The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  Mr. Hearst appeared via a hidden door to great applause and he pointed us toward the Refectory, a dining hall in the style of a middle-ages monastery, with tall windows, colorful Sienese banners, and a long table fit for sixty-four fools. Placecards directed me to the ass-end, some forty or fifty miles from our hosts. Painstaking place settings were old hat to me, but this was farcical: three china plates, three glasses, four forks, three spoons, two knives, and a selection of other instruments of dubious utility.

  “And paper napkins!” exclaimed the drunkard to my left.

  “And ketchup and mustard bottles!” exclaimed the drunkard to my right.

  “That Hearst,” said the first, “is one of a kind.”

  I buried the urge to kill. Onward came the soup, caviar, bison tenderloin, potatoes and gravy, string beans, apricot tartlets, and enough alcohol to honor its resurgence. People englutted and imbibed and cackled, and not one of them paid me any mind. My empty veins itched with the maggots of antipathy until I could take no more.

  I bolted upright to leave but the cockamamie handkerchief tucked into my collar had found its way beneath my untouched plate. Plate bumped glass and glass overturned, spilling my wine across the tablecloth. Drunkard I and Drunkard II at last noticed me and raised a hearty hurrah at my faux pas while servants rushed to blot and wipe. I sat to dislodge myself and Drunkard I grabbed my shoulder.

  “I know this mug! This is that young fella who sticks forks in his arm. It’s a riot!”

  “Forks, you say?” chuckled Drunkard II. “Like some kind of savage? Maybe Fay Wray discovered this guy on Skull Island! Whaddya say, kid? How’s King Kong smell in person?”

  The bastards howled until a tray of crab flakes distracted Drunkard II. Drunkard I, though, was undeterred, mussing my hair with every insult until the ladies around us began to laugh as well. Had I really traded companionship with Church for this debasement from self-righteous jackals? My emotions coalesced into a cold fury that burned through the rancid cancers of my torpid organs, and I turned toward the heckling dipsomaniac, flaming with the ice of la silenziosità.

  Hearst Castle smudged down to a Neanderthal’s cave of stone and fire. Time swallowed me down its hot throat. There!—Death!—waiting as always to tease me with vulture claws. This time the pain was worth bearing in order to watch the drunkard’s plumped roseate cheeks flatten and whiten and the boozed exuberance of his eyes deplete with horror.

  I am the savage, you fat fuck?

  Indeed I am, and unto you this I savage.

  Adrift in obliteration, I did not hear the cheery voices die out nor see the grins fall, but when at last I surfaced, it was not two or three diners staring at me with their open mouths crowded with cud, but our entire half of the table, twenty or thirty people rudely awakened from their everlasting privilege to the realization of their ugly, encroaching deaths. The drunkard himself was a blubbering wreck, his fountain of tears melting through a flume of snot and beer.

  I stood, this time unmindful of my handkerchief, and charged toward the nearest door. La silenziosità, dependably as ever, had left me weak, and servants were amassing to warn me that this was not an exit. I shoved past the busybodies, anything to escape from all those film-camera eyes, and if I became lost in the castle? All the better. Castles had dungeons; perhaps down there I might be shackled.

  The door fed into a sitting room that looked like a mouth—a long tongue of purple rug, the biting teeth of chandeliers. Past stone sphinxes stood two golden doors, but they were locked, and so I took up a three-foot candlestick and swung it at my pursuers.

  So weaponed, I dashed to the right, through a chamber dominated by snooker tables and a Flemish tapestry, then beneath an Arabian doorway. Servants cornered me in a small Art Deco movie theater, but I climbed over four rows of padded seats and candlesticked my way out of a side exit and into a blue evening of tall palms and long shadows.

  I expect a night watchman would have shot me down like a coyote had I not happened upon a door that brought me back to the Assembly Room. There I encountered a serving boy ignorant of my escapades. I asked him to fetch a taxi, and make haste, make haste! I bashed through the vestibule and onto the front esplanade, and would have sprinted down to the road to intercept the cab had I not received an abrupt question.

  “Still disturbing the locals, Z?”

  Behind a veil of smoke stood Bridey in a red dress, tapping ashes into an ornamental urn. Her repose suggested nonchalance, but the bosom heaving within the bodice betrayed that she had hurried to catch me.

  “How do you do,” said I. “Had I seen you at dinner I might have—”

  “Delayed your jailbreak? That would have been a shame. It was the highlight.”

  Behind rattling doors, a squad of irate servants shouted to one another their scheme to nab me. I needed to vacate, and yet so complimented was I by Bridey’s attention that I lingered.

  “The truth is, Miss Valentine, that I have had a streak of rough luck. It has made me mindful that I do not belong here, not with people of your stature. The jailbreak, as you say, has only begun. I believe I shall hop a train tonight, or steal a car. Whatever it takes to make myself scarce.”

  “A pity.” She fluttered her bobcat lashes at my groin. “And here I thought you were excited to see me.”

  I looked down and saw that I still wielded the three-foot candlestick. Such clever ribaldry! I laughed aloud; it surprised the both of us into grins.

  “You know what?” posed she. “You’re exactly right. You don’t belong here. Which is why, in my opinion, it is such good fortune that you are here. I trust you got a good gander at those quacks crammed in there like a Busby Berkeley number? They make a lot of money changing—by the role, by the trends, by the minute if necessary. But you? You’re as strange as ever.”

  “You praise me for this?”

  “I don’t know what it was you did in there, but you might as well have pissed directly onto Hearst’s plate. In other words, yes. I am praising you, dear, most highly.”

  My luck could not last forever. The doors burst open and spit out a butler whose last filament of hair stood straight up in the breeze. He expected a lengthy sprint before catching me and was taken aback by my presence. He glared, pet down his cranial poof, and bowed at Bridey.

  “Madam, I must ask you inside. This young man is an infiltrator and crook.”

  “An infiltrator?” Bridey looked amused. “Why, this is Mister . . .”

  She extended a braceleted arm in my direction.

  “Finch,” said I.

  “Madam, he has purloined a valuable candlestick.”

  “Pish-posh. He’s stolen nothing.”

  The butler winced as servants do when tasked with correcting their uppers. He gestured at the antique that I held at my side.

  “It is one of a quartet of gilt-brass sticks set with four moonstones. Unmistakable, I’m afraid. The police are on their way.”

  “Oh, that,” said Bridey. “I asked Mr. Finch to carry it for me so that I might have a set of my own designed. Did I forget to ask permission from Miss Davies? Blame it on the feminine mind! So flighty, you know. Now be good and call off the police, lest we create a headline about Bridey Valentine’s Hearst Castle incarceration.”

  The butler knew he was being gamed but, well trained, he bowed grimly, returned inside, and began snapping fingers to call off his tuxedoed hounds. Bridey waited until the doors were closed before giving me a most devious curtsy.

  “Acting,” said she.

  “Brava,” said I. “But I think I should return the candlestick.”

  “Out of the question. It’s our cover story. In fact, I’ll have to get an entire set made just to cover my tracks.”

  “I am sorry about that.”

  “Sorry? It can’t cost more than one or two thousand, tops.”

  “Still. If there is any
thing I can do to repay you.”

  Bridey dropped her cigarette into the urn and arched her back so as to push herself from the column. She advanced with a serpent’s slowness, the diamondback crepe of her dress rasping across the underfoot marble. Inches before me she halted, hands low upon her cocked hips, elbows back, chest forward, and face tilted so that I could see my pale reflection in her lipstick’s luster. The lips parted, wet. Behind them, white teeth, pink tongue, nibbling movements, a throaty hum.

  “Repayment,” mused she. “Yes, I can think of something.”

  IV.

  THE LEBARON CONVERTIBLE, AS CANDY-APPLE in color as Bridey’s dress, had been a gift from an MGM honcho, or so she shouted over the lament of wind, purr of engine, and thump of California asphalt zipping beneath us. I hadn’t traveled so fast since outrunning Prohibition agents in Tin Lizzie, and held tight as the car nestled corners and blasted through stop signs down the crashing coast and through Santa Monica, slowing only when hitting the fences, hedgerows, and drives of Beverly Hills. She acted as tour guide, hollering who lived where along with a garnish of commentary.

  “Clara Bow! Has a screw loose! Mother used to chase her with a butcher knife!”

  “Buster Keaton! Serial lothario, new divorcé! Ten to one he’s slobbering drunk!”

  “Gloria Swanson! Couldn’t hack it in talkies! Has a really unusual nose!”

  It was too dark to comprehend the Valentine estate beyond how the outdoor tiki torches flashed across row after row of windows. We jerked to a halt inside of a garage, colliding with something. Bridey was unconcerned. She leapt from the convertible, took me by the tie, and led me beneath pepper trees, around a pool house, alongside a tennis court, past the servants’ quarters, and through a back entrance made to look like part of the rubblework masonry.

  Inside, her pull upon my tie tautened, and in the mausoleum dark I could catch only major furnishments: the wrought-iron staircase, the opposite balconies overhanging the foyer. We passed through a hallway soldiered with grandfather clocks cracking away at the nut of Time, and emerged into a library lit by a popping fireplace and lined with surrealist paintings of an apocalyptic bent. I felt a sharp tug at my heel and fell to a knee. Hearst’s invaluable candlestick rolled beneath an armchair.

  The incriminating glass eyes of a bear rug stared up at me. One of its fangs had snagged my pant cuff, yanking the tattered fabric so that the top of my knickers showed. Before I could adjust my virtue, Bridey lifted me by the tie—had I needed air, I would have choked—and appraised the development. With agonizing slowness, she passed a cool fingernail between my skin and the elasticated waistband of my drawers.

  “A little eager, are we?” she breathed.

  I should not have come. I knew that. But the aftershock of la silenziosità was invariably a paralyzing loneliness; had the bear rug offered a fig leaf of companionship, I would have taken it. Bridey curled my tie around her fist to create a shorter leash, and dragged me upstairs until we arrived at a palatial bedroom. With nimble puissance, she untied my tie and skinned my jacket, and with both hands she shoved me between two of the four posts of a blue-and-yellow silk canopy bed. Tasseled drapes did a jig at my landing.

  Bridey crawled her way up my body, her small, strong hands taking fistfuls of my shirt. She buried her face in my neck and filled the grappling-hook hole with warm breath. Kisses crested my jaw and continued across my ear. The long-forgotten glories of girl-flesh awakened in me a near-cannibalistic hunger. She bared her beautiful neck and I devoured it, nibbling the lean muscles, sucking the tender skin, licking at coils of hair with my sandpaper tongue.

  Her hips rocked in pleasure and she slithered downward with a hiss of fabric. I felt a pull on my torso and gasped—it was Dr. Leather cutting the flap into my gut or Merle sewing it back shut. Bridey’s head resurfaced, not with gore in her mouth but one of my shirt buttons. With the gentleness of an obedient doggie, she set it upon my chest, then waited, pleased with herself, for her reward.

  For the first time since, well, my first time, I knew not what to do.

  She gave me a sidelong look.

  “I don’t have to bite all of them off, I hope.”

  Thirty-seven years, Reader! Nearabout four decades since I’d been skin-to-skin! With desperation equal to that with which I’d dug myself from a Belleau Wood trench collapse, I tore at Bridey’s dress. Since the Nan-and-Dot episode, ladies’ garments had evolved yet again and I could not locate a single damn hook-and-eye. By the time I’d isolated the key to her nakedness—an Oriental gold buckle that pinched the whole ensemble together—Bridey, embodiment of sex to a nation of men, was kissing her way down my stomach.

  My rotten, putrefying stomach.

  “Stop,” said I. “My body—it’s unclean.”

  “Good,” hissed she. “Everyone else is buffed and trimmed like show dogs.”

  “I’m cold. Can’t you feel it?”

  “So? Everyone else is hot, or so say the headlines they plant.”

  “I’m pale. Look how pale.”

  “And everyone else is baked brown like hamburger in the pan.”

  I snatched both of her wrists.

  “What?” gasped she. “Did I do something . . . ?”

  Show me a god, any god, the Gød, and I would build a ladder tall enough to strangle Him! It was not fair! Not fair! Seventeen I was, a flooded reservoir of potency, but with no pumping blood to steel my enfeebled male organ, I might as well be a toddler. I snaked myself from her torrid limbs and sat against the headboard, feeling downhearted enough to end it all, if only that were an option.

  “I can’t,” said I. “I just can’t.”

  Here was a woman no man had ever spurned, and I braced for her face to adopt the wolfish snarl used to imposing effect in so many of her pictures. She would then scream for a manservant to throw my inadequate corpse to the street, or, to maximize degradation, do the honors herself. For leading her on with false promise, I deserved it.

  This unpredictable female instead rolled to the side, propped her head with a palm, and gave me the studious squint of a zoologist struggling to classify a bizarre creature. She clucked her tongue.

  “Chastity. Now that’s a new perversion.”

  “It is not my intent,” moaned I, “to be perverse.”

  “Don’t say that. I have a hunch you might be the most perverse of them all. Who knows? Abstinence could be a fun lark, provided one is open to a little suffering, which I am. I’ll try anything once, and most things twice. For now we’ll just—what do they say? Turtledove? We’ll do some turtledoving?”

  Zebulon Finch, barnstormer of female anatomy, conquistador of copulation, rutter of lore—turtledoving?

  With an idle hand, Bridey pulled tight my belt and then, to torture me, traced her fingernails in circular patterns across the tongue.

  “Polite young man like you. You’re holding a torch for some sweet young thing back in Indiana, I’ll bet.”

  The first rule of any carnal encounter is to deny ever having seen another woman. Bridey’s hypothesis, however, offered an honorable exit from an awkward situation. Moreover, there was truth to it. I had, and forever would, hoist a torch for Wilma Sue, if not a ten-story inferno. From the floor I could hear my darling’s heart, the Excelsior, ever patient with my shortcomings, tutting from my jacket pocket.

  “Illinois,” said I.

  “Tell me her name. No, let me guess. Phyllis. Wait. Lois.”

  “Wilma Sue.”

  “Two names? She ought to be twice the homemaker, then.”

  Bridey did not hide her skepticism. For some reason, she believed us cut from similar cloth, incapable of finding any fulfillment in the humdrum of a little house, a little job, and a little lady to bring me my slippers. She had no idea of the type of creature with whom she laid, nor that creature’s appetites.

  I removed her hand
from my belt and slid it up under my shirt.

  “Changed your mind already?” pouted she. “I barely even tried.”

  “Shh,” said I.

  Over the next half hour, I gave her fingers a guided tour of my damage, every unhealed hole, abrasion, gouge, and burn, supplying no explanation beyond the obvious—that I was far stranger than my newsreel or parlor tricks had made me out to be. I was, just as she’d implied, a perversity.

  I took care to make the exploration chaste, but even here Bridey rebelled. At each patch of decay she tickled; at every crossroad of collapse she caressed. It was, of course, sexually aggravating; more than that, though, it was moving—profoundly so. The promoted image of Bridey was that of an exotic who welcomed the uncanny and profane. Magazines, fabulists by trade, were, for once, on the money. My repulsiveness excited her. Perhaps my strange flavors acted as antidote to the perfect blandness of a celluloid world.

  Had you burst in upon us afterward, you would have believed we’d just finished the good deed rather than aborted it. For a time, Bridey lay stroking my cheek and watching the sluggish reaction of my dead flesh. I was not a fellow given to snug-a-bugging, but so thankful was I for her lack of disgust that I could have lain there all night. Bridey, being Bridey, had other plans.

  She stood up alongside the bed and all but groped herself as she smoothed from her dress the evening’s creases. By the time she bothered to give me her bedroom eyes, I was on tenterhooks.

  “You’re not sure you have what it takes in the sack. You’re still stuck on this Wilma bird, too. Well, that’s fine for now. I have but one humble question to ask.”

  She detached the Oriental buckle and with a shrug the dress fell like rose petals about her naked feet. There in the moonlight shone an aphroditic vision of Bridey Valentine before which the general public would never get a chance to genuflect. She angled an arm behind her head coyly, while sliding the other suggestively across her exposed tummy.