by Tito Perdue
“Did van Gogh need green toothpaste?”
Leaving their luxurious compartment, they paced down to the dining room and to a table where she could be viewed from different approaches. Everyone desired her, but no one could have her save himself alone; it was important that they understood this. He had brought his revolver, but didn’t expect to need it, not among this prosperous and semi-civilized crowd.
By good luck, the waiter was not quite as snotty as expected. He recommended a certain wine, and after deep consideration, the boy consented to it. In fact, he was given a mere smudge of the stuff while the girl received nothing. He could feel his gorge rising. The menu itself, printed in Old English, was as tall and narrow as a folded newspaper. It alluded to all sorts of dishes unknown to either of them. He pointed to the name of a cheese and artichoke salad, a good choice apparently, that sent the waiter hurrying off to fetch it. It gave the boy a minute to focus on the calm, erect, alert, intelligent, and always somewhat melancholy phenomenon sitting just across from him.
“I look at you and . . .”
“I know, I know.”
“It’s killing me is what it’s doing! And you just keep making it worse!”
“I know. It’s worse for me, too.”
“You are unbearable.”
“I know. And I’m going to have to pay for it, too.”
“I pay for it every day!”
“I know. But it’s what you wanted.”
“No, what I really want is to . . . Oh, I don’t know. Conglomerate with you. Like two amoebas.”
Came the waiter. The salad comprised not just the aforementioned, but avocado, too, and sticks of celery. He tried to recalculate the cost of this meal. The girl was more accustomed to such surroundings, courtesy of the half-dozen persons who had wanted to marry her. There were enough silver spoons and crystal goblets in the place to have salaried the Confederate Army for a month.
“This is a vile society,” he concluded. “Vile, vile, vile.”
“I know, I know. But name me a good one.”
From nearby tables, half a dozen diners were staring at them. How had such a one as he ensnared such a one as she? He grinned at them. The food was good, of course, perhaps five percent better than a frankfurter (frankfurter with sauerkraut) available for seventy-five cents on the other side of the street. They dined, appalled by the sight of middle-aged people—he could have thrashed any three of them by himself alone—striving to dance to a short-handed orchestra composed of saxophones, mostly.
They left their table when came the time for that and then ventured out to the verandah with its ocean view. The night was certainly a good one, as such things go, and the Moon was shining greenly over a sea much like the one that lay over against Cornwall in Tristan’s day. Far from shore they saw a ship with lights aglow in the Captain’s quarters, enough pirated spoons and goblets in that cabin, he supposed, to pay King Richard’s ransom three times over.
“Should we go swimming now?” she asked.
“Far too late,” he said, watching to see if she might cry.
Returning to their upholstered apartment, he ignited a cigarette and checked the lock, startled to find that the girl had somehow gotten into her one-piece white bathing suit before he could supervise the process.
“Dagnab it!”
“I know, I know. Next time. If you’re good.”
The sea was dark and green and had been set aside particularly for them. Oh yes, there might be a few fisherman still functioning on the wrong side of the world. They swam out a distance and then turned and critiqued the lantern-lit shore where hundreds of people had come together to wait out the night. The surf shimmied about their knees. Now and then a minnow bumped blindly into one or another of them before dashing off apologetically. Everyone knows about the Moon. Reflected in the standard ripples and routine waves, the light splintered into uncountable elements. Not so far away a dolphin emerged, ejecting gallons of sputum that lingered in the air. Sometimes a single moment stands in lieu of an entire epoch almost.
They embraced, providing the sight of two human figures stumbling clumsily against the grain of the current. Her face, luminous, joyous, dotted with ocean drops, drove him insane.
“It hurts me just to look at you. Hurts bad. I want to die.”
“Not yet.”
“When?”
Possibly she answered, though he couldn’t hear her at just that moment in the surf.
They ran up and down the shore, the farm girl screaming each time he came close. Once before he had forced screams from her like those. He said:
“We’ve had two-and-a-half thousand years of Western civilization, and here are we, you and me, standing right smack in the middle of it. That’s why it all got started in the first place.”
“For you and me?”
“Precisely. But now Time is getting old and wants to rest.”
“Not yet.”
“When?”
Again, no answer came back to him from the ambient noises.
They swam a distance, but never so far as to let the sharks get at them. Knowing about the deleterious effects of salt water on numinous flesh, he soon extracted the girl and set her cello out of reach of the incoming tide.
“Play ‘Claire de Lune,’” he required.
There were simply too many stars, too lovely a girl, too many phosphorescent things riding shoreward on glass-colored waves—he was in bad shape. Too much beauty all too abruptly presented, he was, I say it again, in very bad shape. Together they climbed to the hotel, went inside their place, and locked the door. The curtain was opaque. She was moist, and her suit had conspired with the devil to make her . . . You know what I mean.
“If you were any good,” she said, “you’d help me out of this bathing suit.”
“I have a weak heart.”
“And you’d kiss me in all sorts of places.”
“You wouldn’t allow it.”
“Don’t make me wait.”
She spoke. Her words had wings.
Fifty-five
He didn’t know if he got any sleep that night. Reporting to me later, he described how they passed the following day splashing about in the water and sleeping in the sand. The clouds, he said, had come to a halt under the Sun, lending a coppery glaze to her hair. He doesn’t know how long they lay there, sometimes sleeping, sometimes forcing their eyebeams as deeply as they would go into one another’s over-heated brains. No shame, not even when a mob of little white crabs stood watching from no great distance away.
Came evening, they packed up their cello and other scant belongings and set out toward the west. It was not much past midnight, not yet dark enough for the boy to do his best driving. They encountered other cars and other drivers, supernumeraries foiling his dream that the girl and he had at last become the only people on the world. Or that they might go everywhere and see all things, venture in and out of abandoned cities, keeping vigil by night from lofty rooftops. And all this while the girl would still be there, smiling back at him through music and cigarette smoke. Things like that don’t survive for long; he knew it, she knew it, they knew it jointly.
“Look at that Moon!”
“Beware lest it look back at you.”
“Is that one of your philosophers?”
They were listening just then to the fourth movement of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, a superlative recording by the Utah Orchestra. Outside, the wind-distraught trees were slapping one another about the head and shoulders, and in one notable case, actually thrashing its arms against the ground. The car itself was old and thin, and a good-enough gust might shove them off the road entirely.
“Careful!” she recommended.
“Naw, they wouldn’t dare.”
An egoist on principle, he said: “You must never think of us as ordinary people, dear. Because we aren’t.”
But by one a.m. the Moon had disappeared, and the advertisements that decorated the highway had lost some of their aesthetic value. The
y came to a traffic signal standing out in the middle of nowhere, a reminder that death might be waiting up ahead. He sped past a location where three roads came together.
“There,” he said. “It was a place just like that where Oedipus killed his father.”
“Good grief. Why?”
“And that windmill? Straight out of Bruegel.”
“There?”
“No, no, that’s just a gallows with a skeleton hanging from it.”
“It’s a tree!”
“Sure, that’s what they want you to think.”
“It is what I think. Want me to put on some music now?”
“Normally, yes. But not tonight.”
They sped around a curve at thirty-six miles the hour, but then slowed as a concession to their ageing car. They passed an old-style Negro, his favorite kind, hobbling down the highway with a cane and a mess of catfish on a string. He witnessed, did my student, one of the larger stars blaze up suddenly and then fade out forever. How strange all things are! All those heavenly bodies and so forth, apparently they had come into being for the delight of those capable of being delighted by them.
“Did you see that star?”
She nodded.
“It’s meant for us alone.”
“Well, you did say one time that we’re the only people in the world.”
“Yes, I remember that.”
“Except that nobody realizes it yet?”
“They’d be the last to know.”
They came home just as the Sun was rising, leaving them with but moments to get inside.
Fifty-six
In the days that followed, they continued to pursue their lives from about thirty miles apart. He had wanted to go and take up in the same town, the same apartment indeed, but the girl wouldn’t hear of it.
“No, we have to be new each time we meet. I’d rather die than let you get tired of me.”
“That could never happen.”
“And I don’t want us to know too much about each other. Then you’d see how awful I really am.”
“I like the awful part, too.”
“No.”
Forced by circumstances to do so, they replaced the car in October with a retired Studebaker left unattended by an elderly widow who wouldn’t use it. They paid too dear for it and then paid even more to have a radio and heater installed. The car was suffused with an odd fragrance redolent of an earlier epoch, a feature that sealed the purchase. He didn’t haggle over the price.
With a lot of money still remaining in their account, he found that he was working less and reading more. He knew a number of people who had rather work than read, preferring to build up their estates for the happiness of people who were as likely as not to prove despicable. Instead of that, he began to explore the Hindu wisdom, and after giving up on German with its vocabulary, jumped (temporarily) into the Slavic tongues, which he also failed to master.
“You want to be absolutely certain that you never actually learn anything, is that how it is with you?”
“I get bored,” he said. “A person like me.”
“And hard subjects are more boring than easy ones?”
“They’re all boring for a person like me. Once I get the gist of it.”
He was not, however, bored with the girl, and after three months of heavy use, the Studebaker also began to fall apart.
“Why not move in with her?” I promoted.
“I want to!” he said twice.
“But she won’t have it?”
“No.”
“She wants to be fresh and strange each time you meet?”
“Yeah.”
God, she was smart.
Worse than October and bringing higher winds, November now had the girl running up and down the state and even beyond it to give recitals and participate in a quartet that was beginning to make a name, sometimes attracting audiences large enough to defray the cost of travel. She received another marriage proposal that month and actually accepted a modeling contract with a local hairstyling salon. She accepted the occasional flowers and jewelry, but declined a two weeks’ stay in the Bahamas. But best was the seventeenth, when she was delivered a pink envelope mailed from Europe. Naturally, it wasn’t until after she had opened the envelope and in due course had taken out the contents that she read the actual letter itself.
The message, from Romania, did contain a number of understandable phrases in English. She was being asked, beseeched rather, to join The Viteazul Orchestra on a temporary basis at a salary characteristic of the nation in question. Together with modeling, it would give her the best income of her career and go a long way toward the support of the boy in his ongoing struggles with the economic system. She had studied Latin in high school and expected to fit easily into this one-time Roman colony, provided her boyfriend consented.
“Absolutely not!” He laughed. “What would I do in Romania?”
“You could stay here.”
“What did you say just now?”
“Stay here.”
He laughed.
She needed permission from her college, and then would have to dip into their account for airfare. She spent two days at the farm, valuable time during which she saw to the mowing, and after some wrangling, managed to persuade the trombonist to look after the livestock and her father. She had to quit the quartet of course, which shortly afterward dissolved. It left her with just twenty-eight hours for the boy.
He yowled.
“No, no, no, no, no,” and so on.
“I have to.”
“You do not have to. You have to stay here. Staying here is the exact opposite of going to Romania. You want to join up with the gypsies? Well, go ahead and do so! What do I care!”
“It won’t be long.”
“Won’t be long, she says. And what am I supposed to do? Sit around reading pornographic magazines?”
“No! I want you to stay away from those things!”
“It’ll kill me. Might as well just kill me right here and now!” (He took up his three-inch Buck Knife, opened and locked it, and handed it to the girl.) “Here, just stick it in right . . . here!” (He showed where to stick it.) “Go ahead, I don’t care. You don’t care, I don’t care. Go ahead! Get it over with! Nobody cares!”
I have no doubt he was crying again.
They had just twenty-three hours left to them.
Fifty-seven
He began by escorting her outside to catch the failing Sun in her hair. Time and genetics demand that boy loves girl, even if time and genetics sometimes go too far.
“Oh, God.”
“I know, I know. It hurts me more than you.”
“Very funny. Me, I’ll be dead by the time you get back!”
“I’ll hurry.”
“Sure. And meantime you’ll be loitering over there in that awful goddamn time zone with those people. Not even I can learn Hungarian.”
“Romanian.”
“Screwed-up verb system. And you think Japanese is bad?”
She laughed. It shouldn’t be, beauty like this drawing him ever so slowly into the face of the scorching Sun.
“Not afraid of you,” he claimed.
“Should be.”
“I can’t endure it.”
“You must.”
“I just can’t!”
“Actually, you don’t love me one-tenth as much as you should. If you did, you’d turn yourself into a tiny little mite and live in my ear.”
“And go where you go?”
“Of course. Or until I get tired of you.”
“You’re already tired of me.”
“Little bit.”
He chased her to the next yard and forced her to the ground. The woman next door, the one on the porch with the broom in her hands, was not at all sure they were playing. Boy and girl were both crying by now, an established tradition between these two. She watched, the housekeeper, as with rough fingers he forced open the girl’s mouth and tried to insert his head inside.
“I want you to.”
“And cut off your fucking head and eat it.”
“Do it.”
“I don’t have any peace anymore!”
“You’re not supposed to. That’s why they sent me here.”
“They?”
“Sure. Nobody can be as conceited as you and get away with it.”
She smiled wickedly, edging him up to insanity once again. Would only they could sink about a hundred feet deep into that lady’s backyard and repose together there for, say, about ten thousand hundred years.
In the event, they remained in the apartment till Tuesday, striving with but partial success to allay themselves with frenzied behavior. He kissed her feet. She tore his hair, and so on. But the earth in that district was so hard and cold, they weren’t able to dig that above-mentioned hole in which to retire for all those years. He beat her. They wept. They dwelled in paradise.
Came Tuesday he drove her down to Atlanta, a well-attested location where in old times two surveying lines had intersected. They hated it. Both these people were accustomed to streets terminating in trees and green fields.
“I could read a book in the time it’s taking that goddamn traffic light to change! Come here, people, come and take a look at the corpse! Here lies someone who used to be a man!”
“Oh, for goodness’ sakes. I’m coming back!”
“No, you aren’t. You’ll be married to half a dozen people before that happens!”
They went on, passing successfully through a succession of traffic signs that seemed to contradict each another. He spotted an advertisement for a certain shaving cream and then a larger and even more artistic sign promoting a form of dental insurance.
“Is this what life is for?” he asked militantly. “The Greeks would have been nauseated.”
“We can talk about it later, alright? I’m going to be leaving in just a few minutes.”
She was right. Overhead, airplanes were coming and going at the rate of about one every two minutes, enormous vehicles threatening to land. At length he found a parking deck within walking distance of the airport, and after lifting out the cello and the heavier of the girl’s two suitcases, set out on the first installment of the girl’s long trip to Europe. He hated to see it, his gorgeous friend exposed to the curiosity of this country and that one, and their kind of people.