The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  “Ask the ladies.”

  “Janet?”

  “Ask the blokes.”

  “Blokes?”

  “All right then,” Colin says. “You’ve a grand day for it.”

  So they split up. So they paired off. Charles, Tony, Noah, and Ben with Colin. Lydia and Janet and Rena Morgan with Mary. Not even thinking about swimming. Swimming not only out of the question but never even in it, as boating had never been in it either. Making their way in opposite directions across the spare, low, man-made island in the wide, blue man-made lake, stepping through the stunted thickets of mangrove and out into a sort of twin clearing, each group, perhaps not even consciously, seeking purchase, the advantaged, leveraged high ground, running silent as salmon all the traps and steeps (and this not only in opposite directions but with their backs to each other, and not only with their backs to each other but in actual stride-for-stride company with their tall leaders) of inconvenience.

  They could have been duelists pacing off their combat like a piece of property.

  “I guess this is as good a place as any,” Colin Bible hears Mary Cottle settle.

  “Right here’s all right,” Mary Cottle hears Colin Bible approve.

  “Okay?”

  “All right?”

  The boys and girls scramble out of their clothes and lie down to their sun baths in the negligible humidity, in the balmy breeze across the perfect blue sky with its clouds like topping.

  “Won’t you be joining us, Miss Cottle?”

  “I’m fine. I’m smoking my cigarettes.”

  “Colin? This is lovely. It’s really super, Colin. It really is.”

  “That’s all right. You go ahead. I’ll keep an eye peeled in case the kid at the marina goes back on his word.”

  Separated by perhaps a hundred feet, the two groups lie about on hummocks of earth and rock at skewed, awry angles. Tony Word and Lydia Conscience lie in nests of their own clothes. It is really too great a distance to distinguish features, to make out the still only incipient shapes and chevrons of genitalia. They stare across the distance that separates them and have, each and collectively, a gorgeous impression of flesh. They are skinny-dipping in the air and leer across space in wonder and agape.

  “That’s enough, Rena. Put your clothes on. You don’t want to burn.”

  “Five more minutes. Please, Miss Cottle? Just five more minutes. Please?”

  “All right,” she says and the boys get five more minutes to study her indistinct pinkness, the girls to note the fragile pallor of the boys.

  And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at their young age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

  6

  Oh,” said Matthew Gale when Mary Cottle, thinking it would be the housekeeper with her towels, answered his knock and opened the door to the hidey-hole, “excuse me. I must have the wrong room. I was looking for eight twenty-two. Oh,” he said, “this is eight twenty-two.”

  “May I help you?”

  “No, no. No problem. My friend used to have this room, but he’s obviously checked out and gone back to England. Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “To England?”

  “Gee,” Matthew Gale said, “you’re British too. Just like Colin. Well,” he said, “enjoy your stay.”

  “Like Colin?” Mary Cottle said. “You were here with Colin?”

  “Uh-oh,” Matthew Gale said. “I’ve gone and put my foot in it, haven’t I?”

  “Colin brought you here.” Because now she recognizes him. He’s the young man who had helped them that time at the Haunted Mansion and whose exchange of winks with Colin she’d intercepted back in those now-dead live-and-let-live days of their arrival. It hadn’t been he, of course, but the boiling circumstances of which he’d been a part that had turned her nerves into so many fuses waiting to be ignited and had caused her—who hated all arrangements in the first place—to—in the first place—take the room at all.

  “Listen,” he said, who, being no dummy and having a feel for the strange displacements of the ordinary and sizing up the situation, its unspeakable ramifications, and wondering, for example, just what Mrs. Bible was herself doing on the night in question, sought to give comfort where comfort may or may not have been due, “who knows what goes on in another person’s marriage? In another person’s life? May I come in?”

  “You may not.”

  “I have no problem with that. I can say my piece right out here in the hall and let the neighbors think whatever they want to. I’m not going to tell you we’re two consenting adults and there’s the end of it. Because I’m beginning to suspect that in these particular circumstances two consenting adults wouldn’t even begin to get the job done. No, ma’am. I’m beginning to suspect that to be fair to all the parties we’re dealing with here would require a general goddamn election, a whole entire plebiscite. Well, there’s you, of course, and that other one, the master industrial spy, the London, England Colin, and Lord knows who else, the man, woman, or child with whom you yourself may have been disporting on the fateful evening.…Look, if I’m the least bit out of line, blow the whistle on me, please. Promise now.

  “He’s really quite charming, your Colin. He even made me come up with the key to this place. I’m certain it was a test. Well, you know the sort of thing I mean. The little negotiations we do with the fates.…If such-and-so is meant to be, let a purple chicken come around that corner pulling a red wagon. Religion!—No, thank you, I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much; it’s not a bit drafty out here—But, well, frankly, though it’s not my business, it’s just I like your Colin so. He has his faults, of course. Who’s perfect? Certainly not me. Well, I’m sure you know that. Colin probably told you all about it. Well, why not? say I. What’s an open marriage for if the party of the first part ain’t free to lay it all out for the party of the second? However disgusting, degrading, and humiliating it may turn out to be for the poor hick son-bitch party of the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth! Am I getting warm?”

  “I haven’t a clue regarding whatever it is you’re talking about,” Mary Cottle said.

  “No,” Matthew Gale said, smiling prettily, “of course not.”

  She started to close the door in his face. Gale resisted at first, then stepped suddenly back, drawing her off balance, sending her stumbling to the door, her left cheek awkwardly pressed against it.

  “I don’t know,” Matthew Gale said loudly from the other side of the door, “just what it is, what nasty sting operation you people are up to, but under the circumstances I feel obliged to warn you that what we’ve been funning with here isn’t your standard, ordinary point-of-interest or your regular, everyday, five-star, not-to-be-missed, absolute Must, so much as the almighty God’s almighty own country itself! Can I get an Amen, somebody?”

  “Amen,” said somebody.

  “And why not,” Gale said (and she had the impression he was whispering now, that whatever he said he might have been saying into the grain of the wooden door), “why? This is Disney World! This is the basic universal G-for-good, G-for-goodness, main attraction and main event. You’re fucking with Disney World! Lady, lady, do you appreciate what that means? That means, if it came right down to it, they could do you legal as apple pie if they wanted. They not only got the guns, the Bomb, and the animatronics, but the Ten Commandments and the Onward Christian Soldiers too! They’re connected high up with important principles: with Safety First and Handicap Access. With double sinks and orthopedic mattresses. With convenience, clean accommodations, and fair value understood. With public temperance and a Lost and Found like the secret fucking service! With clever mice and friendly bears, with reluctant drago
ns and horticultural bulls. With Nature in sweet tooth and claw, as it were. With—Are you listening to me?” he demanded.

  “Yes,” she said. Her hand was in her pants.

  “With family, I mean! With grampas that fish and fathers that golf. With moms who drive car pools and look great in jeans. With brothers and sisses who’d be lost if they left each other’s corner for even a minute. With pets who’d lay down their lives for any of them. This is the picture. Are you getting the picture?”

  “Yes,” she said. Was separating her pubic mat like a curtain and pushing a finger up into her cleft.

  “I’m talking about a tone. Judgmental calls. Because it really is a small world after all. The high energy of high righteousness and fervency. All the us/them dichotomies. Not just capitalism, not just free enterprise. Not even just morality, finally, but something larger, grander, more important. Efficiency! That’s it. That’s all. Efficiency. More bang for the buck. It’s simple as that. Efficiency. Everything else is moral turpitude. Everything else. This is still the picture. This is still the picture. Who ain’t in it?”

  “Who?”

  “Colin ain’t in it.”

  “Colin,” she said.

  “And you,” he said. “You ain’t in it.”

  “Are you in it?”

  “I’m a different story,” he said. “I’m behind the scenes.”

  “I know who you are,” she said calmly. For she was herself again. Because she’d come now. Was restored to herself, in control, her nerves’ temperature normal, like fever broken in a crisis.

  “What?”

  “I know who you are.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said. “Colin let on. That’s just the way of it with wise, experienced, double-dealing old fags.”

  “I saw you at the Haunted Mansion.”

  “Housekeeping,” a woman said. “I’ve brought you your towels.”

  And when Mary opened the door he was gone.

  Careful to let any guest, even a child, pass through first, he left the elevator and got off on the lobby floor. Gale high-signed his fellow cast members—we’re tight, he thought, we’re tight as skycaps passing in airports—and called out their names. He must have known almost everyone who worked at the Contemporary. Well, he hung out at the Spa so much. Which wasn’t, he thought, in the least suspicious. He was just using the facilities. As he’d seen bellboys and desk clerks at the Haunted Mansion during their lunch breaks. Only part of the perks.

  What was suspicious, of course, was his use of the elevators. Being caught on the guest floors, coming down into the lobby at midnight, at one in the morning. What was suspicious was the flimsy cover story he put out that he was a gambler, that he went up to their rooms to take their money in poker and crap games. They thought they knew better, his bellboy and desk clerk cronies. So he grinned and aw-shucks’d them, and toed awkward circles in the pile carpets and marble floors, as if he were barefoot or wore straws in his mouth.

  “Better give it a rest, Gale, or you’re going to lose it for certain.”

  “Let it come up for air once in a while.”

  “That’s right, Matthew. It’s going to burn out on you. It’s going to disappear like a wick.”

  “Who was it this time?”

  “Ten thirty-three?”

  “Seven-oh-four?”

  “The blonde? The one with the humongous mammaritos and the sweetheart great ass?”

  “A fellow don’t kiss and tell.”

  “You kissed them?”

  “Man, you know what’ll happen to you if the manager finds out?”

  “Yeah, you better off if her daddy finds out.”

  “You’d believe all those workouts in the health club might slow him down a bit.”

  “They do! You think any of them gals would still be alive otherwise?”

  So they kidded him, joshed into heroic farmboy studship the familiar creature from the tearooms of central Florida.

  “Some lover,” the bell captain said. “I saw you step into that elevator not fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Maybe it stopped on the fifth floor,” he said. “Maybe that’s where a certain redheaded Cuban spitfire got on board. Maybe she threatened to dance all over me with her spike heels if I didn’t lock it from the inside. Maybe I serviced her right there in the box. Maybe that’s all the time we needed. How you doin’, Andy?”

  “Pretty fair, Matthew. Yourself?”

  “Be an ungrateful liar if I complained.”

  “Be seeing you, Matt.”

  “Be seeing you, Andrew.”

  And spotted the dog, Pluto, surrounded by kids and holding the brace of Mickey Mouse balloons he always carried but so sparingly gave out.

  (“Jesus, Lamar, you’d think you paid for them yourself,” he’d said.

  (“No, but I have to fill them with helium. Do you know I have to blow up Goofy’s as well as my own?”

  (“Really?”

  (“He outranks me.”

  (“No shit?”

  (“Sure, and I’ll tell you something else. That son-of-a-bitch dog is one hard taskmaster.”

  (“You know something? You had me going. You break me up, Lamar.”

  (“Well, shit, I’m a pro.”)

  Who owed him one. Probably more than one. For sometimes spelling Kenny whenever he drove over to Orlando or Winter Park or Daytona Beach or Kissimmee for an audition. (“Jesus, kid,” he’d said, after returning from one of these auditions and coming up dry, “you’ve given away every fucking balloon I had. I’ll be a year blowing the mothers up again. Show business!”)

  So then and there Matthew Gale decided to call in his marker. He ambled over to the besieged pup and gave what always before had been Lamar Kenny’s overture, their secret silent signal. (Silent because as one of the characters he’d been forbidden all speech, not permitted even a growl. “Kid,” he’d say afterward, “they’ve muzzled old Pluto.”) He made the gesture with his hand. Kenny saw him but shook his head like a pitcher declining a sign. Matthew did the thing with his left hand again. The dog looked at him quizzically. (So comical, Gale thought. Damn, he’s good! Matthew had no idea why Lamar never landed those jobs. He was a wonderful actor.) So Matthew stepped up to him and did it again. Again the pooch shook it off and again Matthew repeated the signal. Pluto shrugged and released the balloons he held in his paw. They floated up out of the reach of the children, who jumped to grab at their strings. In the confusion Matthew Gale sidled up to his friend. “Meet me,” he said. “It’s important!”

  Pluto looked up sadly after the balloons. He didn’t break character by so much as a whimper, but Gale could tell that anyone looking at him, every kid in the place, could read his mind, the expression written plain as day across his doggy jowls. Fuck damn, he was thinking, now I’ll have to blow up twenty more of these mouseshit balloons!

  They were standing by his locker. Not until he’d removed the last of his Pluto suit and hung it neatly away did Lamar Kenny say anything at all. He pointed to the locker. “Is that the dressing room of a star or is that the dressing room of a star?”

  “What do you think, Lamar?”

  “I think it’s the dressing room of some assembly-line guy, a U.S. Steel worker, an A. F. of L.”

  “About the gig.”

  “Leave them to Heaven.”

  “Come on, Lamar, what do you say?”

  “I say it’s nuts. I say if you’re looking to get us fired you’ve struck pay dirt.”

  Gale rubbed his finger across the locker’s dusty metal shelves. “I think it’s the dressing room of some assembly-line guy too.”

  “That’s the way,” Kenny said. “Play up to the trouper in me.”

  “I am. I want to. Didn’t I come to you with my proposal?”

  “Some proposal.”

  “Admit it, Lamar. It’s a great gig. Admit that much.”

  “Don’t say ‘gig.’ You’ve got no right to say ‘gig.’”

  “Sorry.”

  “Do I say
‘rough trade’? Do I say ‘butch’?”

  “I didn’t mean to offend, Lamar.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m so touchy. I’m in a profession; we live, we let live. You’re right,” he said, “it’s a hell of a part. Nah,” he said, “they’d turn us in. They’d call Security. We’d be lucky if all that happened was we lost our jobs.”

  “They won’t turn us in. The guy, Colin, is in too deep. Forget about the bed part. The bed part’s the least of it. He has sensitive manuals in his possession.”

  “You gave him sensitive manuals?”

  “You think I know what I gave him? I don’t know what I gave him. I threw some stuff together. He played it down. He made out like it was nothing. Naturally I’m suspicious.”

  “And the wife?”

  “There’s something strange there.”

  “Strange.”

  “She’s got this attitude.”

  “You,” Mary Cottle commanded Colin Bible, “stay out of my room!” And reminded him of her good name and demanded to know how he’d found out.

  It was astonishing, really. How the bottom of things lay at the bottom of things like the lowest rung on a ladder. But how, beneath that, there was a still lower level, that open area of the air, some apron of the underneath, mysterious, inexplicable. Colin sent her to Nedra Carp. Who put her on to Janet Order. Who implicated Mudd-Gaddis.

  She went to him.

  “Charles?” she said.

  “Yes, lady?”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “The Angel of Death?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Do I get another turn?”

  She stared at him.

  “Are you living?”

  “Of course I’m living!”

  “Are you bigger than a breadbasket?”

  “Mudd-Gaddis!”

  “How many is that?”

  “Mudd-Gaddis!”

  “Do you reside in eastern Europe west of the Odra?”

  “I’m Mary Cottle!” she said.

  “That was my next question.” He looked at her. “Yes, Miss Cottle?”