perhaps a mirror. He seems older somehow, tired, his chest sunken and belly out, legs bowed, his genitals shriveled up between them like dried fruit. It is not a beautiful sight. Of course Richard is not a beautiful man. He is short and bad-tempered and rather smashed up. Victor calls him riffraff. He says Richard makes him feel greasy. And it is true, there is something common about him. Around Victor she always feels crisp and white, but around Richard like a sweating pig. So how did she get mixed up with him, in the first place? Well, she was lonely, she had nothing, not even hope, and he seemed so happy when she took hold of his penis. As Victor has often said, each of us has a destiny, for good or for evil, and her destiny was Richard. Now that destiny seems confirmed—or sealed—by all those people downstairs. “They are not waiting for anything,” she says, as the realization comes to her. It is over.

  Richard grunts in reply. He probably hasn’t heard her. She feels a terrible sense of loss. He shuffles in his black socks over to the humidor. “Shit, even the fags are gone,” he mutters gloomily. “Why’d you have to come to Casablanca anyway, goddamn it; there are other places . . .” The airport beacon, sliding by, picks up an expression of intense concentration on his haggard face. She knows he is trying to understand what cannot be understood, to resolve what has no resolution. Americans are like that. In Paris he was always wondering how it was they kept getting from one place to another so quickly. “It’s like everything is all speeded up,” he would gasp, reaching deliriously between her legs as her apartment welled up around them. Now he is probably wondering why there seems to be no place to go and why time suddenly is just about all they have. He is an innocent man, after all; this is probably his first affair.

  “I would not haff come if I haff known . . .” She releases her shoulders, picks up her ruffled blouse (the buttons are gone), pulls it on like a wrap. As the beacon wheels by, the room seems to expand with light as though it were breathing. “Do you see my skirt? It was here, but—is it getting dark or something?”

  “I mean, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the—!” He pauses, looks up. “What did you say?”

  “I said, is it—?”

  “Yeah, I know . . .”

  They gaze about uneasily. “It seems like effry time that light goes past . . .”

  “Yeah . . .” He stares at her, slumped there at the foot of the couch, working her garter belt like rosary beads, looking like somebody had just pulled her plug. “The world will always welcome lovers,” the music is suggesting, not so much in mockery as in sorrow. He’s thinking of all those people downstairs, so hushed, so motionless: it’s almost how he feels inside. Like something dying. Or something dead revealed. Oh shit. Has this happened before? Ilsa seems almost wraithlike in the pale staticky light, as though she were wearing her own ghost on her skin. And which is it he’s been in love with? he wonders.
He sees she is trembling, and a tear slides down the side of her nose, or seems to, it’s hard to tell. He feels like he’s going blind. “Listen. Maybe if we started over . . .”

  “I’m too tired, Richard . . .”

  “No, I mean, go back to where you came in, see—the letters of transit and all that. Maybe we made some kinda mistake, I dunno, like when I put my hands on your jugs or something, and if—”

  “A mistake? You think putting your hands on my yugs was a mistake—?”

  “Don’t get offended, sweetheart. I only meant—”

  “Maybe my bringing my yugs here tonight was a mistake! Maybe my not shooting the trigger was a mistake!”

  “Come on, don’t get your tail in an uproar, goddamn it! I’m just trying to—”