‘I know,’ I said through the catch in my throat. ‘In fact, oddly, I was just—’
‘If I had a wish,’ he spluttered (‘Hey, don’t get that red stuff all over me!’ laughed the gigolo behind me, as Bunky passed out thanksgiving hugs and kisses), ‘I’d wish always to have … one … more … minute … !’ Of course, death itself caused no suffering, only this gnawing terror of it – it was, more or less, what I was saving him from. ‘Is … is my daughter … ?’
‘She’s in the next room, Vic. She’s got a part in Zack’s play. Shall I – ?’
‘No … just tell her for me … tell her to watch out for words like … like mind and … and soul, spirit …’
‘You better point it a little higher,’ Bob murmured, ‘or you’ll just cause him more useless damage.’
Jim knelt and tipped Vic’s head to one side. ‘The best place, Gerry, is here behind the ear …’
‘All that junk … just … just a metaphor, tell her … old animistic habit …’
‘That way, you’ll penetrate the medulla at the top of the spine, which is the center for regulating all the internal functions …’
‘ ’Assa pretty bad sunburn, li’l lady,’ Charley was rumbling behind me.
‘… There’s nothing in there, goddamn it … no me, no I …’
‘Breathing, for example.’
‘… The brain … just makes all that up … the first person …’
‘Or speaking.’
‘Iss even got scabs!’
‘… Is a hoax, an arrogant sham … the first person …’
‘That little place does it all?’
‘Yes, the smallest damage to it causes death in a few minutes.’
‘… Is no person … at all! Tell her …’
‘So what’s all this baloney about thinking with the whole body, old man?’ I muttered hoarsely to myself as I took off the safety.
‘Did I say that?’ He looked up at me, cocking one yellowish eye (this startled me), and a wet sardonic grin formed at one corner of his mouth. He seemed disconcertingly alert all of a sudden. ‘Well, just watch me … twitch after … !’ he grunted.
‘Vic?’ But he was delirious again, rumbling on about ‘militant time’ and ‘the living organic arena …’ (‘That often happens,’ Jim was explaining softly, ‘a kind of involuntary hypoglossal reflex …’) ‘… of choice and freedom …’ I heard someone behind me say something about ‘the host,’ then ask for a drink. Or perhaps offer one. ‘Yeah, he’s a sweet guy …’ Vic was fondling his knee with his free hand (he clutched the fork in the other still like some kind of credo) and I supposed he was thinking about Ros again. Well, why not? For all his dogma about the oppression of the past: who was I, locked even now in reverie (that quiet talk we’d had earlier in my bedroom, now so poignant: it was ancient history!), to hold him to it? This unexpected weakness had in fact endeared him to me even more. ‘One in a million,’ someone murmured, and my wife called out from somewhere back there: ‘Gerald, can you help with the coffee, please?’
‘Yes, in a minute.’ My shoulder throbbed, and something was blurring my vision. Tears maybe. I couldn’t see his face at all, it was like that face in Tania’s painting.
‘Why don’t you … wise up, old buddy?’ he gasped. I found the place. I hoped Jim was right. ‘There’s not … much time … !’
‘To tell the truth, Vic,’ I sighed, ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Famous last words,’ he grunted, and I squeezed the trigger.
There was less kick than I’d expected, less noise. I’d been braced for worse. And Vic was mistaken. I waited patiently (no, that’s not true, it wasn’t patience: I was rooted to the spot, frozen, a waxworks figure, legs spread, body and neck rigid, arm outstretched, lips pulled back over my clenched teeth – I wasn’t any good at this), watching him, but nothing twitched. Except my shoulder, after the cop pried the gun out of my hand. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ he said. Jim, kneeling by Vic with his stethoscope, looked up at me and nodded solemnly. He reached for Vic’s eyes, now wide open as though startled by something he’d just seen (or remembered?), and closed them. ‘Okay!’ someone said, a chair scraped, the lights dimmed – then brightened again and wheeled around: ‘Daddy—?’ My arm dropped and my fossilized spine unlocked and sagged as the light spun away. ‘Oh no! Daddy—!’
As Jim rose, concern pinching his tired face, to gaze over my shoulder toward the living room door, I turned the other way, weary of concern itself. ‘How do you feel about nihilism, then, as a viable art form?’ Gottfried was asking, the mike thrust in front of my face, but I pushed away, out past Scarborough and Patrick and the guy on the chair, across the room (‘Gerry, your wife –’ ‘I know, I know …’), and on through the swinging door into the kitchen.
‘Ah, just in time, Gerald,’ she said, switching off the oven timer. ‘The coffee’s ready. Could you take that tray of cups in, please? We’ll get the chocolates and the whipped cream—’
‘In a minute!’ I snapped. I’d made it as far as the butcherblock table in the middle of the room, and stood there now, leaning against it. The stains were gone, it had been scrubbed clean.
‘You look exhausted, Gerald.’ At least she was able to see that much. I could feel her ego, callous and swollen, billowing out of her, packing the kitchen, crushing me. Or perhaps that was my own ego, her own infuriating in its evanescence. Or maybe Vic was right, maybe it had nothing to do with egos. ‘Is Vic … ?’
‘He’s dead,’ I shot back.
‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘it’s probably for the best.’ She brought the bowl of whipped cream over and set it on the butcherblock. I clutched my head in my hands. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Gerald, I forgot about your shoulder – don’t worry about the cups. Instead, why don’t you –’
‘My god!’ I cried. ‘What’s the matter with you? He’s dead, I tell you, his life is ended, it’s all over!’
‘I know, you just—’
‘But how can it be for the best? That’s crazy!’
‘Yes, I’m probably mistaken, Gerald, please don’t shout at me.’ She glanced back over her shoulder. ‘Maybe what you could do is bring in the brandy. And anything else people might like with their—’
‘You get the damned brandy! I’ll – I’ll—’ I felt like picking up the bowl in front of me and heaving it across the room. I had to struggle to get control of myself. ‘I’ll bring the whipped cream!’ I yelled.
‘Well, if you wish, but Alison had offered—’
‘What?’ All along I’d been seeing Louise over at the breakfast bench, as usual. But it was Alison. She sat there, watching sullenly, huddled up in a heavy checkered overcoat. ‘Ah …’ I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. Her hair was snarled, her makeup gone, her eye shadow smudged. As she got up, I saw she was barefooted as well, and there were welts on her ankles. ‘I’m sorry, it’s all right, I’ll, uh, take this in, then—’
‘No, I’m the novelty act here tonight, allow me,’ she cut in acidly and snatched up the bowl of whipped cream. She glanced briefly at me as she padded by, her brown eyes hard and dull like hammers.
‘Does she always walk that way,’ my wife wondered as the door whumped shut behind her, ‘or is it just the funny coat … ?’
‘Does the Inspector know she—?’
‘Oh, is that whose it is? She came in hungry and cold, so I fixed her something to eat, while Woody went to find her a wrap. She seems to have misplaced all her own things.’ She put on mitts, opened the oven door, and took out a pie, set it on the counter, reached in for another. ‘I must say, Gerald, I’ve never known anyone to have such an uncharitable view of you.’
‘Well … I probably deserve it.’
‘Oh no. She feels slighted, but I’m sure you’ve done everything you could, Gerald. It’s all these extra guests.’ She sliced the pies, ran her fingers along the knife blade and licked them, wiped them on her apron (it was that handwoven red-green-rye-and-gold one that we’d bought
at a mountainside roadstand on our way back from Delphi), sprinkled some powdered sugar on. ‘Just because she didn’t get enough attention, that’s no reason to blame you for everything that’s happened! Even poor Roger, and Cyril and Peg – really, she got quite nasty about it, said it was all your fault, you were no better than a petty thief!’
‘Yes …’ She’d mentioned thievery that night at the play. Or I had. The theatrical transaction …
‘She might have been talking about her watch, I don’t remember, but it got Louise so upset she went storming out of the kitchen!’ She filled a large basket with fresh fruit from the refrigerator, brought in some boxes of chocolates from the pantry, got down a stack of dessert plates from the cabinets, stood on a chair to reach a pair of silver bowls on the top shelf. ‘Honestly, I’d just fixed her a nice hot soup and some fresh spinach crêpes; you’d think no matter what had happened to make her so grouchy, she might have been a little more gracious.’ She topped up the sugar canister, filled the cream pitcher – ‘But some people are just never satisfied!’ – then touched the coffeepot gingerly. ‘Good, still hot. If you can bring in the coffee and the fruit, I can carry the rest.’
‘Sure. Is that all?’ I felt much subdued now.
‘I think so. For now. Except … well …’ She smiled up at me, wrinkling her nose slightly as though looking into the sun. ‘I know Alison’s acting rather unpleasant, Gerald, but she is our guest. I think you should try to make it up to her somehow.’
‘I don’t know really … what I could do …’ I tried to recall that happier time, now so long ago, when her eyes had another look in them, but all I could think of was her husband on the back porch, blocking my way into the house. What had he said? ‘It was as if the very geography of the world had shifted.’ Yes, ‘something anarchical and dangerous’ – it was coming back to me now. ‘You were stroking her thighs,’ he’d said, ‘she bent down to put your—’ ‘But I’ll try,’ I said.
‘And please forgive me for what I said before. I’m truly sorry about Vic.’
‘Vic?’ I looked down at her. She was smiling still, but there were tears in the corners of her eyes. ‘Oh, right …’
‘Hey, you two lovebugs!’ Fats sang out, thumping grandly in through the dining room door, the Inspector’s gray fedora, its crown punched out, perched on top of his big head like a party hat, Scarborough, Gudrun, Michelle, Benedetto, Earl Elstob, and others in his wake. ‘You get outa here now and go enjoy yourselves! Ole Fats is takin’ over!’
‘Oh dear. Fats, I’ve just cleaned up in here—!’
‘No backtalkin’, little lady! We got some citizens with a desp’rate belly-wrinkles crisis, but you has done did your duty!’ He warbled out a striptease tune while untying my wife’s apron, jigging around her as he peeled it off. ‘La-la-la-la-la-la-la!’ sang Beni, practicing his scales and strutting around in his silken codpiece. ‘We is gettin’ up a do!’ He tied on the apron on his way to the refrigerator, tipped the fedora down over his nose as he peered inside. ‘Whaddawe got? Cottage cheese? Good! Cocktail onions, grape jelly, ketchup – what’s in these little tin cans?’ ‘Why are we here?’ Michelle asked vaguely, looking around, and Beni, a halftone higher than before, responded: ‘La-la-la-LA-la-la-la!’
My wife glanced at me, shrugged helplessly, picked up the tray of cups. ‘What’s that you’re tracking in, Mr Elstob?’
‘Huh? Aw – yuh! – whuppin’ cream!’
‘I’m afraid it’s all over your hallway floor,’ Dolph said, lifting a foot to show us. ‘I think they’re trying to ski in it or something.’
‘Oh dear … I think that was the last of the cream …’
‘Here, Gerry, I’ll help with that, if you’ll rescue Zack,’ said Gudrun, picking up the bowl of pink pears and melon balls in her scarlet hands and bumping out backward through the door ahead of me. ‘Come on, there’s some old bawd in here queering the pitch, and Zack’s going bonkers.’
‘Ho-boy! Get ready to sink your pegs into the real bony fido, friends! Ole Fats is homin’ in on the range!’
‘La-la-la-LA-la-la-la!’
Out in the hall, people were laughing and cheering: ‘Go get her, gangbusters!’ they shouted up the stairs. ‘Hair wut?’ I glanced hopefully into the dining room where the brandy bottles were (‘Can-busters, more like! Ha ha!’), but she wasn’t there: only Sally Ann, wearing Tania’s heavy peasant dress now and wistfully cradling her dead father in her arms in front of the cameraman’s bright lamps and video lens; Patrick was helping with the lights, and Gottfried seemed to be interviewing Brenda, or vice versa – they were drifting, heads bent over the mike, past the abandoned sideboard toward the TV room – but all the rest were gone, and it seemed peculiarly barren and lonely in there. Some awful absence … ‘Okay!’ the cameraman barked. ‘Now tip his head the other way!’
‘It’s nice to have those guys around, they add a little color!’ Horner laughed, turning away from the foot of the stairs, and Mr Waddilow, standing on the landing, blushed perceptibly. Or perhaps he was trying to lift something up. Beneath him, Daffie stepped out of the toilet, holding her forearm pressed against one bare breast. ‘Hey,’ she said with a vague glittering smile. Malcolm Mee was still in there behind her, under the red darkroom bulb, back to the open door. ‘Eet wass like night off fool moon, no?’ grinned Hilario, picking up the fallen overcoat, just as Zack Quagg came fuming out of the living room, sliding through the floor’s flocking of whipped cream, his dark cape flying: ‘Where the hell’s Hoo-Sin? Hillie—? Jesus! What am I working with here, a buncha amateurs? We got a fucking show on the boards in there, goddamn it! Where’s that extra grip? Horner—?’
‘Easy, Zack,’ Horner said, ‘that mudlark’s been pulped.’
‘What—?! Holy shit, Jacko! We’ve lost our goddamn band, half the deck crew, our new end-man’s off banging tail, that bearded dude’s pulled his lens outa the show – we’re gonna die standing up in there, if we don’t move our ass!’ He kicked the fallen cream bowl across the hallway in pale-faced anger.
‘Awright, screw your tits on, Zack, we’re doin’ what we—’
‘Aha!’ Quagg cried, grabbing my arm. ‘I been looking for you!’ He dragged me toward the living room. ‘There’s some old scud in here murdering our production! She’s up the fucking flue, man, and taking me with her! You gotta do something!’
My mother-in-law stood calmly on the collapsed ping-pong table, her arms folded. That’s what it was now: a collapsed ping-pong table. Her presence had quite effortlessly disenchanted our living room. The sacred cave had become a bunch of dirty laundry, the altar a table with a dead body on it (this latter, most of the skirt now cut away, was being removed by Vachel and Gudrun to make some room, my wife, bracing one edge of the tray of cups and plates against the table, instructing), the proscenium arch merely my skis with nailholes in them. I half-expected the lamps to drop off the ceiling in sheer embarrassment. ‘It’s time to go home,’ my mother-in-law said flatly.
‘Put it down! Put it down!’ Vachel screamed, his head slick still with petroleum jelly. ‘Yeu-uck!’
‘You see what I mean?’ moaned Zack, waving his arms around wildly. My mother-in-law only set her jaws tighter. ‘Thank you, Vachel,’ my wife was saying. ‘I know it’s not pleasant, but it can’t be helped. Now could you move that bowl of fruit nearer the center, Louise?’ ‘You gotta get this dry hole outa here, man!’
I glanced questioningly at my wife, now spreading the cups and dessert plates out on the table: she smiled toward her mother and shook her head, sent Louise off to the kitchen for the pies, slapped at Vachel’s fingers as he dipped them in the chocolate sauce. ‘I’m afraid there’s not much I can do, Zack,’ I said. ‘She’s not going to budge.’
‘You can’t be serious!’ He clutched at his hair (‘God! I’m starved!’ said Gudrun, peeling a banana) as though to tear it out. ‘We’ve just hit the nub, man, the weenie, the payoff! This is everything we’ve been working for tonight! What are we going
to do—?!’
‘Well, Zack,’ my wife put in, taking the coffeepot from Michelle, who stood dazedly by, ‘I suppose you’ll just have to exercise your imagination. Could you please move the strawberries, Gerald, so I can set the coffee down?’
‘Maybe we oughta fold it up, Zack,’ grumbled Gudrun around her mouthful of half-chewed banana.
‘No, wait,’ he said, gazing thoughtfully at my mother-in-law (‘That’s funny,’ said my wife, lifting up the sponge cake: ‘where did the plate go?’), ‘if the old bat wants to become part of the set, then, goddamn it, we’ll just build the show around her!’
‘Actually, there’s an old lady in the next scene,’ Anatole pointed out. ‘It’s the dream sequence in which—’
‘Hey, you’re right! Lemme see that script a minute!’ My mother-in-law looked disconcerted, but stubbornly held her ground. ‘Meanwhile, kid, go in there and get our guitarist back – even if you have to pick her ass up and haul it in here—!’
‘Yes sir, Mr Quagg!’
‘I once had a dream about an old woman,’ Michelle remarked languidly. ‘She was standing on a mountain, or some high place. She said she’d been there for a long time.’
‘Do you suppose someone took it?’ my wife asked. I gazed down at the cake, sitting there on the bare table as though after a pratfall, trying to think what it was that was bothering me.
‘Her clothes were all worn away and her skin was covered with sores and scabs and a thick dust almost like sand …’ Michelle touched her breast, her privates—