The Ept, The Ane and the Fantile

 

Grill smoke drifted like chalk drawings of tropical fish on the darkening air. A sudden calm suspended everything…the falling sun; Frisbees at apogee; the tiny crucifix of a jet dangling from the string of its vapor trail…in the mellow aspic of future memory. They all prepared to listen to Gregg read, conscious of the fact that many years into the unknowable they’d look back on this moment with intense affection. Affection for the city and the era and their former selves. Eric, Dave, Andy, Bill and Eric grinned open-mouthed with anticipated pleasure, their shadows long, as Gregg cleared his throat and lifted a finger of emphasis. All of Roosevelt Park, along with their future selves, hushed for a moment to listen. 

 “ ‘Two decades ago, with her sculpted features, Alaia-friendly figure, and a languid drawl that spoke of nannies and finishing schools, this rangy, patrician beauty (her uncle was a prime minister of Belgium) was perfectly cast to play artist’s muse.’” He peered up from under the corners of his tinfoil hat and affected a lisp. “‘They were a very, very glamorous couple,’ recalls the artist Peter Blah Blah, ‘He was this powerhouse of creativity and bravado and interest and talent. She was so intimidating to look at; a camera couldn’t capture her outrageous beauty.’” He closed the magazine and waited a beat.  “Now, I ask you…”  

Andy said, “Kinda makes you see the world through Charlie Manson’s eyes, doesn’t it?” 

Dave adjusted his tinfoil hat, which suffered from being a hasty construction, and said, “And for that I’m grateful.” He sipped beer from his family-size jug of Diet Sprite. Gregg handed Dave the Vogue and Dave put the sloshy jug down between his knees and paged through the magazine with one eyebrow raised and nostrils flared, a patented Dave expression. He passed the magazine to Bill, who would have preferred the jug. 

“Whatever happened to the peasant class, anyway? Why don’t we hear from any of them on stuff like this? Aren’t we long overdue for widespread rebellion?” 

“Revolution these days,” responded Andy, as Bill passed the Vogue to him, “is atomized, permanent and absorbed by the system. If we could somehow organize all the yuppie muggings that take place during one year in this country and concentrate them into one day and location, that would be your uprising right there. But the revolutionaries are all lone wolves now and they tend to have crack habits.” 

Eric reached for the Vogue. “Where did you find this thing?” 

“Wait,” said Bill, “You mean even bloody insurrection suffers from the same crisis of hot-dog individualism now plaguing the NBA?”  

 

“Gregg got a subscription for Christmas,” said Andy. Andy took off his tinfoil hat and looked at it with some interest. “Hey, am I just imagining it or are my thoughts a little…I don’t know…less staticky while I’m wearing this?” He put it back on top of his head. 

Gregg, with his perfect deadpan, said, “Now that you mention it.” 

“I don’t know about less staticky thoughts,” said the other Eric, “but I’ve had an erection since I put mine on…and that was at 5 in the morning.”  

“And they said he’d never screw again!” 

“Who said I’d never screw again?” 

“They.” 

 

“Oh, them.” 

“The same know-it-alls who said Christopher Reeve would never walk again, I presume?” 

Eric swatted Eric with the rolled up Vogue and Eric snatched it away and swatted Eric back and everyone laughed. A bumblebee lobbed over their loose circle in a wobbly arc as though it weighed a ton, and a beautiful girl in cut-offs and a vintage The Police t-shirt, oblivious in headphones, intersected the bumblebee’s flight path on her way to the water fountain. Eric and Eric had to twist on their spots to see what everyone else was gawping at. The denim lobes of her cut-offs appeared to inflate as she lowered her mouth to the spigot and she pulled her hair out of the way and slurped. 

Dave said, “Hey, in all seriousness, how are those burgers coming?” 

 

Bill crawled over to the hibachi on two knees and one hand, holding his tinfoil hat to his curly head with the other. He said, “The burger that’s directly over the one hot coal is getting there. The others appear to be incubating salmonella to varying degrees according to their distance from the one hot coal.” 

Dave chugged from his Diet Sprite bottle again and said, “I always thought that was the tastiest sounding food poisoning, you know? Salmonella. Salmonella spread, with pimento. I’d buy some of that.” 

Gregg said, “Let’s face it, it’s a major setback that our manliest member couldn’t make it this year.” 

Bill chuckled. “Manliest member.” 

“Mark,” said Dave, wistfully, “was, indeed, an idiot savant of the hibachi briquette fire.” 

“Is hibachi a Mexican word or a Japanese word?” 

 

“A skill he picked up as a pyromaniacal adolescent of the upper-Midwest, no doubt.” 

“It’s a Japanese word that refers to a heating device but not a grill, actually. The correct word is shichirin, but that’s too difficult for the average American consumer to pronounce, so they were marketed as hibachi.” 

“I love being forced to learn things.” 

“I told Mark he could bring Sadie if he wants.” 

“Well, the funny thing is it’s actually an ancient Chinese technology.”

“He obviously didn’t want.” 

“Will somebody stop this guy?” 

“Maybe he was afraid we’d covet her.” 

“Or frighten her with these hats.” 

“You asked and I told.” 

“Sadie. What kind of name is that, anyway? Is she a retired rhumba teacher?” 

“Next time I won’t ask.” 

“No, but I bet she refers to sexual intercourse as ‘relations’.” 

“He says they want to have kids.” 

“Quick, before the population falls under seven billion.” 

“Anyone ever notice that the blink-rate of a baby is only something like once every three minutes? My sister’s kid…” 

Bill jumped up and said, “Okay, who am I now?” He folded his upper lip under itself, exposing his teeth, and stuck his thumbs into his armpits, but before he could finish the impression a very large black woman loomed, wearing camouflage pants and a hooded black sweatshirt which presented a picture of Albert Einstein with his pierced tongue sticking out. She was large not only in the sense of fat but of tall as well and physically intimidating. She spoke with such abrupt loudness that Bill flinched, his upper lip still folded under itself. 

“Is this the thirteenth annual Delmore Schwartz memorial picnic?” She gestured with the classifieds section of the daily paper. 

“You advertized?” hissed Eric to Gregg. 

“I thought it would be fun.” 

“Well here’s your fun.” 

Bill said, “Yes it is.” 

She gestured at Bill’s tinfoil hat. “Is that supposed to be funny?” Before he could respond she added, “Is mental illness funny? Is suicide funny? Is the suicide of a gifted 53 year old poet grappling with the debilitating effects of an untreatable mental illness funny?” 

Gregg, with spell-breaking sang froid, said, “I’d prefer to conduct this interview in writing, if you don’t mind,” and Eric, Dave, Andy, Bill and Eric all laughed, grateful that he’d shown them the way. 

 

   Berlin (Reuters)-Police in re-unified Germany’s capitol announced today that a serial rapist targeting elderly women has been active in the Charlottenburg, Mitte and Moabit neighborhoods of that city. The suspect is described as a tall, well-built, extremely handsome dark-skinned black male of approximately thirty-five years of age who speaks English with an American accent and wears a dark blue woolen cap. The six reported victims of the alleged rapist are said to be between the ages of seventy two and seventy eight years of age and of a uniformly tall, handsome, aristocratic appearance. At least three of the alleged victims are of “blue blood” by birth, and the others by marriage, sporting the tell-tale “von” prefix in their surnames. Police are as of now unwilling to speculate on a possible motive, but have confirmed that the alleged victims display few signs of physical trauma as a consequence of the so-called attacks, and forensic experts have been unable to establish evidence of forcible entry at the purported crime scenes. Women who fit the victim profile are strongly cautioned to exercise heightened vigilance in the vicinity of individuals matching the description of the alleged perpetrator.

There is a secondhand English language book store around the corner. A basement shop. The Black feels like a man who has made a resolution to get in better shape and so takes the next opportunity to walk right up to…and then actually into…a Health Food Store, or a sports equipment shop, sucking in his gut and reading with great care the labels on year-supply tubs of vitamin E and Brewer’s Yeast and then hefting chrome barbells with a thought towards investing. But it’s his brain not his body he needs to improve and therefore a bookstore not a health shop he dutifully enters. He has to watch his head as he descends the steep concrete stairs into the sick fluorescent lighting. The dark wood floor is warped and paint-spattered and there are fat pipes (the color of the ceiling; the color of the spatters on the floor) racing across the ceiling and around a corner into the back room.

The not-entirely unattractive woman behind the glass counter, with unconvincingly jet black hair and not much chin, gives The Black the tolerant smile with which she means to put him at ease on the matter of whether she’ll hold against him his inevitable decision to circumambulate the store once and then leave without buying a single thing, never to return. Little does she know that The Black actually feels compelled to buy, and not only by her reassuring smile. He is on a self-improvement kick and hopes to walk out of this place with an armload of second-hand books because there’s no time like the present to start.

The Black read a few books in High School. There is a case to be made that Isaac Asimov is every bit the genius that Vladimir Nabokov is but even The Black suspects the case would be ridiculous. Where’s the literature he can lose himself in? Where is the book that isn’t merely a careerist tactic or an extension of the writer’s adolescent libido, rotten with clichés or sub-Joycean experiments in narrative and typography that invariably go dud? Where is the living, breathing and engagingly sincere literature? The stuff he can apply towards Life? The Truth Telling?

The Black picks up a handsome old volume with a photo of what looks like a sinister Edwardian chickenhawk on the cover and rifles the pages and puts it with vague reverence back. The Black hasn’t the slightest idea who Gertrude Stein is (although the name rings some kind of bell) and he has certainly never read Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha, the second story from Getrude Stein’s much-discussed Three Lives, so how could The Black possibly be aware of Richard Wright’s oleaginously positive assessment of Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha in this handsome old edition of the Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein?

“The first long serious literary treatment of Negro life in the Unites States,” is how the Negro writer Richard Wright praises Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha in this handsome old edition of Gertrude Stein.

“Rose Johnson was a real black, tall, well built, sullen, stupid, childlike, good looking negress,” writes Gertrude Stein about the character Rose Johnson in the Richard Wright-lauded Gertrude Stein story Melanctha. “Her white training had only made for habits, not for nature. Rose,” explains Gertrude Stein, “had the simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people.”

Richard Wright noted: “I gathered a group of semi-literate Negro stockyard workers…into a [Southside of Chicago] basement and read Melanctha aloud to them. They understood every word. Enthralled, they slapped their thighs, howled, laughed, stomped, and interrupted me constantly to comment upon the characters.”

Later in this edition of Gertrude Stein’s Selected Writings, sui generis Gertrude Stein displays her mastery (a mastery which clearly vindicates what might seem simple and racist in such writings of hers as Melanctha) in a piece inspired by travel, with her mousy factotum, to Spain: It can no sail to key pap change and put has can we see call bet. Show leave I cup the fanned best same so that if then sad sole is more, more not, and after shown so papered with that in instep lasting pheasant. Pheasant enough. Call africa, call african cod liver, loading a bag with news and little pipes restlessly so that with in between chance white cases are muddy and show a little tint…(sic)

What The Black doesn’t like is the feeling (imaginary?) that the shop girl’s eyes are trying to steer him towards the colorful rack of celebrity biographies to the immediate right of the door, or the LARGE TYPE sports “literature” that stands in the rack to the left of it, forming a lowbrow gateway The Black had to pass through before discovering the musty nest of middlebrow paperback fiction lining a water-stained wall.

These same books are always waiting to be rescued from places like this, and they are as unappealingly poignant as mustached Romanian orphans. The kind of books that not only infest and depress second-hand book stores all over the English-speaking world but infest and depress junk shops, too. Something about these books emits an aerosol of salt peter for the literary boner. Something about the cover designs, the typography, and even the stylistic content…everything…turns The Black off to the extent that he suddenly wants to circumambulate the shop and leave without buying a single thing, never to return, despite his avowed intent to purchase an armload of brain-improving literature.

“I am liking your shoes.”

The Black looks up at the shop girl. She’s smiling at him over the top of a tabloid newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung or BZ. The headline on the cover page in 72pt bold screams SCHWARTZE RAUBTIER!?!

“Thanks.”

“They are pretty…nearly the woman’s shoe. You have small feet to be so big.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“That’s a good one.” She nods towards the book that The Black is just then pushing back in its place on the shelf, making him feel obligated to pull it out again and pretend for a moment to re-consider it. One of Anais Nin’s old things.

The shop girl sighs and says, “She was so free!” The Black stares at the self-absorbed face on the cover of the book, examines the back cover with equal intensity and slips it, finally, into its slot again.

“She didn’t care what the world is thinking. That’s the best way, I think.”

“Yes, I agree.”

Without warning, the shop girl erupts into theatrical laughter, covering her mouth and apologizing. The Black picks up another book and rifles the pages and says “What?” without looking at her.

“I’m sorry, but I look at you and I think: he has many girlfriends.”

“No.”

“What sort of book are you looking for?”

“A good one.”

“They are all good. Every book was once somebody’s hopeless dream…that’s what I say.”

“It’s a nice thing to say.”

“Thank you.”

The Black smiles back at her and gestures awkwardly that he’s about to retreat into the back room to check out a bit more of the inventory. “Enjoy,” she says, and pretends to go back to reading her tabloid. But she looks up again as he turns his strong broad back.

Is it him?

The back room is a catacomb. The 70s saw a fecundity blip of middlebrow paperback production and the output (from huge pipes at key points around the globe?) seems to have papered the planet three or four times over in self-regarding, clunky, sexually summer-campish fiction, for The Black has been seeing exactly these books on the Lit shelves of second hand establishments for thirty years now, across twenty American states and four European countries, though some of the books are surely by now eighth, ninth, tenth hand…with penciled-in prices erased and re-written and erased again on the fly-leaf in layers of embossed pentimenti. Interesting thing, in the books where the successive prices are crossed-out rather than erased, is how the values first show a steady decline until bottoming out well below a dollar (or Deutschmark), but then a weird bounce-back, post-Internet, as books more and more became the spinster’s luxury item…decorative artifacts for the shut-in’s night stand. This Gravity’s Rainbow, for example: the penciled-in asking price is €8, far more than its original cost (in 1972) of $2.98, though it cannot be considered a collector’s item…the cosmic joke being that no way did any of the chain of seven people who once owned and then re-circulated this fat gold tome ever read it.

Shockingly, a paperback of a non-70s vintage has found its way in the tight slot between Irving and Mailer and The Black digs it out. Yellowed pages and a dark blue cover sporting a grid of four headshots of the heroes of another era titled FOUR GREAT MINDS: A QUARTET OF MEN WHO SHAPED THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Then, possessed of a sudden inspiration, The Black seeks the piously cloistered “ethnic, gender, disability” section to the far left (as much as he hates to) and finds one miraculous copy of a book he hasn’t much thought of in almost forty years: MANTAN in LILY LAND by Napoleon Fanon. He digs it out with trembling hands and experiences an instant erection. The book is like Viagra for him. He taps Fanon’s name on the cover.

Despite the considerable embarrassment of obviousness he must endure (a black man buying a book about black issues by a black writer; why not a Frenchman in a striped shirt and black beret in line to buy a baguette?), The Black marches right up to the shop girl and plunks down the money for this 1968 first edition paperback of ManTan in Lily Land (with its lurid, racist cover). The shop girl waves goodbye. Her heart is beating so hard that she can barely catch her breath.

Once he is home, the light on everything else around him in the room seems to dim as the book emits the melancholy glow of erotic nostalgia. Dusty, perched on the windowsill, closes her eyes when he catches her watching him caressing it. The laminated cover of the paperback, though yellowing and cracked, gleams with the image of a black giant’s gaudily be-ringed, kong-like hand as it grasps a creamy doll-sized nude blonde. Her pubes and nipples are tastefully hidden behind giant black fingers and the expression on her face is compellingly ambiguous. Her mouth is open. Her eyes are half shut. Terror? Rapture? Her hair is done in the big blonde aeronautical style of the late ‘60s, a platinum nose cone. ManTan in Lily Land. As a blurb has it, the shocking narrative of an urban pilgrim’s progress from stuttering Negro to bold Revolutionary…

The Black’s bedroom is high-ceilinged (the ceiling ringed with the 30s-era ornamental plaster-work called Stück), with tall windows, white walls, and a hardwood floor. The floorboards are separated by quarter-inch gaps where some kind of putty used to be, and down between the boards, in these deep dark grooves, is the shoe-deposited stratified compote of twentieth century Berlin (dried cum and blood, dog shit and dandruff) along with a sprinkling of the desiccated essence of the 19th and the 21st centuries, too. This is an old old building, as rooted in the brittle block of Kant Strasse as a stone molar. Still, no unfamiliar ghosts have bothered to trouble him here, despite the various moans and howls and gasps these bedroom walls have absorbed during his tenacious occupancy.

He did, however, one Sunday morning, glancing up from a crossword, get an adrenalized glimpse of a hawk with a wingspan the length of a man’s body taking lunch in the linden outside that window…so close that The Black could’ve swung the window open and leaned on the sill and dared to tickle the bird’s wingtip with his finger…so close that The Black could see the baked dirt on the pale scruff of the creature’s wide neck where no contortion of beak was possible to preen it. With one talon the hawk clutched the headless body of a pigeon ( an old unraveling sock), tearing off red bits and shuttering its big black Pentax of an eye at The Black …there was something of Herbert Von Karajan in the hawk’s profile as it took him in through the double-glazed window…and it did seem to give The Black a glance of disdain before lifting back off into the merciless grandeur of its natural element…but the ghosts he expected to haunt him in Deutschland…livid Aryans and mournful Jews and plaster-dusted, eyeless waifs…they never did materialize.

Though someone once put to The Black the chilling proposition that a certain percentage of the pale, poorly dressed and dour creatures one comes across in Berlin every day…on the streets and in the U-Bahn, in the bakeries and grocery stores…are, in fact, corporeal ghosts from the War. A casual removal of their dingy jackets or stained skirts would reveal the noose burns or perforations of ancient machine-gun fire. Why were these spectral scowlers still hanging around? They had nowhere else to go, rejected by the afterlife itself, having made the bizarrely stupid error of persecuting the Jews in a Universe run by the father of a world-famous rabbinical student.

The sun is setting. The sun has set.

Dusty is staring out the bedroom window with an unreadable expression as twilight suffuses the sky with dark blood and the courtyard lights click on, casting unvarying shadows in the high-walled courtyard. The black imploring shadow hands of three old leafless trees stretch across the grass and red brick tiles and stand up on the dirty stone wall under The Black’s windows like a creepy etching by Otto Dix. Across the courtyard, visible through gaps in the high foliage, life of a sort is evident in random windows, bright or dim, under the pearly folds of Europa’s view of the Milky Way.

A too-tall blonde in an evening gown is ironing pillow cases. A pacing man with vivid black hair is lecturing (with broad gestures) a white-haired straight-backed couple seated on opposite sides of a kitchen table, making his passionate case for Euthanasia, perhaps. Two white-capped guys in overalls are painting an empty room, under a bare bulb…a portable television is placed atop the third step-ladder. The movie on the portable television is full of explosions and the screen blossoms repeatedly with orange blooms of fire and digital debris intercut with close-ups of a small-eyed, blank-faced starlet and her swollen, parted lips.

Near-naked in his dark bedroom, spying on the well-ordered mystery of German existence through a wind-shifted scrim of moon-blue leaves, what The Black misses most at this moment is… cricket song. Cricket song, and the smoke from the incense they bought as kids for two a penny and called punk and burned to ward off mosquitoes. Cricket song, punk, lightning bugs and talcum powder. Oh, and adolescent armpits. And autumn leaves, burning in damp piles, and Doctor Pepper, or Wint-o-Green Life Savers, on a pretty girl’s breath. Laundry flapping on the line, both the sound and the smell of it. Hose-water hitting hot sidewalks.

And the ruckus of a two-blocks-distant, contentious game of twilight stickball and the hiss of traffic on a Sunday morning after a light rain and the bright orange taste of a Dreamsicle and the deep smell of Vaseline on his anus as the rectal thermometer slid in…he was sickly as a child and that rectal thermometer was always sliding in. Burnt pancakes…don’t forget burnt pancakes. Don’t forget the menacing odorous glow of RCA tubes through the grille in the back of an old timer’s radio. And the clank and roar of a coal-burning furnace and the pagan dance of the flames as his grandmother snatched the grate open with a hooked poker to shovel more in. A grass-covered gasoline-smelly lawn mower parked in a damp hot garage on a puddle of oil on the garage’s cracked floor. A box of stale coconut macaroons, too. Garden-fresh tomatoes and green beans in two dirty buckets. The pulse of windshield wipers versus the throb of tires across the steel matrix of a drawbridge and their doze-disturbing properties. The crackle of ozone from the loosely connected tracks of an electric train set. A brassiere from the dirty clothes hamper. The sharp black reek of a chicken coop. The electrifying odor of a brand new Schwinn bicycle, freshly stolen from the shop. Wet cardboard. Wet bandages. Wet dog. Paper-thin cicada song above a vacant lot. The smell of cornpone baking…

The Black caresses the cover of ManTan in Lily Land…

With two flicks through the pages of the thick-as-a-porterhouse paperback, the pages red-edged as rare steak, he comes right to the most familiar passage of the book, as though the copy he holds in his hand is the one he read from originally, in the library, Chicago, 1968, Harriet Tubman Elementary…

“What do you want with me?” she demanded, her eyes aflame with hatred. No Negro had ever so much as made eye contact with this proud daughter of America’s Anglo Saxon ruling class, this much was clear. That I dared not only to stare her down with an equal hatred, while seizing her wrist in a grip whose strength had been forged in everything from the Memphis workhouse to the brutal stockyards of Chicago, but also to address her in a tone that the Master reserves for his servant, was beyond the pale.

I twisted that fragile white wrist until she was down on one knee, and, truth be told, the expression I showed her then would have frightened even me, had I seen it, for it meant only one thing, and both of us knew it. Still grasping her wrist with the one hand, I back-handed her with the other, and she sprawled at the foot of the king sized bed in her parent’s master bedroom, overlooked by a framed, crocheted American flag. The symbolism was striking. She touched a finger to her bleeding lip and wept softly as I unbuckled my belt.

“For centuries,” I growled, in a voice devoid of emotion,”what’s about to happen to you has happened to innocent Negro women at the hands of your rapacious forefathers…”

On Chesil Beach Ian McEwan

Jonathan Cape, 166 pp 

Ian McEwan is the gothic poet of British class anxiety. Over an arc of novels including The Innocent, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, and Atonement, McEwan has polished a talent for giving his readers nasty and sometimes bloody surprises when the classes interact on too intimate a level. His most recent, On Chesil Beach, however, is both a perfect specimen of McEwan’s hardening suavity as a prose stylist and the latest example of an ongoing renunciation of his greater gift. As Saturday did before it, this novella-length book promises much, initially, but ends up being deeply unsatisfying before its conclusion. A necessary catharsis has been frustrated for the sake of a decorous treatise on the grim predestinies of class.  

The book’s unhurried narrative anchors to the first few hours of a marriage between Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, shuttling between the “now” of their honeymoon supper (and its aftermath) and earlier points in their lives and their relationship. The presiding metaphor is on view from the French windows of their honeymoon suite: the “infinite shingle” of Chesil Beach, on which “thousands of years of pounding storms ha(ve) sifted and graded the size of pebbles…with the bigger stones at the eastern end.” Edward, a lower-class rustic educated above his station and faintly embarrassed about his background, is, in practically every way, Florence’s inferior. He’s even a chronic masturbator.

Florence’s upper-middle class parents are a neurasthenically haughty Oxford don and a prosperous businessman so competitive that he’s nearly an anachronism (or an American). Florence is a chaste, disciplined and accomplished violinist in possession of an IQ 17 points higher than Edward’s, as he discovers by having a “peep” into her school report folder; even this peep indicates a moral inferiority on Edward’s part. As if his congenital disadvantages weren’t enough, an accident during his childhood has left his mother brain-damaged and the Mayhew household dark and filthy as a consequence, in schematic contrast to the Ponting’s Victorian villa, sterile with the hard light of eminence. While Florence’s mother is friends with Iris Murdoch, Edward’s mother is friendless. Clearly, Edward and Florence are like the pebbles on Chesil Beach, widely separated by the work of thousands of years of merciless grading.  

McEwan’s schematic stacks the deck with the force of stereotypes so entrenched they feel like empirical laws of a natural science. Making the upper class female love-object in this novel superior in almost every way may feel like an expression of the author’s (unconscious? Self-hating?) class prejudice, but it’s also the de rigeur chivalry of the post-feminist celebrity, as it would be difficult to imagine a writer with McEwan’s following getting away with making any of the males in his couples more intelligent than their invariably attractive wives or lovers. Hewing obediently to this unspoken stricture is a minor failure of nerve that doesn’t, on its own, threaten the integrity of the work. But as McEwan ages and his stature grows and he devolves towards the artistic cul-de-sac of Elder Statesmanship, other strictures…other obediences to the sensibilities of his auditors…undermine his mastery. A certain squeamishness sets in.  

In the disappointing Saturday, the bloodletting centers on a broken nose for a prig and a tumble down stone stairsteps for a bad man of the lower class variety. Even in Enduring Love, the beginning of McEwan’s spiral descent from the previous heights of his Grand Guignol, the virtuoso set-piece is dispensed with in the first chapter of the book, as if to step clear of childish things before getting to the mature business of the rest of the story, which being a report on the dangerously unhinged behaviour of a lower-class person and the effect of said behaviour on his betters. 

On Chesil Beach consists chiefly of interlocking character studies of fair nuance; as ever, with McEwan, we are privy not only to dossiers of the telling vignette for the folksier players on the page but rifle through papers written, curricula mastered, books planned and theories mused upon in the service of fleshing out the rich interiors of the brainier players as well. Edward’s and Florence’s story (and the story of their story) is about ideas when it isn’t about sex, and most of the sex is a phantom dreaded or a vision longed-for but not a physical fact. Tension accumulates as the mounting effect of preparatory exposition indicates the McEwanesque relief of a shocking twist, foreshadowed in carefully-seeded references to Edwards’s potential for violence. 

The narrative tension created by putting this poorly-matched couple in the wedding night’s bed is further amplified by the tamped-down sexual hysteria of the era; it’s 1962, after all, and Kenneth Tynan hasn’t said “fuck” on television yet. The explosive pressure of the era’s sexual tension is recapitulated in Edward’s having “saved himself” for the big night by an unprecedented fortnight of autoerotic chastity. He’s fit to burst and, as it turns out, his brand new bride is frigid as a fjord. His legal right to Florence’s body can’t even guarantee him a sensual kiss, so something has to give.  

In classic McEwan, the build-up always resolves to a horror, a corpse, some blood-letting…the uncanny moment around which the rest of the book swirls as towards a sucking drain. The horror revealed will be a set-piece of cinematic power; a short, sharp shock to cure the abiding malaise that has crept with the pace of a wasting disease into the mind of the reader for the duration of the book: the proletariat German corpse rolled up in a baklava of glue and carpet, then sliced, in The Innocent; the (perhaps apocryphal) rape of a French beauty by Nazi-trained Alsatiens in Black Dogs; the “head on a thickened stick” of the good samaritan who fell to his death in Enduring Love; the rotting extremities of parents exposed in their cracking tombs by the slack workmanship of their children in The Cement Garden.  

With On Chesil Beach, however, we climax with an anti-climax…with nothing more shocking than a flesh-crawling joke as McEwan exerts his superb technique to alienate the reader from something only slightly more dramatic, and less common, than a sneeze.  

In the perfectly functioning McEwan novel, the suffocating horror of class is just the beginning; we are made to suffer it to the limits of our readerly tolerance (knowing how far to stretch this limit, which veers dangerously near to boredom, is the mark of mastery), at which point McEwan saves the day by producing and then describing with rejuvenating relish a human corpse, for Death trumps class every time. There are no upper or lower class corpses. In On Chesil Beach, however, McEwan provides the reader with no such twist or violent redemption. McEwan’s novella reveals itself as a monograph on socio-economic kismet in the United Kingdom.  

The final movement of this book is a queerly compressed postmortem that violates the pace of all that came before it; roughly ten pages for the next forty years of the life Edward has tossed away merely by blowing his chance to remain married to a disciplined, ambitious, upper class girl. Edward, it seems, was doomed from the beginning, but not in the way a loyal reader of McEwan’s might have hoped.

He’d been meaning to start a notebook with all such examples but the resolve to do so faded every time…the same with the general notion of keeping a journal. In school he’d had friends who’d faithfully recorded their thoughts and experiences in the quiet hour before sleep, inspired to do so by a certain charismatic English teacher. He could imagine these friends as responsible old women and men of the future, clear-eyed and sturdy and crisply dressed, watched over by pictures of children and grandchildren as they angled over a diary on a rolltop desk, recording in a fine clean script another day in an orderly life. The steady accretion of meaning. However, every attempt he made at starting a journal devolved into parody and then boredom. He always found it impossible to pretend that what he was writing during these attempts was unselfconscious and private and for his or its own sake. He immediately pictured an audience and what he should and yet couldn’t reveal and whether the style was literary enough. He’d lost track of the number of nice little moleskin notebooks he’d bought, only to leave enigmatic markings on their first few pages and toss them in the trash with a sigh of relief. And yet the urge to write things down kept coming back, a compulsion that refused to leave him.

His grandfather, as dead as the Mesopotamians now, had kept a life-long journal. Hundreds of volumes were found boxed in the basement after his death, stacked behind old luggage and the rusted treasure of a ‘30s-era Tyco electric train set, an epic of secrecy recorded in his stingy, left-slanting, impenetrable code. Secrets so faithfully kept increase in profundity until the eventual deaths of all concerned devalue both the secrets and the effort of keeping them and render the keeper quaint or absurd. A figure of vain pathos. Even if he started now keeping a record, late bloomer that he is, there were so many important events that had lingered in vain for so long before disappearing completely from his thoughts, erased by subsequent moments of greater intensity but far less meaning. Usually to do with sex, the pursuit of which had occupied his twenties after an embarrassingly late start and precious little return on the investment.

Warned to get to the station early, he’d been up before dawn, dressing in a strange cold room in fumbling darkness because he couldn’t find the light switch. Borrowed flats were usually poor ones…student housing or workspaces without bathtubs and in this case the only heat was supposed to have been provided by a coal-burning stove he was afraid to meddle with. He imagined he could see his breath, faint and moist as ectoplasm, as he blew on his hands. He went over the catechism of streets and corners and left and right turns in the memorized path to the Altona station, the reversed sequence of the directions to this flat which were scrawled on the very envelope the key had come in. The envelope he’d carelessly tossed in the trash and which he had no intention now of digging for. He got his clothes on and then patted the floor around the mattress for any small possessions gone accidentally unpacked. With a flinch of his heart like a stroke of the strings in that Hitchcock film he found his passport while patting the floor a foot from the head of the mattress. What if he hadn’t checked?

The “cluck” of the lock engaging as he shut the front door and the irreversible gesture of the key pushed back through the letter slot and the heft of a sack over his shoulder plus the run-down beauty of the frozen blue sidestreets at dawn were the sensual pleasures of departure he always looked forward to. The self-pity he’d felt about having to wake in a strange cold flat before sunrise to make his train changed, quickly, as his head cleared, into a smug glee, the sense he was getting away with something. He imagined disturbing the sleep of school kids with his hard bootsteps up the cobbled slope in a narrow pass between red brick buildings that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Chicago if one didn’t look too closely…the slot between the buildings like a flute topped up with the dawn’s champagne. Distant birds even floated and rose like quivering bubbles in it.

Booking a ticket the last minute for the New Year’s weekend had tripled the normal Berlin-to-Hamburg-to-Berlin-again fare, straining his budget, which had kept him out of trouble, in the end. His ears were still ringing from the amassed fury of firecrackers on Saturday… firecrackers bouncing down the street and raining from apartment windows and tossed by every kind of drunken maniac, the air a black sack of bright hot beads, the aggressive good will of the Germans. Now it was Monday morning, day after the aftermath and his ears were still ringing. Even his boot heels seemed loud on the cobbles. He’d had these boots ten years and they’d overlapped three distinct eras of his life. If as a child he’d have heard cold loud bootsteps echoing outside his bedroom window at dawn on a school day he’d have dreamed a whole future of far-flung adventures for the man in the boots…the sailor/troubadour/Christ figure of his boyish imaginings. But he himself was now this figure.

When he boarded the train at Altona he found the carriage almost empty and the aisles still wet from a fresh mopping. The vinegary disinfectant the Germans think smells fresh. Pickles. He slid the compartment door open and saw that he had his compartment, which would normally seat four comfortably, entirely to himself. The next thing he’d noticed was the thickish linger of a cheap perfume, a shock after the pickles, the type of cheap perfume with the faintest cinnamony whiff of vulva about it…some working class teenager’s erotic Christmas gift. He saw the torn silver square of wrapping paper in the ashtray built into the window sill and he felt like Sherlock Holmes as he fingered it, imagining the small-eyed boy who’d hoped to receive pleasure in exchange for the dimestore offering. Feeling superior to the imaginary boy he’d dropped onto his seat and thanked his good luck in being alone.

But now he thinks, staring at the Slavs’ faint reflections on the window backed by rolling snowfields, that some version of this same thing keeps happening to him, over and over again…it must be the fundamental scenario of not just his life but Life itself, this kind of twist. These mean little inversions of fortune. The mournful catchphrase about a thing being too good to have been true.

The first stop after Altona he’d held his breath. Few climbed on the train and all of those who had walked right by the sliding glass doors of his compartment. So far so good. Sigh of relief as the train edged out of that station. The morning was low-ceilinged and it shredded into a white flurry over the tops of the old stone buildings he rolled past and then the snow thickened as the countryside opened its hollow flank to the tracks, the blind ice of bronchial trees and hard cream fields fanned out and curving up like the sides of a bowl to the high horizon. The view from the train was splendid and evoked the euphoria-inducing religions that predated all cities in such fields. He felt the euphoria himself. A feeling of pride towards existence and solidarity with the living world.

It was the fourth or fifth station, after twenty minutes of peace…twenty minutes of the warm compartment and the clotting snow and greeting-card view and him there drifting in his thoughts…it was then that his mood fell. As the train eased to a halt along a platform dark with a jostle of people and their rucksacks and their hills of luggage several rows deep he thought: shit. Lüneburg…the city near where they’d caught Himmler…he knew that for some reason. All those people. The jig is up. He gathered his duffle bag, and the book he’d unpacked from it, closer, and drew himself up as though to receive a formal visit. He’d seen many young, hatless heads in the crowd…students…many blondes at that…there was a good chance that the bad fortune of being on a train that pulled up to such a crowded platform would turn into the good fortune of a female shape. Maybe even a pretty one, with English but not so much that it made her haughty, on her way home after New Year’s. He’d had Germans attempt to correct his grammar more than once and the next time it happened he’d be ready for it.

But there they were, not a pretty girl at all, at the sliding glass door of his compartment, the father fumbling with the mechanism of the handle as though he’d never been in the 20th century before, scowling at the door, shaking his big black mop of gray-streaked hair and scratching at his salt-and-pepper stubble with the air of a mountain village patriarch, disdainfully ignorant. The head-scarved woman in a shapeless bundle beside him, and then somebody’s grandmother, and the chronically ashamed teen-age daughter behind them all, lugging a stunned baby like cold lunch.

He couldn’t possibly have managed to disguise the look of horror they must have seen through the door the moment before they and their sole possessions crowded into the compartment with him, taking up the final inch of available air. They heaved a suitcase-sized toaster oven on the space beside him and then a clanking box of kitchenware on top of that. He imagined a distant future in which he’d refer to the oven, milking the story for groans and laughter, as the girl’s dowry. They were still stacking shopping bags of food and clothing on the luggage rack overhead when two college-age girls, one blonde, appeared in the doorway of the compartment, frowning at their tickets and then at the compartment number over the door and back at their tickets again. He exchanged commiserating glances with the girls and there was no doubt that they all would have gotten along wonderfully well together for the duration of the trip to Berlin. That old fantasy. The holy grail of travel.

‘I’m sorry,’ smiled the blonde, who was not sorry at all, in her ski pullover and tight jeans. She spoke in the formally condescending German she’d have used in a bakery. ‘I think there is somehow a mistake. Perhaps your tickets…’

The patriarch cut her off. He had a wheezing voice; the voice of a man who couldn’t even take breathing for granted. ‘You want to complain? Go get the police,’ he said, without for a second even looking at her or otherwise interupting his work. He and his headscarved wife were securing things in the overhead rack with twine while the daughter and grandmother sat on opposite ends of the facing banquette. The baby could have been a doll, or dead, for as much as it moved or made noise in the girl’s lap. The blonde blinked a few times and said, ‘This is not very polite!’ and she and her dark-haired friend, who was the more attractive of the two, marched off.

For a long time after their departure he managed to nurture the hope that the girls had gone to fetch a ticket collector or porter but he knew it was more likely that, being young, they were flexible enough to find other seats and still not well-formed enough, within, to know how to handle a confrontation. Ruefully he pictured them sitting with their arms around their pulled-up knees on the hard carpet with the rest of the student overflow in the dining car or some lounge, joking about it with some handsome boy. American girls, especially middle or upper-middle class ones, would have handled it as an affront to their human rights as consumers and would indeed have gone to fetch someone in a uniform…the driver of the train if necessary. This was one instance when he’d wished for Americans or even the old kind of German…but that last thought and its implications made him feel so guilty that he tried to catch either the grandmother’s or the teenage daughter’s eye to give them a reassuring smile as though it were in his power to give. But this didn’t happen, in any case, not once in two hours of travel.

From right to left, as they were reflected in the window, floating like menacing ghosts over the snowscape, sat the teenager, the patriarch, the headscarved wife and the panting, black-eyed old woman whose thick white hair was plaited in a disturbingly youthful style of platinum braids down her dark embroidered blouse. None of them seemed to have much to say to each other, and when they did speak, in their coughing, swallowed language, whoever speaking would continue to stare into the middle-distance while speaking, just as whoever the remark had been aimed at would not so much as tilt a head or cock an eye to respond. Clearly, history was having its way with these people. He thought: that’s the mistake, the belief that it’s a constant roar of white noise that we’re all contributing to, all being affected by, all the time, forever. In fact, the sound of history being made is discrete, a sharp shock or a cluster of them…gunfire, near or far. What was the suburban America of his and his parents’ youth but a safe haven from history? Where time is quiet.

The fantasy he entertained (or frightened) himself with was that here they were, the family of eternal Slavic refugees, beaten with clubs and chased by dogs in Sarajevo in 1915 and subsequently starved in a forced march through Poland in ’39 and kicked by Russians into a work camp near Prague in the ‘60s…and here they were on the move again, with faintly discernible rope burns around their necks and fraying bullet holes in their moth-eaten clothing. Several times the patriarch leaned over him, so close that the heat from his lap was felt; actually seemed to brush his cheek; and handed first tangerines, then later salami and later still crumbly bread and cheese for the headscarved woman to prepare in her lap, tossing it down without looking. Mundane circus trick. When she passed the lobed tangerines to the family she made a perfunctory gesture of old world manners across the compartment at him but he smiled and he shook his head no, the smile wasted because she picked up the ‘no’ with her peripheral vision, and that was the first and last effort to communicate between the two camps. The American and the refugees.

The first fifteen minutes of the journey after their appearance stretched to accommodate what seemed like a week’s worth of thoughts. Three days back. Wandering the cold, surprisingly empty lanes of The Reeperbahn, all alone, in the late afternoon of the last day of the year, the sky already black, he had felt as cut off from any sense of human purpose or belonging as he ever had in life. He remembered feeling dizzy from it, the sense that it didn’t matter in which direction he chose to walk or how fast or with what facial expression or whether he bothered to remain on the sidewalk or suddenly walked into traffic: it truly didn’t didn’t matter. A vertiginous feeling. He’d thought: I could scream obscenities, or gouge my own eye out. What is it that holds everything together? You could slash a hooker’s throat with a boxcutter or use the same tool to slice your own thing off instead. The sun wouldn’t fail to rise the next morning. So this is what they call Nihilism.

The American hamburger joint with an Indian motorcycle gleaming in the window felt like a life-saver after that train of thought, and he’d realised he was powerfully hungry, and with just enough money in his pocket to splurge on a grotesque meal of warm, fragrant American plastic, he crossed the street and pushed the door open and kissed the prospect of a post-midnight, discount handjob goodbye. The global American hamburger joint that the Germans he knew jokingly referred to as the American consulate. The very thought that he’d been saving his Deutschmarks for a doorway handjob made him smile faintly as he ordered. It suddenly hit him how young he was, since the shiny-as-a-glazed-doughnut schoolgirl taking his order was not even young enough to be his niece. He took his tray to a table at the window near the Indian motorcycle and watched the occasional clump of tourists tromp by through ankle-deep snow, drunk and with their collars clutched tight against their throats, bored already at the sight of towering hookers dressed for Las Vegas marching in the opposite direction towards whichever side-door with a gray rainbow of accreted pisstains on its low right corner or whatever anger-filled car idling at a curb. He’d thought: it’s true, I’m young, there’s still time. Staring out the window and chewing that slop.

He glanced across at the head-scarved woman, her man, the grandmother. In aggregate emotional age one thousand years old. But surely that’s a thought that only the old have: I’m young. If not old in years then old in chances lost. The grandmother with her carved brown face…a face like something found under an apple tree. She’d done everything she was ever going to do and had the serenely blank expression of someone who wanted no more; would go when they called her to, easily. Who is the better human? The one with so little potential who fullfills it completely or the one with so much potential he can’t possibly hope to match it with real deeds, real accomplishments?

He was hounded by unformed talents…by his so-called potential, and there wasn’t a so-called great book or movie or masterpiece of music that didn’t fill him with contempt and the thought that he could have done it, he could have created that, he could even have done it better. Nothing was beyond his reach. One simply needs a method. A technique. He could mock himself, though: I have the soul of a famous artist. The world looked, when it bothered to at all, and saw only a young man standing impatiently in the space the famous writer/painter/musician/film director was meant to occupy. A kind of place-holder.

He didn’t even have a job: he had the money his grandfather had left him. An amount just small enough, or so his grandfather had believed, to force the young man to find honest work to augment the stipend. But his grandfather had had no idea how cheaply he could live, or that he’d choose to live even more cheaply in Europe. Worse: in Germany. Where they’d threaded two bullets through the old man (then young), two bullets from opposite directions, accounting for the frogged brown arm with which the grandchildren identified him like something out of a bedtime story calling him Hoppy behind his old back. Pappy Hoppy. The frogged arm, Pappy Hoppy had once confessed, (with his back turned) had undercut his confidence and caused him to marry the first plain girl who’d have him. Not the formula for a happy life but the inspiration for a richly secret existence as recorded with patient care in journals no one would ever be able to read.

This girl, what was she, seventeen? Not pretty but very skinny which was attractive in and of itself…skinny but present in the chest, a dark line tracing the lipstick painting her thin, resentful lips and her bleached blond hair showing roots. With as much access to television as any teen North of Sicily she might almost have passed for American minus the shrewd expression. Worrying the dull baby’s little white fingers like prayer beads. Was that her little brother or little sister lying insensate in her lap and how had the head-scarved mother, as packed away as an age-old football in layers of patches and repair tape, ever managed enough nakedness to conceive it? It would have been accomplished with a dutiful grunt in a dark room with grandmother’s black eyes shining from a rocker in the corner. Or maybe it was the girl’s baby. He exchanged a look or two with her but there wasn’t enough imagination on the whole train or even the world to finesse those disinterested glances of hers into any kind of a flirtation.

 

 

A figure in a hooded lapis running suit rounded the northernmost curve of Lake Pleasant. It veered up the leaf-strewn incline to Pleasant Lake Road and cut a diagonal across the asphalt. A pantheon of street lights looking more distantly curious than protective craned over the runner as it ran under the unblinking eye of one after another in a long row before taking a sharp right up Plymouth Circle Drive.

She jogged the road’s middle as it curved into the heights of Pleasant Hill, canopied by elms as old as the city itself, a grand continuum of elms whose thoughts were obvious, though immemorially misinterpreted by tone-deaf humans as the meaningless rustle of leaves. She remained on the dotted median of the road, keeping the late model imports a good distance to her right. She exhaled in punchy syncopation with the soft slap of her excellent shoes on the pavement and when the moment was perfect she enjoyed the sensation that the world was a treadmill rolling with slow majesty beneath her feet. To top this pleasure she ran for a mile with her eyes closed, chin up and arms out-stretched like a child becoming an airplane.

In contrast to the corona of dead brilliance around the lake, the Pleasant Hill sidewalks were lit with genteel inefficiency by electric faux gas lamps themselves so old they had become authentic antiques. The neighborhood was lovely yet theoretically dangerous, too, so dark and moneyed and full of hiding places, though statistics continued to indicate that violent criminals remained remarkably reluctant to commute. Such criminal activity as could be found on ‘The Hill’ was merely quaint: leaf-burning; low level tax evasion; residents of a certain age keeping rubber-banded stashes of ‘ganja’ in mysteriously marked coffee cans on high shelves in their two-car garages.

The higher along the pretty spiral of Plymouth Circle Drive the runner ran, the more impressive, and stand-offish, the houses became. Parked cars thinned out and then disappeared from the curb entirely except for the occasional Beetle or half-restored vintage muscle car indicative of home-for-the-holidays offspring, and picket fences replaced hurricane fences and hedges replaced picket fences and the hedges grew lusher as she put on some speed. The hedges intensified into crennelated battlements, mutated into topiary fantasias and resolved into the simple-yet-vast, this last example being a description of the stately, ten foot tall, six foot deep hedge around the Van Metzger Estate. A moat wouldn’t have looked out of place around the hedge.

She slowed as she approached the grand green citadel of Gus Van Metzger’s corner. She loved this part of the run. As the neighborhood’s demographic shifted she was up here with decreasing frequency but later in the decade, in fact, she planned on paying old Van Metzer himself a visit. The air was creation-fresh and hung like a gallery with decorative lanterns of fireflies that winked out, one by one, as she reached to touch them. The sheer diversity, she marveled. The inaudibly low octave of far-ranging insect systems in the soil. And then the next order of creatures for whom these ‘tiny’ insects were armour-plated dinosaurs. And the bacterial super-communities of minds even smaller than that, whose thoughts were individual atoms. And so on.

If you looked from the bluff where the street ended, one block on from the Van Metgers’s, in the little roundabout called Plymouth Circle with its central boulder featuring a commemorative plaque of two loin-clothed indians and a white man in a preposterous hat, the view presented was a toy metropolis’s downtown as it fit in the soft box of the valley…the diamond bracelets of southbound traffic and northbound necklaces of rubies and the pearls of municipal lighting. She stood for a moment on the ledge of the bluff, checking her pulse.

On her way back down the spiral road, she took the detour up the alley behind the Van Metzger property, pulling her hood off in order to look less like the kind of character some might fear would spring from the bushes. Heaven forbid she should scare some dogwalking old lady to death. Her afro expanded in the dark wet air and she felt, with a wry smirk, like intelligent topiary.

“Merriam?”

Upstairs at 5727 Humboldt. The house had settled into itself for the night with an asthmatic wheeze from the central heating. To the left and right and across the street and behind the alley were noveau mansions in the understated Scandinavian style, but 5727 was a bungalow in comparison, the oldest structure in the area. 5727 faced its mainstreet sideways and the soft-edged roofing over the attic dormers sagged in a way that made the old house look fraught with worries. The j-shaped walk from the gate in the hedge, curving across the yard to the front door, was broken-backed where roots cracked the old concrete. The roots were also responsible for muddy bald spots all over the yard and the owner of the property, Mrs. Gustafson-Davis, had been meaning to remove the offending tree since forever. Inside the house, the master bedroom had that flickering, morbid luminence her husband Marcel always associated with blue balls. Blue balls and palpitations.

Merriam was wearing her gargantuan wireless headphones and watching The Mitch vs Spectre Hour, immune to her husband’s extremity in all three senses of the word. His nightly stations of the cross. Marcel Agonistes, is how he put it. Merriam, who prided herself on the fact that she and Marcel hadn’t had a voice-raising argument in twelve years, feigned to fail to notice that it had been exactly that long since the marriage had heard a voice raised in laughter or ecstasy, either. She had discovered wireless headphone technology and could do almost anything on either the first or second floor of the house without severing a connection to the ongoing narrative of the outside worl, or having to listen to any distracting, vaguely irritating, or embarrassing sound that Marcel might make after Merriam got home from work.

“Merriam?”

In those headphones she appeared to him, laying there on her side in her pyjamas with her back turned, to be sporting Mickey Mouse ears that had sagged and slipped halfway down her head in late middle age. Still, he longed to have his knowledge of her sketchy cunt hairs refreshed; he wondered if they had all gone grey. Her husband lay there fretting while Merriam’s breathing synchronized itself with erotic empathy to the cadences of television personality Nate Mitchell’s voice.

Mitchell was handsome and blonde in the manner of an ambrosia-fed Liberal and his partner/opponent Spectre looked wonderfully-well described by his name: white-haired and gauntly Conservative. His head wobbled, a la Hepburn, when he rose too high in the saddle while on the charge viz certain topics: abortion, school prayer, The War. The show was ostensibly a balanced presentation of Left and Right worldviews in the form of an ongoing debate, with the audience voting the ‘winner’ by call-in touchtone menu at the end of every program. Merriam had been a campaign volunteer in every Presidential election since Jimmy Carter’s. Marcel had yet to register to vote.

“I’ll register to vote,” he said, externalizing the conversation in his head, “when they put something relevant on the goddamn ballot.” He’d vote against professional sports, Fourth of July fireworks, recreational water vehicles and Nate Mitchell in a New York minute.

Nate Mitchell, who never got flustered on camera. His brow never creased nor wept with perspiration and his voice maintained the gratifying temperature of pot-warmed honey on an oven-fresh banana nut bran muffin. Just imagine those two Liberal Aryans start talking politics together, thought Marcel, who considered politics to be a trivial affront to the majestic intangibility of the human spirit. He hadn’t had a paying job, other than the ongoing project of painting the garage, in twenty years. He hadn’t even graduated from Art College.

He could hear the Van Metzger’s neurotic border collie Apollinaire barking in the dead of night at the crickets and/or squirrels again. The VMs were at the other end of a very long alley but it was such a quiet neighborhood and the acoustics of the alley were so peculiar that on summer nights with the bedroom windows open you could hear Apollinaire whimpering and farting in his sleep. Could Apollinaire, conversely, hear Marcel whimpering and farting in his sleep? Marcel frowned: the batty dog was barking louder and harder than usual. Possible sign of a coon in the garbage cans. They could be scary animals if backed into a corner.

“That damn dog is going to have another heart attack,” said Marcel, before remembering, immediately, for the Nth time, that Merriam couldn’t hear him. She used to point at the headphones to indicate that she couldn’t hear him, but she no longer bothered with that. The isolating boundaries of their marriage had hardened into tacit structures.

“Merriam,’ said Marcel. “What’s sadder than an old man and an old woman in a bed they never use together? A hard cock they never use? A cunt they never use? I know you have possibilities, still, Merriam. You don’t have to tell me. Bag boys at the grocery store still look at you, sometimes, oh yes, for a fleeting moment, those moments I guess you live for, without even thinking you’re old. Maybe they don’t care that all that gray hair is dyed gold and the big droopy never-used tits are strapped up and plumped together in a wonderbra and a third of those big white teeth go in a glass overnight. Maybe they don’t even know it. Maybe they’re blessed with the ignorance of youth. I mean, of course they are. They see the surface. They don’t know what surfaces hide, dear. You know what the surfaces hide?”

Marcel moaned and shifted his position.

“I have a confession to make. Merriam, do you remember the last big piece I did? Before I quit Art, I mean? Years ago. Twenty years ago. I was driving around town, collecting old futon mattresses. Rolling these dusty old things up and stacking them in the back seat of the station wagon, I was kinda affected by hugging all of those…you know…sponges of intimate experience. Think about it: all those soaked-up fuckings and droolings and fartings and fevers and dreams. I hugged them to myself and frog-marched them out of strange buildings but maybe they were a bio-hazard. Maybe I got the disease then. This loneliness thing.”

“I turned down a few for being too gross, even after driving all the way to the other side of town, ringing the bell, jogging up flights of stairs and being met at the door by a person too bleak looking or filthy. I wasn’t about to hug that nasty history to myself, and drag it to the car, and nail it to the gallery wall. Most of the mattresses I bought were from couples, or single women…that old prejudice. Didn’t want to touch a mattress a man had been crying on, I guess. I never told you that the one I paid the most for I bought from a beautiful law student named Amina. She had described the color, lapis, over the phone. It was queen-sized and stainless. Consider this my confession, Merriam. The closest I ever got to infídelity. Close up, you could see the futon was covered with her super-long kinky hairs. It was beautiful. The faded lapis and the delicate hairs. Been dreaming about that girl ever since. Twenty year old Muslim law student with a spectacular afro.”

“I’d end up with three or four mattresses rolled up in the back of the station wagon in a day, the classified section of the newspaper on the seat beside me, and this complicated odor…the body-nostalgias of total strangers…. It amazed me the number of people who weren’t ashamed to sell me futons with big urine or period stains on them. But that was the theme of the exhibition.”

“And then I was thinking of the irony of going around buying these old futons, rejecting the really gross ones, the ones from the really repulsive owners, when we had, you know, the previous year, sold someone a bed set, including a mattress, on which…okay…on which you had the miscarriage. Sold it without disclosing this information. Well, I had considered keeping it for whatever historical reason. But you said: no. Like you were disciplining a puppy. No no no, Marcel! No Marcel! No Marcel! No…Amina…”

Marcel gasped a telescoping gasp…it sounded as though he was having a coughing fit backwards. He went rigid on his pillow.

Nate Mitchell’s startling blue eyes, set in a bronzed mask that briefly changed the color scheme of the entire bedroom, seemed to follow Merriam as she rolled out of bed and slipped, while lowering her pyjama bottoms, into the master bathroom, door open, headphones still on, in a cruel parody of a marital post-lovemaking pee.

The jogger jogged back down towards the lake, slipping the hood up over her afro, and Marcel, slightly confused, jogged behind her.

 

Piotr had never seen such a small human being up close. Stretched straight from the balls of her feet to the crown of her skull, she couldn’t have been much more than two feet long. If Piotr had a ruler or a yardstick he would have measured her. Measuring her precisely, with scientific instruments (in no way expensive or otherwise intimidating but stringently reliable) seemed important, somehow. He pictured himself recording the measurements in a log of some kind and the fantasy was immensely comforting. Piotr in a white lab coat and a clipboard, licking the pencil tip and inscribing digits with professional detachment in his tiny, neat script. The hum and whirr of machines in the background and the bright white blur of a lab. Obsequious assistants consulting with Piotr in hushed tones. Excuse the intrusion, Professor Piotr, but can you look at this data for a moment? Piotr the famous seeker of truth, fair in his dealings with underlings but impatient with the time-wasting niceties of politic deportment. Yes, that would have been him had he not become the he he was instead.

He looked around the room and mentally toured the rest of the flat and tried to imagine, objectively, being a stranger and guessing the profession of the person who’d choose to live there. He couldn’t, however…couldn’t imagine what a stranger would guess about the inhabitant of such a dwelling by the clues of the dwelling’s contents…and he realized what was throwing him off.

The baby on the blanket on the floor in the middle of the room. Did Piotr, in his library, have some sort of measuring device, or a straight-edged object of a known length? He used up a certain amount of time on that question, without, however, getting up and venturing into the library to settle the matter. Instead of moving from the spot he peered out the little window over his bed, and guessed from the quality of light on the wall opposite that it was late afternoon. Which would mean he’d been staring at the baby for hours. Then he had an amusing thought: yardstick? The last time he’d seen a yardstick was in grammar school! Had he known anyone in all his adult life to have possessed a yardstick? A bright orange yardstick for measuring what, exactly?  

He stared at the baby but the baby did not stare back and it seemed to him that she was strangely unobservant of her surroundings, glazed eyes scanning with a sparrow’s nervous methodology a few cubic feet of the middle distance. Staring vacuously into space whereas Piotr, had their positions been reversed, would have been without a doubt immensely interested in the giant kneeling on the floor nearby. If Piotr had been a baby in Piotr’s room, the last thing he’d do is take his eyes off Piotr, or any adult, or any living thing bigger than a fly, for that matter. Was her obliviousness the natural arrogance of the baby in its exalted ignorance, or the sign of a subtle defect? Some sort of recent trauma, possibly. Weren’t babies famous for wiggling and crying and generally making noise? This one simply lay on her back, breathing. The rise and fall of her ruddy little chest. Breathing and scanning the middle distance with both hands balled in fists and held to her mouth. Like an old woman in shock after witnessing a catastrophe.  

If you squinted and forgot you were looking at a baby it was easy to imagine that in all of her soft smooth heat and pinkishness she was some adult’s large-ish, heavy, temporarily-removed organ. Especially in that throbbing, docile state. She probably thought of herself that way, in fact, and was still in denial about external existence, the harsh lights and cold dry sounds, waiting to be stuffed back in and hooked back up to cozy wet infinities. Piotr was dying to go to the toilet but he dare not leave the room. He rocked a little on his haunches. 

A breeze pushed at the curtain and he remembered that it was spring, albeit in a tentative way. Spring this year was like a machine with a faulty switch, a machine that sputters before coming fully on, mixing bits of winter, still, with the flicker of warm days Piotr had been so desperate for. He’d barricaded himself in his flat November’s onset, ordering food to be delivered every Monday and reading his books morning, noon and night while the weather clawed at the city, leaving white scabs on the streets and bleaching the days of purpose. He’d passed the months in bookish hibernation, and what he longed for now was a park bench, some late-morning sunlight, a warm breeze laden with the sweet obscenity of flowers. Girls would traipse by in their short skirts and invincible legs and Piotr, as he did every year, would distinguish himself by not leering.  

The baby had a swirl of thick black hair on her head like a calligrapher’s sable brush laden with ink. That would indicate Asian, or Mediterranean, parentage. Possibly.  Piotr felt the sudden urge to curse his luck: stuck in a room with a helpless creature relying on him for everything but the air it filled its small lungs with, what could he hope to accomplish? He was no longer even free enough to void his bladder, a freedom the scruffiest dog takes for granted!  

Piotr sighed the sigh that meant that work on the novel would be indefinitely postponed. The need to urinate was another matter entirely. Piotr and the baby knew this both.

 

“That was great.”

“Did you really…?”

“I really liked it.”

“You’re not just saying that?”

“I’m not just saying that.”

“Me too.”

“Did you ever think…?”

“God no.”

“But I’m relieved.”

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“We both…that is, neither of us….”

“Of course.”

“You know what I mean?”

“I think so. But, really. I’m serious. It was quite…”

“Go on.”

“I was just going to say it was this unexpected intensity in an otherwise…”

“Yes.”

“Explosive.”

“Like…”

“Like the sun exploding.”

“Yes.”

“Like the sun exploding behind my eyes.”

“I’m still…”

“Me too. Shaking.”

“No guilt?”

“None.”

“That’s good.”

“Good. That’s not…”

“I know. Good is hardly…”

“I just hope it’s not. You know. You know? That we never…?”

“Do it again?”

“Exactly.”

“It’s more than that now.”

“But what will we tell people?”

“You won’t believe this…”

“But you only just thought of it now. I know, I know; same here. I was so…”

“Obviously. We were too…”

“It’s understandable.”

“It’s perfectly understandable.”

“We’ll say she fell.”

 

With apologies to Ambrose Bierce

 

5.

Lucius Nathaniel Calvin. “Luke” or “Lucy” to his friends. Good-looking boy with innocent sour milk breath. Dutifully unspectacular student. Never show-offy with hand-raising in class or sinister in the sophistication of his cheating. Reasonably popular within the limits of rural terms of popularity, which hinge on things like prowess with a hunting rifle. Unrealistically blue-eyed, farm-tall, short-lipped, with veiny hands and close-cropped, pale-wheat hair which he kept in a Caesarean haircut that only a perfect-eared boy would dare to. The grainy photograph showing up in all the papers on the same day was from his yearbook, of course. The kind of smile that everyone of a certain age knows is put on to mock the cheap-suited yearbook photographer. 

Jennifer Paine. Jennifer Paine would later call Lucius, in all the interviews, on regional TV and local radio and for all the Midville newspapers, her fiancé. Lucius’ maternal grandmother (with whom Lucius had lived the first five years of his life, after his mother’s exit and before his father had gotten his accounting firm “off the ground”) claimed she’d heard of no such plans. She’d never said this in interviews for she was never interviewed. She always said it in a room featuring a television or radio on which Jennifer Paine was being interviewed, whether or not there were others in the room at the time. Lucius had caught his grandmother talking to the television before.  “Dream on,” she’d say. Or: “As if.” 

The kick of a rifle should increase with the size of the animal hit. The kick of the rifle should hurt. Then it would be fair.

Once, Luke said that the sky is a river. 

“What?”

“The sky. It looks like a river, doesn’t it? It’s like the sky is a river and we’re stuck on the bottom of a cloud looking down on the river and we could fall in it if we don’t hold on.” 

Jennifer squeezed Luke’s hand. He recognized the gesture of concern. Her other hand was palm-up on the sharp tips of fresh-mown grass and her eyes were shut. “I guess.” 

“No, seriously. Try.” 

“Try what?”

“Try and see it that way.”

“But why?”

“Because you’ll love it.” 

“I guess I’ve heard that argument before.”

Lucius laughed. He loved it when she acknowledged their iffy sex life. They were using pregnancy as a method of birth control.

A bullet is also a message.

Civilians were still finding silver blobby or feathery black fragments from the space shuttle in their driveways and swimming pools. Portrait-sized flakes of ash were scattered across flat roofs. Jennifer Paine loved Mike and the Mechanics and Lucius Nathaniel Calvin did not. 

4.

Oh My Papa. 

A big hit for Eddie Fisher. 1954. A very big hit. Fisher was of Russian Jewish descent but came off to many of his many fans as Italian. Being Italian had gone from acceptable to dreamy overnight and everybody wanted to know one and nobody knew why. What they called those dark good looks, which are always accompanied by a swagger. He thought he had it made. Died and went to Acceptance heaven. Fisher had a variety show called Coke Time with Eddie Fisher.

The unconscious smile on the old man’s flickering face as he stands in the doorway, angled against the jamb. Like, he doesn’t want to dignify that red-baiting network by sitting on the divan and taking the entertainment it offers like everyone else, as a responsible member of the audience. No, he’s making a statement, which, at this rate, it’ll take Ike approximately six thousand years to get the ambivalent message. But Debbie Reynolds is a different story. That he’ll watch. Eddie and Debbie duet. 

-It wasn’t six million Jews, it was six thousand. It’s not six billion years, it’s six thousand. Is this a coincidence? 

Three distinct strains of local rumor about Fisher that year (as though Midville has a plausible connection to either Hollywood or Tin Pan Alley) merge into one and hit Abraham Winters’ son with the force of an iron fastball to the temple on the suntorched baseball diamond he first hears it on, standing at first base with the kid who’d got there by bunting. The not-green grass of the diamond is patchy. The kid has a classic bowl haircut that reminds him of 1950. Maturity is measured in rectal thermometers. He caught himself thinking the word Ralston-Purina without anything attached to it. 

“Hear about Fisher?” 

“Hear what about Fisher?” 

“You seriously don’t know?” 

“Seriously what?” 

“Eddie’s a Hebrew queer who sucks colored cock like it’s going out of style. Pass it on.” 

“You’re so full of shit your eyes stink.”

“Oh yeah? My uncle’s seen the pictures.” 

“You’re uncle’s a drunk.” 

“So’s yours.” 

There’s a line drive straight over the only other half-Jew on Winters’ team so he never gets the chance to finish the argument. Home is a very long walk away for the losers.

“If you looked any more like Eddie Fisher than you already do, your father would smell a rat.” 

“Don’t say that, ma.” 

“I thought you liked it?” 

“Eddie Fisher’s a queer.” 

His mother slapped him. Slapped Robert Algood Winters, Caucasian, 5′6″, brown eyes, 125 pounds, fifteen years old in December. Nicknamed Howdy Doody by the arresting officer. Apprehended in flight to Matoon. 

The old man is shouldering the doorjamb in a plaid suit with the tie loose watching Channing Pollock saw a lady in half on Sullivan with a look on his face like he’s picking up tips. Like he’s matriculating. One hand balances a paper plate that’s way too shifty and bent and hot with baked beans while loud drunk relatives cavort in the gazebo. Speedy Gonzalez jokes and everything they imply, including the aunt with the bristle chin whom nobody can remember which relative by birth she used to associate with before he died and to ask now would seem insensitive. But the old man is mesmerized. Looks like Ray Milland in the cyanide-blue Sullivan light. The ghost-beacon that is midcentury television, guiding lost souls through the ether. The Ray Milland of interstate feedgrain sales. We’re talking about a magician that the old man quotes like a Winston Churchill. 

-Happiness: a way station between too little and too much-Channing Pollock. 

-No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating one peanut-Channing Pollock. 

There were two main medical theories about masturbation and neither was flattering.You were either a homo or a werewolf. He had a two-handed technique that made him look like he was committing hari kari with a turkey neck. His father would curse under the window before trying to yank-start the lawnmower again. His bedroom walls would mottle with waltzing late-afternoon clock-gears of leaf shadow and he couldn’t help thinking of them as Jew walls; Jew leaves; the roar of the motor. Robert first learned the adult theory of the word pussy back in the fateful Thanksgiving of ‘53. This sparked an increase in the annual productivity of his jerk-off factory by an impressive 51% percent. 

There’s a street in Midville, east of his house, with a colored on it.

The old man lectures him that he never touched his own self once before marrying your mother. 

Midville isn’t even a proper name, but a description, as a teacher informed him, sadistically, because Midville is half-way between Decatur and Matoon. Mr. Schieble. Feeble Schieble. Is Robert a name or a description? She lives in a split-level with a two-car garage and her polio husband with two young unisex offspring, pretending to be Italian, doing that pinchy hand-gesture, but you can see the Mulatto of her at the end of every summer, when her skin is just a little too brown and the humidity of August brings the frizz back up in all the tawny hair bunched under the scarf and he pictures her on her knees in a pearl necklace and zip else, sticky as butterscotch, blowing Eddie Fisher and boom the earth moves and Robert sees stars and his junk hits the ceiling. He has trained himself in the art of not groaning. His mother’s Episcopalian, meaning he is not a Jew, an explanation he has polished to terse perfection in the relentless rehashing. Maybe Mrs. Schieble is an Octoroon, speaking of Robert’s favorite kind of cookie, a brand new unopened box of which on the dresser awaits him. 500 million sperm cells in the average healthy white male emission. 100 million on the ceiling alone. He does Jackie Gleason doing Reggie Van Gleason III, the imitation everybody says he should get paid money doing, saying, What do you think, old boy, shall we go another round? 

The old man suddenly bangs the door open. 

His Schwinn can do ten, fifteen miles per hour, easy, just cruising downhill towards the reservoir. He’s standing up on the pedals like a walk on the wind with a song at the top of his lungs and furious black smoke like a thunderstorm bottled up in the house behind him. But no more songs by Eddie Fisher. 

3. 

I look you and everything forgiveness. You are unbelievable beautiful. I feel like wrecks compare myself but I’m think you choose me for be most beautiful also. I do not dare for looks in mirror to whispering of sentence for staring you with sleep for whispering loud to hear this make me strong. This is hope my letter is tell you. 

Life is such in Europe city to require every for what my strength is. I know is choice of me with go was make to go is true. I for snapped him finger one by one to daring try is stop me leave for everything. What a terror is for getting on such plane! But so many terror are unbelievable thrilling. For terror you are comfortable make to misery live. So for consider blessings to what city for people say way of talk with uncomfortable stay to stay. So smell of walking sidewalk with careful not bumping not notice for people I’m walk here. So stay is food smell for make is remember carnival or such childhood of fair from childhood is happen. This fair in a longest driving city was far long going. I from do not think of fairs now more. 

Sometimes I wonder so panics what you think when look me. For always fears I say with do wrong thing to see what loving turns with pity. Loving what impatient become is something else. I wonder such times if not for transitional emotion, love. Unstable by definition, connecting deeper more useful states like fear, disinterest, hatred? I mean maybe you can’t hate something until you have loved it first and maybe the capacity for hating something is so important that love had to be invented in order to making hate work? 

You can tell your mother almost have go for college. She know is Somerset Maugham or Upton Sinclair or also Saki.  She know is Pride and Prejudice for. As you can also tell she unbelievable mess. Remember you get the good and the bad with everyone. But look at you so perfect, beautiful, innocent, deserve everything good. I am looking at your slightly parted lips with that rosy space between them so unbelievable small like ghost of the finest watch-part. It’s like you are truly powered by some new kind of energy better than sunlight glowing through your cheeks and eyelids and the tips of your hair and warms your sweet breath. Or it’s like you’re made of this energy and I cannot believe it came out of me. They always called that the miracle of life that I finally understand, after thinking this was just flower talk for many years but I know it now something so pure can come out of a body so stained and dirty with a dark bubble of pain from this dirty body’s bloody mess. 

I feel that you angelic is masterpiece of geometer to look at the spiral of the wax of its ear and the small fat fruit of each balled fist unfold in a flower. Exactly its dreams probably are made still of the numbers more of the one than words that are something more envy to because the life of its mother is words and nothing but. My dreams are words always mumbled or scream but remembering I used dream for mostly in smells. For remembering the smell of a man’s aftershave could make me sicker than dogs. I’d go in and out of the house with a handkerchief deliberately soiled with chickens–t covering my nose when he’s shaving. I don’t want to complain in this letter but I have had rashes you could read in the dark by plus problems of the lower body most doctors would kill to look at. And these are just a few of things I overcame to becoming your mother. 

Today when you found your own seat on the tram and sat a little ways apart from me swinging your feet looking back to wave, I was so proud and crushed, darling. It made me so hopeful for future and for worrying. I thought about how today it’s your own seat on the tram, tomorrow it’s you talking with people I don’t know and bringing questions home with you. It all depends on how much I’ve unbelievable lie to you, which is not a lie for fun but for safety and pride and caring. This letter is my answer for one of those questions. I’m still not sure how I’m going to writing this. 

You don’t have a father, but you will know that already, by the time you’re read this. Oh, and you’ll probably never know the sensation I just felt after writing the last dependent clause of previous sentence. It’s like seeing one’s name on a list of the dead. I’m write this from the other side of my extinction, in a way, since (and I guess it’s spookily significant that I was always unbelievable affected by plot devices like this in second-rate novels and third-rate films) I’ll have made the necessary arrangements that you’ll be reading this letter only after receiving whatever possessions you’ll inherit in the event of my etc. Well, corny as that sentence is, I just can’t bringing myself to write it all out. 

Back to the thing about you have no father. That’s just the way it is, darling. I guess there’s a good chance I’ve already discussed this part with you (by the time you read this), but, in case the topic never came up, or I never had the nerve to be straight about the situation to your face: I wouldn’t recognize the man who inseminated me with you if my life depended on it. If your life depended on it, I’d make unbelievable effort, but, no. All I wanted was you, and I needed a man’s help to make for happen. 

He was very good looking and intelligent enough (we chatted for quite a spell at the touristy bar I picked him up in because I wanted to make sure). It was a Friday night, warm out, crowds on a sidewalk. We held hands on the way to his hotel room, which is more important to me, now that I think back on it, than you can possible imagine. I’m sure he’s the father, because I’ve only had sexual intercourse with two men in my life and the second man followed the first by gap of fifteen years.

You’ve never seen America and there is a good chance we will never go there together. Maybe you’ll go on your own one day. It’s hard to believe that I wouldn’t have discussed Midville with you but truly it’s obvious that my method will be for balance your happiness with the truth for shift and evolve as you grow older depending where your interests develop and so forth, so, if it turns out that I’ve decided to inventing the city of your mother’s (me) birth and childhood I’m sorry. The truth is the place I’m from is called Midville in the state of Illinois which is know as part of the Midwestern part of the United States of America. 

If I’ve invented my own exciting childhood in an urban metropolis for you, with rich parents and exotic friends: no. None of that is real and I hope I haven’t going too unbelievable far overboard to give you a mother with past you can to proud of. Again, I am very sorry if that was the case. The only difference between a working farm and the place I grew up on was that the place I grew up on was not working. I always felt I had a certain right to be bitter about the thriftshop clothing and chewed-on hand-me-down toys (shipped in crates from superior cousins I never met) but I always thought also even as unbelievable kid: what you expecting? The country’s ten times bigger than it was in the days that a farm was a livelihood… something more than the perfect place for the head of a family for hang himself. But your grandfather never hung himself. 

No, he didn’t. But you’re going ask of me, one day, about your grandparents, and whatever story I will have made up to tell you when you ask, this letter is the final truthful answer. 

2. 

“What a coincidence.” 

“No such thing, my friend.”

“This is the last place I’d expect…”

“Paging Carl Jung… “ 

“A real live Midvillian. Pinch me, I’m dreaming. Remember the Dairy Queen? Everyone called it the Hairy Queen…?” 

“I do indeed.” 

“Bastards tore it down. What. Fifteen years ago. It’s a Planned Parenthood now. There’s an irony for you. When was the last time you were in Midville, anyway?” 

“Don’t ask.” 

“Honey, you wouldn’t recognize it. Even got ourselves a gang problem these days.” 

“Inevitable clash of hierarchies.” 

“You’ve lost me.”

“Country clubs, Al-Qeada, the Black Panthers, Catholic Church, the military… they’re all hierarchies. That’s the first thing you get wherever two human beings or more shall gather together is a hierarchy.” 

“Interesting.” 

“That’s what people say when something isn’t.” 

“Isn’t what?” 

“Interesting.” 

“No, seriously. Tell me more.” 

“Well. You find yourself at the bottom of one hierarchy, what you do, any self-respecting ego, he invents one he can be at the top of. Say you’re some towel-head with a 5^th-century education who couldn’t get laid if his life depended on it…” 

“Ouch.” 

“You invent, or situate yourself within, a hierarchy in which towel-heads…” 

“Not the most politically correct member of the frequent-flyer club, are you?” 

“Oh, I can do better than that.”

“I’ll bet you can. Let’s go back to your little hierarchy theory for a sec.” 

“Okay.” 

“Are we a hierarchy?” 

“Unless I’m missing something.” 

“Who’s on top?” 

“I guess I’m thinking what it would be like to put my cock in your mouth.” 

“You smooth-talking devil.” 

“That’s me.” 

“Hey, what’s the rush?” 

“You only live once.” 

“A grab the gusto kind of thing.” 

“Life is short, my cock is long.” 

“Vita brevis, cockus longus.” 

“You’ve been to college, I see.” 

“Auto-didact.” 

“Impressive.” 

“That’s exactly what people say…” 

“When something isn’t. Touché. You never answered my question.” 

“I don’t recall it was phrased in the form of one.” 

“Can I fuck the shit out of your ass?” 

“My, we’re saucy this morning.” 

“It’s been at least an hour since I jerked off. Look, I’m shaking. Hold me?” 

“Poor baby.” 

“If you let me fuck you in the ass, I’ll let you clean the sweet shit off my cock with your tongue.”

“And people say the art of conversation is dead.” 

“Now you’re being evasive.” 

“Not evasive. You just haven’t closed the deal yet, honey.” 

“You’re a treasure with a rusty lock.” 

“Getting colder.” 

“Are you allergic to beautiful dick?” 

“I think I hear my mother calling.”