Before he turned, he decided the party watching him could not be his wife—she was still soundly asleep. It was probably the prowler, the burglar. This gave him a thrill. Maybe he should continue to caress Cicciolina until the man was closer to him, and then suddenly whirl and strike the bastard a mortal blow with an iron fist that had but a second before been an incredibly tender, loving hand. This had much appeal.
He waited but could not hear the blackguard crossing the kitchen. It was more than a little unsettling to try to hear someone creep up on you as you worked up pizza bianca on a floury board in your kitchen. Finally it occurred to Mario that he might be in some marginal danger, and it was certain that he was not—distracted as he was—acquitting himself well with Cicciolina. He took a deep breath and whirled. No one was there. What he saw where he had expected the man—it was crazy, but he now realized he had expected the Frenchman—was a Michelin guide to Italy open to the psalm of the modern Italian. He looked at the book. He stared it down. It was on its back, and across the room, yet somehow was watching him. If he thought a book on its back could watch him, maybe he should see Sevriano Buffala after all.
He kindled up a small fire in the old stove and found a pan for Cicciolina’s dear bread. She felt, she smelled, so good it was incredible. Mario was salivating. He thought to surprise his wife with an even larger surprise than breakfast prepared by a respectable taxi driver. He put Cicciolina in the oven and, before going to the bedroom, tossed the Michelin guide to Italy in the firebox. Cicciolina could use the heat. When Mario served the tough bread to his wife she seemed not to notice. She seemed warmed by his gesture and ate the pizza smiling at him girlishly, as if, it seemed to him, he had been away for a long time and they were consequently a little new and exciting to each other, as they had been years before. His wife sat in bed eating the bread and deftly picking up crumbs from her bosom with a moist finger and looking at him when she put the crumbs in her mouth, and Mario sat looking seriously back at her, thinking, It is like I have been away somewhere.
Dr. Ordinary
DR. ORDINARY FOUND SOLACE in nothing. He found his shoes untied during surgery. He found his mother once, when she was in her sixties, naked in the bathtub calling for a fresh martini. He found bluebirds too far south. He found pies too sweet to eat. He found God with no difficulty, but locating his belief another matter.
He found it curious that he should have gone to medical school in the first place. He found a human head in the car trunk of his anatomy-class partner. He found, after his certain initial horror, that it was not the head of the cadaver he shared with his ghoulish roommate.
He found Tuesday the most trying day of the week, by far. He found a stray dog. He found a wallet full of cash. He found a lost child on the edge of a huge mall parking lot. He found it difficult to turn her in without coming under the suspicion of authority. He found telling them he was a doctor to be of no help.
He found beautiful—as beautiful as crystals and snowflakes and precious gems—the cysts and stones and lumps he took from human bodies. He found dry cleaning to be tantamount to not cleaning. He found he had no objection to staples in clothes, but he could not abide them in paper.
He found whiners offensive. He found a rare buffalo nickel in his pant cuff. He found blues-singers-in-Angola shows on TV totally absorbing. He found the behavior of mature people unpredictable. He found the doctrine of Christian charity at once commendable and absurd.
He found women close to tears at all times. He found old-fashioned foundation ads such as those in the Sears catalogue more titillating than modern-day pictures of nudes. He found relief in tension and none in release. He found certain sentimental poems, of the sort found on greeting cards, salacious. He found that if, as he gave a woman a physical examination of any intimate region, she spoke to him loudly, he was attracted to her strongly. He found impossible the notion of taking sexual advantage of a patient.
He found color-gradient charts at paint stores the most engaging art he had ever seen, and he had the world’s largest, if not only, collection of them. He found mules and other sterile hybrids, excepting sterile hybrid plants, most sympathetic. He found vegetarians everywhere.
He found Campbell’s soups odious in the extreme, more risky to consume than a Coke with a rat in the bottle. He found himself sometimes longing for the fine and light linen of yesteryear—white suits and handmade doilies. He found his relatives no more boring a lot than anyone else finds his. He found salvation in loss. He found cheer in the lugubrious carrying-on of patients who thought themselves incorrectly to be dying.
He found photographs of landscape pretentious. He found altar architecture rude. He found fresh-faced waitresses the most likely to spit in food about to be served. He found no difficulty, in principle, in pederasty, though he found no impulse for it in himself.
He found coloring with crayons an art form worthy of adults. He found fast cars on TV somehow more offensive than fast cars in person. He found reptiles of all forms pitiful. He found expensive tools harder to lose than cheap tools, to his surprise. He found telephone solicitation not so much annoying as vaguely rakish, if not prurient. He found pretty certain kinds of … of nothing.
He found himself a pallbearer at his own funeral, and the strongest of the six. He found himself less moved by his demise than anyone. He found, when touching the expensive, pointless, fake-brass coffin, that he had made the largest mistake of his life in allowing himself to be put in it. He found no solace in regret, but he regretted not willing himself, unembalmed, into a simple wooden box made not by a funereal concern but by a cabinetmaker. He found this sentiment repulsively common, but he found it to be true, deep, and his.
He found himself, once dead, able to relive his life with free editorial rein. He found the possibilities for revision endless. He found he had no interest in changing a thing. He found it easier to conceive of an alteration for the worse than one for the better. Dead, he found his clothes better fitting and longer wearing. He found this both reasonable, most reasonable, and odd.
General Rancidity
GENERAL RANCIDITY RAN THE obstacle course and the whorehouse. He ran away from nothing. He ran to weight on furlough. He ran headlong into marriage. He ran aground once in a ten-foot dinghy in a foot of water, disposing himself toward a career in the infantry.
He ran religious seekers out of his unit, and out of the Army if he could. “Bullets and Jesus do not mix” ran his slogan on this policy. The devout consequently ran scared before him, scattering like small fish before the large pagan shadow that General Rancidity was.
He ran underground raffles for military contraband, profits running into the thousands. He ran the flag up on his base personally. He ran into a woman with a jeep. He carried her fireman-style to the infirmary. Of the expression “Still waters run deep,” General Rancidity said, “Blanks. Still water just sits there.” He was much more fond of the expression “Fell off a turnip truck.” He wanted no one accusing him of having fallen off a turnip truck. Consequently, he ran a tight ship.
He ran into difficulties, over time, with his friends—they ran off and left him. He was resigned to it: with familiarity, his turdy behavior around and his ungracious treatment of his friends increased until the general index of rancidity in his character exceeded the practical limits that people, even soldiers, were designed, or desired, to put up with. Only the truly rancid themselves could run with General Rancidity for long, and the truly rancid were rare.
One day General Rancidity, running late, ran low on gas and in fact ran out. No one would stop and pick him up. Thousands of lower-ranking men passed him on the roadside, running afoul of military as well as human protocol. General Rancidity’s blood ran more than hot.
He ran for a period toward the officers’ club, where he ran up a giant tab, to have a drink before initiating procedures to court-martial the entire base. Luck was running low, or high, depending upon your affection for General Rancidity: he was run over by the wom
an he had run into and carried fireman-style to the infirmary. She hit and ran.
General Rancidity’s obituary ran to less than twenty-five words, the result of a twenty-five-words-or-less contest run by his best surviving friends:
General Rancidity and the turnip truck he rode in on ran off the edge of the earth last Thursday, rancid turnips, rancid general, and all.
Spirits on base were running high, most high, and weather fair, and all schedules on time, and all probabilities true. Soldiers, and small schools of fish in the golf-course water hazards, ran over shoal and dale, rejoicing, relieved, relying on the base without General Rancidity to most happily, most trottingly, run itself.
Mr. Nefarious
MR. NEFARIOUS SMILED, AND only when smiling was he able to do anything else. When smiling he could also do nothing, but when not smiling he could do nothing but not smile. He smiled as he scissored tiny stray threads from his clothes, smiled marveling at how many stray threads there were, almost… well, enough that you wondered how many non-stray threads were in position holding the garment together rather than … straying off, hanging off and out of seams like … flopping around on his clothes, loose cannons on the deck of haberdashery; he smiled and snipped and snipped and there was no end, logically—he kept cutting, smiling, cut a pair of pants to pieces.
He smiled phoning a girl who was in no sense his girlfriend, or anyone’s girlfriend; in fact, if you asked anyone who knew her, say even a tall woodsman type of fellow in his woodshop or on his horse how to get to this girl’s house, he was supposed to know because she had been supposed to be his (the woodsman’s) girlfriend once but of course wasn’t, only in her mind was she, for two minutes, he (the woodsman) said, “We went out four times and she wanted to get married,” and if Mr. Nefarious asked how to get to her house of the woodsman who had declined the fifth date on grounds of risk, the woodsman would say, Sure you want to go to her house? And Mr. Nefarious would smile and say, Not her house, I’m looking for that girl lives near her house, and actually both Mr. Nefarious and the woodsman would be smiling at this point, but Mr. Nefarious would smile longer, which would irritate the woodsman, and decide to phone the woman instead of risk going to her house—the tall practical fellow who could rip trees in his spare time was right.
So phoning her he smiled but when she did not answer he smiled and hung up.
Tossing a tennis ball for his dog he could smile for a quarter of an hour, all the dog and the ball could take, the dog fat and the ball a tennis ball, made for clay courts, made for concrete courts, not made for ivory and saliva courts.
He could look at bilge water and smile.
He smiled rarely at his mother.
The girl whose house the woodsman recommended they avoid reminded him of his mother, when she, the girl, smiled. When his mother smiled, she, his mother, reminded him of his childhood. When it came to his childhood there was no smiling. It seemed to him an era as humanly distant and crude as the Cro-Magnon’s. If he said something stank in this era of cave dwelling, his mother corrected him: it didn’t stink, it smelled. Okay, he’d assent, something smells, Mom, upon which she’d instruct him: “Look on your upper lip!” with a superior sneering tone that stopped him in his childhood tracks. That’s the way it was in this life? Nothing stank, it smelled, and it was always, if you smelled it, on your own lip. Even though it was his own, this motherhood struck him as odd.
Once, he had invited a girl to swim in the family pool after school, and they had spent a fine afternoon of it together, the girl barely constrained by her two-piece and the young Mr. Nefarious dog-paddling his nose into her breasts, occasionally sinking from the cumbersome weight and bulk of his teenage tumescence, rescued each time by the girl, who breathed life back into him with a peck of a kiss and released him to paddle upstream some more. When his mother uncovered this tryst she prohibited any more on the grounds that they had been unchaperoned (obviously, the young Mr. Nefarious thought to himself), and that, therefore, the neighbors would talk.
Everywhere they went, they sued all the neighbors first thing, but in this one instance his mother had a point. They had not yet sued any. Behind them was the mother of a hoodlum who lived in juvenile detention centers, to the side of them the people who’d sold them their house and held the mortgage and had a severely retarded child, across the street a millionaire who lived abroad, next to him ever-changing renters, next to them a man who had sired thirteen children out of his one, lame, eighty-pound wife. There was no one to sue. But they would talk. To whom, he could not guess.
The young Mr. Nefarious stood there that day following his pool tryst, still marginally priapic and limping slightly from his afternoon of unrelieved water ballet, ready to assent to this absurd prohibition because he did not know if his seminiferous system could take another four-hour throttling, when his mother pulled out another stop on the organ of her rectitude. “I want you to write me,” she intoned, smoking a cigarette and having her first cocktail, “an essay on integrity.”
“On what?”
“On IN TEG RIT TEE. Do you know what integrity is?”
“Think so,” the young Mr. Nefarious managed. “If not, I’ll look it up.”
“Good.”
“Do you think it’s in the World Book?”
He cannot remember if he actually made the last crack, only hope, and he does not remember looking up the word in the dictionary, but thinks he did, aiming to kill twenty-five words by copying the definition into his “essay,” which he did not—this much is for sure—ever write. Nor did his mother ask for it. It was clear to Mr. Nefarious, if not to her, that the matter of integrity between them was extinct.
When he thought of the girl whom the woodsman recommended they all avoid, smiling and looking like his mother, he suffered a wicked thrill and then shuddered and hung up the phone before she could possibly answer it. This was a dangerous moment for Mr. Nefarious. The next thought was invariably this: everyone looks something like his, Mr. Nefarious’s, mother, if you get right down to it, including himself. How could you go about life avoiding everyone on earth, and yourself, because humans resemble each other? The long-term answer to this question had worked itself out over time without his knowing it: dogs were safe, as were all people who demonstrated a total want of, or an aggressive dislike for, integrity. Those were your playmates in this tough world: dogs and people with shit on their upper lip. Mr. Nefarious had developed his nearly incessant smile by attempting to look at his lip.
At trees no smiling unless there was axing, and then the smiling was worked quickly into a determined slit-of-purpose mouth. But spiritually still a smile.
He smiled writing letters to people, overintimate, unsolicited revelations of himself, and smiled retrieving from the mailbox mail-order catalogues mostly from fancy gardening-tool concerns, in each of which was an outdoor bench costing not less than $500. To X, a woman who certainly had never been in any sense his girlfriend but who had been for damned sure somebody’s girlfriend, namely Charles’s, to whom she had been securely married for fifteen years or more, he wrote, “I do not customarily”—here he smiled—“write love letters,” and then he saved the day, which made his smile dim, or curl, ever so rancidly, by of course not declaring his love for her, which did not really exist anyway (he smiled: where, with whom, on whom, did it exist?), saved the day by just letting the letter drift off into a rather lame and nonspecific lament about his … not depression, just downness, all of which was designed—he smiled—to suggest he did love her, about 23 percent. That was enough love and at the correct angle to come at a married woman with better sense than to listen to garbage—she could certainly not entertain 25 percent, a full one-quarter throttle—and Mr. Nefarious smiled, sealed it up, stamped it with two stamps (one was extra so he could lick twice), packed it off in his country mailbox, raising the red flag, and wondered on the way back from the mailbox what it would be like to have—it bordered on not smiling to think of it—a $598.95 teak bench sitting out
in the rain, the rain, and then the sun.
Mr. Desultory
MR. DESULTORY CANNOT, FOR the life of him, or of anyone else, or of any thing, do this after that, or that after this, if either sequence might logically look sequential from a distance of, say, 2 cm or more. Mr. Desultory, as a somewhat colorful British roofer he once knew put it, referring not to Mr. Desultory but to the roofing concern in whose employ they at the moment were, Mr. Desultory an ordinary interloper and the colorful Brit somewhat more wayward in that he had accepted a proposal of marriage from an unnubile American woman to stay his imminent deportation only to find himself praying for deportation immediately after the honeymoon and thereafter referring to his immigration bride as the Dragon—anyway the colorful British roofer subject to a harridaning beyond the wildest torments of immigration authorities or coal mining or whatever he had to do back home, it must have been something unpleasant for the Dragon Knot, as the wedding was called, to have been tied in the first place, though even Mr. Desultory can remember the colorful British roofer’s having said she, the Dragon, was “sweet,” he used that word, and straight, without a glint of irony or sarcasm in his glinty little eyes, all colorful British roofers have glinty little eyes to match their glinty little Cockney mouths, where are we? The Cockney married to the sweet, fat (he said she was huge, a matter that all the boys on the roof found impossible to verify, though try they did—running to the edge of the roof when the Dragon came to retrieve her husband, and looking down from their roof at the roof of the tiny car from which she never stepped and speculating just how large she might be to be in so small a car, what is that a Comet or what? She can’t be that big, and look at old Bob stepping right on in, he step in there without a shoehorn, don’t he? Don’t see him squoze out the window either—look, he smilin!) American girl, the Cockney married to the American girl told her that the company for whom he and Mr. Desultory and those who speculated upon her size worked could not have organized a piss-up in a brewery or a shaggin session in a brothel, and it is arguable that both colorful expressions, which had to be translated somewhat to American idiom, both expressions could be said to apply, and to have applied, though not so much then as now, for he is worse now, to Mr. Desultory himself.
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