A case of curiosities

by Kurzweil, Allen

  That was the last comparison Claude wished to consider. The mount's monstrously large organs of assault did nothing to cheer up the rejected lover. Nor did it ignite the inventive flame that had been blown out when Alexandra closed the garret door.

  Piero tried more compliments and more jokes. But the compliments were of no consequence, and the jokes fell flat. Claude decided to leave his lodgings. He felt oppressed and needed to escape the site of his humiliation. He had planned to meet Plumeaux and the coachman after his teunion with Alexandta, to ptovide them with details of conquest. The encountet would now take on a mote melancholy tone.

  As he was leaving the gattet, he met the wet nutse passing through the couttyatd. Matguetite asked what was wtong. He did not have the sttength to resist telling net.

  The wet nurse said, "It seems this woman could forgive anything but happiness." She tried to comfort him by redirecting his thoughts in much the same way Piero had. "Surely, the pleasures of construction will distract you from your pain."

  He shook his head.

  She wanted to give him a hug, but, encumbered as she was by a baby tugging at her hair, she could not. Sounding uncannily like his mother, she offered up a homily. "The young," she said, "are subjected to splinters, scrapes, and scars." The baby drooled. "The traumas of men take place here." She reached out and touched the general vicinity of Claude's heart. The baby wailed, and Marguerite gave over her finger to the infant's tiny hand. Instinctively it grabbed on.

  3 6

  THE COACHMAN AND the journalist did what they could to bolster their unhappy companion. Since one of Claude's friends was a voluptuary of food and the other of women, there was some disagreement about which of the deadly sins would most help to alleviate the hurt. The coachman suggested a pub crawl at the outskirts of the city, where he had intimate acquaintance with a string of taverns purveying hearty food and decent, untaxed wine. Plumeaux thought a hunt for venereal pleasures would better serve their wounded friend. In the skirmish between gluttony and lust, gluttony won out — at least, at first.

  The coachman hitched Lucille to a loppy carriage mare and pointed her toward the Royal Drum, a wine shop beyond the city limits. The Drum was famous for crude graffiti and dented tankards that could be cheaply filled with modest wine.

  As they entered, the coachman and Plumeaux displayed the kind of excessive enthusiasm found in those hungry for good cheer. Claude and Plumeaux settled themselves in a dark booth while the coachman tested out one of his schemes. Pulling up his breeches and grabbing the attention of the hostler, he cited rules prohibiting the use of lees for house wine. (They could only be turned into vinegar.) The hostler had heard the ruse before. "And do not try improper stoppling or bogus measuring cups or the charge of imbuing the wine with false aromatics. All those gambits have been used." The hostler threatened not to serve them, and so the coachman quietly paid for the drink and returned to his friends.

  Claude recounted the story of his rejection. His friends stared at their tankards before drinking deeply and ordering another round. The coachman dispensed praise of Claude, while the journalist poured contempt on Alexandra. The mix was awkward and offered little in the way of solace.

  The coachman lifted himself out of the booth to order a carbonade. "Consider it homage to our first encounter at the Pig."

  "I have no appetite," Claude said meekly.

  Plumeaux said, "She wasn't good enough for you. She suffered from chronic distraction. Given the chance, I would have her ducked. I do not refer to the normal method of naval punishment in which one forces the harlot to straddle a thick batten. That seems hardly adequate. I was thinking of ducking the way they do it in Marseille. Your Madame Hugon should be shut up, stripped to the shift, in an iron cage that is fastened to the yard of a shallop." The journalist indicated the rest of the procedure by the leverage of his arm. "After a few of those, I have no doubt she would repent."

  "But, surely, our friend here can come up with an even nastier invention," the coachman said when he returned to the booth.

  Claude refused to oblige them with mechanical improvements on Plumeaux's method of retribution. "What is the point of producing new devices when the others were so casually dismissed? Besides, I will no longer have the time or funds to fashion my ingenuities. I will be returning to the drudgery of the Globe."

  "So end your association," the coachman said. "With your talents, you could get funds fot projects through subscription. Fotget the bookshop. Putsue yout plans, the goals outlined in your lecture."

  "The coachman is tight," the journalist said. "The wealthy are quick to toss money at invention, as long as it does not threaten."

  "That has not been my experience," Claude said. "Besides, how do you expect me to leave the Globe?"

  "If you want to leave, you must make Livre want you to leave. The alternative, Claude, is to be held in the perpetual employ of a chutlish, brutal, rude, pathetic little snarler."

  The coachman hiccuped and rolled his eyes. "Plumeaux. You're not being paid by the word."

  The three drinkers fast moved to a more demonsttative state of inebriation. The journalist sang a ballad of his own composition. It concerned Madame Hugon's husband. While the words do not translate all that well, the final refrain went:

  Oh the wondrous three E's

  Oh how they do please

  Entrance, Erection, and Ejaculation

  One man's short-coming is another's salvation.

  The coachman laughed uproariously under the burden of the final pun. Soon other patrons of the Royal Drum joined in, shouting what was latet chapbooked under the title The Ballad of the Impotent Man. The evening progressed with the singers drinking and the drinkers singing, until all the patrons of the Royal Drum were pounding their greasy tankards to the beat of the ballad, a rhythm of release Claude very much needed. He stared out at the bottles behind the bar. The glass and crockery swayed and underwent change. The hostler became a stout, talkative btandy bottle, and the coachman turned into a cloth-wrapped demijohn. The transubstantiations unsettled Claude.

  "I think it best if we leave and get some air," he gasped.

  The three drunken friends worked out the bill with the hostler and stumbled to the coach. Insulated by the padded comforts of Lucille's interior, Claude confessed his anguish. "I was part of her diversions but never a part of her life. How is it that venom and sweetness can intermingle so freely? A paradox. How is it that the moment I most despised her was the moment of greatest rapture? My ecstasy and hatred were never more profound." Claude then leaned out the window and vomited.

  Plumeaux said, "I am well acquainted with the path of inebriation. From feeling gay, one turns sullen and sick—you have just gone through the sick state. From there it is on to furious lewdness. What you need now is a means of enduring that final condition." He told the coachman to take them to a street behind the Palais-Royal.

  They reached their destination at an hour when most tower clocks had stopped striking. Plumeaux and Claude jumped off Lucille. They stumbled. "You're as pickled as broom-buds jarred in brine," the coachman said before driving off. The two friends careened onward by foot, pausing to listen to the offers of a hot-potato seller and a gap-toothed streetwalker dotted with beauty spots. Both enticements were declined. They paused to urinate prodigiously against the shutters of a wigmaker's shop. Plumeaux fished into his pockets and pulled out a brass coin. He slapped it into Claude's hand. "It's not regular currency. Consider it a token of my affection. Of should I say a token for someone else's."

  The moment for the next deadly sin had arrived.

  Claude had a highly developed, if theoretical, sense of whoredom. Though he had read much of what was published during an especially pornographic age, and knew the Prostitutional section of the Curtain Collection intimately, he had always avoided paying for his pleasures. Terror of disease restricted his curiosity.

  Madame Rose's establishment was located hard by a butcher shop, a contiguousness Plumeaux thought
apt indeed. Claude sobered up slightly as they entered the brothel. The sitting room was draped in tasteful silks, and the proprietress, a handsome woman of some forty years, welcomed Plumeaux with a familiarity that left no doubt about the regularity of his commitments. The bedswervers sat and stretched in a variety of poses.

  The proprietress whispered to Claude as she took his token, "Does the young man like his tarts hot and crusty?"

  "Please, Madame," Plumeaux interceded, "allow me to make the presentations." He introduced the women using their noms de lit.

  "This is the pony," he said of one who threw back her hair.

  "Because of her beautiful mane?" Claude inquired.

  "No, it is another aspect of cavalry—the employment of certain leathers—that has earned her the sobriquet."

  "Do you know," Claude said, drunkenly raising the subject of his lover, "that Alexandra applied such devices, and canthar-ides, besides. I saw them in her cabinet."

  "The woman had bad counsel," the proprietress said. "Flies can cause blisters. There are other ways." She removed the stopple from a decanter and touched a drop of creme de menthe to her lips.

  Plumeaux redirected Claude's attention. "Let us continue. Here is the crab. She has been given the appellation because her legs clamp down on patrons like pincers." The journalist whispered, "But there is another reason, too." He scratched his groin by way of explanation. Maintaining a hushed tone, he said, "That one stooped in the corner is the vulture. She lunges straight for the genitals. This one I call Angelique. She inspired the line — do you remember it? — in my Xanas." Plumeaux quoted himself: "Angelique was not a shy girl. She would hike up her skirt as if it were a choirstall seat and give the whole world a peek at the angel." The prostitute corroborated the phrase with the gesture.

  In the end, Claude chose none of the women presented but took instead a young Bretonne whom the journalist did not know. The proprietress said she was new and special. For the pleasure of her clients, she acted out fairy tales in ways that were far more graphic than the high-toned moralities of La Fontaine. "In the hours ahead," the whore said, "I am sure you will live happily ever after."

  She was right. But the following day, Claude awoke sick from his intemperance, despondent that Alexandra had dismissed him and his mechanical concerns. In addition to all this, it was Monday and he would have to face the tyrannies of Livre.

  37

  THE impotence trial received a good deal of notoriety. Factums proclaiming the ruling, printed in the hundreds, covered church notice boards throughout the quarter. Cheaply printed vaudevilles carried on the tradition of The Ballad of the Impotent Man. Even if Claude had wanted to forget Alexandra, he would have been unable. His pains became less obvious but no easier to deny. Two months after the final fight and desperate act of love, the coalescent smell of passion — that potent mix of jonquils and sweat — still lingered in the garret. He found long blond hairs (both hers and her wig's) everywhere. One rogue strand even pulled tightly around his neck during a night of fitful sleep. When a light-haired woman in a tightly corseted polonaise one day crossed the Rue St.-Jacques, Claude rushed in unthinking, hopeful pursuit, only to find himself face to face with a shrewish grandmother surprised by confrontation. Each time the name "Alexandra" was shouted in the streets — not an uncommon occurrence, to judge from the birth records of the city — Claude would turn around in wrenching expectation.

  He was, in short, a man obsessed. He smelled her, felt her, saw her, heard her everywhere. He dreamt of her in dozens of settings. Often he saw her writing out a note of reconciliation in the manner of a Fragonard fiancee, but no billet-doux ever reached his door.

  All he had were the paper pearls. The end of the liaison with Alexandra revived the servility and humiliation suffered earlier at the Globe. Claude was again made to brush out the Mysteries, required to polish windows, to dust and arrange, to dash here and serve there. He was reacquainted with the tools of supplication Livre had so liberally employed in the past. Livre called the quality of his work lackluster, and it was exactly that.

  The bookseller wore away Claude's confidence as a butcher wears away a block, by a thousand daily slices. Claude tried to ignore the attacks. He could not. All he could do was dream of disappearing, of ending his apprenticeship. When he composed a mental checklist and divided up the pour and the contre, the reasons to stay put — financial and contractual obligations, pride, fear — were far outnumbered by reasons to leave — Livre's cynicism, peevishness, and gastric gurgles, the general deadening of his brain, the physical assaults, the verbal attacks, and the denial of mechanical talent.

  Plumeaux and the coachman commiserated. So did Marguerite and Etiennette. Claude complained to Plumeaux. "1 feel like one of Livre's pearls, hanging from a string."

  "Leave, then. We have all told you to do so before."

  "What of my indenture?"

  "What of it? There are ways, especially with Livre, to break the agreement."

  "And what of my pride?"

  The journalist shook his head. "Pride is the downfall of the weak, self-esteem the mastic of the mighty, the fixative that will allow you to hold on to your art even when it looks hopeless. Your talents, the mechanical wonders that clang and whirl in your garret grotto, could be your livelihood if you chose to extricate yourself from the Globe. It is in invention that you should posit self-esteem. Sell tickets to the apartment. Entice the curious. I will produce a little booklet if you wish. Perhaps then you can undertake a subscription campaign."

  Claude allowed himself to dream, but only momentarily. "How could I break away from Livre?"

  "You once described to me the principle of the pendulum," Plumeaux said. "Adapt that principle to your predicament. For every error Livre punishes, respond in equal measure. Do it subtly so that he considers you incompetent and not malicious."

  "I don't see what that strategy has to do with pendulums."

  "Never mind the definitional problems. What matters is that you free yourself from his grip. You have to get Livre to want to get rid of you. Do you understand?"

  "Go on."

  "Diminished efficiency. When you line up the books, they should be crooked on the shelves, but only slightly. Be inventive with your alphabetization. Slice pages improperly, spill ink with flourish. Fail in your polishings."

  "You mean leave smudges on the windows?"

  "If pushed to such desperate acts, yes."

  Claude followed the plan to the ill-artanged letter. His mood picked up as he watched Livte grow'livid. The hotsehait whisk hurt less, the exotic curses meant nothing. Livre called him a bumbling Patagonian, a tin-head (a tribute to Claude's fascination with metalwork), a de-brained Bucephalus. Claude learned to ignore the assaults and insults, performing his tasks with exacting incompetence. The end of his apprenticeship came six weeks after the plan's initiation, during a weekly meal. Claude chose the setting with care. Livre would be so preoccupied by the quality of his food and the methods of its preparation that his defenses would be lowered.

  At first, Claude simply watched. Livre cautiously inspected his potatoes — he was back to potatoes — making sure they had been properly peeled, overcooked, and sieved. He bent over the plate and, clearing his nose, sniffed around the rim. He sucked his teeth, as if something were stuck between them. He lowered his nose again and took another sniff. Then he pressed his finger into the potato mush. Having looked at it, smelled it, and touched it, Livre was now ready to do what seemed almost incidental. He ate like an unhappy child, nervously and without the slightest pleasure.

  As Livre consumed the tubers, Claude contemplated the plan of attack. Plumeaux, who had outlined the strategy, called it the Kartoffelkrieg, the Potato War, though it was not nearly so complex an engagement as the Battle for Bavarian Succession. Still, there were risks. Claude would have to mask rejection in feigned respect. At last, he began.

  "I cannot, sir, keep quiet any longer. For some time, I have noticed that you have been dissatisfied w
ith my work. I have not maintained your standards. The fault is mine."

  "Of course it is yours. Who else should assume responsibility? You have forgotten how to serve your master. But I will whip you back into shape — and I do mean whip."

  "I am thankful for your attentions, but I think, sir, that I would be better suited to some other activity."

  "You are a bookseller's apprentice, Claude Page. I knew that from the first day we met."

  "If so, I am not a very good one. I find that I display greatet talents in the field of the mechanical arts."

  "Nonsense. I thought we tesolved that long ago. The subject is closed."

  Claude pushed on. "Then it must be teopened."

  "What do you lack? My Bibliopola offets you employment in a Globe filled with wotds."

  "And yet, sir, I find that proximity to knowledge is no guarantee of its acquisition. Touching books does not mean that they touch you."

  "Perhaps. But it is not just books that you have touched while working at the Globe."

  Claude ignored the oblique reference to Alexandra. "I now realize that in wielding tools, in creating objects, I have a commitment and competence I lack here."

  Livre grew uneasy. He picked up a knife and cursed its dullness. "What would you do if you were not my apprentice?"

  Claude said, "I hope to be an engineer."