Travesty

by John Hawkes

  No doubt it is just as well that I was not wearing a ring. But tell me, are you feeling better?

  Approaching. Yes, we are approaching closer. And once again, you see, I must shift the gears. Shift them from one velvet plateau to the next. And now how directly we are propelled toward Honorine in her mammoth bed. By now she must indeed be smiling in the depths of her sleep. But of course she has left the old lantern burning for us as usual, burning in our honor and for our protection. If I remember, I will point it out to you—that old lantern swaying on the end of its chain.

  Jealousy? Jealousy?

  After all I have said . . .after my woman of luxury . . .after Monique . . .after all my fervent protestations of affection . . .after all I have done to clarify our situation and to allay your fears—now, as a last resort, you are finally willing to accuse me of mere jealousy? As if I am only one of those florid money-makers who is afraid to thrust even his fingers into the secret places of his stenographer’s attractive body and yet turns green, as they say, whenever he imagines that his lonely wife harbors in her heart of hearts the quivering desire to watch while her husband’s best friend climbs nude and dripping from his tubful of hot water? Is it with such implications that you expect to stop me, to bring me to earth, so to speak? As if on this note I will suddenly recognize myself and bow to your judgment, exclaiming that, yes, for all these years I have been an excellent actor outwardly while inwardly nursing the most unpleasant banalities of sexual envy? As if you are the hero and I the villain, the one openly and, I might say, foolishly accepting the favors of the other’s honest wife and naive daughter until the other has finally spent enough years drinking slime (in his toilet, in his monastic bed chamber, in his cold automobile parked side by side with his wife’s in what was once the stable) in order to act? But are you then so foolish? And could any man, even me, bear such violent feelings for that length of time? And are you suggesting that Honorine is not sensitive, perceptive? After all, if I had in fact been concealing and suffering all this time the latent frenzy of jealousy, would it not have exposed itself in some faint sign which Honorine, in all her concern for my welfare, would have noted at once? Well, you can see what I think of your last resort. This argument is not your avenue of escape.

  Of course it is true that you are not a very good poet. I have always made my opinion plain. And it is true that all your disclaimers (about your worth, the size of your audience, the importance of your prizes, the extent of your creative torment, the unhappiness of your life, and so forth) were always to me offensive. And it is true that you are an emotional parasite. Would you deny it? As for your dreadful and eternal seriousness, it is indeed true that on certain occasions, when you have been brooding alone before the fire, when you have been brooding with Honorine over some dull line of verse, when after a glass or two of cognac you have converted your brooding into a sullen, pretentious monologue for the benefit of Honorine and Chantal and me, then I have indeed longed to hear you suddenly give voice to a single, extended, piercing shriek of laughter. But no more than that. Never have I wished you pain or discomfort more than that. So please do not accuse me of being jealous. It is a bad idea and a poor ploy.

  On the other hand, it is also quite true that even after sharing so many intimate years together, still there is a great deal that you do not know about Honorine and Chantal and me. Witness my discussion tonight. And this discussion is, I assure you, the merest hint of what you do not know about the three of us. Only the clear, white, brutal tip of the iceberg, to borrow a familiar but indispensable figure of speech. But wait. Stop for another moment. Consider everything you do indeed know about your mistress and her only two living blood or legal relatives. If you exposed this information in one of your poems you would embarrass the three of us for a lifetime. At least such a revelation would embarrass me if not Chantal and Honorine, who might in fact cherish this permanent form of your devotion.

  But have you forgotten it all? Need I remind you of the afternoon and even the hour of day when you wrote your first inscription for Honorine—wrote it, that is, in her copy of your first book of poems? Yes, Honorine’s treasured copy of that volume; your earliest and, I later heard, most derivative poems; my own gold-tipped pen which you borrowed for that occasion with hardly a word. Don’t you remember? There were times when I might have wished that Honorine had chosen to show me that first inscription of yours, but then there were others when I was equally pleased that she had instead chosen to guard it selfishly from any eyes but hers. At least I caught a glimpse of your black, flowery handwriting that afternoon and, to be honest, thereafter kept my gold-tipped fountain pen capped for a week.

  But what of all those first days and months and seasons when I retired early to my own sumptuous but monastic room, took unnecessary business trips, bundled Chantal off to mountain holidays? Have you forgotten how considerate I was, and how discreet, ingenious, flattering? Don’t you remember Honorine’s pleasure when there were two gifts of flowers on the piano in a single day? Or all those winter evenings when, on the white leather divan, the three of us enjoyed together the portfolio of large, clear photographs depicting the charming pornographic poses of a most intelligent woman of good birth? Surely you remember that visual history of the life of Honorine from youth to middle age in which her own appreciation of her piquant autoeroticism becomes increasingly subtle, increasingly bold? Surely you will not have forgotten the night when you remarked that every man hopes for an ordinary wife who will prove a natural actress in the theater of sex? Well, I savored that remark for days. I still do. It was perhaps the only poetic remark you ever made.

  I could go on. I could remind you of our disagreements, which were to be expected, or of our “family” celebrations, such as the event of my fiftieth birthday when you decided at last to inscribe one of your precious books for the so-called head of the household. I could remind you of all those physical moments when you managed to convey your awareness of my pleasure, generosity, total absence of perturbation. For instance, I need say no more than “the king drinks!” to recall to you those yearly festive nights when three of us sat around our flower-crowned cake and with shouts of happiness and admiration hailed the fourth. Surely you remember that you were always the king, though I would not remind you of how foolish you looked with your famous cigarette and open white shirt and paper crown. You accepted your royalty begrudgingly, as you did your popularity, but accepted it all the same. Or, for instance, it would be a simple matter for me to say that single word, those several words, which would immediately revive in your memory the sight of your body, of mine, of Honorine removing her nightgown of plum-colored velours before the embers still glowing in the conical recess of her bedroom fireplace.

  It so happens that the book you inscribed for me no longer exists. But no matter. You know what I am talking about, and none of it—none of it—can be denied. So you must not accuse me of being jealous. Now is not the time to offer me a wound so deep.

  But now I must tell you that once we pass Tara I will say nothing more. And I warn you now that if you make a single movement or utter a single sound once we pass Tara your death will not be an ironic triumph but a prolonged and hapless agony.

  And yet I do not mean to adopt that tone of voice. Will you excuse it? To clear the air, I can tell you that whenever anything unusual is about to happen my chest itches. Yes, the skin in the area of my sternum is especially sensitive to unexpected occurrences, changes of scene, threats of impending violence. And now it is itching!

  Chez Lulu. That’s the place. I remember it well. And how fortunate for me that it is you rather than Lulu who is my companion for tonight’s undertaking, since Lulu may have been an agreeable and even seductive giant of a young man but was hardly fit for the mental and emotional rigors of the private apocalypse. He was an excellent host in the establishment that bore his name, but I cannot imagine anyone more frustrating in a discussion such as this one and occurring under these the most difficult of conditions. Ac
tually our charming, dark-haired young brute of a man could not possibly have been your substitute, never fear. And yet both Honorine and Chantal were fond of him. At any rate it was in Chez Lulu that Chantal gained her emotional though not legal majority in a spectacle that you especially would have enjoyed. Chantal could not have been more than fifteen years of age at the time.

  Well, anyone with a penchant for the ocean and for summers promising a certain harmless decadence will recognize Chez Lulu from merely its name. You too must have discovered it in a dozen seaside resorts: the harbor barely large enough for a handful of sailboats and a yacht or two, the summer evening rich with the scent of both the rose and the crab, the couples strolling or arousing each other beneath the aromatic trees, and there, fronted by a few feet of powdered sand, there the bar-restaurant which for its disreputable music and growing adolescents and strings of brightly colored lights is indispensable to any such dark and idyllic cove noted for quietude, natural beauty, safe swimming. With Chez Lulu the glorious nighttime summer shore would have offered no champagne vying with spilled beer, no irruption of girlish laughter, no hint of first (or possibly last) romance. Perhaps you are already beginning to smile. I need say no more. The point is that until we concluded that we preferred to spend our summers in an Alpine resort instead of beside the sea in the second and smaller dwelling owned by Honorine’s mother, Chantal and Honorine and I were among the most favored patrons of Chez Lulu. There, I can tell you, we ate mussels roasted on olive twigs and laughed with appreciation at Lulu himself, who as owner and master of ceremonies was large, handsome, amusing, and the possessor of an unlimited store of sexually aggressive ways. You know his type: one of those tall, strapping young men who would have made an excellent athlete had it not been for his relentlessly dissolute nature.

  Well, by now you will have the scene in mind: a warm late night at Chez Lulu, Honorine and I seated together at a small wicker table at the edge of the sand; the young accordian player and of course Lulu already making spectacles of themselves on a low, crude, wooden stage facing away from the sea and toward the animated crowd of Lulu’s favorite patrons old and young; the protective matting of bamboo strips rustling above our heads; the colored lights strung like a bright fringe about the perimeter of the place; the tide going out beyond us in the sultry darkness; Lulu well-launched into the predictable early stages of his exhibitionism . . . Yes, everything was conducive to what Lulu had promised us would be a night of surprising and superlative entertainment.

  Preliminary to this entertainment, a secret event he had been anticipating for us the entire week, Lulu was in the midst of telling one of his rare, evocative stories which always caused Honorine to smile and settle herself more comfortably into her own special attitude of languor and expectation. The story, as we began to discover, concerned a man who had been sent out by his mistress one rainy afternoon to sell a spray of mimosa on one of the town’s busiest thoroughfares. The mistress was a beast of domesticity, the rain was heavy, the street was crowded (mainly with children), the man had a face of amazing scars and was so small and stolid that he was not much better than an impressive dwarf. But most important of all, this maltreated and ridiculous figure was the possessor of a left arm nipped off and drawn to a point at the elbow by one of those familiar accidents of birth that are so prevalent in a nation that still lies under the wing of medievalism.

  On he talked, our Lulu, now contributing illustrative gestures to his story, which was punctuated occasionally by a few disrespectful notes of the accordian. Well, the stubborn and resentful lover, such as he was, attempted to sell his enormous branch of mimosa in the rain. He held the mimosa first in his right hand and then in a furious grip in the armpit of his offended partial arm, then in an agony of self-consciousness he shifted the mimosa from armpit to angry hand and back again. The children laughed (as did we of Lulu’s audience), the hatless man was wet to the skin, a small but elegant automobile drove past with an enormous heap of gleaming, yellow mimosa covering its entire roof. Well, this story had no ending, of course, but afforded the perspiring Lulu a good many artful strokes along with an increasing number of sour notes to the accordianist. And though Lulu wiped his face and laughed and apologized for being unable to reach the moral of his story, no matter how fast and sonorously he talked, still each and every member of his audience smiled in immediate and pleasurable recognition of that moral, which says in effect that we are a nation of persons not only unashamed of the handicapped but capable, as a matter of fact, of making fun of them.

  But now came the moment of the rare entertainment that we were all so primed to receive. The laughter faded, Lulu wiped his partially visible bare chest as well as his face with his handkerchief, the accordianist bestowed upon us a great, gleaming sweep of fanfare music, Lulu made a brief but enticing announcement about the spectacle we were now to see. Then he turned and drew aside an ordinary bed sheet which, throughout the story of the unglorious lover, had concealed the rear portion of the small makeshift stage which, I may now assure you, is all that remains of the long-since abandoned Chez Lulu.

  But that night, and at that moment, already we saw no signs of impending physical decay. To the contrary, because there before us on that little stage stood three young girls who were delightfully natural, only moderately shy, and appealingly dressed in the most casual of clothing—in undershirts designed for boys, that is, and in tight denim pants. The families of those young girls were in the audience, each member of the audience knew each one of those most reputable young girls by sight. Need I mention the clapping that followed the removal of the sheet? Need I say that the smallest and most attractive of the girls was our own Chantal?

  So she was, and barefooted, like the other two, and like them attired to affect simplicity and to erase undesirable differences between the three. As a matter of fact, Honorine and I were pleasantly and simultaneously aware that these three young, innocent girls were already more provocative, more indiscreetly revealed, than most professional seminude girls in a chorus line. You can imagine the activity which this combination (the adolescent amateurs, the public performance) sent rippling through the audience at Chez Lulu that night. What, we wondered, had he trained our girls to do? And what were we to make of the three large, orange carrots suspended small end downward approximately a meter apart by lengths of ordinary white twine tied to a slender beam affixed overhead? What “act” could Lulu possibly have in mind?

  Well, we had not long to wait. Lulu clapped his hands, the accordianist set aside his great gaudy instrument, we of the audience craned or crowded forward, some of us going so far as to leave our tables and sit informally in the cool sand at the foot of the stage. And then, while the two men bustled about, whispering to the girls and positioning them in an exact giggling line across the impromptu stage, so that each one stood directly behind the particular dangling carrot which had previously been designated as her own, suddenly and as if by prearranged signal, all three girls knelt as one with their faces raised, their knees apart, and their hands behind their upright backs. The tips of the immense carrots hung barely within reach of the three sets of pretty lips which, we noticed, had been freshly painted with a glistening red cosmetic for this debut on the stage. There were whistles, random volleys of clapping, more jockeying for better and closer locations from which to see. But what now, Honorine and I asked each other with smiles and raised eyebrows, what now— blindfolds?

  Yes, they were indeed blindfolds, and at the first sight of them, and while Lulu and his grinning assistant were tying them like broad, white bandages over the eyes of the young trio kneeling as if awaiting the revolver of some brutal executioner, the audience voiced its approval and curiosity in a new and sudden spurt of informality. By now we knew what was coming, of course, and that we were about to witness some sort of competition or game which would involve the men, the girls, and the carrots. We could hardly have been more aroused or appreciative.

  Lulu called for silence, and in the next
moment one could hear even the lapping of water against the flanks of an invisible sailboat or the sound of insects in the bamboo matting overhead. All faces were admirably attentive. We watched as the three girls, now illuminated in the bright beam of a single spotlight, shifted nervously in their kneeling positions and gathered their muscles, so to speak, and raised their pretty, blinded faces like sniffing rabbits. The girls waited, Lulu raised his thick right arm, the assistant composed himself behind two of the girls as might a sprinter. Already the three charming contestants had begun to perspire. Music from a car radio came to us faintly across the little midnight harbor.

  Then Lulu shouted, flung down his arm, and thereby sent our trio of sweet girls into an unbelievable flurry of agitation which, we saw immediately, was all the more pronounced and even feverish because of the ground rules by which the girls were forbidden to move their spread knees. In the previous few moments each of us in the audience had made his firm choice, his loyal commitment, and had fixed upon that particular young girl whose efforts he would champion to the very end. And now, even at the mere outset of this simple sport, the shouts of encouragement were deafening.