King of the World

by Thomas Berger

  He returned to bed and cocooned himself in the blanket. He hated suspense. In detective novels he turned to the last chapter just after reading the first. He also disliked analysis, and was embarrassed by anything that could not be translated into instant emotion.

  —Chase Manhattan Plaza had turned out to be a huge rubbish heap among the ruins of several buildings that had once been made chiefly of glass, judging from the greenish chunks in the rubble and the gritty powder underfoot. His pumps were covered with it. Witkovsky must have given this address in jest. There was no possible place here for a studio. Nevertheless, Cornell had tramped about, virtually ruining his last pair of shoes and snagging his stockings on the rusty edge of a fallen girder.

  At last he reached a concrete parapet, giving onto some sort of dry well which the rubble had filled to within ten feet of the brim. He flapped his hankie to clear the dust from a fanny-spaced portion of the parapet and sat down. Scarcely had this happened when he heard, from behind him, a vile obscenity, though rather cutely pronounced. He turned and saw Witkovsky at the top of a ladder rising from the filled well.

  She wore an unspeakable coverall, splashed with paint, torn out at the elbows, unbuttoned at the fly.

  “Shithead! You’re trespassing.” Her face was smudged with filth. She could have been a member of the company of derelicts who had harassed Cornell on the route down when he had strayed into the Skid Row of midtown Park Avenue and been cursed, kicked, and spat upon for his error.

  “Miss Witkovsky, I met you outside the Dondis Gallery….” He went through it again.

  Witkovsky’s indignation became sullenness.

  “I don’t sell pictures behind my dealer’s back,” she said. “I never allow the public into my studio. I have contempt for people who think me a genius, and I ignore everyone else.”

  She went down the ladder. Cornell looked over the parapet and saw what he had not seen on the earlier cursory glance: that the mound of rubble sloped away on one side and that the walls of the well were glass, or apparently once had been such, with some panes remaining and others replaced with plywood sheets. He watched Witkovsky slide one of the latter aside and admit herself to whatever subterranean space lay beyond.

  Now, in those days, Cornell still possessed some spirit. Furthermore, he was desperate. He had been terribly lucky to find the job at Dondis’ so soon, and terribly stupid to give it up so irresponsibly; he understood that now. At this point he would have surrendered his virginity to anybody who would have taken it.

  He thought otherwise a quarter-hour later, after he had shamelessly gone down the ladder and into Witkovsky’s studio, explained his plight to the eccentric artist, been thrown onto a foam-rubber mattress and brutally penetrated with a massive dildo.

  Once she had had him, however, Witkovsky showed her gentler side, for behind that hard shell she was not the world’s worst gal.

  “Artists have to be tough,” she told him, “to survive in a commercial culture. And if the Philistines ain’t bad enough, your so-called admirers will eat you up to feed their own squalid little egos.” She put some Vaseline on his bruised parts and then dusted the area with Mexican Heat Powder. She patted his right ham. “Don’t take it so hard, kid. You would have lost it sooner or later anyway, and at least I’m a celebrity. A pimp might of grabbed you and sold you to a series of slobbering old women, pocketed most of your earnings, and kicked your ass out when you lost your looks.”

  She helped him to his feet and pushed him towards a door. “Go in the toilet now and fix your face.”

  He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and murmured: “So that’s making love.” The tears had made his eyeliner run down in two black lines. What a boy must do to survive!

  When he came out, Witkovsky asked: “Want a bite? I forget about eating when I work.”

  Her kitchen had been improvised at one end of the large but low-ceilinged and dark room. At the other end a big canvas was spread upon the concete floor, with tubes of paint and brushes scattered nearby, the area illuminated by floodlights on tripods.

  While she went to a little half-refrigerator and took out packages of frozen provender, Cornell looked at the work in progress on the floor. It seemed to him a magnificent beginning, already populated with a host of brawny women assaulting male nudes against a backdrop of classical architecture, columns, arches, and the like. On the horizon, not yet reached by pigment, were charcoal outlines of hills: seven, by his count. He tried to remember from his art-appreciation courses the principles by which one judged a picture. Color. Yes, the flesh tones, always very important, glowed. Perspective. This seemed very accurate, from the prominent figures in the foreground to the much smaller hills in the distance. Moral significance….

  He called: “Miss Witkovsky, I’m admiring your new painting. Am I right in thinking it concerns ancient Rome?”

  Witkovsky shouted back: “You can call me Pauline, for Mary’s sake!” She slammed a pot down on a two-burner electric hotplate. “Shit, food bores me. I wish you could live on pills.” She tore open a frozen-food container and dumped the solid rectangle of its contents into the pot.

  Cornell went back to the kitchen area.

  “Here,” said he, “let me.” He reached for the spoon she held.

  “You?” asked Pauline. “With that face and body, you’re also a cook?”

  “My minor was home-ec,” said Cornell. He looked into the battered vessel and saw a glutinous-looking mess of melting succotash.

  Pauline cocked her head and smiled at him with her yellowed teeth. “Hmm.” She patted his rump. “I could use somebody like you around here.” She patted him again. “How’s the old heinie now?”

  He smiled back. “Better. I guess one gets used to it in time.”

  “First is always worst,” Pauline said. “You’re a cute kid.” She kissed his cheek. “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Georgie.”

  “Well, Georgie, so you like the picture? It’s The Rape of the Sabine Men.”

  The next day Cornell got his suitcase from the residence and moved into Pauline’s studio. He never got to like sex any better, but fortunately Pauline was not as erotic as she had pretended to be at the outset, especially when working on a major canvas. Her typical day began with a glass of lemon juice and hot water, to open up her bowels, and then she settled down to hour after hour of pigment and brush.

  In the midafternoon he would prepare a sandwich on which he took some trouble—perhaps chopped egg mixture with piccalilli, slice of tomato, on wholewheat toast—put the paper plate and the cup of tea beside her on the floor, and steal quietly away to his kitchen corner, where he was already at work on dinner, which he generally made an elaborate affair. Always a first course, often soup as well, homemade, none of your tinned stuff, followed by a good solid roast or hearty casserole—he had persuaded Pauline to buy a little electric oven, and he worked wonders with it. Finally, a real dessert, fresh fruit and thick cream, or chocolate mousse, never the packaged puddings and frozen strudels Pauline had formerly eaten. They were both putting on weight.

  Dinner was served on an enameled steel table which he had cleared of the tubes of paints, palette knives, and turpentine rags, which he spread with the lime-green linen mats Pauline had let him buy. There were napkins to match, decent china plates of a simple conservative design, and the cutlery he kept polished. The center bowl of paper flowers, flanked by tell candles, completed the scene, an island of graciousness and serenity amid the stormy chaos of a working artist’s studio.

  Those were the golden days. They both labored from morn till night. He kept the kitchen and bathroom spotless, and there was always some mending to be done for Pauline, who was typically rough on clothes, or laundry, or checkbooks to balance, bills to be paid. Her accounts had been in quite a mess when he moved in. The true artist, she was indifferent to such matters, and to all else, really. At first he would be hurt when after a hard day’s painting she sat down at his lovely table and f
ed like an animal, spitting onto the floor fragments of foods she did not recognize or like, conversing in grunts, even belching vilely if the need arose.

  But as he persisted, she began to change, to notice the dishes with some particularity, even to savor his cuisine. She went so far as to develop an appetite for certain favorites: tarragon chicken, breast of veal stuffed with a forcemeat of sausage, authentic Irish lamb stew.

  “I’ll still take a broiled steak and baked potato,” said she, wiping her mouth with the napkin now and not the tail of her blue work-shirt. “But there’s something to be said for this fancy-ass bellyfiller.”

  Pauline had dropped out of high school in her final year and hit the road. She pumped gas for a while in Juneau, Alaska; was on the bum in Flagstaff, Arizona; joined a work gang re surfacing an asphalt road near Davenport, Iowa; and discovered her pictorial talent only when the other itinerant laborers in the Kansas bunkhouse admired her random sketches on the bunkhouse wall: luscious seminudes, men with one thigh bared or in bulging lace undies.

  “A bunch of us used to go into town at night,” she reminisced. “Drink and fight in taverns.” She put her neck at an angle and asked Cornell to find the scar, a thin white tracing just behind her dirty ear. “That was a Hell’s Angel switchblade. I got her in the guts with a broken beer mug. Like butchering a sow, I tell you! I don’t know if she made it. I blew town. I bet the sheriff’s still lookin’ for me.”

  Cornell loved these stories of a life so far beyond his purview. Until now he had been a sheltered schoolboy.

  Later Pauline took a sketch course at the YMCA in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where daytimes she worked as mechanic in a garage and body shop….

  —Again Cornell’s recollections were interrupted by the opening of the cell door. Harry had returned. His slippers could be heard moving to the other cot, which then creaked under the weight of a descending body.

  Strange, strange it was, but Cornell did not dare to speak. It was none of his business. If explanation there was, Harry would no doubt give it next morning. And Cornell had better get to sleep without further nostalgia for the happy time of old—which anyway had ended unpleasantly: the halcyon days had come to an abrupt end when Pauline finished the Sabine picture. She went out to deliver it to Dondis and returned stinking drunk with a little redhead in tow. When Cornell protested, Pauline showed him the door. He was too proud ever to go back.

  He was philosophical now about the affair. Artists were all like that, no doubt. And no doubt they should be permitted their delinquencies. In later years other women had been quite as cruel to him without the justification of creativity: Alice, who beat him more than once, was an accountant; Martha Headway, a used-car salesman.

  … Perhaps with a good night’s sleep he might arise early enough to do a passable job with the razor. Cornell missed his little apartment. He had always been ill at ease in the group residences, full of chattering, spiteful, jealous males. He really was a private sort of person, content with his own little corner of the world, if not precisely happy. Now it was gone.

  Harry was still sleeping when Cornell awakened, or at least he was in bed, face turned towards the other wall. The ceiling light was on. Cornell lay there watching him. No way of telling what time it was. Harry was the only gauge of their schedule. Cornell awoke with that understanding. Harry was a very special person.

  Cornell at last coughed loudly, turned the other way, and shut his eyes. Harry could be heard getting out of bed. He came over and shook Cornell.

  “Come on, lazybones,” Harry said. “Hit the deck. They’ll be here soon.”

  Cornell rolled over and with simulated difficulty opened his eyes.

  “Good morning,” he said. “If it is morning.”

  “Light’s on,” said Harry. “That’s how you tell.”

  Harry’s brazen smile was infuriating to Cornell, all the more so because it was painted across a beardless face.

  Cornell swung himself to a sitting position and probed with his feet for the slippers.

  “You go ahead and hook up the razor and take your shave,” he told Harry. “I’ll wash first.”

  “I’m all done already,” Harry said, with a demonstrative rubbing of the chin. “Nothing seems to wake you.”

  “I’m a terribly sound sleeper.” Cornell said this in his childish, mock self-accusatory style, with eyeballs rolling up into his forehead and little shoulder movements. He had learned this in adolescence, watching the professional cuteness of teenaged actors. Women seemed to like it, or anyway those who doted on boyishness. He had not done it in a long time, though; it was somewhat grotesque at twenty-nine. He was using it now to conceal his surveillance of Harry.

  Cornell had awakened with the conviction that Harry was a woman. He knew not whence this idea had come; nor, for that matter, why he had not enjoyed, or suffered, it earlier. The clues had been there. In fact, Harry had not made a very good job of the imposture. There was in that negligence an implied insult to Cornell’s powers of eye and mind. Somehow his pride was more badly wounded than it had been even by the demotion to janitor, the arrest and jailing. One thing Cornell could never endure was being deceived. He was by nature extremely gullible. He knew that. But the alternative was cynicism. He would rather be dead than cynical. He never wanted to know how things really were, which always ended up as hopeless. Perhaps it was not deception, then, but revelation that he found unacceptable: Harry should have done a better job.

  “You’re a very quiet person,’” he said. “But why do you always replace the cover of the light, when it only has to be taken off again for me?”

  Harry squinted at him, then seemed to make a conscious effort not to stand on this point.

  “The guards make spot checks without warning. Better to go to a little extra trouble than to get caught. I was up and shaving an hour ago when the light first came on. No need to wake you, sleeping soundly as you were.”

  It was just barely possible that he was telling the truth. But he was she, so therefore all the particulars, even if true, were but aspects of a general lie.

  “But,” said Harry as Cornell prepared to stand up, “I don’t’ mind going through it again.” He fetched the screwdriver from the box.

  “But why should you bother?” Cornell asked. “Let me.” He reached for the tool.

  Harry pulled it away. “You might hurt yourself,” he said.

  “But I’m taller than you. You can barely reach the socket.”

  Harry stepped onto his bed and began to unscrew the framed panel of glass. He had very fine ankles and remarkably neat kneecaps. His feet were unusually small for even a man of his modest height. But the width of his pelvis was significantly larger by the same gauge. The jail dress was tight across the hips, then suddenly slack at the waistline. The bosom was indeterminate. The rounded chin was smooth and pale; the nostrils were tiny and divided by the most delicate filament; the red pageboy was a wig; and he had no Adam’s apple.

  Cornell stood up, pressed his cheek against the gentle swell of Harry’s soft abdomen, and, clasping his arms around and under her bottom, which was more ample to the touch than to the eye, he lifted her off the bed, held her for a moment, and threw her down. He had intended to do this more violently; he was strangely inhibited: she felt so light and yet so full. He wanted to hurt her, but in some magic way that would produce no damage. He developed a kind of heartbeat in his groin.

  And then an excruciating pain, for no sooner had she hit the bed than she came up again with two claws into his testicles. He recoiled onto the other cot, and she followed him, hooking in again. A spasm lifted his right knee forcefully. It took her in the solar plexus. She became a sphere, rolling between the beds, arms around calves, spine to floor, buttocks high: she wore jockey shorts, and not the standard male jail-underwear.

  Cornell seized the electric-razor cord and bound her in that position.

  He had never seen quite that combination of hatred and pain on a face, male or female. She had lo
st her powers of speech.

  “Well, Harry” said he. He had difficulty in speaking. He seemed to have a volleyball between his thighs. “Well.”

  She gathered herself and spat into his face. He was bending over, to favor his sensitivity as well as to address her.

  He wiped himself on the sleeve of the dress.

  “You’re a filthy spy, aren’t you?”

  The first spit had taken all her available strength. She pursed her lips again but they froze in position. He knelt beside her, spreading his legs as wide as possible, which helped.

  “The name’s Harriet, isn’t it? Well, Harriet…” He was in a rut: had he nothing better to do than gloat? Yes—worry about his next move. The guards would arrive soon. He had no plan whatever. He had acted on impulse, out of spite, revenge, bruised vanity. But Harry—Harriet—was one of them. He tried to think, chattering meanwhile to distract her from his desperation.

  “You should have been more clever. You’re arrogant, Harriet, and it has made you lazy. You could at least have pretended to shave. And then slipping out last night before I was asleep—that was just plain stupid, Harriet. But you did get one thing out of me: poor Charlie’s name. There wasn’t any truth serum, was there? You tricked me. Well, I’ve got you now!” He felt a growing panic. It was all he could do to keep his fingers from his mouth.

  And then the rapping at the door!

  But breakfast came first. He clutched his left breast and remembered that. He slid open the panel, standing to the side, and accepted the trays. Spilling the contents to the floor, he got back to Harriet and closed her opening mouth before she could cry out. In the struggle her wig had become askew, and he pulled it off now. Her own blonde hair was in the short, neat cut of a woman.