Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  “Well all right!” said Betsy. “Hey, did I ever tell you about the time Grace Slick and I dropped acid in the punch at Tricia Nixon’s wedding?”

  “What’s the Mona Lisa?” Rabi wanted to know, and Seraphina, accustomed to Lexa’s omniscience but surprised all the same, asked: “How did you figure out it was me?”

  “You just came to mind,” Lexa told her. “Also, the unpublicized portion of the police report includes an interview with a museum guard who swears he saw a talking beaver fleeing the scene. They gave him a urine test for that.”

  “Oh.”

  “So what did you do with the painting? Is it still in one piece?”

  “For the moment,” Seraphina said. “I hung it in the old Apollo Theatre in Harlem. You know, the one they’re going to tear down to build the parking annex for New Babel? It’s in plain sight in the lobby, so all anyone has to do to find it is step inside for a minute.”

  “And if nobody’s feeling nostalgic, goodbye Rembrandt,” Toshiro observed. “Rough justice.” He laughed. “This is a hard family I’ve got myself tangled up with.”

  “How did you get to Harlem?” Lexa asked.

  “Oh, I borrowed a limousine.”

  “With diplomatic plates?”

  “Yeah. How did you—”

  “The car pool at the African Free-Trade Zone consulate reported another theft.”

  “All right!” Betsy said.

  “Just do me a favor and don’t tell your father about this tonight,” Lexa said. “I’d like him in a relaxed mood.”

  “As relaxed as Philo ever gets, anyway,” said Betsy.

  Lexa shifted into first and drove down the ramp, Betsy damping her lights so they wouldn’t have to see the used condoms floating on the surface of the river. Toshiro shuddered as the Beetle entered the dark water, saying: “I hate this part.”

  “Don’t worry,” Betsy said. “I’m a Volkswagen.”

  Male Bonding

  A German bird of prey had been carved into the rock above the submarine dock, but Morris had used a kosher salami to blast away the swastika in its talons. Likewise a yellowed banner announcing “U-boats Wilkommen Hier” had been scorched with lasers, and a stack of crates and steel drums stamped with the SS thunderbolt had served as the bull’s-eye for numerous whipped-cream targeting experiments. The only Nazi artifact in Pirate’s Cove that remained undamaged—if indeed it was a Nazi artifact—was a tabletop diorama encased in glass. The diorama showed Manhattan Island as it had looked in the 1940s, with U-boat attack positions and gunnery elevations marked in all the rivers. A caption read, in bad German: PLAN TO TERRORIZE BACKSTABBING WHITE AMERICAN INDUSTRIALISTS; PLEASE USE.

  The Yabba-Dabba-Doo was a tight fit in the tiny slip; mooring lines were little more than a formality, as there was no room for the sub to drift. Philo stood on the sail relaying instructions to Osman to make sure he didn’t run the bow up over the end of the U-shaped pier, where even now Betsy Ross was parking. The Volkswagen had its own entrance to the Cove, smaller and quicker to get through than the submarine pressure lock. Lexa stepped out of the car and blew Philo a kiss.

  “Hi!” he called down to her. “How’d we look on TV today?”

  “Very Earth friendly,” Lexa said. “Edward Abbey would have been proud. But I still say Norma should use a shot of your buns in the opening credits. Tight jeans with the Dufresne logo on the pockets, just the thing to win some new fans.”

  “Yes, well. . . we’re trying to run a family-oriented pirate ship here, Lex.”

  “Well hell, I’m family. I’d love to see your buns on a million television screens.”

  “Uh huh . . . full stop, Osman.” A tinny voice replied over the mike: “Istanbul!”

  The Yabba-Dabba-Doo rested in its berth. Philo descended from the sail and swung out a gangplank. On the pier, Toshiro and Rabi emerged from the Volkswagen with smiles and hellos, but Seraphina, after only a cursory wave to her father, focused her attention on the submarine’s launch deck. She was looking for Twenty-Nine Words, for whom she had developed a burning passion. (“I can’t explain it,” she’d confided to Lexa, “it’s like he’s this little round North Pole bon-bon I want to eat. Is that a ladylike way to feel?” Lexa had assured her that it was.) But Twenty-Nine Words for Snow, below decks helping Marshall Ali pack a shore leave duffel, would not appear for some time.

  Lexa met Philo at the foot of the gangplank; they kissed. Toshiro gave them a moment to get reacquainted before joining them. When Philo saw Lexa’s other significant other approaching, he stepped away from her and dropped into a wrestling stance. Toshiro, in what had become a ritual, responded in kind, and the two men ran at each other like horny primates contesting for dominance.

  The thing about polyandry, from the male point of view, is that not only are you both in bed with the same woman, but you are also both in bed with each other. For Toshiro, whose life on the New York strip circuit had led him through more permutations of love and lust than he could remember, this was completely natural, but Philo had learned about sex from an Amish marriage manual, and old inhibitions die hard. So he countered what was actually a pretty mild case of homophobia by tackling Toshiro at first sight, getting in a friendly sweat-raising tussle to take the edge off the even friendlier one that would come later in the evening.

  “Harrrrr!” Philo growled, catching Toshiro by the shoulders and swinging him. “Grrrrrrr!” Toshiro growled back, making a show of resistance, though in a real fight Philo would have snapped him in half like a twig. Instead they collapsed together on the dock, locked in pretend mortal combat. Lexa found this amusing and not unexciting to watch, especially when Philo got overzealous and ripped Toshiro’s sweatshirt, but Seraphina was embarrassed by the whole display. “African warriors screwed each other all the time, Dad!” she shouted. “You don’t have to be such a wimp about it!”

  Asta Wills and Norma Eckland climbed out onto the launch deck, Norma in a subtly shifting chameleon evening gown, Asta in a more ordinary blouse and skirt with imitation kangaroo-hide handbag. “Up for a little male bonding, eh?” Asta said. “Chummy people, these Americans.”

  But the wrestlers were winding down. Philo flopped on his back, beached, while Toshiro lay in a panting bundle across his knees. Chicken pox—spotted daughter Rabi took this opportunity to run up and leap on her father’s exposed stomach, and Lexa knelt by Philo’s head to give him another kiss. Seraphina set aside her thoughts of North Pole bon-bons long enough to join in the general pile-up.

  Norma rested her chin on Asta’s shoulder.

  “Got to love that old nuclear family,” she said.

  6

  Sex is what makes males and females different from each other. It also attracts them to each other and involves deep feelings and desires. Through sex, a man and a woman may become interested in each other, fall in love, get married, and have children. Higher animals and plants produce their own kind, generation after generation, by means of sexual reproduction. But for humans, sex involves much more . . .

  —World Book Encyclopedia

  2001: The Making of Lust Noir

  It was the decade they called the Naughty Oughts, at least at first, the conquest of AIDS in 1999 coming just in time to usher in a New Promiscuity with the turning millennium. Out of a spirit of fairness to moral conservatives, the Supreme Court chose that same moment in history to finally overturn Roe v. Wade, the swing vote in the surprise 5–4 decision being supplied by a Democrat-appointed “stealth Christian” justice. The resulting social paradox was the sort for which America is justly renowned: you would return home in those days from an all-night “play party,” ring up the Birth Control Shopping Network for a free-delivery refill, and then—just in case—check the Abortion Law Toteboard in USA Today to keep abreast of the latest shifts in local legislation. The Toteboard (actually a map, and located, curiously enough, in the Sports section of the paper) showed “open” states in blue, “closed” states in red, and “misdemeanor” states in pink.
Oregon, where abortion was state-funded on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and subject to a stiff fine on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends (the Salem legislature had been trying to make a wry point about the lack of a national standard, but ended up just pissing everybody off), was highlighted in canary yellow.

  It was during this era, in the spring of 2001, that Joan Fine was asked to leave St. Jude’s College at Philadelphia, where she had just completed her first year of undergraduate study. Her mother’s Womanist rabble-rousing had begun to wear on the Holy Fathers, but since Sister Ellen Fine had already been excommunicated for bearing a test-tube baby in a convent and presiding at the artificial insemination of two other sisters (by means of a blessed turkey baster), there was nothing more the Vatican could do to her directly, short of stoning; so in time-honored biblical tradition, they visited the iniquity of the mother unto the daughter. Joan might have protested the expulsion—never actually called that—but thinking that there would be more interesting fights to be fought elsewhere, she packed up her grade transcripts, bade farewell to Pennsylvania (a red state in the USA Today geography) and caught a Greyhound into the wicked liberal heart of New England (where the color scheme was evenly divided between blue and pink). A recovering ex-nun in the Harvard Admissions Office arranged a computer error in Joan’s favor, getting her transferred in for the fall semester on a Public Works Scholarship: Joan volunteered two nights a week at a Boston homeless shelter, and in return the Commonwealth covered a portion of her tuition.

  Public Works, public service. Joan didn’t and couldn’t share her mother’s dedication to reforming the Church—her own response to the pope’s foot-dragging was to abandon him back in the twentieth century where he belonged, as easily and with as little regret as she abandoned St. Jude’s—but at Harvard she found another way to stay true to the Fine family tradition. Liberal activism and Roman Catholic theology weren’t all that different, Joan thought. Both drew a bead on salvation, one in this world, one in the next; both recognized the importance of individual good works; and both had their dogmas. Liberal sensitivity to oppression had given rise to a strict etiquette of proper speech and thought, like the rules of theological debate: beliefs deemed racist, sexist, or homophobic were condemned as “philosophically untenable,” or P.U. Or in other words, as heresy.

  “Oh no no no, it’s not like that at all,” said Penny Dellaporta, Joan’s housemate and fellow radical, but Joan thought it was, and at any rate she didn’t intend the comparison to be negative. Here was a creed she could get fired up about, that’s all she was saying. After a few beers and a cigarette she could even envision a Lefty God of sorts, a gender-neutral, racially nonspecific deity who ate bean sprouts, shat nontoxic waste, and rooted for the passage of a pro-choice constitutional amendment. Pledging herself to a cause for the first time in her life, Joan finally understood something of her mother’s passion; but because her mother was also an outsider in her own religion, Joan’s heart would always lie with the heretics, the Waldenses and Albigenses of the liberal milieu who bucked convention within as well as without, and never lost their sense of humor. What would it profit her to save the whole world, after all, if she forgot how to laugh, especially at her own pretensions?

  It was this sensibility that first drew her to Lexa Thatcher.

  “She’s a pornographer,” Penny Dellaporta told Joan as they walked home, exhausted and bleary-eyed, from a midnight revival showing of Warren Beatty’s Reds. “Not a feminist reclaiming erotica, not even the pretense of that, just a straight-out smut peddler. Last spring she copublished a student porn rag full of s&m pictorials, all these men and women running around in leather and handcuffs, and there was this one picture of a penis with a snake tattoo. A big snake, coiled around the penis six times, and the snake’s tongue flicking out by the. . . . God, I don’t even like to talk about it!”

  “Sounds like you examined this snake pretty closely,” Joan said.

  “I had to, to take full measure of the objectification and exploitation. Now they say that Thatcher’s collecting money to finance her own porn movie. The ultimate in P.U.”

  “More penises?”

  “In color,” Penny whispered. “Moving around.”

  “Hmm . . .”

  Later that same week Joan rose early for a combination jog and postering expedition. She had stopped to chemically weld an ACLU placard to the side of Thayer Hall when she heard a window slide open above her. A nylon ladder unfurled from the third floor, and a figure in a hooded velvet cloak swung out over the sill. From within the dormitory, a freckled blond woman—a loyal Bostonian judging by the tattoo of the Old North Church steeple on her left breast—leaned out for a goodbye kiss. The cloaked figure handed her a red rose, waved, and descended quickly to the ground not five feet from where Joan stood.

  “Well hello there,” Lexa Thatcher said, pulling the hood back from her face as her paramour reeled in the ladder. “Out for a little sunrise vandalism, are we?”

  Joan wasn’t sure how to answer that, so she said: “You’re the pornographer.”

  “That’s right,” said Lexa, “and you’re the Catholic who smokes. One of my friends in MassPIRG was bitching about your P.U. attitude towards tobacco use, so I figured we’d bump into each other sooner or later. Joan Fine, right?”

  Joan nodded. Without meaning to she glanced up at the window Lexa had just descended from.

  “That’s Ellen,” Lexa told her. “Ellen Leeuwenhoek, a.k.a. Kinky La Bia. My photographer and cinematographer.”

  “Oh.”

  “‘Oh,’” Lexa mimicked her, but not unkindly. “Listen, you feel like breakfast?”

  A curly-haired Tunisian exchange student served them steak and eggs at the Wursthaus in Harvard Square; also fresh-brewed Nicaraguan coffee, the philosophically tenable kind harvested by ex-Sandinista bean-pickers. As part of the New Promiscuity, smoking in public places had briefly been made legal again, so while Lexa stirred enough sugar into her coffee cup to light up an army of hypoglycemics, Joan lit a Marlboro and pressed her saucer into service as an ashtray: complementary addictions, they would later tell people, that served as the first omen of a lifelong friendship in the making.

  “Well here we are going into another sexual revolution,” Lexa said, in answer to a question about her film-making ambitions, “and judging from all the griping and backsliding everybody did after the last one I figure this time it might be nice to have a sort of cultural beacon to show the way, or at least give people some ideas . . .”

  “A cultural beacon?” said Joan. “A porn movie is going to be a cultural beacon?”

  “Well”—Lexa held up her hands—“well, maybe not a beacon, exactly, maybe more like a neighborhood bonfire where everybody can gather round and toast their marshmallows together. You know how Americans are about sex, Joan, there isn’t a power in the universe that can keep us from doing it, but to do it with our eyes open we need permission in triplicate. What I want to do with this film is convince people to give themselves that permission, and maybe clue them in to some options they hadn’t thought of before.

  “Now the way I see it, there’ve been two kinds of pornography tried already. There’s the traditional male-oriented stag film, which had stereotyped women getting fucked by dog-ugly men with all the emotional delicacy of a piston rod assembly. Then there’s the femme erotica that came into vogue at the end of the 1980s, where for a switch you had intelligent, liberated women fucking dog-ugly men with too much sensitivity, everybody repeating how gentle and nonviolent they were until you were ready to pound a stake through the fast-forward button on the VCR.

  “So what I want to do is take the lust from the stags, about half the poetry from the femmes, toss in some real-world ingenuity from the plague years when people learned to be careful and creative in bed, add some male actors who don’t make you want to laugh or throw darts, put it all together on a roll of sixteen-millimeter celluloid, and turn it loose on the general public: a breakthrough erotic f
ilm that works for women and men, gays and straights, romantics and sex maniacs alike.” She laughed. “And with a real plot, too.”

  “Pretty ambitious,” Joan said, impressed by Lexa’s courage. “Not that I’m an expert on the subject.”

  “That’s the best part. This is America—nobody’s an expert on the subject. Look, they say the sex field is a business where you can be totally stupid and still make money, but I want to find out what a smart pornographer can do.”

  “You know you’ll be picketed by every family values group from here to California . . .”

  “Which will guarantee that the film is a blockbuster.”

  “. . . not to mention a lot of lefties. My housemate Penny would probably say that with most of the groundwater in New England unfit to drink, there are more important things to worry about than erotic fantasies.”

  Lexa drew one of Joan’s Marlboros from its pack and lit it. “I happen to know a lot about the history of the clean-water movement in this country,” she said, “and anyone who tells you that clean water and ecstasy are mutually exclusive goals is a crackpot. Do you think your housemate would be willing to pledge celibacy until Boston Harbor is safe for lobster again?”

  Joan smiled. “Penny’ll probably be first in line to rent your film on video—under an assumed name. I think I want to see this movie.”

  “You will. You can help me make it.” Lexa took a single drag on the cigarette, grimaced, and stubbed it out. “God, that tastes awful! How can you stand that?”

  “The same way you stand coffee with eight packets of sugar to a cup.”

  “That’s different,” Lexa said. “I’m half-Moroccan; it’s part of my cultural heritage.”

  “And Moroccans don’t smoke?”

  “That’s the half I didn’t inherit.”

  “Right. What the hell is your major, anyway, that you came up with this sort of idea? Theater arts?”

  “Investigative journalism. Future muckrakers of the world. That’s my long-term ambition; if the movie makes enough money I want to take the profits and start my own newspaper, the old-fashioned kind that you actually read. No news digest on the front page, no corporate advertisements mixed in with the editorials. And the slogan on the masthead will be: ‘Founded on a lust for truth.’”