Intercourse

by Robert Olen Butler

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  23, writer

  CÉLINE GAUTHIER

  34, prostitute

  in a brothel on the rue de la Huchette upon Hemingway’s return to Paris to confirm that his wife, Hadley, had indeed lost virtually all of his manuscripts, including carbon copies, on a train, December 4, 1922

  ERNEST

  how did it begin, the one I ache for the most:

  We waited in the woods in the shadows of the trees the color of

  They told us to stop the Germans from crossing the bridge and we waited in the woods. The shadows were

  The shadows of the trees were gray. There were barrage balloons in the sky

  We waited for the Germans while the barrage balloons floated over the Austrian lines

  We waited in the woods and the shadows were the color of

  We waited in the woods. The color of the shadows was gray

  We waited in the woods for the Germans

  The shadows

  We waited in the woods for the Germans. The shadows of the trees were the color of gun metal. The barrage balloons

  We waited in the woods for the Germans to try to cross the stone bridge. The shadows of the trees were the color of gun metal. Against the distant mountains we could see the barrage balloons floating over the Austrian lines. I felt I was already dead because she put every word I’d ever written into a valise and then lost it on a fucking train

  CÉLINE

  I wait and later I will go to the café and I will sit in the corner table, I will drink a calvados slowly, keeping my palms on the tabletop, my hands will rest on the coolness of the slate tabletop and I will watch Bernard behind the zinc bar, he will wipe the top of the bar lightly in long elegant strokes, in the long mirror behind the bar I will look at the bald spot on the back of his head, I know how the spot has grown since I first came to this restaurant and the zinc bar has grown darker, from a dark gray to nearly black, and I will not see myself in the mirror from the table where I sit, everything else is in the mirror but I am not, the calvados will taste of apples and a little bit of pear and I will drink it slowly and there will be nothing in my mind, the nothing of the tabletop and the nothing of the zinc bar and the nothing of the bare spot on Bernard’s head and the nothing of the trees silhouetted outside against the electric light and the nothing of sitting very still and drinking slowly

  JOSEPHINE BAKER

  19, dancer

  GEORGES SIMENON

  22, writer

  in her rooms at the Hôtel Fournet, Montmartre, Paris, January 1926

  GEORGES

  oo la la la la la la la the butt, the most famous butt in Paris, sweetly compliant now, silent, but redolent of its fame onstage: this butt can laugh, this butt can sing, this butt can carry on a sublime dialog within its twinned self in its own language, one cheek quivering and then the other: I am so beautiful my sister yes yes I am too my sister this city is watching us entranced and we are both so beautiful we are and we are so chic wearing flamingo feathers or bananas as if they were a Paul Poiret or a Jean Patou we are so very chic but we are even more beautiful utterly naked for we are the perfection of curves ah yes we are the globes to the angles in art deco it’s true sister we are modern but we are also savage we are also primitive we are the jungle we are the night we are the call of birds—wait, wait, what has Josephine done to her Georges—I am a man of words, nineteen novels already, full of elegant and simple words, and yet in praise I have just had her butt make bird calls: I have gone mad

  JOSEPHINE

  oo la la how they want me to be blacker and blacker, even Georges, his pipe on the bed stand and his hands all over my naked butt and I just have to make my cheeks tremble there and he will cry out in French as wildly as Genevieve and she will answer from across the room in Monkey, but I keep them both quiet tonight, I am myself quiet inside and I cannot stop my mind, for tonight I danced as I always dance—some Charleston some Black Bottom, some Mess Around and Tack Annie and Shim Sham Break and some things I tell myself are Africa but are St. Louis, for all that, are me just knocking my knees and camel-walking and vibrating my butt and flailing my arms and legs—I danced as always but at the same time I was somewhere up in the balcony with these ravenous French watching me dance, which is something I almost never do, but just because I dance in a trance most of the time don’t mean the dance has anything to do with what I am and what I am driven to want, which is something I got from St. Louis, as well: my hair is conked flat and lacquered, which the French don’t understand the meaning of, and at the end I cross my eyes at them and I flap my arms like a backyard chicken, and they don’t understand that either, but after it’s all over and the night is gone and the sun comes up in Paris, each morning I get into my hotel bathtub and I soak in hot water and goat’s milk and lemon and honey and Eau de Javel that they scour their sinks with and I soak and I soak till my pussy’s on fire just so I can be white

  JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

  24, recent graduate in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure

  SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

  21, recent graduate in philosophy from the Sorbonne

  in her fifth-floor rented room at 91 avenue Denfert-Rochereau, Montparnasse, Paris, 1929

  JEAN-PAUL

  too much of her too much silk skin, brick nipple, face of porcelain, too much of this room too much cane chair and claw-foot table and orange divan too much orange-papered wall and foxed window shade, too much café still clinging like the smell of pipe smoke to us in too much wood-plank bed too much stack of café saucer, too much mirror showing mirror showing mirror too much gilt frame, too much sheep-back hunching of bodies all around, too much night street after the café too much plane tree and shadow of plane tree on the cobbled street too much hooded lamp and boulder row of Renault, too much stairway and crystal of bare lightbulbs and shadow down the hall and hard brass doorknobs, all of it too much, all of it with no reason for being there, too much gape of her lips, too much gape of her loins, too much of her and too little of me: I think I’m going to be sick

  SIMONE

  one eye dead, one eye drifts away, neither of them looking at me, and I thrash in the vague light on the crumpled sheet not from his touch but from his sightlessness: I have vanished and my invisibility shudders through me like sex and I can hear him thinking inside that wall-eyed head sitting on that tiny body with its tiny parts and he knows me not, but he knows he knows me not, and I know he knows he knows me not, and so I am even more alone in this bed in this room in this shuddering trembling body of mine and I am free

  MILTON BERLE

  23, comedian

  AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON

  40, evangelist

  in her apartment in Santa Monica, after a Los Angeles charity benefit, 1930

  MILTON

  this is a novelty act on the Orpheum Circuit if there ever was one, the sexy Christian pastor and the good Jewish boy—well not such a good boy, though Mama looks the other way and just packs our bags when I’m hosing down a girl—I think sex is better than logic, but I can’t prove it—this is more like a freak act, not big enough to close before intermission, this, but maybe we’d go on after the three-spot, presenting the Wandering Youth with the Giant Dong and Sister Aimee with the dust of the Arizona Desert from her phantom kidnapping clinging to her ankles—and pretty ankles they are—The sex was so good that even the neighbors had a cigarette— but it’s a freak act all right, with the candles burning over there on the dresser and the silver cross and the framed crucifixion—don’t look at me, Sister, I didn’t do it—A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts are feeling good—all that chestnut hair of yours, smelling like the sea—I’d be happy to give your way a try, but It’s hard to be religious when certain people have never been incinerated by a lightning bolt—and you know who you are, you’re not laughing right now—what are you, an audience or an oil painting?—maybe it’s just that you know the real me, Sister, you and the silent audience both—forget
my baby face, I’ve been doing this a long time, a long long time already, shtupping and shticking and I’m starting to feel old—At least I don’t drink, I learned that from my Jewish mother, who never touches the stuff, alcohol interferes with her suffering—Jesus may love me, but everybody else thinks I’m a jerk—Sure, there was a time when everybody believed in God, and the Church ruled the world, it was called the Dark Ages—I believe you, Sister, Jesus is coming, but I’m coming first

  AIMEE

  my back bends upward and I can imagine my body turning all the colors, from my toes to the crown of my head, from red to orange to yellow and green and then to blue and indigo and to violet: I am a rainbow, I am a covenant, my Lord Amen a covenant Amen You put me in this body and the flesh yearns for You and You are the word made flesh and You are also the flesh made word He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts and You are present in all your creation, Lord, You are in the sparrow and You are in the beggar by the road and You are in the comedian from the vaudeville stage and with Your infinite tenderness You understood the woman at the well and You understood Your dear Mary Magdalene Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine and You understand me, who aches and thrills for You and who cries out Your love, Lord, to the world, for Your gospel is not the gospel of fear and hell and damnation but the gospel of reconciliation and of love, You move in me You fill me up, my Lord, I am full of love for even the least of Your creatures, and this one happens to have a part like the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus and I hold him close so he can hear the heart in my breast which beats now madly in love of You and he will listen Amen and I will soar to You Amen and he will believe Amen and I say Amen and Amen and Amen

  CLYDE BARROW

  25, outlaw

  BONNIE PARKER

  23, outlaw

  in a cabin in the woods near Shreveport, Louisiana, on the eve of their death by police ambush, 1934

  CLYDE

  some gump I knew wanted to be a tough guy and had no chance, but I was interested in his sister who they said had slipped on the ice and broke her arm and she had it in a sling, and so I go over to the gump’s house thinking to make time with the girl now that she’s one arm short, and there’s noise in the kitchen and I get touchy real fast because they also say the laws is looking for me cause of the little getting-started jobs I’ve been pulling in McLennan County, and she says Go on in and meet my friend and there she is with her back to me, and she turns and the window is behind her and it lights up her strawberry hair like it’s a fiery crown and it sure starts to burning in me right away, and the first thing I do after saying my name and she says hers is to reach into my coat pocket and pull out my pistol and lay it on the table that’s between us, a 1911-model Colt .45, and this is just to make it clear to her from the first who I am and what she’s getting into with me cause it don’t take me more than about three seconds with this tiny girl with the red ringlets and the freckles and that smart-aleck half-smile to know she’s the one, though I never dream how far she’s going to go with me, but the first thing out of my mouth after we get our names and my Colt on the table is Here is my honest declaration to you, Miss Parker, I am a dangerous man to anybody who gets in the way of me taking what I want and pissing on the shoes of the government that has took everything the working stiffs have got, which also means that nobody messes with any woman who is with me and she moves that half-smile from one side of her mouth to the other, and little did I know that one day I’d give her a .32-caliber Harrington and Richardson top-break pistol for her purse and her eyes would fill with grateful tears

  BONNIE

  I hear a noise behind me while I’m standing in Daisy Wickham’s kitchen trying to open a jar of Ovaltine at the sink, and my head is full of the darnedest thick mud from the sun coming off the dirty snow outside and from the ticking of a clock and the dripping from the faucet, and I’m sinking fast in that mud cause of this being what my life is—making Ovaltine and hearing these sounds that ask me to just go ahead and beat my head on that window till it cracks—but this noise behind me is footsteps and somehow I know it ain’t Daisy, and I turn and there he is with his brown hair slicked back, though a curl of it has figured out how to drop down on his forehead, and his eyes are dark but they might as well be bright red with fire cause they are burning their way into my brain, and he says I’m Clyde Barrow and I say I’m Bonnie Parker and he pulls a pistol out of his coat and lays it on the table and I don’t even for a second worry about a thing ’cause he’s giving off something into the air so sweet as to make me want to wiggle my hips, but I keep real still and he says I mean to be honest with you, Miss Parker, I am a dangerous man but I am a strong man and I can get things for you so that you and me won’t ever turn into working stiffs and I can take care of you forever and I don’t know how long forever will be with Clyde Barrow but I am ready to say yes right then

  ADOLF HITLER

  46, Reichskanzler and Führer

  INGA ARVAD

  22, journalist

  in his office at the Reich Chancellery, during an interview for a Danish newspaper, Berlin, 1935

  ADOLF

  pigeons outside the window murmuring at the seed laid out, crumbs in the corners for the mice, Wolf sleeping in the outer office on a leather chair, dreaming—how I wish I could dream his dog’s dreams, hanging out of the car with the wind lifting his ears, running fast without even moving his legs—this little mouse beneath me, a perfect Aryan mouse, I will not eat you up, little mouse, I will eat cabbage and lentils and peas instead, not my little mouse, and at my temples I begin to burn and now all my face is burning and I cannot breathe and I cannot sleep and when I do, hands are upon me and my father’s whip, my mother’s hands and her wild eyes and my face is aflame from what the social democrats have done to us and what the liberals have done and the reactionary monarchists and the capitalists and the communists and the Jews, the Jews, what the Jews have done to us what the Jews have done to all of us and eighty million voices cry out as one and it is for me and they lift their arms and they are inside me, the German people, and they are like a woman, needy, needing, needing, needy beyond thought, needy for strong hands upon them, needy for Fatherland for Father for Empire for the great German Empire needy for Hitler and Hitler will feed the mice and he will kill the beasts

  INGA

  how can this be, for soon I stopped taking notes and then I stopped asking questions and I am on the pale plush rug in the middle of his office floor: it was his voice, the unlikely quietness of it, the pain of it, he crossed his hands on his chest and lifted his eyes upward to the ceiling and far beyond, and he was hurt, this man for whom vast throngs of Germans cry out to command them, but for me his eyes lifted in pain and then returned unwavering to me, confiding deeply in me, those eyes came upon me and did not waver and at first they seemed pale blue, a fragile bird’s-egg blue, but now they were bright and dark, nearly violet, and these eyes would not move from me and I capped my pen and I trembled at his need and then his voice rose and he began to fill the room with a guttural litany of rage and his crossed arms unfurled and his hands flared and then clenched into fists and leaped up to frame his face and his power filled the room, and even as I trembled in fear I knew that his showing me this was an intimacy, as well: he commanded me fiercely and he needed me desperately, needs me even now, for this brief time, he is strong enough to hold me safe and weak enough for me to hold him safe, and so

  INGA ARVAD

  29, journalist

  JOHN F. KENNEDY

  24, ensign, U.S. Navy Intelligence

  in room 132, Fort Sumter Hotel, Charleston, South Carolina, February 1942

  INGA

  how can this be, this long skinny boy on his back and it’s simple inside that brain of his Inga Binga hop on let’s go and that was on his mind even as he told me that the FBI is following me and he said he knows I’m not a Nazi spy but Hoover hates the Kennedys and will destroy the number-two son through me
but that’s okay by him, his big brother Joe can go ahead and be President without him, he’s ready to teach history somewhere with his Inga, his Lutheran-former-Miss-Denmark-older-woman-divorcée wife, and to hell with Mama Rose and Papa Joe and he can play touch football with his students, so he said Inga Binga hop on and now I let my hair fall into his face and he’s always contented for this to be quick, but I won’t let him move yet, not this time: his eyes are gray as a winter sky and I’m bundled up in the Tivoli Gardens and there’s only the snow and that sky and I’m feeling warm about some toothsome schoolboy and I’m thinking about when the first time will happen and how it will be simple when it does and how there is nothing I need to think about beyond that