‘Where have they all come from, Hillie?’ This never used to happen. Michelle’s dream of the old lady’s infested navel came to mind: it’s what comes from growing old. ‘What am I going to do?’
‘You wan’ get reed?’
‘Sure, but—?’
‘Seemple like a tart, Cherry! Don’ cry!’
My wife, rummaging through the hall closet, said: ‘My good fur wrap is missing, too.’
‘La serpiente – what you say the dance-sneak, no?’ He reached forward as though gripping a waist and did a little rumba step. The guy they were calling Carmody, hugging his pale green bottle and muttering, ‘I know wha’m doing, wobbled past us (‘Yippee! Let ’er rip!’ shouted someone in the dining room) and disappeared through the front door.
‘Look out!’
‘Yow—!!’ Crash!
‘Eet always work!’
‘That would be nice, Hillie, I’ll put some music on,’ my wife offered, but just then Charley came banging back through the front door and grabbed us both: ‘Wait, you guys! I forgot!’ ‘Pairmeet me!’ Hilario smiled, bowing from the waist. He shuffled gracefully off toward the living room, hands still on the imaginary waist. ‘I sold my car!’
‘Your car?’
‘Yeah, the big station wagon. Your buddy – travel agent guy. Hey, whaddaya cryin’ about, Ger? I got a fan-tas-tic deal!’ He fished around in his jacket pockets, came up with a crumpled check. The crazy whinnying had stopped. I could hear the music now in the living room. Hilario was turning the volume up. ‘See? Awmoss twice what I paid for it!’
‘Charley, isn’t this check signed “Waterloo”?’
‘’Ass right – hah! ole Waterloo – you ’member! That dumb shit!’
I glanced up at my wife: she sighed and shook her head. ‘I showed them everything …’
‘Whuzzamatter?’ He stared in puzzlement at the check, held it up to the light.
‘Listen, Charley, you take my car for now.’ I handed him the keys. The music was getting louder.
‘Hunh? Oh yeah, thanks, ole buddy!’ He wrapped his arms heavily around me. ‘Hey, I love ya, Ger! I mean it!’ He hauled out his handkerchief and wiped my eyes and then his own. Over his shoulder I could see a line of people, hands on one another’s hips and led by Hilario (he winked and raised his long fingers in a V), come hopping and kicking out of the living room, all singing along with the music, now turned up full volume: ‘Don’t LAUGH, it may be LOVE … !’ The woman who’d hit the door lintel with her face was still out cold, the guy who’d carried her in now dragging her along by one ankle. As they wound toward the back into the dining room (‘Hey! wait for me!’ people shouted, grabbing on to the tail), Dolph and Louise came squeezing out past them, holding hands, looking flustered and confused. Beside me, my wife caught her breath, and Charley, pulling away (‘It’s YOU I’m thinkin’ OF!’), said: ‘Great goddamn party, Big G! Bess I ever wen’ to!’
‘I guess we gotta second that,’ Dolph grinned.
‘Is it true, then?’ asked my wife, and Louise blushed and nodded. They fell into a big tearful embrace and then Dolph hugged my wife and Louise hugged me: she was trembling and I thought I heard her gasp something about ‘love you’ or ‘because of you,’ it was hard to tell because things were getting pretty noisy. They both hugged Charley, who seemed to have no idea what it was all about, then hugged us again (they’d been standing in the smoke too long and smelled a bit charred), Louise now almost unable to breathe for excitement. While Dolph had his arms around me (‘I love it!’ Charley was saying. ‘God-damn it, Louise!’), I stage-whispered in his ear: ‘If you grab my buttocks, Dolph, I’ll bite your ear off!’ Dolph laughed, a squeaky but joyful laugh, unlike any we’d heard in over a year, and my wife, in tears, hugged them both again. ‘I’m so happy for you!’ she cried, and Charley, punching Dolph in the ribs, said: ‘’Sbeaut-iful! I mean it!’
Hilario’s snake dance, meanwhile, had come winding out of the living room again, led now by Olga, who seemed to think she was a frog: she was down on her haunches, hopping along, her big cheeks bouncing rhythmically off the floor, and shouting ‘Borp!’ every time she leaped into the air. The line coiled to the rear of the hall, Olga going ‘Borp! Borp!’ in front of them, then swung round and hopped toward us again.
‘Life is ONLY what you SEE … !’
Dolph said something about influence, but the noise in the hall was deafening. ‘WHAT—?’
‘I SAID YOU GUYS—’
‘Borp!’
‘Here they come!’
‘So come DANCE along with ME!’
‘Look out—!’
My wife flung the door open and we pulled apart to let them by, but Olga, as though in panic, stopped dead at the threshold. Hilario prodded her effectively – ‘BORP!’ – in the behind.
‘You’re a genius, Hillie!’ I shouted.
He laughed, kicking. ‘I promeese dem all w’en we outside we EAT de FROG!’ And then he was gone, the long line hopping and whooping behind: ‘Won’t you TRY to under-STAND …’
My wife seemed to be saying something. ‘WHAT?’ I cried. Horner had his hand up the skirt of the woman in front of him: she bounced rigidly as though on coiled springs, her eyes glazed, mouth agape.
‘I said, I get the feeling half my wardrobe walked out the door tonight!’ She pointed at Beni, who, one hand cupping his silk codpiece affectionately, winked and shouted out a ‘Ciao!’ ‘Or hopped!’
‘If you’re the GLOVE, then I’m the HAND!’
A guy with a runny nose and what looked like dried vomit down his shirtfront staggered out of the line and threw his arms around us. ‘G’nigh’!’ he shouted. ‘’Nkyou fr’inviding us!’ He seemed to be crying. ‘C’mon, Boomer! you’ll get left behind!’ ‘ ’S been so … shit! … so—’ ‘Soup’s on, Boomer!’ ‘So goddamn … I don’ know howta … God! yareally SWELL!’ he sobbed and grabbed up my wife’s hand and kissed it. Or maybe he was only wiping his nose on it. Then he stumbled back into the line, disappearing through the door.
Slowly the sound wound away from us as the dancers snaked past. A guy with an eyepatch waved a bottle at me, Bunky blew a kiss – ‘Noble said to say thanks, Gerry, thanks a lot!’ – Scarborough moved lugubriously out of step. ‘If I’m the HAND, then you’re the GLOVE … !’ they sang, kicking, the music still blasting away. The woman getting dragged along at the tail seemed to be coming around at last. ‘Phil … ?’ she asked as her head bumped over the threshold. ‘Where am I, Phil …’
‘So don’t LAUGH …’
I shoved the door shut, leaned against it, turned the latch. ‘Whew!’ I gasped.
‘What happened to Dolph and Louise?’ my wife asked, looking around in amazement. ‘And Charley—!’
‘I don’t know!’ I said. We were still shouting. ‘They must have joined in!’ She shrugged, then said something I couldn’t hear. About the kitchen maybe: she wandered off that way. ‘I’ll go turn the music down!’
In the empty living room, Michelle danced alone, wan under the bright lights from the ceiling, drifting wraithlike through the wreckage, hands crossed at her breast, eyes closed. When I rejected the tone-arm, the sudden silence was shocking, almost physical in its impact, and I heard her gasp faintly, frozen in her movement. ‘I guess it’s that time, Michelle.’ The deadly silence was eery and I was almost tempted to put another record on. I thought: it used to be more subtle than this.
‘Have you been crying?’ she whispered.
‘Yes, well,’ I said, and wiped my cheek, ‘I hate goodbyes.’
‘Once, when I was modeling for Tania …’ She hesitated. ‘…This was a long time ago … I was young then …’ Her head dipped slightly. ‘… Just a little bit of hair … “like a boy’s moustache,” she said …’ She seemed lost in her own reverie. ‘…Trying to help me feel more … relaxed …’
‘Michelle?’
‘What? Yes …’ She clasped her hands at the back of her neck, her elbows in front of her face.
Her intricate lace blouse was unbuttoned, tails out over a wrinkled skirt. ‘That day, she was apologizing for keeping me in the same pose for so long … and it was true … my whole body ached … it was awful … I wanted to fly right out of myself …’ She lifted her head, stretching her neck against her clasped hands, then let her hands separate to slide forward and support her chin. ‘ “But an unfinished painting frightens me,” she said …’ Yes, ‘a bare patch of canvas,’ she’d once remarked to me, ‘is like some terrible ultimate nakedness …’ ‘… I can still see her face as she said it … her eyes …’ ‘… Reality exposing itself obscenely …’ ‘ “I can’t sleep,” she said, “I can’t eat, I can’t even think properly until I’ve completed it … I become cruel to myself and cruel to others …” ’ I remembered how she’d turned away and seemed almost to shudder. ‘… “And then … when it’s suddenly done …” ’ Michelle dropped her hands limply at her sides, lowered her chin. ‘… “There’s this terrible emptiness …” ’
I watched her drift away, stepping barefoot through the butts and crumpled napkins, spilled food, the debris from Scarborough’s set (near the cavemouth, Malcolm Mee’s cast-off plastic wrap lay like an insect’s husk, glittering and dead), and, though I wanted her to leave, I felt abandoned at the same time, left behind in a room (why were the windows so bare, the lights so harsh?) full of grave disquiet. The bloodied drapes and linens had turned dark and dirty. Sticking out from under the collapsed ping-pong table: the chalk drawing of a pair of legs. Scarborough had rigged the cords of all the lamps to a kind of switching system in a box dangling just behind the proscenium arch, but I was afraid to touch it. It had a rickety yet lethal look, as though it might go off. I needed a drink, but I didn’t want to go in where Vic was, so I stepped into the makeshift cave, away from the flat lights and stripped windows, and sniffed at the half-filled glasses. I found one that smelled more or less like scotch, but just as I tipped it back, I noticed what looked like pubic hairs floating in it – I spat it out. But it was only someone’s false eyelashes. I sank back into the gold couch in there, feeling suddenly very tired. We’d have to clean up tomorrow. Outside, in the hallway, I could hear my wife saying good night to Michelle, her voice thin in the hollow silence (‘Goodness, Michelle, where did you – yawn! – get those nasty toothmarks … ?’), and it reminded me of the time when, spelunking in Greece, we’d come on this cavernous pit of human bones. What she’d said then – thinly, hollowly – was: ‘Did you notice? None of them have heads … !’
Of course … that wasn’t my wife …
‘Somehow,’ she said now, gazing around wearily (she was standing in front of me, easing her shoes off: I hadn’t seen her come up), ‘parties don’t seem as much fun as they used to.’ She sat down beside me, curling under my arm, the one I could still move, and tucked her feet up. ‘It’s almost as though the parties have started giving us instead of us giving the parties …’ She loosened my shirt, lay her head sleepily against my chest. ‘It gives me a … funny feeling …’
‘Yes …’
‘Still, I guess it’s worth it …’
The woman in Greece had said something much like that about making love. She’d had an appetite for the unusual, the perverse even, and I too was pretty jaded in those days, frustrated by the commonplaces of sex, bored with all its trite conventions – the state of the art, so to speak – and so in need of ever greater novelty, ever greater risk-taking, in order to arouse myself to any kind of performance. What worked for her – and thus for us both – was to be unexpectedly violated in a more or less public place, the key to a successful orgasm being not so much the setting or the use of force, as the element of surprise. It was a kind of essential trigger for her – like having to scare someone out of her hiccups. Thus, I might walk her through public parks, churches, department stores, taunting her with exotic possibility while yet denying her, only to jump on her back in the busy hotel lobby while asking for the key. Or I might arrange a night out at some mysterious destination, coax her into dressing up elaborately, then get her out of the hotel, hail a taxi – and suddenly violate her on the sidewalk just as she was stepping into the cab. I don’t know why I thought that pitful of decayed atrocity victims would work. Perhaps because it seemed so unlikely. But nothing happened. In fact it was a disaster. We got filthy, she hurt her back on the bones, got her nose bloodied, I cracked my elbow, we were both choking with dust, and when it was over – or rather, when there was no point in going on – she told me just to leave her alone and go away. I never saw her again, my last vision of her being sprawled out there in the – ‘Ouch!’
‘Sorry, Gerald, is something … ?’ She had been stroking me through the trousers and had caught the place where Jim had nicked me. She opened my trousers carefully, eased my shorts down. ‘Oh, I see …’ She licked it gently, then took the crown into her mouth, coating it with warm saliva. ‘Bat’s a bad bwuise, too,’ she observed, touching my tummy, then let her mouth slide gradually down the shaft. I reached for the hem of her dress and she shifted her hips, turning her knees toward the back of the couch.
There was a sudden crash, the whole house shook – I lurched away, reared up – and then a scraping, another crash, a rumble, something rolling in the street. She closed her mouth around my penis again, curled her hands behind my hips, tugged at the back of my trousers.
‘But … my god, what was that—?!’
‘Pwobabwy Chawwey puwwing out ubba dwibe…
‘Ah …’ She eased my trousers down below my hips – outside, there was another crunch, the distant squealing of tires – then pulled them away from between my thighs. She put my hand back on the hem of her dress. There was a tag there, I noticed, stamped by the city police department. ‘Wewacsh, Gewawd,’ she whispered. I liked the pushing of her tongue against the consonants and, surrendering to that, slid down toward her knees. ‘Tell me again …’
‘Wewacsh, Gewawd … ?’
‘Yes … good …’ It all comes down to words, as I might have argued with Vic. Or parts of them. ‘Is this a new dress?’
‘Yeumf,’ she said, working my trousers down to my ankles: I lifted one foot out and raised it to the couch. ‘Do woo wike it?’
‘Right now, it’s in my way …’
‘You say the nicest things, Gerald,’ she sighed, taking her mouth away. She located the fastener, unhooked it, pushed at the skirt: I pulled it away and, stretching forward, eased it past her feet. ‘What are you doing with pancake makeup on the back of your neck?’ she asked.
‘I don’t remember.’
I tugged at her panty girdle, stretching it down past her soft hips, and she took my penis in her mouth again, warming it all over, closing one hand tenderly around my testicles. She kneaded them softly, pulling them toward her as though gently pumping them, sliding her other hand around to stroke my buttocks, finger my anus. Only one arm worked for getting her clothes off her: I left the dead one between her legs for the time being and she squeezed her thighs around it. ‘Just … a minute …’ The panties and stockings came off in a tangle. I ran my tongue slowly up her leg from her calf, past her knee, and up the inside of her thigh: she spread her legs and, as I nosed into her vulva, lifted the top one over my head. ‘Mmmmf!’ She had her finger up my anus now and was sucking rhythmically, her mouth full of foamy saliva like a warm bubble bath. I had found the nub of her clitoris with the tip of my tongue and now worked against it as though trying to pry it open. I reached round from behind, dipped my fingers into her moist vagina, pushed one of them up her rectum – ‘Ouch!’ she cried, letting my penis go.
‘Sorry …’ I pushed my nose deeper between her thighs to have a closer look: her anus was drawn up in a tight little pucker, inflamed and cracked, slightly discolored as though rubbed with ashes. ‘How did you—?’
‘You know. The police.’ She paused, holding my penis by the root. Perhaps she was studying it. Or simply reflecting.
I pressed my chin against the hood of her clitoris
, gazing thoughtfully at her crinkled anus, remembering now her position on the butcherblock (as though being changed, I’d thought as they lowered her), her thighs stretching back, belly wrinkling, tiny little red lines running down her cheeks. ‘What … what’s an exploding sausage … ?’ I asked uneasily.
‘Oh, Gerald!’ she laughed and wagged my penis playfully. ‘Don’t you know a joke when you hear one?’
‘Ah …’ I stroked her buttocks gently as my penis returned to its soothing bath, rubbing my chin rhythmically against her pubic knoll. Like veined marble, they’d seemed to me at the time, as I remembered, something like that, though now they sparkled with a kind of fresh dewy innocence (it was the kind of feeling I had between my own legs now) under the bright overhead light. She was beginning to grind vigorously against my chin, thighs cuffing my ears, so I moved my mouth back over her rosy lips, dipping my tongue into their warm mushy depths – I was aswim in warm mushy depths, we were both—
‘Say, uh … where the hell is everybody?’ someone asked. I peered up between my wife’s convulsing thighs, my own hips bucking against the cushions: it was Knud, standing bleary-eyed over us, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘Crikey!’ he muttered, his voice phlegmy with sleep. ‘You’ll never believe the dream I just had!’
‘Everybody’s gone home, Knud,’ I gasped, my chin sliding now in the dense juices beneath it.
‘Hunh?’ He frowned at his empty wrist. My wife had stopped pumping her head up and down the shaft of my penis, but she was still sucking at it rhythmically and stroking it with her tongue, marking time, as it were, her throbbing clitoris searching for my mouth. ‘Even Kitty? Jeez, what time is it?’
‘Everybody’s gone, Knud. It’s late.’
‘Holy cow, I must have slept through the whole goddam party,’ he rumbled, still staring at his wrist. He yawned, belched. ‘Boy! What a dream, though!’ My wife’s hips had stopped pitching. She held my testicles and one buttock firmly, but had let my penis slide past her teeth into one cheek. ‘I was like in some kind of war zone, see, only everyone was all mixed up and you didn’t know who was on your side—’