334

by Thomas M. Disch

  Safe inside she kept squeezing further droplets from the wound.

  January banged and clattered.

  “Jan?” addressing the crack of the bolted door.

  “You better stay in there. The next time I’ll use a knife.”

  “Jan, I know you’re angry. You’ve got every right to be angry. I admit that I’m in the wrong. But wait, Jan. Wait till you see him before you say anything. The first six months are so wonderful. You’ll see. I can even get an extension for the whole year if you want. We’ll make a fine little family, just the—”

  A chair smashed through the paper paneling of the door. Shrimp shut up. When she screwed up the courage to peek out through the torn door, not much later, the room was in a shambles but empty. January had taken one of the cupboards, but Shrimp was sure she’d be back if only to evict her. The room was January’s, after all, not Shrimp’s. But when she returned, late in the afternoon, from the therapy of a double feature (The Black Rabbit and Billy McGlory at the Underworld) the eviction had already been accomplished, but not by January, who had gone west, taking love from Shrimp’s life, as she supposed, forever.

  Her welcome back to 334 was not as cordial as she could have wished but in a couple days Mrs. Hanson was brought round to seeing that Shrimp’s loss was her own gain. The spirit of family happiness returned officially on the day Mrs. Hanson asked “What are you going to call this one?”

  “The baby, you mean?”

  “Yeah. it. You’ll have to name it something, won’t you? How about Fudge? Or Puddle?” Mrs. Hanson, who’d given her own children unexceptionable names, openly disapproved of Tiger’s being called Tiger, and Thumper Thumper, even though the names, being unofficial, didn’t stick once the babies were sent off.

  “No. Fudge is only nice for a girl, and Puddle is vulgar. I’d rather it were something with more class.”

  “How about Flapdoodle then?”

  “Flapdoodle!” Shrimp went along with the joke, grateful for any joke togo along with. “Flapdoodle! Wonderful! Flapdoodle it’ll be. Flapdoodle Hanson.”

  28. 53 Movies (2024)

  Flapdoodle Hanson was born on August 29, 2024, but as she had been a sickly vegetable and was not, as an animal, any healthier, Shrimp returned to 334 alone. She received her weekly check just the same, and the rest was a matter of indifference. The excitement had gone out of the notion of babies. She understood the traditional view that women bring forth children in sorrow.

  On September 18 Williken jumped or was pushed out of the window of his apartment. His wife’s theory was that he hadn’t paid off the super for the privilege of operating his various small businesses in the darkroom, but what wife wants to believe her husband will kill himself without so much as a discussion of the theory? Juan’s suicide, not much more than two months before, made Williken’s seem justifiable by comparison.

  She’d never given any thought to how much, since she’d come back to 334 in April, she’d come to depend on Williken to get through the evenings and the weeks. Lottie was off with her spirits or drinking herself blotto on the insurance money. Her mother’s endless inanities got to be a Chinese water torture, and the teevee was no defense. Charlotte, Kiri, and the rest were past history—January had seen to that.

  Just to escape the apartment she began seeing movies, mostly in the pocket theaters on 1st Avenue or around N.Y.U., since they showed double features.

  Sometimes she’d sit through the same double feature twice in a row, going in at four o’clock and coming out at ten or eleven. She found she was able to watch the movies totally, any movie, and that afterwards she remembered details, images, lines of dialogue, tunes, with weird fidelity. She’d be walking through the crowds on Eighth Street and she’d have to stop because some face, or the gesture of a hand, or some luscious, long-ago landscape would have returned to her, wiping out all of her data. At the same time she felt completely cut off from everyone and passionately involved.

  Not counting second helpings, she saw a total of fifty-three movies in the period from October 1st to November 16th. She saw: A Girl of the Limberlost and Strangers on a Train; Don Hershey as Melmoth and Stanford White; Perm’s Hellbottom; The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle; Escape from Cuernavaca and Singing in the Rain; Franju’s Thomas l’Imposteur and Jude; Dumbo; Jacquelynn Colton in The Confessions of St. Augustine; both parts of Daniel Deronda; Candide; Snow White and Juliet; Brando in On the Waterfront and Down Here; Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter; Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings and Mai Zetterllng’s Behold the Man; both versions of The Ten Commandments; Loren and Mastroianni in Sunflower and Black Eyes and Lemonade; Rainer Murray’s Owens and Darwin; The Zany World of Abbott and Costello; The Hills of Switzerland and The Sound of Music; Garbo in Camille and Anna Christie; Zarlah the Martian; Emshwiller’s Walden and Image, Flesh, and Voice; the remake of Equinox; Casablanca and The Big Clock; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; Star Gut and Valentine Vox; The Best of Judy Canova; Pale Fire; Felix Culp; The Green Berets and The Day of the Locust; Sam Blazer’s Three Christs of Ypsilanti; On the Yard; Wednesdays Off; both parts of Stinky in the Land of Poop; the complete ten-hour Les Vampires; The Possibilities of Defeat; and the shortened version of Things in the World. At that point Shrimp suddenly lost interest in seeing any more.

  29. The White Uniform, continued (2021)

  It was delivered by some derelict messenger. January didn’t know what to make of the uniform, but the card that Shrimp had enclosed tickled her pink. She showed it to the people at work, to the Lighthalls, who always enjoyed a good joke, to her brother Ned, and all of them got a chuckle out of it. The outside showed a blithe, vulgar little sparrow. Written underneath in music was the melody he was chirping:

  The lyrics of the song were on the inside: Wanna fuck? Wanna fuck? I do! I do!

  At first January was embarrassed playing nurse. She was a largish girl, and the uniform, even though Shrimp had guessed her size correctly, didn’t want to move the way her body moved. Putting it on, she would always feel, as she hadn’t for a long time, ashamed of her real job.

  As they got to know each other more deeply, January found ways of combining the abstract qualities of Shrimp’s fantasies with the mechanics of ordinary sex. She would begin with a lengthy “examination.” Shrimp would lie in bed, limp, her eyes closed or lightly bandaged, while January’s fingers took her pulse, palpated her breasts, spread her legs, explored her sex. Deeper and deeper the fingers, and the “Instruments” probed. January eventually was able to find a medical supply store willing to sell her an authentic pipette that could be attached to an ordinary syringe. The pipette tickled morbidly. She would pretend that Shrimp was too tight or too nervous and had to be opened wider by one of the other instruments. Once the scenario was perfected, it wasn’t that much different from any other kind of sex.

  Shrimp, while all this was going on, would oscillate between an excruciating pleasure and a no less excruciating guilt. The pleasure was simple and absolute, the guilt was complex. For she loved January and she wanted to perform with her all the acts that any ordinary pair of women would have performed. And, regularly, they did: cunnilingus this way and that, dildos here and there, lips, fingers, tongues, every orifice and artifice. But she knew, and January knew, that these were readings from some textbook called Health and Sex, not the actual erotic lightning bolt of a fantasy that can connect the ankle bone to the shin bone, the shin bone to the leg bone, the leg bone to the thigh bone, the thigh bone to the pelvis, the pelvis to the spine, and onward and upward to that source of all desire and all thought, the head. Shrimp went through the motions, but all the while her poor head sat through yet another screening of those old classics, Ambulance Story, The White Uniform, The Lady and the Needle, and Artsem Baby. They weren’t as exciting as she remembered them but nothing else was playing, anywhere.

  30. Beauty and the Beast (2021)

  Shrimp thought of herself as basically an artist. Her eyes saw colors the way a painter’s eyes
see colors. As an observer of the human comedy she considered herself to be on a par with Deb Potter or Oscar Stevenson. A seemingly offhand remark overheard on the street could trigger her imagination to produce the plot for a whole movie. She was sensitive, intelligent (her Regents scores proved that), and up-to-date. The only thing she was conscious of lacking was a direction, and what was that but a matter of pointing a finger?

  Artistry ran in the Hanson family. Jimmie Tom had been well on the way to becoming a singer. Boz, though unfocused as Shrimp herself, was a verbal genius. Amparo, at age eight, was doing such incredibly detailed and psychological drawings at her school that she might grow up to be the real thing.

  And not just her family. Many if not most of her closest friends were artists one way or another: Charlotte Blethen had published poems; Kiri Johns knew all the grand operas inside out; Mona Rosen and Patrick Shawn had both acted in plays. And others. But her proudest alliance was with Richard M. Williken, whose photographs had been seen all over the world.

  Art was the air she breathed, the sidewalk she walked on to the secret garden of her soul, and living with January was like having a dog constantly shitting on that sidewalk. An innocent, adorable, cuddly puppy—you had to love the little fellow but oh my.

  If January had simply been indifferent to art, Shrimp wouldn’t have minded. In a way she’d have liked that. But alas, January had her own horrendous tastes in everything and she expected Shrimp to share them. She brought home library tapes the like of which Shrimp had never suspected: scraps of pop songs and snatches of symphonies were strung together with sound effects to tell such creaky tales as “Vermont Holiday” or “Cleopatra on the Nile.”

  January accepted Shrimp’s snubs and snide remarks in the spirit of tolerance and good humor in which she thought they were intended. Shrimp joked because she was a Hanson and all the Hansons were sarcastic. She couldn’t believe that anything she enjoyed so much herself could be abhorrent to another person. She could see that Shrimp’s music was a better kind of music and she liked listening to it when it was on, but all of the time and nothing else? You’d go nuts.

  Her eyes were like her ears. She would inflict well-meaning barbarities of jewelry and clothes on Shrimp, who wore them as tokens of her bondage and abasement. The walls of her room were one great mural of unspeakable, sickly-cute junk and sententious propaganda posters, like this jewel from the lips of a black Spartacus: “A Nation of Slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their Master, who, in the abuse of Absolute Power, does not proceed to the last extremes of Injustice and Oppression.” Bow-wow-wow. But what could Shrimp do? Walk in and rip them from the walls? January valued her crap.

  What do you do when you love a slob? What she did—try and become a slob herself. Shrimp wallowed diligently, losing most of her old friends in the process. She more than made up for her losses by the friendships January brought with her as a dowry. Not that she ever came to like any of them, but gradually through their eyes she learned that her lover had virtues as well as charms, problems as well as virtues, a mind with its own thoughts, memories, projects, and a personal history as poignant as anything by Chopin or Liszt. In fact, she was a human being, and though it took a day of the very clearest air and brightest sunshine for this feature of January’s landscape to be visible, it was such a fine and heartening sight that when it came it was worth every other inconvenience of being, and remaining, in love.

  31. A Desirable Job, continued (2021)

  After the sweeping license fell through, Lottie had one of her bad spells, sleeping up to fifteen hours a day, bullying Amparo, making fun of Mickey, living for days on pills and then demolishing the ice-box on a binge. In general she fell apart. This time it was her sister who pulled her out. Living with January seemed to have made Shrimp one hundred per cent more human. Lottie even told her so. “Suffering,” Shrimp said, “that’s what does it—I suffer a lot.” They talked, they played games, they went to whatever events Shrimp could get freebies for. Mostly, they talked; in Stuyvesant Square, on the roof, in Tompkins Square Park. They talked about growing old, about being in love, about not being in love, about life, about death. They agreed that it was terrible to grow old, though Shrimp thought they both had a long way to go before it got really terrible. They agreed that it was terrible to be in love but that it was more terrible not to be. They agreed that life was rotten.

  They didn’t agree about death. Shrimp believed, though not always literally, in reincarnation and psychic phenomena. To Lottie death made no sense. It wasn’t death she dreaded so much as the pain of dying.

  “It helps to talk, doesn’t it?” Shrimp said during one magnificent sunset up on the roof with rose-colored clouds zooming by.

  “No,” said Lottie, with a sour. here-I-am-again type smile to say to Shrimp that she was on her feet and not to worry, “it doesn’t.”

  It was that evening that Shrimp mentioned the possibility of prostitution.

  “Me? Don’t be silly!”

  “Why not You used to.”

  “Ten years ago. More! And even then I never earned enough to make it worthwhile.”

  “You weren’t trying.”

  “Shrimp, for God’s sake, just look at me!”

  “Many men are attracted to large. Rubens-type women. Anyhow I only mentioned it. And I was going to say that if—”

  “If!” Lottie giggled.

  “If you change your mind. January knows a couple who handle that son of thing. It’s safer than doing it as a free lance, so I’m told and more businesslike too.”

  The couple that January knew were the Lighthalls, Jerry and Lee. Lee was fat and black and something of an Uncle Tom. Jerry was wraithlike and given to sudden meaningful silences. Lottie was never able to decide which of them was actually in charge. They worked from what Lottie believed for months was a bogus law office, until she found out that Jerry actually belonged to the New York State Bar. The clients arriving at the office behaved in a solemn deliberate way, as though they were after all here for a legal consultation rather than a good time. For the most pan they were a son of person Lottie had had no personal experience with—engineers, programmers, what Lee called “our technologically ee-leete clientele.”

  The Lighthalls specialized in golden showers, but by the time Lottie found this out, she had made up her mind to go through with it, come what may. The first time was awful. The man insisted that she watch his face the whole while he kept saying, “I’m pissing on you, Lottie. I’m pissing on you.” As though otherwise she might not have known.

  Jerry suggested that if she took a pink pill a couple hours beforehand and then sank back on a green at the start of a session it was possible to keep the experience at an impersonal level, as though it were taking place on teevee. Lome tried it and the result for her was not so much to make it impersonal as to make it unreal. Instead of the scene becoming a teevee screen, she was pissed on by one.

  The single largest advantage of the job was that her wages weren’t official. The Lighthalls didn’t believe in paying taxes and so they operated illegally, even though that meant charging much less than the licensed brothels. Lottie didn’t lose any of her regular MODICUM benefits, and the necessity of spending what she made on the black market meant that she bought the fun things she wanted instead of the dull things she ought to have. Her wardrobe trebled. She ate at restaurants. Her room filled with knickknacks and toys and the fruity reek of Fabergé’s Molly Bloom.

  As the Lighthalls got to know and trust her, she began to be sent out to people’s homes, often staying the night. Invariably this would mean something beyond golden showers. She could see that it was a job that she could grow to like. Not for the sex, the sex was nothing, but sometimes afterwards, especially on assignments away from Washington Street, the clients would warm up and talk about something besides their own unvarying predilections. This was the aspect of the job that appealed to Lottie—the human contact.

  32. Lottie, in Stuyvesant Square (20
21)

  “Heaven. I’m in heaven.

  “What I mean is, anyone if he just looked around and really understood what he saw … But that’s not what I’m supposed to say, is it? The object’s to be able to say what you want. Instead, I guess what I was saying was that I’d better be happy with what I’ve got, cause I won’t get any more. But then if I don’t ask for more … It’s a vicious circle.

  “Heaven. What is heaven? Heaven is a supermarket. Like that one they built outside the museum. Full of everything you could ever ask for. Full of fresh meat—I wouldn’t live in any vegetarian heaven—full of cake mixes and cartons of cold milk and fizzies in cans. Oh, the works. And lots of disposable containers. And I would just go down the aisles with my big cart in a kind of trance, the way they say the housewives did then, without thinking what any of it was going to cost. Without thinking. Nineteen-fifty-three a.d.—you’re right, that’s heaven.

  “No. No, I guess not. That’s the trouble with heaven. You say something that sounds nice but then you think, would you really want it a second time? A third time? Like your highway, it would be great once. And then? What then?

  “You see, it has to come from inside.

  “So what I want, what I really do want… I don’t know how to say it. What I really want is to really want something. The way, you know, when a baby wants something? The way he reaches for it. I’d like to see something and reach for it like that. Not to be aware that I couldn’t have it or that it wasn’t my turn. Juan is that way sometimes with sex, once he lets loose. But of course heaven would have to be larger than that.

  “I know! The movie we saw on teevee the other night when Mom wouldn’t shut up, the Japanese movie, remember? Do you remember the fire festival, the song they sang? I forget the exact words, but the idea was that you should let life burn you up. That’s what I want. I want life to burn me up.