“Ah, well, if you’ll notice,” I pointed out in a professorial manner, “he’s not talking to me. He’s talking to you.”
“So, Phil,” Jay said, rotating the planet that was his head, “what’s this about a novel?”
“Huh?”
“I was talking to Veronica,” Jay replied, “and she said you were working on a novel.”
“That’s right,” said van der Glick, after it became apparent that I wasn’t going to respond. I was trying to remember when I’d mentioned it to Ronnie. The answer (which bubbled up from my gut rather than descended from my brain) was that I mentioned it to her all the time. At the end of many a drunken telephone conversation I’d blurt, “Just wait till I finish my book, read my novel, Ronnie, and you’ll understand everything.”
“It’s an autobiographical novel.”
“Really?” said Jay.
“Oh, yes. It has the ‘incident’ in there, and a lot about you …”
What, you didn’t think that was me talking, did you? Oh, gosh, no. I was beyond stupefaction, plus I was busy receiving drinks from Amy, who had chosen an approach to the table that brought into her view van der Glick’s hand rooting around my crotch, searching for the shrivelled penis.
“Now how, exactly,” wondered Jay, “can Phil write an autobiographical novel when he has no sense of himself, and a faulty memory to boot?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Rainie. “But that’s what he’s trying to do. Like Proust. But what was it Dorothy Parker said about Proust? That reading In Search of Lost Time was like soaking in someone else’s bathwater?”
“Who says I have a faulty memory? Thank you.” That last comment was made to Amy, who shrugged to indicate that bringing me drinks was her job and in no way elective.
“I do,” said Jay. Talking to me, directly to me. “I say your memory is totally fucked. Like, for example, you didn’t even remember about Tom and Tony until I reminded you a few years ago.”
“Wait,” I said, “weren’t their names Ted and Terry?”
“I knew it. I knew you were getting everything wrong.”
“You’re the one who told me their names were Ted and Terry!”
“Let me read it,” said Jay.
“I’m not going to let you read it.”
“He’s worried,” announced Rainie, “about using real people as fodder for his so-called fiction.”
“He should be. He treats people badly enough already.”
“Guys, I’m sitting right here. You shouldn’t be discussing me as if I were, you know, elsewhere.”
“But you are, Philly Four-Eyes,” said Jay.
Rainie van der Glick nodded in accord. “You are elsewhere.”
Then break time was over and Jay returned to the grand piano. He balanced some drinks upon it, hung his head low and began to play. It was the last set, so he abandoned his idiosyncratic renditions of classics and show tunes, dipped into his classical repertoire and came up with some real weepers. He played the first Brahms intermezzo, for example, which choked me with the strength of an anaconda. And he played Glenn Gould’s transcription of the Siegfried Idyll, by Wagner, that great anti-Semite. I felt this was something of a low blow. Do you know the story? Cosima Wagner woke up on her birthday and there were thirteen musicians sitting on the staircase, playing this beautiful avowal of transcendent passion. Wagner did this wonderfully romantic thing, was Jay’s implicit statement, and he was a fuck-pig. What, exactly, does that make you?
I awoke the next morning, although, again, I’ve used an overly delicate term. Rather, I was spat forth from a comatose void that was more deathlike than death. Spat forth screaming, I might add, crash-landing in a strange land. There was a naked woman beside me, one who’d obviously thrashed the whole night long. The sheets were kicked clear across the room. The woman lay on her back, her arms and legs spread, her head slapped sideways. Rainie van der Glick, my childhood friend. And here I was in her bedroom, which seemed remarkably girl-like for van der Glick, to the extent that there were stuffed animals goggling at me from their perches on book-laden shelves. The walls were lined with works of art and framed photographs. The paintings were all very realistic, all landscapes, and the photographs—which hove into view as I plucked up my spectacles from the bedside table and balanced them on my nose—were of Rainie and strangers to me. They were by and large men; was Rainie seriously involved with any of them? I wondered.
As I ruminated on this, my penis (and whereas it is hypothetical that part of my psyche is still thirteen years old, it is incontrovertible that my dick is) demanded that I study the naked woman in repose. Rainie had a fine body, but I found it somehow dissatisfying. I studied the way her breasts lolled to either side of her ribcage and I frowned, not because they were no longer young and were therefore imperfect but because Ronnie’s breasts lolled differently. My penis began to roar then, a ferocious roar, although the effect, looking down upon it, was probably less than the little fellow had intended. Still, he was game, and assuming that Rainie and I had been too polluted to accomplish anything the night before, I ran my fingertips up the inside of her thigh. She stirred, swung her head to the other side. “McQuidgey,” she whispered. She lifted her hands, groped the empty air, took hold of my head. “What time is it?”
I checked the clock on the stand, which was huge, the numbers of the digital readout an inch high so that, I assumed, Rainie could see them even without her spectacles. “It’s 7:13.”
“We’ve only been asleep for like twenty-two minutes.” Still, she drew my head downward. I crawled on top and gentled myself into her. “Mmm,” went Rainie.
It was not the most impassioned act of lovemaking, but we were both grotesquely tired and swill-stunned. When we were done (“I’m done,” said Rainie van der Glick, and then I was done, too) she drifted back to sleep. I climbed out of bed and located my clothes, not all of which were in the bedchamber. My socks, for example, were in Rainie’s shower stall, bone dry.
As I sat on the lip of the bathtub and pulled on my socks—an act that possessed a perverted domesticity—I wondered if Rainie would like to have me for a boyfriend. Maybe that was what her life needed, someone with whom she could take Sunday drives, stopping at antique stores and roadside fruit stands. Or it could be that I was in such rotten shape that Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy Fucks needed to devote her attention to me twenty-four/seven.
I went down in the elevator. My stomach was so tender that the short ride sickened me as vigorously as a squealing plummet on a roller coaster. Then I was on the street and blinded by the sun. It was late October and very chilly, but that didn’t prevent this huge cock-adoodle of light. There were churchgoers out there, sedate and well-dressed, heading toward their various houses of worship, which nauseated me far more than my descent in the elevator. I considered throwing up in the gutter, but steeled myself, only because I didn’t want to hear a small voice coming from behind, “Mommy? What’s wrong with that man?”
I threw my arms up into the air and prayed for a miracle, and a miracle occurred. An orange taxi pulled over to the side of the road. I loaded myself into the back seat, spoke my address and went to sleep. The cabbie woke me up gently (for a cabbie) and, surprisingly refreshed, I paid him, got out, circled around the back of Michelangelo Barker’s house. There was a brief moment of panic because my house keys weren’t in my pocket, but they were in the door, which was all very well and fortunate, although I couldn’t really understand why they were there. Then I entered my basement apartment and saw my pages strewn about and I understood.
Remembered, I suppose, is the technical term, although I doubt it is any kind of remembrance that you people might understand. You might not understand memories that appear in a diarrheal blast, lacking form and order, splattering against the walls of your mind. Not unless you are, like me, an enthusiastic amateur alcoholic. These memories included: Jay, Rainie and me stumbling along the streets at dead of night; Jay and me sitting curbside and intoning, “Akela!
We’ll do our best! Dib dib dib, dob dob dob!” whilst Rainie performed some sort of interpretive dance; the three of us in my gloomy apartment sifting through the loose pages of my manuscript. Ergh, that last memory certainly disturbed me. I hope Rainie didn’t find the pages that were pertinent to her, ow!, too late, another painful squirt of memory, this one of Rainie clutching a piece of paper and demanding, “Hey, bud, just what is so heartbreaking about my stabs at femininity?”
At this point my book’s pages numbered perhaps one hundred and seventy, but as I scanned the room, I sensed somehow that there were not so many as that. It seemed to me that there were, oh, twenty-odd pages missing …
I dove for the sheets of paper, scanning them frantically for proper names: Ted, Tony (whatever the fuck) and Norman. I saw nothing. There was no accompanying trumpet of memory, but I soon knew that my brother, Jay, had carted away all the pages dealing with what I’m still bent on calling, simply, the “incident.”
“Hello?”
“Philip. It’s Milligan.”
“Who?”
“Ed. Edward. Eddie.”
“But you’re dead.”
“Right, right, right. But I try not to let it slow me down.”
“Oh. I get it. This is a troubled dream.”
“Well, I did use to call you all the time. Wouldn’t you say it’s more like half memory, half troubled dream?”
“Mostly troubled dream.”
“I’ve been reading the Bible.”
“Okay, okay. There’s some memory involved.”
“What I want to know is, why is there any troubled dream when it’s, what, four-thirty in the afternoon?”
“You should talk. Mr. Nocturnal. You were always sleeping in the afternoon, fearful that the sun’s rays might spoil your perfect skin.”
“And it would have. The great giver of life also destroys. That’s one of the Great Chuckles.”
“Hmm?”
“Oh, that’s kind of an inside joke. Around here, we don’t say great irony. We say great chuckle. Because the Big Guy is a comedian.”
“I see.”
“‘Isn’t that Henny Youngman? No, that’s God—he just thinks he’s Henny Youngman!’”
“So you’re in heaven, are you? Not the other place?”
“Well, it doesn’t exactly work like that. You’ll see.”
“Please, tell me more. I’m interested.”
“There is no hell. There’s just this place. And it’s boring. The earthly vale, that’s where all the action is. That’s why I don’t like to see you sleeping at four-thirty in the pee-em.”
“I was out last night with a friend of mine, and we had a little bit too much to drink, and then we—”
“Fornicated like silver martens?”
“How do silver martens fornicate?”
“Quickly. It’s painless, but also pleasureless.”
“Well, all right. We fornicated like silver martens. The point is, I didn’t get much sleep, so I’m having a little nap. There’s nothing wrong with that. Dagwood Bumstead has naps, right, curled up on the couch with all those little z’s hovering over his head. No one thinks of Dagwood Bumstead as a slobbering degenerate.”
“Dagwood fucks Blondie up the ass.”
“Ha! It’s good to see you haven’t changed, you’re still the same old Milligan.”
“No, Phil. I’ve changed. No getting around it.”
“Anyway, anyway, it’s a little hard napping around here. The phone is ringing off the wall, except it’s not on the wall, you know, it’s one of those portable phones, so it keeps ringing off the, you know, wherever the hell I left the damn thing. My brother called about an hour ago.”
“Jay.”
“Yeah, Jay.”
“I like Jay. He’s a great musician. An artist.”
“What does that mean? That I’m not an artist, right?”
“Phil, what you are has absolutely nothing to do with what your brother is.”
“Oh, fuck, what was that, some kind of enlightened wisdom or something?”
“One has one’s moments.”
“Anyway, it’s just not true. We had the same damn upbringing, didn’t we?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no, dead man?”
“You had the same mom and lived in the same house, but you two had vastly different experiences …”
“That’s what I said. Because he called me up, you know, and he’s all Phil, you got this wrong, you got that wrong, and I told him, My experience was different than yours.”
“Oh no, in that particular case, you got everything wrong. Listen to Jay.”
“We’re going out tomorrow night. He wants to meet on the street, when the sun goes down. Ooo-wooo, very dramatic.”
“Tomorrow night. Yes. A nice touch.”
“Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but to what do I owe the pleasure of this phone call from the Great Beyond? What exactly do you want?”
“I just wanted to chat. So were you out with what’s her name, cute little makeup girl with the perfect butt?”
“Her name is Bellamy.”
“Hey, don’t get all, don’t get all … shirty.”
“And no, that didn’t work out with Bellamy.”
“Sure it did. It broke up your marriage, right? Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“What, do you take psychology classes up in heaven?”
“I think about things, Phil. I’ve got a lot of time to just think.”
“You think about me?”
“Sure. Because you’re in crisis.”
“Oh, gawd.”
“So if you weren’t out with Bellamy, who were you out with?”
“Rainie van der Glick.”
“Ah! Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy Fucks.”
“See, now, that just proves that you are nothing but grog-addled fabrication. Because there’s no way you could know about that.”
“That’s not true. I was on her radio show, remember?”
“Oh, sweet jesus, don’t remind me.”
“And then we went out for a coffee and, in point of fact, had sex. But we didn’t fornicate like silver martens, Phil. Not at all. It was very sweet. Tender.”
“You had sex in the midst of your spiritual conversion?”
“Sure. Sex is a beautiful thing, Phil. It’s one of the great joys.”
“This from a man who had a, I don’t even know how to describe it, a leather suspension harness in his rumpus room. There were instruments of torture, implements of perversion. You had a trunk full of wigs and an endless collection of red shoes with stiletto heels.”
“But listen to what I’m saying to you, Phil. None of that was as rewarding as simply engaging. I had all those devices because I was afraid of contact. I had those clothes because I was afraid to be naked.”
“Hold on. You used to wear the wigs and high heels?”
“Of course. What did you think?”
“And you had joyous sex with van der Glick?”
“We made contact.”
“I’m not certain I’m believing this.”
“You don’t believe I had sex with Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy Fucks? Come on, Philly. She had sex with Bob Hamel, for goodness sake.”
“There! You’ve just positively identified yourself as mere figment.”
“I know Bob Hamel. The Dullest Man in Heaven, we call him.”
“He’s dead?”
“Testicular cancer. He tried to call, but you weren’t around.”
“Okay, look, I know why you’re calling.”
“See that? See that little dodge, that little sidestep, that little sashay? When guilt comes, you just step out of the way.”
“You want me to feel in some way responsible for what happened to you.”
“I want you to feel responsible? Why is this bird coming to land on my shoulders? Whether or not you feel responsible is your lookout.”
“Well, I don’t. You were fucked up. You were always
fucked up. You’re a fuck-up.”
“Fair enough. I own what happened to me. I started reading the Bible—the one you told me to read—and I started thinking about the Good Samaritan. And Jesus Christ, of course. I started reading all these stories about self-sacrifice, and they started to change me, because you always told me I was a self-centred egotistical bastard. Which was true, quite true. And then you wrote that scene, you know, like in that movie, the one that we watched that night when we were all fucked up on árbol de los brujos, so I—”
“Okay, okay, I can see how I was kind of involved.”
“Uh-huh. Kind of sort of.”
“But, Ed, I’ll be candid. I can’t feel any guilt about what happened to you. I’ve got too much guilt already, I can’t take any more. It would destroy me.”
“What do you feel so guilty about? Screwing the makeup girl?”
“I guess so.”
“Oh, bullshit. The only reason you had an affair with Bellamy was so you’d have an excuse to feel guilty.”
“Look, I don’t need this nickel-ante psychology from the Other Side. What’s more, the other phone, I mean the real phone, is ringing somewhere. So I’m going to have to say goodbye.”
“Look, you’ve got to forgive yourself. For whatever it is you did. I have no idea what it is, and I don’t care. But you can’t forgive yourself until you look at the thing, and acknowledge you were wrong. Once you’ve forgiven yourself for the big thing, maybe you can forgive yourself for what you did to me.” “And what then? You’ll find eternal peace?”
“No. But I might win the pool.”
“Okay, enough. I’m going to answer the other phone. The earthly phone.”
“I’m just trying to help. You’re fucking up. Pull up your socks.”
“That’s your great wisdom? Pull up your socks?”
“Basically, yeah. Turn things around. You can do it, baby. Turn
things around.”
15 | ALL SOULS’ NIGHT
“VAN DER GLICK?”
“Huh, wha?”
“You’re fucking van der Glick?”
“Ronnie?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, my boner, I should have identified myself. Hello, Philip? It’s Veronica, your estranged wife.”
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