Butterfly Stories: A Novel

by William T. Vollmann

  The high heel twitched. The voice was soulful and whispering like a dead grandmother's.

  I couldn't go out for a week, I was so scared, she said.

  Water dripped steadily into the fish tank. Blue eyelids, cheek lines. Lips a sideways heart, she blinked disgustedly in the mirror.

  I'm not forcing you, he said quickly.

  If I'm being forced to that's wrong. But you're not forcing me. You like me, don't you? You don't have to love me. Ready? OK.

  Zipper sounds in the sudden dark. And the husband thought: this creature is as strangely and fearfully specialized as a hymenopteran.

  The kitten jumped on them in the dark . . .

  Stop it, cat! she shouted. I'm sorry about the cat. He's only a baby.

  I'll give you a ride back anyhow, he said. You want to go?

  Oh it's OK I'll walk.

  You don't trust me?

  It's not that.

  Turning on the light, he saw that she was shaking. She must need her fix.

  The TV went on and on. He thought of the different Buddhas made by hand, the faces of Buddha of all sexes, the biggest one with the wheel of enlightenment, six-colored, then the big Buddha standing, the lower Buddha lying on his side dying peacefully, the two Buddhas standing to give birth to a message. She was the Buddha twitching the wig nicely down.

  Are we done yet? she said. Please please.

  You're really good. You've done this stuff before.

  Yes I have. I have. We're done. Please.

  27

  Round the corner, blinking square lights. A thin girl with thin legs twinkled away. A motorcycle cop shone his flashlight into a car. Not as much fun as Phnom Penh. A blonde stood crossing her legs, holding a white purse like some signal while she smoothed her hair. Slowly wandering up the street on tiptoe, she lowered her head, clasping her hands behind her phosphorescent butt. Long lean stockinged legs rubbed against each other. She waggled her cigarette so that the bright pink tip, possibly erogenous, swung through a wide arc of night. She was so perfect at what she did that it seemed inconceivable that someday she would be annihilated, probably not by pickaxe, bulldozer, poison injection or crocodile, but quite likely by some means equally hideous, given how the world regarded her. As he stood watching her from across the street, the husband wondered for a moment why he couldn't simply marry her instead of Vanna. It would be cheaper, in the short run at least, and it would be a lot more convenient. But it gave him joy to acknowledge that his deductions had now marched in single file almost into the grave called transcendent conclusions. He was not lost at all. He had proved to himself that he still loved his new wife, only his new wife. He had divorced his old wife. He had not called the Inuk girl whom he had once considered marrying. He had not called the Peruvian girl, although it is true that he had kissed her. He had disbarred the pronouncements of the wise man and Jeremy from all relevance. He had not been tempted by the fat whore. He had not tried to get to know the transvestite. So he watched the blonde from the shadows, smiling. She jounced her hip at each passing car, flashing her earring, turning her head, doing a quick split, pacing, leaning against cars and streetlights, brushing her hair back until the car stopped. It had a little mobile just above the dashboard, and it had stopped so recently that the mobile was still shaking. The blonde leaned up against the passenger window, negotiating. Finally she opened the back door. Other cars pulled past. The car put on its turn signal and went around the block. After one circuit the man dropped her off. He wouldn't pay enough. She drifted back sadly, brushing her hair, looking both ways. She pulled down her white skirt, her tight skirt; then she pulled it up again like possibilities erumpent. She turned her head smartly, flinging her hair so that she could straighten it. She tap danced and rubbed her crotch. She jiggled her white purse like an instrument, mooning cars with that lovely ass. When the cops drove by, she brushed her hair very seriously.

  So time swallowed itself, until at last her pink rainbow blinked. Thus came the emphatic closing of a car door behind a happy whore. The happy couple sped around the corner . . .

  Still smiling, the husband wished her prosperity. Although she'd tempted him, he'd been faithful to his new wife. He was a little closer to the orchid, a little farther past the dead grey fronds that hung down in piecemeal walls like tattered birchbark -

  28

  He dreamed that his former wife had announced that they must move, and he didn't want to move but there was no way around it. They were on the freeway. They came to a shopping mall and she went in while he waited in the car. She never came out. He called her there once and she said she was busy. Finally he decided to drive around the mall and find her. He started the car and made the first turn but that caught him up in a current of speeding traffic that sucked him back on the freeway in the opposite direction and he was getting farther away all the time and there were so many other malls like the one his wife had gone into that he would never find her again.

  29

  He called an immigration lawyer and she said: How can I help you?

  I want to marry a Cambodian girl and bring her back to the States.

  Well, that's going to be difficult. Anything else I need to know? Any special skills your fiancée has?

  She can't read or write.

  I don't think that helps us very much. What does she do?

  She's a prostitute.

  A former prostitute, I take it. If it's been more than ten years there's no problem with the waiver . . .

  No, she's a prostitute now.

  Hmm. Are you sure you want to marry this person?

  How much are your services going to cost me? the husband said. I just want to know if I can do it, is all. It's two thousand just for her passport out of Cambodia, and another two thousand for the baby . . . How much will the whole thing cost me? Can I do it for under ten grand?

  I can't tell you how long the waiting period's going to be. I recently did something similar for a gentleman who married someone from the Philippines, but she qualified for the waiver. That made it less expensive. Far less expensive. Immigration's going to drag this one out. A minimum of nine months after they get her application. Possibly two years or longer -

  I guess I can always take her to Mexico, the husband said. I can live with her there for a couple of years . . .

  30

  When he got to England with all the English girls as multitudinous as English birds (curlews and corncrakes and olivaceous gallinules, water-rails and pratincoles and dunlins and stints), he sat waiting upstairs for his friend Bob in the sitting room's well-lit multicolored grins of book-toothed shelves, book pyramids on the threadbare rug, Bob's folders and manuscripts on the smaller table and the floor about it, his list of Egyptian slides, his atlases, the filecard boxes: CHURCHES DONE, CHURCHES TO DO, CHURCHES NOT USED, then the round table with its pebbles and scissors and pens, and he was so very tired from all the senseless wandering he'd done. Thirty-nine hundred dollars he'd saved up for Vanna now. He sat waiting for Bob with half-closed eyes. Esther was downstairs line-editing a manuscript on Ba'thi Iraq; he heard the manual typewriter's emphatic clicks. Bob was at this moment rattling home in the Tube which went under ever so many English bookshops that looked almost the same as American bookshops except that there was a black and white photo on the cover of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion instead of the color drawing, and the paperback of Pound's Cantos had a very nice sketch which the husband had never seen before; Bob, who'd lived in England many years now, couldn't care less. The husband sat looking at Bob's art books. It was better than reading the paper, though he'd been quite absorbed by the article about the old man who killed his young Filipina wife for messing around, cut her into pieces, fried her in her own fat and fed her to the cat. (Before half finishing that article, Sherlock Husband had said to himself: I bet she'd been a whore. I smell whores all over that marriage. And sure enough, when he read the fine print, he had cause for deductive self-satisfaction.) As soon as the front door opened and clos
ed, Esther's typewriter stopped, and then Bob came up the stairs and the next thing Bob and the husband were drinking up Bob's whiskey in delight. - Oh, no, that's not the worst hotel in northern France, Bob was saying. I've found a worse one than that. It has a painting of a very dangerous sunset, a quite explosive sunset ... - You could mention a book to Bob, and chances were that he'd not only read it but had it and could lend it to you immediately; his shelves were like the magic wallet of food in the Saxon fairytale; at that moment the husband was reading The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, which he'd never finished as a butterfly boy because the girls from whom he'd borrowed it had moved away, and when he asked Bob if he knew anything about that other book Lagerlöf had written, the one for adults, what was it, Gösta Berling's Saga, it just so happened that Bob had a copy, not that he'd been exactly amazed by it even though it had won the Nobel Prize, but after more whiskey, beer, wine and whiskey the husband descended to the privacy of the guest boudoir, spread the covers coaxingly open, and began to make love to it with his eyes while Bob, sighing, took the dog out and in, then returned upstairs to grade a thesis on meaning and metaphor in the sewers of Kensington, Bob shaking his head over the student's blandishments and saying: Now isn't that amazing? after which he poured himself and the husband more whiskey. Scenting this divine beverage, the husband took respite from his honeymoon to pay another visit to Bob's observatory of book-space, Bob's disco of book-wives. The husband loved Bob and believed that he was a wise man. But Bob did not want to be considered wise. He dispensed advice only with the most enfrictioned reluctance. So the husband confined himself to showing him some color prints of Vanna which the photographer had given him as a gift; he took them everywhere now because it became increasingly difficult to visualize her, and Bob said mmm as he flicked through the photos dreamily. Esther, who was also wise, and this evening had made a wonderful dinner of cabbage and lamb's neck stew while the husband and Bob drank down their potations like magnificent drones, would occasionally give advice upon request, but she had long since gone to bed by the time that Gösta Berling was saved from committing suicide in a snowdrift; God knows how long poor Bob's light bulbs glowed over the next thesis, about public space and private space in the seventeenth-century garden, but Gösta Berling had gone to the ball by then to undo a friend's girl's engagement to a nasty rich man and by one of life's weird card tricks ended up wooing her himself while the wolves howled around the carriage, and the husband, so desperate to assemble his own wedding kit that he didn't know how to believe in coincidences anymore, was certain that there must be a providential reason why the book had come into his hands, so he was unable to desist from making love to the words like swarming white beads of pollen within red flower-lips; and Gösta Berling jilted the girl and took up with the mad broom-seller, whom he told he'd marry; then he forgot all about her on account of a melancholy Countess, and the broom-seller put sunflowers in her cunt and killed herself in the woods. The Countess didn't even know about it. She was gliding through the disco searching for gold, and when the husband searched for her, leaving his broom-seller wife to be hunted for by others who'd never thought her any better than crazy and wouldn't care when they found her at the bottom of the ravine, he found his way blocked by a Cambodian militiaman who was dancing with his fingers spread at eye-level, as if he were calmly clawing at darkness's eyes; the militiaman's eyes were hypnotized; his mouth spread into the tiniest smile of longing and bewilderment. The girl he was dancing with had a red silk flower in her hair. Her hands parted the thick air around her waist as she watched him alertly. Her thighs were as soft as snails. Between her legs was a huge sagging orange-colored blossom, glossy and slimy. When the husband tried to go around her, she gripped his shoulders until the dead broom-seller could claim him, swallowing him up in her desperate Chinese porcelain face. The husband couldn't sleep anymore. He lay in the bed that Esther had made so nicely for him, turning pages in the midnight silence to learn what happened when the Devil went to church, while the cat slept on the husband's sweater, lovely and indifferent to a far from flattering conversation which the husband and Bob had had about her after the husband related to Bob a story that an old Inuk lady in Resolute had told him about a couple in the old days that couldn't get children, so they found a polar bear cub and kept it and treated it like their dear child. Years went by along their wide and wriggly river between snow-ridges; there was usually snow on its flat muddy banks. The bear grew up, and then a child came. Whenever they had to go away hunting, the bear would babysit and play with the infant. - The old lady said this had happened in her own family less than a hundred years ago. - The husband didn't know what to believe. Bob couldn't believe it. As evidence Bob adduced that the cat had been very affectionate as a kitten, and when she'd been hit by a car and had broken her pelvis Bob had nursed her as tenderly as he could because the vet said that she might not live; and that tenderness caught her like the Royal Palace by night (almost deserted; white columns of kindness deliciously carved, unknown figures leaping out of whiteness, their faces enriched by dark shadows); in Bob's heart the cat glimpsed a huge-eyed face half hidden among the floral works; the topmost layer of a white wedding cake stark against the hot black sky, which was why whenever Bob came in to see her she lifted her head and purred, happy behind her big green eyes, but as soon as she was well she became ALIENATED. So Bob thought that the polar bear would have become ALIENATED, too. Raising himself up on his elbows, the husband watched the cat sleeping and twitching her whiskers and wondered what the key to affection was; behind his weary eyelids there stretched a mathematical sequence of terms which he still couldn't lock into equivalence; the cat was to Bob as the polar bear was to the Inuk child as Gösta Berling was to the Countess as he the husband was to - whom? - He remembered how on the flight to Bangkok the Korean stewardesses in grey skirts and burgundy vests would often pat each other's hips when they went by. They could give love. The polar bear could give love (suddenly he believed that story again). - At around three in the morning, just as he'd gotten to the part about how the saints marched out of the river, dripping and weedy and dull-dark like old dominoes, for they refused to allow the Countess's husband to evict them from the church, there was a faint noise and the cat opened her eyes and he heard Esther coming downstairs, insomniac; she opened the oven door to warm herself at the gas flames while she took her sleeping pill, and the husband dressed and went out to visit her.

  Esther said: But you've got to stop fucking around!

  and he hung his head and said: I can't help it.

  and she said: You don't mean that you have AIDS?

  and he said: I don't think so, but I'll probably keep on until I get it.

  31

  The cool white girl's body had turned away from him, sleeping in his hotel bed, shoulders drawn up like frail bony wings, swellings of breath at her delicious salty armpits (her neck and face smelled like soap) - the Virgin sleeping, too, on a leather thong around her neck (the white girl had said that whenever she fucked, the Virgin turned her back, huddling sadly into the medallion), dark hair on the pillow, thick dark hair between her legs, richer and fleecier and more odorous than the Asian girls'. Something about the way her eyes were closed made the vision-crevices wider and more massive, the darkness within glistening like her eyeball. She'd only let him do her once. But all night she stroked him tenderly. He hugged her, kissed the needlemarks on her veins. In the morning she jerked him off. He lay secure and triumphant against her with the wordless animal happiness which defeated past and future, a new lover to his credit; an hour after he'd left her, he called her on the phone and she said to him: sweetheart.

  Instantaneously the disease of love broke out again with all its hideous purpuric spots.

  He tried to remember everything about her, everything she'd said and done to him.

  Do you want to meet me at the hotel? he'd said.

  That would be cool, she'd said.

  Do you want to come up?

  I don't m
ind.

  Do you want to stay over?

  I don't mind.

  Do you want to do it?

  I don't mind.

  When they were done she'd laughed proudly and said: Don't I have a tight cunt?

  When she was giving him the hand job she'd said: See how he dances!

  In the studio, when he was supposed to be working, he sat thinking about her strange little breasts that he could easily cup in half a palm. She'd always wanted to be a boy, she'd said.

  Then suddenly he remembered his new wife and something had imploded so that it was almost impossible to see her when he recalled her; with great effort he dragged out of darkness the rainbow hem of her gauzy dress as she sat enfluffed and red-belted just under the breasts with one hand in her lap, fingers curled against her cheek, her cheekbone very sharp as she sat spilling hair-darkness down the back of her chair in Phnom Penh, her eyebrows plucked into inverted Vs.

  32

  He felt cold, and he was trembling. He felt that he was going somewhere now, doing something that the necessity of his being nudged him toward (no matter that he must pass through vine-hairs hanging and curling between the knees of roots), so that was good and right, but what was it? It was something secret and spiritual that he could hardly understand yet; he knew only that it must be good; it was the way that he must go.

  He remembered a passage he'd read in the memoirs of that German pilot, Hanna Reitsch: The object was to learn, by repeatedly carrying them out in imagination, how to make the correct movements to control the plane absolutely automatically and without thinking, like a form of reflex action, in order to tide over the dangerous moment when the pilot is uncertain or afraid or for any other reason incapable of swift and lucid thought.