

### EMBERS

Early Stories

by

S. P. Elledge

Embers: Early Stories by S. P. Elledge

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2016 S. P. Elledge

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**Table of Contents:**

1. An Abcedarium

2. Manifesto

3. Even Emma Bovary

4. Angel My Angel

5. My Big Ideas

6. Punch and Judy Today

7. Bad Baby

8. Last of the Casanovas

9. The Big Beat

10. Do the Ennui

11. Assassins

12. The Boy Who Painted Himself as Christ

13. Indigo Blue

13.2 Another Abecadarium

for old friends
An Abecedarium

ADRIENNE smiled to herself, running her fingers lightly along the hood of the gleaming limousine. Nothing would stop her now. She had the deed, the valise, and the complete trust of the Thistlewaites. Her smile grew more open, more defiant as she slipped into the backseat. Odd, how the woman she saw in her compact case looked no different from an hour ago. She set about remaking her face, but could not resist one final glance through the tinted glass at the burning stables at last retreating into the distance. Now, why wouldn't the chauffeur drive any faster?

BASIL had run six blocks in the rain to see her before she got the chance to open the letter. He stood there, dripping, his white ducks splashed with mud, until she answered the doorbell. He wanted her to know he had never felt more in love, despite her uncle's disapproval. She did not invite him in—she was crumpling something in her hands. "I... I don't ever want to see you again," she said with utter calm.

CELESTE tapped the toe of her bone-white pump. Her silk chemise was sticking moistly to the small of her back. She glared at the cigarette stub with its vermilion ring of lipstick. Leslie has gone too far this time, she thought, too incredibly far.

DUNCAN flung the sable, the brooch, the Chablis-soaked slippers, and the Parisian negligée off the chateau's balcony. For the coup de grâce, he added the nearly transparent designer lingerie, which was borne aloft like silken leaves. That would teach her!

ESME liked the soft, subtle, soothing sounds of crêpe rustling in florists' boxes, crystal chandeliers chiming in hotel lobbies, fashion magazine pages turning crisply in the breeze of ceiling fans, ice crackling in tall goblets of unadulterated vermouth and bitters, and long moist kisses in wistaria-shadowed gazebos. But perhaps the most pleasant sound she had ever heard was the popping of small bubbles on the surface of the penthouse pool, rather like champagne going flat. She felt strangely elated knowing the bubbles arose from Cyrus, who (still in dinner jacket and tie) lay motionless on the bottom of the pool.

FOSTER cringed when Lorna mentioned impotencies. And he was certain she misplaced the accent just to spite him. He thought of seizing her wrists.

GENEVIEVE concluded the letter: "You must try to understand that it had to end this way. We were poisoning each other's soul. I can scarcely hold this pen as I recollect all those wanton, wasted nights.... It is resolved. I shall board the next express out of Southampton. Adieu!" That done, she folded the stationery, inserted it into the envelope, darted her quick little red tongue along the flap, and closed it. She sighed but once as she pressed Brandon's signet ring into the sealing wax.

"HECTOR, darling!" the girl who wore too much of everything cried as she emerged from the phaeton. The entire garden party turned as one and gasped. Hector saw there was no place to hide.

ILSE finished her confession and offered Madame Glynne a demitasse of Ceylonese tea, so rare and expensive that summer before the war broke. She had been frank. She knew no guilt. She merely wanted the matter over and done with. Madame Glynne scrutinized her reflection in the polished surface of the samovar; as always, she understood. She rattled her many beads and prescribed a hearty opiate in his oolong, followed by a good long flight of marble stairs.

JASPER continued to stare into the rear-view mirror of his new roadster, searching for hints of last night in his face, in his bloodshot eyes. He remembered Gerald and Gerald's hands. That quivering feeling, that sweet but bitter taste in his mouth came back to him. But just once wouldn't make him one, would it?

KIRSTEN nearly swooned when she recognized the man beside her daughter in the rotogravure supplement.

LANGLEY studied Penelope as she stood within the bath-house doorway in her old écru riding habit—she wore it well; she could wear any old rags well. And.... yes, she was stunning, but to an unnecessary degree. She was stunning and lissome and (how would the French say it?) soignée, but cold, so cold—a swan carved in ice. Still, it did seem somehow a shame what he would have to do to her with his mallet during their polo match.

MADELEINE declared, in that sometimes appealing, sometimes strained mid-Atlantic accent of hers, that she "would rather be six feet under." Niles tried not to show any immediate disappointment. Once, when they had just finished a late breakfast of pralines and isinglass pudding aboard her schooner, "The Sea Wasp," she had held aloft an éclair and swore she "would love to go to Vesuvius soon and stuff it with meringue." She hadn't meant that, either.

NELSON felt that most subtle and terrifying of all things—a sense of doubt—when he stepped into the headmistress's office and saw the negatives scattered across her desk.

OTTOLINE wished people in casinos did not talk so fast and so shrill. She nearly shattered the champagne flute in her hand when the bids were raised. If this was Max's idea to abandon and frighten her... There was no way to escape the croupier's gaze. Her eyes narrowed and the glittering crowd blurred before her; her mind was spinning like the roulette wheel. If this was Max's idea... With no remorse, Ottoline bet it all.

PIERCE thought of a thousand things—twisting strands and strands of pearls around a slave-girl's ankles and wrists, the scent of juniper and jasmine at a regatta, the red triangular sail of a boat he had once seen on the Rhône (or was it the Rhine?), an advert for Tyrolean bath-salts, the feel of skin against buckskin and sand against silk, foreign voices heard on a shortwave in the next flat, even Evelyn's face reflected for a split second in the black window of a passing hearse—all in that endless moment of embrace.

QUIANA lay back on the hot sand and looked up into the gas-blue tropical sky. Only a month before Dashielle had confronted her with the half-empty vial of pills in their miserable aerie overlooking Central Park West. Now that was as long ago and far away as a fairy tale. She closed her eyes as the dark man beside her began to untie her maillot.

REGINALD's finger struck one lucid note, like a drop of water on stone, on the baby grand in the still, still music room. Terèse stood opposite him, before the windows, half-shrouded in the curtains blown by the electric Mediterranean wind. Reg looked so cool; he always looked cool, cool as lilac and vanilla, so perfect in his restrained passion Terèse doubted if he could ever perspire. Reg, Reg, Reg: she was reminded of one of those fish that spends its entire life in a pool in a cavern, white and bloodless and oh, so blind. Yet—yet he kept her in thrall. Would he glide across the room as if across ice, and with one adroit finger touch her until she, too, rang a small note, and then rippling chords of desire?

SERENA knew that if she had not insisted on one daiquiri after another that fatal weekend, probably nothing of any of it would have happened.

"THIERRY, handsome Thierry," Mrs. Courtlandt cooed. "Unzip this gown, s'il vous plait. It's simply suffocating." Thierry considered. Who did she think he was these days—a mere domestic servant, a dressing girl, maid-in-waiting to the empress? Then he considered her money, every last centime of it. "Oui, madame! And your brassiere?"

URSULA could find nothing more to say to William. She peered at him through the freesia, keen to the quaver of candlelight in his eyes. He was so, so innocent of it all, she thought for a moment she might hate herself. For some opaque reason, he reminded her of a man she had noticed while crossing the piazza in Milan more than five years before. The man had a silver-white mustache and wore an immaculate linen suit. As he passed her, he seemed to purposefully inhale the last breath she had exhaled. It was uncommonly sensual. Ursula succumbed to the memory—until William spilled his fingerbowl while humming that bloody aria again.

VICTOR swallowed another shot of rye to combat the bad night air. It was not the admiral's first. The day air had lately, alas, turned rather sour, as well. He stared up at the brooding oil of Cecile above the landing. How she would wail, how she would admonish, how she would beat her hard little fists against his lapels if she were here. If she were here!

WINIFRED, invigorated by the salt spray which tousled her long brassy locks (no longer her own!), was reminded of the sea breezes that would sweep in from the coves near her family's estate in East Anglia. (It was just Winnie in those days; when was it, at what point had she become Winifred?) She had been so free then, so content whenever she rode bareback along the pounding surf. So dearly had she loved those early mornings when the fog rose from the glistening, glittering strand! But it would be impossible to go back now. Soon they would know. Winifred breathed in the briny air and turned to Wallace, who was still rowing quite furiously. The once unspeakable was about to be spoken.

XAVIER, disguising the suggestion of a smirk, speculated upon pushing Lady Ashton's face into her charlotte russe... but for only the very slenderest of moments.

YOLANDA's tears fell heavy upon the faded satin cushions. "This time he'll regret what he said," she sobbed. "This time he'll realize how much he did mean to me." She dabbed her eyes (once described as violet, today looking merely pale blue) and glanced out this humble atelier's window, out across that awful, barren cape. Snow again. She found it fairly easy to swallow the seventeen cerise sleeping tablets.

ZACHARY erased the last paragraph. That digression about Sylvia nearly flambéing the ambassador's escort with a wayward pan of crêpes was perhaps too outré—or then again was it too predictable? Also the usherette would doubtless have overlooked those tiny spots of blood on the as-yet-unnamed fencing tutor's wingtips. And Hyram would never, never have made so bold with the vicar. All in all, there needed to be more madness, lust, despair, et cetera. Zachary tamped his meerschaum. At last, he had it! The diamonds, not the stiletto, should be concealed within the beluga!
Manifesto

Introduction

To my imaginary public at large: What is printed below may be confusing, pointless, insightful, or amusing—depending on, perhaps, your opinion of the history of art or (as I see it) the art of history; I myself shall refrain from any attempt at analysis or theorizing on cults and cultishness and merely limit myself to describing the circumstances under which this peculiar manuscript became known to me. In the end, I leave the decision to burn or frame this article entirely up to the individual reader.

A second or third uncle of mine having recently died of mysterious causes (no condolences, please; he was very old and I did not know him), it devolved upon me the task, as closest living relative, of putting his material possessions in order for benefit of our inestimably scrupulous government tax assessors. Since no will had been left behind, and no one (including myself) elected to claim any right to inheritances (knowing full well Uncle was seriously in debt at the time of his demise, though I'm not quite sure to whom or for what), his estate would be—in the somewhat aquatic terminology—"liquidated." The house had already been condemned and was to be razed in a matter of days, to be replaced by either a parking lot or a toxic waste dump.

There was really nothing much of interest or value in the house when I made my appraisal of it; Uncle had lived the solitary life of a pensioner (he had been a tollbooth operator for thirty years in this country) and altogether I was even more disappointed than I had expected to be by his humble furnishings. Since there had been rumors in my family when I was a child that this "funny" uncle kept some quaint customs of the "old country" (a country since erased from modern maps) and that he had been an insurgent during some great and glorious but forgotten war, I had faintly hoped that I might find something a bit out of the ordinary: a revealing diary, perhaps, or an autumnal scrapbook pasted with newspaper clippings written in an illegible language. But I found nothing. Or next to nothing, I thought.

In the cellar of the little house, however, in a small compartment that might have served as a coal-bin in another era, I did come across a rather odd writing desk most probably pieced together by my uncle himself from old cigar-box wood. The drawers of the desk proving to be empty, I turned away in disinterest, and in doing so, knocked a picture frame off its precarious position on the rafter above; the frame struck the desk with some force, and in doing so, caused a heretofore secret compartment to spring open from an upper niche inside the desk.

Inside the compartment (whose hidden mechanism I could not quite understand) I found a broken kaleidoscope, "Pandora" brand, which seemed to have been manufactured at least a century ago. I held one end up to my eye and saw that inside the toy's wooden tube was what appeared to be at first a wide piece of tangled adding-machine paper. Having extracted it, I saw it to be what is known as a "Moebius" strip, a piece of paper folded over onto itself with a twist, a classroom curiosity known topographically to have, for demonstration purposes, just one side. The point at which the paper was sealed from one end to the other, however, eluded me when I turned it over in my hands, evidence of oddly expert craftsmanship. It was of medium-weight bond, with a watermark (clearly visible when held up to the subterranean window) depicting a dragon of oriental heritage; the surface of the paper was surprisingly "new" to the touch, as if the strip had been placed in this damp and musky cellar room quite recently, though why and by whom remains a mystery. Judging by the thick dust on everything in the room and my uncle's reclusive, padlocked personality, I would be more willing to believe that the unusual document had been forgotten within the desk decades ago—or had just appeared there, defying restrictions of time and space, like one of those anachronistic toads freed from cavities in solid igneous rock by perplexed miners.

There was writing on the document in a light black-turning-lavender ink, done in a fine if skittish hand (not, apparently, my uncle's) from one outer edge of the strip to the other, from one inner "end" or false terminus to the other. It was written in French, and since I know no more French than a Chinese infant, I took the trouble to consult a bilingual friend of mine, an ex-wife, in fact, who was initially glad to translate, if a bit puzzled at first. I only regret now that I did not first have the paper examined by an expert, a detective; otherwise its age and origin might have hinted at its purpose. My Francophone helper was as amazed as I at how fresh the strip seemed to be and how the ink seemed to have been applied only recently; unfortunately this led to accusations on her part which will never be sufficiently refuted now that the document has been destroyed.

Why did she destroy it? Because, she said in her typical way, without a shred of humor, it was either my own work or the work of the Devil, and we might be the same. The "manifesto," as she called it though it bears no title, is ludicrous, and it means nothing. Now, I have only a cursory knowledge of this or that "-ism" or school of art, and I have read only scraps of other manifestos, revolutionary or otherwise, and really do not care to be party to an enigma. So why did she reduce it to ashes?

"Because," she wrote me from the distant city where she has since retreated, "the thing is endless; I would get to where I thought I surely had begun my translation when I would discover that it was not translating in exactly the same way twice; the meaning (what there was of it) was basically the same, but somehow it read differently. It is written in some sort of pidgin argot I found exasperating enough anyway, and then—maybe because I had stared at it too long—the words seemed to be rearranging themselves before my eyes! It was impossible to find either a beginning or an end to the thing; I must have read through it fifty times trying to somehow hold it still so I could get the most accurate translation, but it insisted on shifting and changing and wriggling out of my comprehension like an eel made of mercury—it was literally endless, infinitely sided, a Moebius not only in words but in content. At last, with dawn coming up, I tore my hair and in a fit of rage threw the damned thing into the Dutch oven. But I am not sorry. The translation I gave you is only one of many attempts. Its beginning and end are purely arbitrary. This is the most sensible translation I could manage, but, darling, you see, too, that it began to repeat itself in a slightly different way, and I had to stop..."

What we have here, then, is a rough draft of an attempt at a translation that seems to have been futile to start with. My "friend" has always been a highly excitable, impressionable sort, subject to the occasional psychic delusion, so I cannot really vouch for her linguistic authenticity or her oblique description of the document's properties.

What I have already described is uncommon enough. Now may I renege slightly on my original promise not to provide any sort of commentary on the actual contents and make a few well-intentioned gestures of appraisal? First, to go back to my late distant uncle himself—I am now convinced he was murdered. By whom, I do not know. Why, exactly, I do not know, or for what, but I think it might have had something to do with the very document translated here. He was found in bed, a hale and hearty man of eighty, by a neighbor who had come to call, a thin and sickly woman of fifty. Uncle was choking on feathers; his head lay on a torn pillow and an open window blew the down about like snow. He suffocated before the neighbor was able to effect a rescue. Now, it may be that the pillow had split of its own accord, but a spilled water glass and a capsized portrait of an unknown archduke suggested violence—though it might have just been wind through the open casement. The neighbor, moreover, spoke of how my uncle, in his increasing senility, had alluded to "dark angels" who had somehow recently acquired his address. At family gatherings when I was young much had been debated among the elders at the dinner table: how Uncle had once been some sort of painter—or was it sculptor?—back in the "old country," how he had once participated in cabaret rituals and antagonistic public performances, how he had become linked to a cabal of rebel artists who he had later betrayed for the love of a hypothetical aunt (who was never to be). All of this sounded like rude myth-making to my young and Apollonian mind, but now that this particular document has surfaced, it does seem possible that Uncle did indeed harbor secrets which we cannot comprehend at this distance in time and from this side of the mausoleum's door.

But others in my family always maintained that Uncle was some sort of comic charlatan, a cheat, a swindler, a counterfeiter, and a fake. He had made his living in the "old country" by peddling cheap toys guaranteed to break the first time you played with them. Perhaps, then, he planted the kaleidoscope just to confuse his survivors. (This still does not account for my translator's reactions to the "mutability" of the words on the strip, or the strip's own strange appearance.) Or perhaps I am the charlatan and, as my former friend slash lover slash wife feared, I have been content to make the whole thing up.

I remind my potential detractors, however, of something we all should already know—that life is even more mysterious than we can ever dream it to be... and time, space, and matter, these "dimensions" by which man tries to measure his universe, may not always behave as we expect them to or ask that they do. (What of those time-traveling toads?) My uncle, it appears, knew this—I only wish I had known him. And if his "dark angels" are indeed out there, compiling their statistics, totting up their scores—I wonder who of us they are and if this document will allow us to guess their names.

Let me hold your attention for just one more paragraph, I beg you. I promised some sort of explanation a while back, didn't I? And so—this "manifesto" seems to me to be an attempt at an end to all manifestos, the progenitor of a whole new breed of manifestos, or an assay at critiquing what is written in manifesto form as the manifesto itself is being written, a metamanifesto—something perhaps only possible to do on a Moebius strip. Dear me, I may have already said too much. I'm afraid now the "Manifesto" itself may be somewhat anticlimactic. Oh, hell. Here it is.

The Document

...as an idea reveals its intent, the intent revealing the idea. We will not discuss the meaning of art but the art of meaning. Our works are inexplicable, not because they are meaningless but because they shall contain all meanings. Ideas will be sufficient, creation itself an unnecessary and obscene indulgence. The idea of the idea, moreover, will be enough. Who thought of God before God thought up himself?

We do not know one another, though we are of a brother and sisterhood; we will repudiate each other only to vindicate one another; we will renounce those who renounce us only to prove they are of us. We have no leaders, no followers; we are all leaders and follow only ourselves. We have yet to reveal ourselves, yet we have always been here—and will always be coming into existence. Our boundaries are nowhere and our center is everywhere.

We announce our existence to the world in secret ways, in symbolic terms—though we are neither secret nor symbolic. Allegory is merely what is read into the expansive psychology of the universe. You will know what we have done only by mistake or chance—you will find it perhaps in the space between a leaf and a passing dragonfly or in the movement of traffic through an intersection or the nudge of a stranger's hand pushing a revolving door—in like series of unrelated events only shall we be evident, in the music that is unheard between what is heard, between what is seen and not seen, not in what is written here and not in what is implied here, but in what cannot be said here—or anywhere.

Some may think we are anarchists because only in anarchy can order be defined, in the same way that only during the storm are we aware of the peace existing before and after. Others may think we are ideological fascists because only when life is completely ordered can anarchy, the order beneath the order, be revealed. Both theories are right, both theories are completely wrong. We are separate and yet whole—we each contain the whole within our individual selves, like the cells within your body that carry the impression at all times of the entire body. Those who read this and understand it to be a lie are on their way to discovering the truth; those who deem this document to be a farce are closer yet; those who comprehend nothing, who cannot explain what is printed here, are very likely our members, our patrons, and our protectors.

There is no need for a name for us because no one name will do. Since names suggest specifics and specifics limit, we accept all names and all limitations, thereby limiting us to no limitations. Our movement itself is not unknowable; it is on the front pages of your newspapers, on the tombstones in your cemeteries, and yet it appears to be hidden merely because what is secret obscures what is not, in the same way that a shadow defines the tree and yet is not the tree—which is hidden by the wall (or the silhouette on a blind is a projection, seen, of what is there but cannot be seen).

We shall issue no proclamations, enforce no edicts, represent no causes, account for nothing. Our members have already chosen themselves—we are a closed order. The critics will have nothing to criticize but themselves, and that will be sufficient to delineate our beliefs and falsehoods. We stand naked in emperor's clothes, we welcome all stonings and pogroms, we will be the first to fire volleys and denounce our movement from podiums and pulpits; only in this way shall we remain united and strong. We entrust our powers to kings and peasants who would be kings. We are the outlaws who make the laws.

Our movement is unbound by any common creed or goal—we do not recognize one another except by accident or in dreams. Our art—all our novels, paintings, symphonies, sculpture, cinema has been completed, has all been judged and resigned to history and adulation, adoration or vilification. Nothing remains to be done. Ours is the science of exhaustion. This is the future of history. There is only the silence of the stars after us.

Even so, the world must be rebuilt, demolished, reconstructed again—for only in the process shall we know the purpose, only in the Act the Word. (And the Word contains all words but is not one word nor no words.) We reserve the right to contradict ourselves and to contradict the contradictions.

All other movements are superfluous, all other artistic or political or sociological factions an intrusion on what we have already cultivated and abandoned, all manifestos a mere illusion—for this manifesto if you want to call it that is itself is just a hint of what is to come but will be unwritten. A distant millennium shall find us frozen at our desks with wastebaskets full and one single blank sheet of paper before us: the paper on which we are about to write about what is to happen after the first second everything has ended, not the moment of death but the moment after, when all our words, images, and gestures become useless, when we know at last that we know nothing, but that is everything, and we are content.

Therefore, we are explicitly the last "art" movement and implicitly the first. Our works are, were, and shall be inexplicable, not because they are meaningless but because they contain all possible meanings, and even those not possible. In the end, we need not produce anything unless it be the suggestion of producing all things; in the end, which will be our fiery rebirth, it will become evident that we need not even exist, or ever have existed.

Our ideas will outlast us—through them we shall live and rule, because we are our ideas, and the idea shall reveal the work, the work the idea. The idea of the work, the word, the work shall, furthermore, be sufficient. Creation itself would be vulgar, an insult to the integrity of the idea.

We live together as brothers and sisters, yet we do not know each other's faces. We will not discuss the arts of meaning, but the meaninglessness of art....

Note: My troubled translator points out that another hand had added in pencil, over a section of the strip, and apparently in some corrupt form of Latin or a lost Balkan language, what seems to be this phrase:

"BUT THEY HAVE GOT IT ALL WRONG!"
Even Emma Bovary

Decided, then: He could no longer wait for her to call back, so instead he would try her one more time. Only one more time. At least only once more this evening. Although he knew her number by heart, had for months, he looked it up in the phonebook just in case. He didn't want anything to go wrong again. Besides, there was something reassuring about seeing her name in print; it made her something more real than just his desires. With one finger keeping his place on the page and another finger on the telephone push-buttons, he dialed her number. After nine rings—he counted them—she answered.

He hoped she hadn't heard him clearing his throat. "Andrea? Is that you?" he began, calmly as possible, even though it was a ridiculous interrogation, considering he knew without a doubt it could only be her.

"Oh... hi... Matt," she said slowly, a little too close to the receiver, it seemed to him.

"Yeah, this is Matt. Say, how are you, Andrea? We haven't seen each other all week, you know. I was beginning to think something might be wrong. What've you been up to?"

"Not much, really. Nothing. I've been too busy to do anything."

"I've been trying to reach you. You're never home."

"Right. I've been really, really busy, like I said."

"Not me. All I've been doing is sitting here reading this book—you might like it, Andrea. It's pretty good, I think. But I don't get all the French stuff."

"Sounds nice, Matt. Lately I've just been too busy to read anything at all." There was a sound in the background, something scraping against something. Metal against wood?

"I've missed seeing you this week. How's your cold? Maybe some Irish coffee would do you good. We could meet at—"

"No, that's all right, it's gone. Listen—"

"Have you looked at the listings in the paper? There are a lot of good movies playing."

"Is that right?" She made a breathy sort of sound, as if she were about to say something, but he interrupted her.

"Did you finish that last painting? The self-portrait? I'd really like to see it when it's done."

"No, I'm not finished yet. Probably never. Listen, I was just on my way out the door when you called." She was talking faster now.

"Oh. So, I'm glad you're through with that cold."

"Yeah. Listen, I better get going."

"Sure, OK. Well, I better let you go. Suppose I'll finish this book. Nothing better to do."

"Good. I'll see you around. Maybe somewhere on campus." She lowered her voice slightly. "We'll have to talk then, when we run into each other."

"What?"

"Not now. I haven't got the time right now. Later, if it works out... Like I said, when I see you around, maybe we'll have to talk, ok?"

"Well, I hope it's soon."

"I have to go now, Matt. Goodbye."

"We'll get together real soon, you promise?"

"Bye!"

"Right. See you, Andrea."

"Um, bye."

"Bye."

"Goodbye, Matt."

"Goodbye, Andrea. Andrea?"

She had already hung up.

For a minute or two he stood there, mesmerized by the droning dial tone, until it was interrupted by a harsh beep and that eternal, prerecorded voice came on saying, "Do you need help? If so—" He fumbled the receiver back into place. "Sure," he said aloud, "but you can't give it to me."

He sat down on his wobbly kitchen chair, feeling wobbly himself. So, he thought, we're through, I guess. That's the way the cookie crumbles. That's the way the world ends. It was all leading up to that. We're through. Why else didn't she want to talk? Where would she be going at eleven-fifteen on a Wednesday night, when I know she has studio at eight in the morning?

She had sounded so bored, with that false casualness she sometimes had. She had nothing to say to him. No, that wasn't completely true. She had mentioned that she had to tell him something, right? It could only be bad news: the formal announcement of the severing of their ties, or that she was dying, or admitting the existence of Someone Else.

Someone Else! That was it. Of course. She had probably already found somebody new. Being just plain bored with him wasn't enough; in that case, she would have flatly told him so and maybe given him another chance. But Someone Else—that he could see. He could picture Mr. Someone Else quite easily: handsomer, taller, wittier, smoother. After all, she was attractive and intelligent; it would be no hard task for her to procure somebody new. He, gullible Matt, had been merely someone available at the time, an interlude between handsomer, taller, wittier, smoother young men. He had been used.

There had been that scraping sound, too—a chair? Another person in a chair? It was possible, probable, definite. He had been there even as they talked. She hadn't been there earlier that evening when he had called, so why would she be leaving right when she had just arrived? Someone Else had been right at her elbow, pulling her toward the door; her palm would have been cupped over the mouthpiece so he would not hear. There were two phones in her little apartment: one in the kitchenette, one in the bedroom. What if it had been....

No. He couldn't even picture Them like that. There, she was no longer singular in his mind. All at once, she had doubled. She and He were two lines running parallel, while he, Matt the Martyr, had been only a line which had temporarily intersected Them. It was like a geometry problem, and he was the tangent that did not belong.

That first time she had taken in a breath, as if she were about to say something more, and he interrupted her, he had felt she was about to cut the conversation short. The next time she spoke, she took the first step toward doing that: "I'm on my way out the door." It was as if he had developed a sixth sense. Uncanny how psychic one could be.

Why do I always have to be so damn perceptive? he asked himself, his lips silently forming the words of his own purely rhetorical question. Things would be better if he had been dumb and naive and let all the insinuations and implications fly over his head, and he had gone to bed in ignorant bliss. True, the result would be the same, but at least then it would hit him all at once instead of little by little. If he had not been so intuitive, there would have been no doubt to consume him.

Whatever it was she had to tell him must be important, or she would not have mentioned it under the circumstances, with someone possibly overhearing. Maybe what she had to say to him was worse than he had already suspected. He had wasted so much time trying to get her to stay on the phone, trying to get her interested in going out for a drink or a movie, when he should have been prying for facts. When would they meet again? Where and how? Would she call him back? Should he call her back?

Most likely, she would never say more than a couple words—hello, goodbye—to him ever again. Or she might come right out and say: "Matt, it is only fair that I tell you. Rod (or Ron or Rob or whatever) and I are in love! It was such a spur-of-the-moment thing. We met on Saturday, were engaged Sunday, and talk about your whirlwind romances, we're getting married tomorrow! Sorry you're not invited to the wedding."

Oh, come on, he told himself. Let's be realistic. Nobody but people in stupid movies do things like that. Even engaged was ridiculous. In love—no, that was not quite so ridiculous.

But, honestly, there had been no actual proof. One insignificant sound does not an entire person make. He must be blowing everything up out of proportion. Perhaps she had moved a chair herself. Maybe He, the Rod or Rob guy, did not even exist—and with a simple change of opinion, the new lover disappeared, no puff of smoke, no flash of lightning, nothing. The cigarettes went out, the bed made itself back up, the strange car in front of her apartment building rolled backwards down the street and into its garage. She was alone; there were not that many men out there she'd be interested in, anyway, come to think of it.

This may have just been a bad night—week—for her. After all, she was getting over an awful cold. People experience moods when they don't feel like talking, and she was as tactful as she could possibly have been in letting him go from their conversation. And she could really have been on her way out. A girlfriend may have asked her over for late coffee, or she might have been busy painting or on the way to the store for some urgent item —aspirin or a women's product that could not wait.

Even so...

She could have been rushing to another man's arms the way novelists always describe it. He remembered Mrs. Bovary. (Senior year, high school, Advanced Literature.) They were called affairs or assignations—and though they were nearly always tragic, they were very exciting while they lasted. Worldly women and foreign spies were prone to such intrigues. Andrea was sophisticated in her own way, too. She smoked expensive cigarettes and had once been to Paris. Doubt overwhelmed him again. To take his mind off the matter, he got off the wobbly chair at last and switched on the television. He stood before it and watched. The set wasn't working right again, and the only station he could get in was in the middle of a movie, a film noir with a blue-gray tint. Men in fedoras and women in veils. The characters had no known origins or motives, but he didn't care; it was something to take his mind off everything else.

"Are you going to go all night without kissing me?" an actress said, sliding a sparkling ring up and down her finger. There was something about her hands, the way she moved her hands...

"Only if you insist," a brooding actor in a pinstripe suit and a broad tie said, leaning across a restaurant table piled with dishes. He took the actress's hands. Amidst a rattle of china, they kissed, her hands wrapping around the back of his neck. The hands were familiar: they looked disturbingly like Andrea's, long and narrow—didn't they? And they way they moved in rhythm with her speech: definitely Andrea again.

He switched the set off just as the actor and actress were drawing apart, his tie soaking up coffee in a cup. Their laughter crackling away, they shrank to a white dot and then nothing. It was no use, he thought, stepping back. He would have to think of something else.

A walk might do the trick; it was worth a chance, even if it was so late. He put on a thick sweater and a coat and galoshes because the snow was still deep. Leaving a light on behind him, he left his apartment and took the creaking elevator to the ground floor.

After a few blocks, he admitted to himself that he was heading for the only place he could possibly be heading: her apartment building, which was nearly a mile away. It was very cold out, but he tried not to pay attention to the weather or anything else. The second time he had to cross the street, he did not even see the dark car which barely missed him and skidded over the icy street into the other lane. The driver honked and yelled something he could only halfway hear because the windows were up, but he guessed it was best he had not understood.

He had forgotten his gloves, and now he regretted it. When he shoved his hands in his coat pockets, they did not warm in the least. Squeezing them under his armpits only made the sides of his chest ache. Lastly, he resorted to breathing on them, but his breath came out in a cold mist, the moisture making his hands clammy and colder. The blocks to her building seemed to multiply in number; he wondered if he would freeze to death before he got there. Maybe in the morning she would see his body lying on the side of the road on her way to class and press her lips against his in a vain attempt to make him breathe again. That would be the tragic yet romantic end to the story....

The lights were burning on her floor of the old apartment house where she lived; he could see them a half-block away. The lights did not prove anything, however—she always left one or two on in case of burglars, the way he did now. He continued down the street. If she were home, there would be several scenarios which were possible.

Scenario Number One would be the easiest. She would he watching television alone, nursing a headache. "I'm so glad you dropped by," she would say, leaning over to kiss him. "I'm so sorry I was rude to you on the phone, but this darned migraine... " There would be more kisses. (Only in a moment did he realize something as serious-sounding as a migraine was his own authorial intrusion; she seldom even complained of a simple headache.)

Scenario Number Two would be harder to take, but his doubts, at least, would be put to rest. She would be lying on the couch, reading a magazine, alone. "I might as well tell you now," she would say, not getting up. "I've found someone new. Please realize how sorry I am for you." Then she would cry.

Scenario Number Three would be unbearable. He would knock, and after several minutes—hushes and shushes in the background—she would answer the door, just opening it a crack. He would see she was in her robe. "Matt!" she would whisper loudly, "I'm sorry, but—" and then he would see the tall, handsome man in the Turkish towel approaching behind her, asking if it were a telegram or special-delivery letter or something equally unlikely, as if this were a similar interruption out of a nineteenth-century novel.

The last half of the last block, he kept his head down and counted the sidewalk squares: one two three four five... When he reached thirty-five he could stand it no more, and looked up into her rooms. The shades were down, but a bluish light shone through the thin blue curtains. A shadow—her shadow—moved across one window, and then another, and he gave up. He knew he would never have the nerve to confront her at this time of the night, with a runny nose and frozen hands.

Music? He heard music, from heaven, the stars, it seemed to be coming—lilting violins, a shimmering cascade of them. The sound was coming from her apartment, the notes falling on him like invisible snow. For a moment the effect was so lovely and strange he could not breathe. It was not the cold which transfixed him, but that music—it was familiar. What was that waltz called? Something or other to do with flowers or Europe. He saw her silhouette at the window again, extending an arm, and an arm reached out to meet her, and she wound the second shadow to her like thread to a spool.

But people just don't dance in their own homes, he thought, not even in books, not even Emma Bovary. And not at this hour. The most hopeless romantics sought out ballrooms or dance floors. It just was not done. This was incredible, like an old movie. Or a bad novel. He watched them dance another minute, his disbelief turning to anger. It just was not done, but then again she might do it. Was He her dance instructor? Did she have a dance instructor? Did they make house calls now, at this time of night?

Then he quickly remembered they had once danced like that, weeks and weeks ago, not long after he had first met her. She loved to dance, but he did not—he had knocked over an African violet perched on a delicate stand. Clumsy. And he felt foolish dancing in her living room, too. They had not danced since. That might have been where he went wrong. Maybe all she was looking for was a good dancing partner. Someone romantic. He was so dull and unimaginative! It was too late now. With a kick at the snow, he hurried up the street, past a closed gas station and a vacant parking lot.

At the corner of the lot, there was an illuminated phone booth. He dove into it and closed the glass door behind him. The fan spun over his head, drawing up his clouds of breath. Digging in his pockets, he found—miracle of miracles—enough change. His fingers were so cold and stiff, he could not hold onto it all, and so a quarter dropped to the floor. When he managed to pick it up again, he inserted it into the slot, lifted the receiver, and set the receiver on the little shelf that held the phone book. He clamped his palms over his mouth, and after his fingers had warmed up enough, slowly and carefully began to dial the number. It seemed to have a thousand digits now, all nines on a slow rotary dial. The bell rang eight times before she answered, but he had already left the receiver swinging on its cord. All he heard as he walked way was the thin metallic voice getting fainter and fainter, calling out, "Hello? Hello? Hello?"

the end

Or maybe that wasn't the way it had to end. He clamped his palms over his mouth, and after his fingers had warmed up enough, he slowly and carefully began to dial the number. But he decided that was wrong; he would have to see her in person, after all. A phone call was not personal enough—that wasn't really you coming over the wires, just a cold, disembodied voice.

So he strode back across the snowy parking lot, past the gas station, and up to the outdoor stairs leading to her place. He could still hear the music, but had not paused to look up at the windows again. After climbing the icy stairs, he knocked; she answered almost immediately. "Matt!" she cried, opening the door wider to let him enter in a burst of cold air.

"Are you sure I'm not.... interrupting anything?" he asked, stamping off the snow on his feet and coming in. Quick glances to the left and right revealed no other persons. He peeled off his coat.

"Of course not," she answered him. "I'm glad you came over—I've missed you all week. I had such a miserable sore throat earlier, but I went out and got some cough drops and cold medicine, so I feel much better. In fact, I've been dancing!"

"I heard the music. Mind if I join you?"

"Please do," and she slipped her arm around his back. He embraced her, pressing his frosty cheek against her warm cheek. "Oh!" she whispered at his touch, and they waltzed across the carpet. A blizzard of violins swirled around them. She led because he was not a very good dancer.

Then he kissed her, or she him, it did not really make a difference. They kissed in waltz time, three to a measure. This was the perfect ending, better than he had hoped for. They bumped into her dining room table during a turn, sending cups and saucers clattering to the floor. He splashed cold coffee on himself. She laughed.

or

He was standing under her windows again, watching their graceful shadows. The music came to an abrupt stop. Did her hear laughter? Soon after, the blue light went out. He stood there, below the expressionless windows, getting colder, feeling more and more ridiculous. What was he doing here on the frozen sidewalk, what was he waiting for? He threw back his face and closed his eyes, just to feel the gentle sting of snow melting on his eyelids. Then he heard the horse and buggy coming down the street, rattling and straining through the snow and ice. He knew from history books that this kind of vehicle was once very common city transportation and was called a phaeton. The driver sat hunched over the reins, a mantle of snow on his cape, and he halted the horse right before Matt. An elegantly ringed hand with a lace cuff reached out of the window, gesturing. And so he got in.
Angel My Angel

In the beginning, impossible as it came to seem, I suppose I must have loved Angel. That is, things hadn't always been so troubled between us—we did have our quota of moonlit moments and sticky Valentine sentimentality. It was only later, much later, when Angel had tugged too hard on the end of my very long and patient rope, that I began to torment and beat him, though I swear my actions were never premeditated. When Angel first came to live with me, I treated him well, or thought I did, and the worst I ever gave him was a pinch on his alabaster backside. But things change, as they so often do; I got bored with him or maybe he (of course angels are of neither sex, or both, and I use the male pronoun only as a convention of convenience) got bored with me, it doesn't make much difference, and the pinches gave way to all-out black-and-bluings—though an angel's bruises are more of a lurid magenta shade not to be found in nature. He really did put up with too much before he left—that may be his fault. It may also be true that after a while I could not restrain myself, but only because Angel could not restrain himself. Oh, my confessor, must one see things through these merely mortal eyes of mine to understand?

Certainly it wasn't Lillith's fault, though it would be easy to saddle her with a major portion of the blame. Lillith was involved, there's no denying it, and she did have that diabolic little way about her that compelled me to commit all sorts of ignoble acts, but she was not, I will admit, the one who drove Angel to his doom. Listen, I need not impugn any further the well-sullied reputation of my less-than-divine Lillith... Again, blame only me. At the very start of our "affair" (hate that dirty little word) the typing pool had been rippled, and the ripple became a crashing wave, naturally—Lillith and I should never have dallied so long by the water-cooler (you see how it was so much like every other run-of-the-mill office "thing")—but the fact that our names might have been registered together at so many nearby motels does not implicate her in what were truly my own misdeeds. If Angel is to be believed, he did not even know about us.

Ah, Angel and I, I and Angel: whatever the causes, our "romance" was starting to malfunction not long after it began. Angel must have sensed its breakdown before I did. Any trivial action or statement I made could prompt him to bring out the hanky. "Angel, dear, would you please quit trailing that damn gossamer crap across the carpet?" I might innocuously ask, and he would burst into tears. Angel tears, by the way, are not like human tears, being composed of something like quicksilver. The tiny silvery globules would rain down upon the floor and coagulate under the furniture, and Angel, being not too adept with earthly things such as brooms and mops, was useless in cleaning up the mess.

Sometimes Angel would cry for even less of a reason; in fact, for no reason at all. I wonder if he even noticed how this only worsened the situation. How else can I explain such lunacy? He would sometimes be sitting in front of the window, composing one of his drippy sonnets, when out of the sky-blue sky the mercury would start to rise.

"Oh dear, oh dear, what's the matter now?" I asked the second or third time he did that.

"Just a pretty cloudlet chased across the firmament by the wind," he said, wiping wistful eyes, which had turned from the deepest of blues to be found in a watercolor set to a lusterless gray.

I was through trying to console him by then. He seemed to be annoying me on purpose. Thoughts of Lillith comforting me as only she could, constricting her voluptuous limbs tightly around my body, teased and tempted me. Maybe, I might be able to tell a psychoanalyst now, if I believed in psychoanalysts, if psychoanalysts believed in me, it was because I had once wanted purity in a lover but had discovered there is something sterile and stultifying in an angel's virginal (sic) perfection. Maybe it was because I was growing older, and after years of high-flown romanticizing nothing could satisfy me as my fantasies once had. Maybe I simply wanted to trade my ideals for some of Lillith's cheap thrills. Maybe—whatever. I knew that, if I ever did love Angel, I didn't love him anymore.

One evening I returned to our sordid little lovenest a bit later than usual (after delighting too long in the flick of Lillith's serpentine whip) and found Angel bawling, prostrate on the couch. His halo had slipped over his forehead, his golden hair was a tangle of knots, and his swanlike wings beat in time with his throaty sobs.

"Why you persist in these angelic clichés, I don't know," I said, going to fix a nightcap. "What happened to your more original guises—the motorcycle cop, the harem dancer, the Amazon warrior? I even preferred the Restoration rake—but this church-window stuff! When you know I don't even trust in any life other than this..."

He looked up, adjusting that ridiculous dime-store halo. His cherubic face (cribbed from Caravaggio) quivered, and then he began to precipitate again. Had he been on the phone with one of those gossipy typists again? Damn them. Of course, he must be jealous.

"Cease!" I demanded. "You're being a big crybaby. Acting like I'd left you for good. Should I exit the room while you finish your grand scene, my darling? I leave you to your critics, the carpet and the couch." I threw my drained glass to the floor, where it did not shatter (being plastic). Angel made an aristocratic sound very much like a hunting horn at a foxhunt—he was blowing his nose into the glittering hem of his archaic robes. What I hated most about this sort of incarnation was its genderlessness, though Angel was otherwise scrupulously hermaphroditic, transsexual, and bisexual. Having resumed "his" composure, "he" informed me, in a voice that rang like a finger circling a crystal goblet, that "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." A remarkably original expression even for him.

"You ought to be in Bartlett's," I said quick as I could.

Angel moistened the bow of his lips with the pink arrow of his tongue. "Don't let's argue," he said. "We could, you know—kiss and make up."

I felt like seizing his flaxen locks. "Cut the namby-pamby and the lovey-dovey. I'm not exactly in the mood."

"You never are these days, ever, ever since—" But then he collapsed under a fresh torrent of tears. His one-size-fits-all halo fell all the way off this time. It rolled across the floor and landed at my feet. Without taking time to think, I picked it up, gave it a savage twist, and tossed it back to him before going off to bed gratefully alone.

For weeks afterward, every time I saw him wearing that bent halo (he refused to change the "angel" drag, as if to spite me) I felt a little awkward. Probably he quit polishing it, because after a while it began to tarnish and rust.

I got used to the halo, though once in a rare fit of compassion I offered to buy him a new one. In the meantime I had made it a practice to sleep alone. Why he continued to hover around, I don't know. I suppose he had no place better to go.

At least Lillith and I never had to deal with such silly emotional antics. Listen now as I tell of the illimitable licentiousness of my illicit Lilly! From the moment I first saw her, as she swept through the vice-presidential suite's foyer wearing a hoydenish suit and a pert fedora, it had been lust and nothing but lust between us. Within minutes of her first day on the job, Lillith called me before her desk for some minor reprimand. I tensed looking into her hypnotic eyes, as if waiting for her to strike—and she had me down on my knees not much later, under her sharp little heel and licking at her black, python-pattern stockings. But again, I say, we were not both to blame!

For a while, Angel sensed the change in me and altered his amatory approaches, determined as he was to "rekindle the flames of our passion" (his words), although the fire had all but died and I was returning home later each day. He would wipe his silver-rimmed eyes and greet me at the door with a kiss (one of a chocolate-box assortment, from chaste to Gallic), and every time I would brush past him, forcing myself not to linger, to go in search of the evening paper.

Angel would invariably want to know, "How are things at the office?" Don't think I didn't know what he was insinuating. I knew he must have been on the phone to Hilda or Gilda or Matilda again (he'd met them all when I'd mistakenly taken him to an office party in our first careless, carefree days together), listening open-mouthed as they spun their spurious tales from deep within the depths of the typing pool. Angel was incapable of lying, so I didn't ask what he had been doing—or hearing. I didn't want to suffer whatever he had to say that might raise the curtain on yet another tiresome tragedy.

He made several attempts to win back my delinquent affections. One evening he tried singing when I could not locate my newspaper—I suspected he had spirited it page by page down the waste disposal. He sang an awful fifteenth-century madrigal (five simultaneous voices, all of them rapturous), with eyes closed and hands clasped, nothing less than—what is the word?—beatific. An invisible orchestra joined him. It was excruciating, not because Angel did not have the voice (or voices) of an angel, but because it was so transparent and pathetic a ploy. Before he finished I had switched on the television, increasing the volume until Angel's tenors and countertenors might as well have been mute. Eventually he got the hint.

He tried reading to me. He first gained my attention by materializing a thick, dangerously heavy book. After the flourish of a sneeze and then a clearing of his throat (congested with the sweetest honey), he parted the tome's gilt-edged pages and began to read some dreary old Dante—or was it Dante Rossetti? The only way I could stop him was by snapping the book shut on his fingers. He squealed like a kitten that had been stepped on. Well, I suppose the four screwballs I had just knocked back with Lillith at the Pandemonium Club had set me a bit on edge. Happy Hour with her was always too short; one Unhappy Hour with Angel lasted eons. Nevertheless, he persevered: "How this fiery heart burns and yearns..." he quoted from somewhere, from his own pitiable memory, the book having evaporated.

"Your heart," I explained, coolly plucking feathers from his grotesque gooselike wings, "if you have one, is a monotonously pulsating muscle about the size of your dainty [pluck] white [pluck] fist [pluck]."

He had his hanky out now and sounded his horn.

"Tally-ho!" I said, going to mix a fifth screwball. "If you really cared anything for me you would just leave me alone for a while. Now, vamoose, scram, get out of here, won't you?" While I was dashing off my drink, he vanished, and an icy wind blew up from nowhere, tilting all the pictures on the walls.

Perhaps I was tilting the wrist a bit much by then. Who could blame me, though? Lillith was making a lot of demands. Lillith was always making demands, in the boardroom and the bedroom. It's possible she suspected even then that I had another, an angel. And Angel himself had developed another bad habit. Though he usually had less than terrestrial tastes, he too began to appreciate the free flights of intoxication. The ordinary liquors I had introduced him to turned him a shade of chartreuse and laid him flat out on the floor, but he was partial to high-proof vanilla extract, which he had discovered once while baking me an anniversary cake he'd found in Fanny Farmer. Just a few sips would send him fluttering around the room sideways and upside down, like a butterfly in a cyclone. At first the extract seemed to make him happier than I could. A few more sips, however, and he would become morose and self-pitying, and I'd hear him later, straining his tear-ducts in a closet.

Looking back on it all now, I realize the hardest part was that almost from the beginning I had begun to doubt that I really could love Angel. Where there is doubt, I learned, there is suspicion (am I satisfying him?) and eventually I reversed the situation as though seeing it in a mirror (no, he's not satisfying me!). Strong passion, I also learned, sometimes gives way to equally strong but more destructive urges.

Then one day, or dawn, after having left Lillith coiled on the soiled motel sheets, it occurred to me: Angel was not, after all, real! He was not real to anyone else but me, that is—he was a carefully constructed artifice of hackneyed sentiments and emotions, an angelic automaton whom I had wished into existence at an otherwise forgotten party and whose only role was to serve me—and there's nothing more exasperating after a while than that. Lillith, though she sometimes seemed more reptilian than human, was at least very much mortal flesh and blood, and she would have smacked me good and hard if I ever doubted that.

The turning point came during one last binge of sexual abandon, involving some particularly acrobatic turns with Angel in bed and in the bath. (Lillith was out of town at a convention, and I was brimming with an overwhelming concupiscence.) The thought came to me—from where, I don't know—that I was not Angel's first. He had had another lover, perhaps many, Up There or at least Somewhere Else! How else could he have learned to be such an expert at carnal sport, a creature not even earth-born and earth-bred? Though the idea infuriated me, I could not confront him about it, I was so sure I was right. If I had a secondhand angel, it would be best not to know anything more. It was also potentially humiliating—look how I had been cheated!

One night, some time after I had first insisted on sleeping alone, I woke to a sweetly cloying scent. It was Angel, slipping into the sheets. His robes were draped over a chair in the corner and his pale neutered body radiated a sort of astral light, a rainbow aura outlining the contours of his wings—a gaudy display that failed to arouse me. His chameleon eyes were vivid indigo—purple for passion. "There are," he whispered, breathing Madagascan vanilla into my face, "always the pleasures of the body."

I groaned and rolled over, pretending it was a dream, realizing this was closer to a nightmare.

"It can be just like old times," he said. "Remember the things I could do with temporal disincorporation?"

Some things, no matter how innovative, are best done only once. I sat up reluctantly, with sleep in my eyes, and shoved his pearly shoulder, sighing a sigh of utter distaste. "I'm tired of it," I said, lying, or maybe not lying. "There are only so many ways you can do it before you're repeating yourself. Of course, you do have more possibilities than most, but let's face it—we've reached the point of no return, that is, the point of exhaustion. As has been said before, it's all been done before." Remarkable how articulate and controlled I could be, even at the dead end of night.

Angel pouted and stroked my hair. "No lust even for the spirit made flesh?" He might as well have been fondling a wax mannequin, but did not seem to notice my total disinterest; he stuck his tongue into my ear and then bit the earlobe. Now, I cannot abide anyone nibbling at my ears, even playfully, even an angel, and it was then that I first struck him—a quick slap across the face, louder than it was violent. Angel instantly dematerialized. Next a fine black snow began to fall within the bedroom; strangely enough, when I touched it, the snowflakes stung. In the morning, when I awoke, my bed was buried under a drift.

So—this is where it all really begins. Not long after that black blizzard, I beat my angel for the first time. It is not something I am proud of. "Lovers" who abuse one another (Lillith aside), even those who profess to enjoy it, have always repulsed me, and I have never thought myself the kind of person capable of pulling the wings off a moth, let alone roughing up an angel. Put a conscientious objector into the battlefield, however, and watch what happens. If Angel did not listen to my words, maybe he would heed my fists.

Our premiere bout followed another tedious one-sided argument, which ended in Angel's contrite slow fade and my return to the mindless cathode stare of the one-eyed monster. Angel, who as I've said before was absolutely inept with mechanical things, must have jammed the remote control while watching one of those daytime dramas of which he had lately become an aficionado, always regaling me with their tedious plots. Forced to get up to change the channel, I tripped over his harp, which he had been playing earlier to my deaf indifference, and if there was one thing I could not stand, it was his random abandonment of that blasted harp.

"Angel!" I commanded. "Materialize this instance."

He appeared, shedding rose petals, wearing that musk-ox scent advertised in one of his romance magazines. True to the ad's claims, it drove me wild, but not exactly with desire.

"Take this, please," I said through clenched teeth. Why did he have to frustrate me so?

He did not reach for it. "You don't love me," was all he said, chin to chest.

Before I knew what I was doing I heard a broken arpeggio and realized I had struck the harp against his right ear. "Don't, Angel," I said, pummeling his shoulders with the instrument and popping still more strings, "don't do this to me!" He cowered before me like a slave willing to die for his master, and I could not stop myself; his submission to my will made me angrier still. For too long I had held back—and inflicting a little pain on Angel satisfied me even more than receiving Lillith's lusty lashes. I slammed the harp against him again and again, but he did not scream; if he had just screamed, I would have quit. But he didn't, and I didn't, until he dissolved into a wisp of aromatic smoke and slipped through a keyhole. Dazed, I stumbled back against the couch, the dented harp still in my hands. I did not regret what I had done at all. And that is the aspect of the episode I feel the most shame for now.

In a while, I heard sobbing in the bedroom. My anger had not abated, however; indeed, the sound of his whimpering only aggravated it. I burst into the room and began knocking him about some more for emphasis. Angel begged my forgiveness, but all that filled my mind was the animal madness unleashed by his musky fragrance. Before I realized what was happening, we were locked in erotomaniacal embrace; to be less euphemistic, I raped him, he raped me, we raped each other's fractured bodies, and I felt no love or tenderness at all, wishing solely to satisfy my primal instincts. It only disgusted me that he seemed to be enjoying such debasement; he did not dematerialize until we were finished with one another, and I fell down hard onto the bed. I felt completely disconnected from my flesh, for which I now held only contempt and loathing, and I descended into a very deep and lasting, if not satisfying, slumber.

The beatings that rather predictably followed, and which I would rather refrain from cataloging here, escalated in force as well as fury, especially after I had been out tippling and twiddling with Lillith. Not that I ever approached seraphicide, despite my temper; I tore some hair and gave him a couple of magenta eyes, but I never came close to killing him—if you can even kill an angel. We also did not "make love" (absurd as that sounds) again, for I at least had lost all desire for his body (and suddenly and strangely, for Lillith's as well). Fortunately, Angel was always miraculously quick to recover from his beatings. I was not so quick to recover my temper, however—soon nearly every argument turned into a wrestling match, though, of course, angels are by nature nonviolent and rarely fight back (Jacob's was an exception).

Why Angel did not disappear for good the very first time I lay hand and harp on him I don't know: Maybe he thought it was just another drawback to life on earth, which after all is unquestionably more suited to the likes of evil creatures such as Lillith and I. Maybe it was because angels are masochists and martyrs. Maybe he was too high on vanilla to care. Or maybe it was simply because despite whatever I did to him he really, truly did love me.

Lillith, too, had become a pain in more ways than one. She would sit on the edge of the motel bed stubbing her cigarette out in my navel and ask what was the matter with me lately, was there someone else or what? Later, at the belching water-cooler, and loud enough so that the typists could hear, she would tell me that her miserable slob of a husband could please her more with one pinky finger than I could with my entire body. The metallic sheath she wore, that fabulous dress which must have cost her Nicky a fortune, would shed a ghastly glimmer and the sequins would shimmer in a shiver of silvery scales. Like a twice-shy mongoose I would back away, as if she were ready to spit venom.

Several weeks after corporeal aggression had become a regular part of the "relationship" Angel and I "shared" (in fact, about all that was left of our relationship), I arrived home in the ungodly daylight of a Saturday morning, having been tortured all night by darling demented Lillith and then told to go. When I raised the eyelids of the blinds I saw that the apartment had been redecorated in a bizarre fashion. Everything was knocked over, out of place, torn apart, ripped up, undone. Sticky gossamer clung to the walls and ceiling. The furniture looked on in horror. Worst of all, the television screen had been smashed in—I stared into it as into the eye of a murdered friend. Among the shattered remains of the liquor cabinet, I found an empty bottle of imitation vanilla extract (the utter depths he had reached!). What had happened became abundantly clear: Angel had been mixing the extract with harder stuff, which sent him into dizzy orbit around the house, a dive-bomber on a mission of total destruction. I presumed he had done it in retribution, although later I wondered if he had just been attempting to paint his world a rosier, more inebriated hue.

My anger, reflexive from so much practice of late, urged me into action. Having washed down the last of the bourbon to perfect my own state of intoxication (after leaving Lillith I had retreated to a Holiday in Hell lounge to lick my wounds and garner the strength for another not-so-chance encounter), I thrashed out in search of my clumsy, somnolent Angel. It was not hard to find him. He was in bed—my bed—fast asleep, softly snoring in waltz rhythm. Obviously he had exerted himself; the ethereal perfume he perspired permeated the air—one whiff of him weakened my umbrage considerably. His golden hair was swept up from his pale brow, his skin was flushed the faintest auroral pink, and there was just the trace of a pout on his lips. Angels, he had told me often, dream only of sunshiny days and full-mooned nights. He looked so Raphaelesque I did not have the heart to wake him nonverbally. Instead, I thought of something less violent but more devious. I did not hesitate on second thought: I allowed myself no second thoughts. Once I had found the scissors, a nice sharp new pair, I silently and stealthily clipped those absurd birdie wings. He was sleeping, as was his custom, on his stomach, so it was not difficult to accomplish the act, and I was so careful and mindful of where flesh began that he did not moan once in his picturesque and drunken dormancy. I unfledged him like a pet parrot, scattered the quills and pinions about him, and went off to sleep on the couch. My dreams, if indistinct, were more infernal than paradisiacal.

When the sun rose, he came to me, fluttering his poor foreshortened wings like a fowl cast out of the barnyard. He had not even bothered to put his twisted halo back on. For once he looked more human than divine, but I suppressed my pity with anger—I had a whacking hangover—and impulsively slapped him when he began to make frail, irritating accusations punctuated with feeble endearments.

"Look what you've done," I remonstrated while mixing up a little follicle of the collie. "Joshua did less damage to the walls of Jericho." I cracked an egg over the Tabasco sauce in the cocktail shaker. "You better watch yourself from now on, or you'll be demoted to guardian angel to some movie stuntman or third-world dictator." I turned the electric shaker on and turned my back to him.

"You don't love me anymore, do you?" he asked, tears glittering in his blood-red eyes.

I took a shallow breath, pressed my thumbs into my aching eyeballs, and spoke one word: "Anymore?" My hands were trembling more than the cocktail shaker.

A floating balloon of silence for a minute, which I was forced to puncture.

"Look, the Age of Romance is long past," I explained. "Apparently so is the Age of Reason." I had switched off the cocktail shaker, but why couldn't I stop shaking? Why did Lillith invade my thoughts, all fangs and malice? Besides, a Trovatorean anvil was being struck within my head, I was certain of it; I gulped my magic elixir straight from the shaker and nearly spit it out again. "Ah, better than a trip to Lourdes," I said, wiping my mouth.

The scarlet jets of his eyes had cooled to a frozen blue. He wanted to cry again, I could tell, but knew that would not do the trick now, if it ever had. "Then you don't," was all he could say.

"Don't what?"

"Love me."

"It's over," I stated, pouring him a tumbler of my miracle cure, which he pushed away. "Don't you agree?"

He definitely had that blasphemed look down to a tee; I was almost starting to feel sorry for him again. "But it's not that easy," he said, levitating about an inch above the floor. "I don't know how to say this, but, but... the spirit made flesh is weak."

Involuntarily, I slapped him again. Right across those rosebud lips. "Now, why don't you pack your clouds like a good angel and get lost." And then once across the left cheek, for good measure. With the back of my hand. The one with the signet ring.

He rubbed his bleeding cheek, staring at me with lifeless black eyes, making no attempt to move.

"You make Lillith seem better all the time," I snapped.

"Lillith? Who is Lillith?"

"Don't pretend you don't know. You're on the phone for hours at a time with those lousy loudmouth typists. But forget Lillith and forget you, too."

Angel was still rubbing his cheek. Royal-blue blood, of course. "You've been very insensitive to me," he said, "but I still, I still..." He threw himself at my feet in a stormy fit of weeping.

I kicked him away. "Why, damn you, damn you, damn you!" I exclaimed, kicking all the time.

He raised his bruised chin, his bloody face, his black eyes, flashed me a look of sudden terror, and screamed—a shriek like that of a cartoon cockatoo in an echo chamber. There was a fanfare of thunder and light as if through stained glass; and my bruised, battered, beaten angel was gone quite literally in a melodramatic puff of acrid yellow smoke.

Dear confessor, I am the first to admit that life without Angel was not any better, after all, than life with Angel. In fact, it was a considerable lot worse. Lillith refused to see me again, that viperous bitch, and saw to it that I was fired when I next approached her office. Her husband found out about me and sent over thugs to ransack my apartment and attack me in the carport. For many broken months, I tried to forget everything by slowly pickling my brains with bad liquor and making a fool of myself with even worse "friends" (who tossed me around among them, stole from me, lied to me—and I hadn't the strength left to defend myself). Home rancid home reminded me too much of Angel. Though I had had the place chemically disinfected—butterflies, I told the exterminator—I still smelled his floral perspiration everywhere in the apartment. No matter; eventually I had to give it up for a welfare hotel.

With no one around to check in and out with, I made staying out all night not only a habit but a preference. Inebriation and joblessness led to poverty, and poverty and febrile lust reduced me to shameless vices: I yielded to the temptation of the lowest circles of metropolitan hell—"singles" bars—and I sold myself, after a fashion, to demons and devils, all former angels, if they were to be believed. The ones who dragged me home were cold and cruel and had the nerve to complain that I was not meeting their drunken demands. Every one of them revolted me once we were away from the flattering lights, and I never finished what my half-hearted urges had begun. After they had fallen asleep, I would dip into their pockets and run. I could scarcely believe I was committing such depraved acts, though deep down I craved even worse punishments. So I kissed all those poisoned lips and entwined myself with all those blotchy, bloated bodies. I looked back fondly on Lillith's lickings—but, most of all, how I longed for the balm of Angel's touch, Angel's kiss! No, I told myself finally, I do not miss him, but the thought that I might flickered within my head like the neon signs outside those wretched dives.

Then one drizzling November night in a dismal neighborhood outside a dank and dreary bar I thought I saw him. There—in the faint red-amber-green glow of a traffic light—was a bent, winged figure in a black leather harness. (Could that be vanilla wafting on the breeze?) The figure was fumbling with the shadows and a cigarette; presently a black sedan emerged from a blacker blackness and came to a silent halt alongside the figure. I was not seeing straight—did a door open, did something silver glint in the dark, did a shapely limb in snakeskin swing into sight and dip inside again? Angel (for it must have been he) was sucked into the car as if by a vacuum, and with a hiss of tires on wet pavement the sedan faded into umbrageous distance.

Since that night, I have not returned to that particular corner of Hades or any other after-hours haunt set on a bleak stage peopled with leering skull-faced ghosts. I come straight to my room from the restaurant where I wash dishes until midnight, and I come here alone; I've seen misery in one too many cracked and begrimed barroom mirrors. My hands are too shaky these days to pour myself a drink. I sit up all night, alone, thinking, more than I should. I think about Angel more than I should... Maybe you sometimes think of me, too, when Lillith holds you at bay under her seven-inch stilettos or strapped to her rack of a bed. So you are real. Real? Real! Oh, but Angel, even I never realized the netherworld to which I have damned you. Does Lillith force you to keep your wings cropped short and mortify your spirit-made-flesh every night? Has she taught you to hate this earth as much as I do? Will you ever be able to forgive me as I've forgiven you, Angel? Ah, but it's too late for your salvation, or mine. And I cannot help blaming myself more than you for what has happened and what will never happen now, for how far we've both fallen, my Angel, my angel.
My Big Ideas

Or, How I Made My First Gazillion

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining in this modest celebration tonight, especially when you all lead such busy, productive lives, and know as much as I do exactly what time equals. This dinner—this award—is truly an honor, and I feel humbled in your company, since you are the best and brightest in your fields, and I probably have as much to learn from you as you do from me. (Following will be a short Q and A, in which I intend to do just that!) But, before I begin to, as therapists say, "share" my story...

Let's be blunt. I know what the Sunday morning talk shows and Wall Street Journal editorials say about me, but I'm not a bad guy, just an honest one. You're here to learn how to make money, I'm here because this fine institution is paying me a king's ransom to speak at this conference, and this award ultimately means next to nothing to someone as fabulously rich—and, yes, happy—as I am. As much as I appreciate the gesture, no prize on this fair earth could mean more to me than simply making more money. Lots more money.

You know me already through my books. Well, actually I don't have time to write them myself—anyone could write them, so anyone does, except they all use my name. I've made a lot of money off these books, even though they all pretty much repeat ad nauseam what I'll be telling you here in a few quick minutes. They're my ideas, but to tell you the brutal truth, since I'm among colleagues, nothing that couldn't have fit into a shortish magazine article, all of my books put together. I've been assured they've been really, really helpful in igniting this country's economic boom. Some day I might even get around to reading one myself, "ha ha," the teleprompter says.

But if you think I'm going to talk about the joys of being rich, or about the rich in general, forget it. Go talk to my accountants if you want inside tips on tax breaks, or my brokers if you want the latest on the market, or my long-unsuffering wife (there she is, wearing half my fortune) if you want to know how to spend your ill-gotten goods. Instead, I'd like to talk about the poor—yes, The Poor. My kind of people. But you know what the trouble with the poor is? Their trouble is.... they just don't have any money. Individually, not one poor person is going to make you rich. In fact, a poor person is likely to make you a whole lot poorer yourself if you don't watch out. Give a poor person even a little bit of money, and she's likely to spend it on some mid-range product, a vibrating recliner or digital video-cam, or worse yet, rent. And the really tragic thing about the poor is they all think they've got a shot at becoming as rich as you or me. Of course, the paradox is, that's what keeps people like us rich in the first place! No, it's not the goods; it's the ideas. Long ago I learned you don't sell products or services; you sell dreams.

Sounding like Disney, am I? Or even worse, like something you heard at one of those ubiquitous "business retreats"? Hardly. Now, I said one poor person can't make you rich—however, a million or more of them sure can help. You think I'm being funny, or worse yet—cynical. I'm not trying to be either. And I haven't really told you anything yet you shouldn't already know, if you have half the intelligence of your Egyptian hairless or Himalayan longhair.

Allow me to give you a little more of my history, even though it was spelled out so nicely for you by our gracious presenter (thanks, Stan, you're the man). Now, I'm just a schlumpy guy who got lucky in my first company's Product Placement division. Lucky! I was a twenty-five-year-old whiz-kid with a shrink-wrapped MBA and a PowerBook full of brilliant ideas. I knew what I was doing, all right. This advertising company had already re-engineered, downsized, streamlined, cut back, given early retirement to anyone over thirty-five. We were ready to make a new name for ourselves.

Product placement, as I saw it, just hadn't gone far enough: and that is the theme, fair ladies and rugged gentlemen, of this talk. Be aggressive. Always go farther than what's considered proper at the time; the rest will follow. Remember the era when movies only showed you a few carefully selected close-ups of a cereal box or cola can? When people were still getting upset when a supposedly rebellious rock group went on tour underwritten by a major liquor company? Those were innocent, if not to say quaint, years.

As much as I'm fond of praising myself, it really doesn't take much of a genius to extrapolate a bit from those primitive concepts of corporate sponsorship. The arts had to be explored and exploited more fully, of course, but so did all the rest of life. When I look back upon my many achievements, I can only marvel that no one had pioneered the changes I set into motion years before. I mean, you could practically write the following scenarios yourselves—but allow me...

Having always wanted to write that really, really important First Novel myself, I started with the most popular authors of popular books. Originally I was a bit miffed to learn that some authors were actually "placing product" without being paid for it! Some "hip" youngish Manhattanite writers of slice-and-dice glamor littered practically every paragraph with brand names, and yet didn't even seem to notice the remunerative potential. Then there were all these boring older "minimalist" writers, some of them avowed socialists, who thought they were being cute with some of America's most trusted trademarks. Now, I don't have to tell you how easy it was to go several steps farther than that by persuading publishers to not only insert colorful advertisements into the middle of so-called "serious" books, but also to entice the writers themselves to pen (I should say "word-process") romances about high-end cosmetics or high-tech adventure stories with the latest in computer equipment as the protagonists. Courtroom dramas could revolve around the relative merits of competing toothpastes or feminine hygiene products. All those teenage horror stories adults can't get enough of these days could involve the forces of Evil, represented by Brand X, in battle with the True Nature of Good, being whatever corporation all too willing to pay through the nasal cavities for that privilege. Why, even poets could write odes to detergents or sonnets about banks.

However, it was important to stick with well-known writers and high-concept novels or memoirs. Unless the subject matter is powerful and "truthful" enough, or the author in effect already a brand-name, the resulting product might smack of parody, which is the last thing we would have wanted to happen. When selling what is essentially a ridiculous idea—and I'm if anything not stupid—one must strive to be taken as seriously as the Pope or the Dalai Lama (more about those types of guys later). This certainly didn't confine us to lumpy-cover genre fiction or sensationalist kiss-and-tells about screwing your alcoholic lesbian sister, but it did make our advertisers wary and our authors cautious enough to speak of their assigned products with only the greatest respect.

Did the reading public, or what's left of it, take notice of these not-so-subtle literary transformations? Naturally, a few critics caviled, but that's what they're being paid to do, after all—who else cavils? What kind of word is that, anyway? Some academic theorists actually praised our cooperating authors for their "avant garde" notions! No one else, least of all the writers, now considerably wealthier, seemed to mind any misrepresented misconceptions. And as with everything else in life, it all comes down to you-know-effing-what in the end.

After manufacturers, publishers, and writers saw the enormously lucrative market we had created for them, we of course had people lining up around the block to do more of the same with movies, plays, music albums, musicals, music videos, computer games, websites, television programs, what-have-you. Naturally, a lot of those ideas were redundant, but we did manage to make some innovative techniques widely available. Tell me now, when was the last time you saw a hit movie or television show that didn't feature actors portraying the very products themselves? When actors or musicians win their awards nowadays, it's the product they thank—and that's assured by the advertising industry, too.

It's easy enough to persuade journalists to insert provocative little "human interest" stories about products between their otherwise dreary newscasts or newspaper articles. Not so much harder to go one step further and have a little overseas war sponsored by the maker of basketball shoes, say, or a new capitalist monarch put into place in some godforsaken country with the help of a major software developer. Even terrorists are eager to wear some rifle-maker's T-shirts—and who's to care what side the enemy is on, so long as your logo is given plenty of prime-time visibility? People get fuzzy on the details in retrospect, anyway.

But, again, I'm not—I repeat, I'm not—being cynical—far from it. I'm being obvious. One lesson I've learned: the more obvious you are, the more attention you'll get, the more money you'll make. And this isn't some think-tank critique of consumer society stretched to its obvious limits. I just find or found these examples amusing, if still not effective enough.

All these ideas and a thousand more were borrowed, in truth outright stolen, from me, sometimes fine-tuned for more effectiveness, other times revved up and vastly expanded in scope. Well, as they say, knowledge is free—if you're willing to pay the price. I'd long since become a freelance consultant, just taking on this or that assignment between vacations, and I was already worth so much an hour that if I were to drop a hundred-dollar bill it wouldn't be worth the three seconds of my time it would take to pick the bill up. In fact, I'd probably be losing money if I wasted that much time picking it up. Another reason to never carry cash.

But I felt this urge, this need to get "back on the street," to see what all those poor people I'd heard so much about were up to—in truth, to discover the greater potential, the untapped markets I'm sure we'd been overlooking. Eagerly, I flipped down my sun-shades and gazed out over a sea of people covered in blinding corporate logos, trademarked slogans, designer labels, and copyrighted color combinations. And to think, no one was paying them for doing this—in fact, they had to pay for the privilege! Now, I may be a rich man, but I don't believe in this kind of exploitation of the masses. I was ready to work the other side of the corporate fence. Besides, clothing wears out, gets discarded or exchanged, and there are even moments when one must take off all those logos and labels—admittedly, the audience is smaller then, but attention much more concentrated, the payback greater.

It became my mission to manage the money-making potential of the common person's own physical body. This meant more than auctioning off body parts, both internal and external, on the open market—a practice which, once legalized, gave new meaning to the notion of selling out, but is unfortunately limited by our own feeble flesh-and-blood limitations. You can only give your left arm so many times.

People had been tattooing themselves for centuries, advertising everything from their preference in religions to their commitment to a certain sexual partner. It was, however, a trend businesses (beyond the tattoo parlors themselves) had been slow to partake in. Why not get sponsors to pay for this privilege? Happy to help, I set up the first clinics that traded hard cash for a logo emblazoned on the forehead or a slogan arched indelibly across the chest (ready-to-wear at the beach). I like to think capitalism was finally giving back to the masses their right to control their own bodies and make money not just from labor, but from simply being visible, simply existing. That's real empowerment, not some agency's "bootstraps" or government handout or pious "self-help" lecture coming from a pulpit or a paperback.

Speaking of government, you might have been wondering by now why I never bothered to vie for some real, aphrodisiacal political power to go with all the money I'd made. But as my dearly departed mother used to say to my hardscrabbling father, why scrub the toilet when you can pay someone to do it for you? Surely by now you've seen how successful a presidential candidate funded by a tobacco consortium or a meat-packing coalition can be. Before I came along, politicians might have felt a little compromised about agreeing to feature in fast-food commercials or billboards hawking suntan lotion, but no longer. And who can really hate a neo-whatever who praises the same puppy chow you use?

With religions, I warned my clients, you have to be more selective; even today, people are a bit touchy about those kinds of things. Stay away from religions less than a hundred years old and be cautious with evangelists who want to peddle your product as slickly as they do Jesus. Watch out for the ones that use obscure electrical devices or promise free trips to Alpha Centauri in this lifetime. Stick with the class acts, the older the better. That's why you're likely to see those famous arches or a familiar "swoosh" on your host when you receive communion. (Please, no jokes about, "You want fries with that?") Or why the Talmud is so much more colorful today now that it's online, with all these web-links to where you can buy Talmud-related food and apparel. Or why all the religious big-wigs, the spiritual representatives of the godhead on earth, or whatever, smoke only the best cigars or drink the finest wines—at least in all the ads. Once we got going on the spiritual angle, it amazed even me how easily this can be made to look like charity or "good deeds." All these ideas are so obvious, aren't they? Any one of you might have thought them up first—but you didn't, and so here am I.

Well, religion is but one way to reach those poor, huddled masses—so my success in that department only led me to try some even bolder experiments. I looked deep, deep, way deep into myself and contemplated what could possibly be the last thing left to commodify. What area could I go into that had not yet been picked over by industry, the military, political parties, or popular entertainment? I wanted to go beyond the media and consumer-slash-producer culture. You've probably already guessed it, and for that I'd welcome you to share this podium with me—but don't anyone get up just yet.

The body's own advertising real-estate is, once again, limited, no matter how much skin you might flash or pounds you pack on. Besides, the poor will always be clamoring to sell much more than just their flesh or their labor. A sidestep here: For years now, the idea of personal trainers has flourished in this country. The problem is, those trainers come and go, and their services are so cost-inefficient. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have someone serving me a mojito than getting me to flex my abs for three-hundred dollars an hour. Then again, I don't want any old servant who comes and goes, doing menial tasks even at a competitive rate; I'd rather have someone at my side, doing the more important stuff—my brainstorming, my business meetings, even public speeches like this one. In effect, why couldn't I own someone to do these things for me—someone for whom I'd be glad to pay handsomely?

Please be patient as you follow my logic. People, especially poor people, and even more especially, the overeducated poor people so prevalent in modern civilization, want to maximalize. That is, they want to get all they're possibly worth and then some. Life is long, and it's unpredictable. Who knows how many decades you can keep bringing in a paycheck, such a diddly amount, week by week, year by year. Surely, it's easier to sell yourself upfront, collect the cash now, be earning interest in the bank. If unskilled, as so many of the unwealthy are, you can be trained on the job; the costs saved over the years would be substantial. And how nice, how humane to have an employer who really takes care of you throughout your life—full medical, dental, retirement.

Ah, but I'm a mindreader, too; I know what you're thinking. "Slavery" is a word weighted with such cultural baggage. We prefer the more commodity-specific term "personal lifetime investment." Again, we have corporate sponsorships, and the sponsors are to identify individual lifetime investments with their own products. That is, you can put your life into the hands of a sponsor, in effect, become the product of whichever company promises you most—what a seller's market, what a buyer's dream! The programs we've arranged in some third-world countries whose names you couldn't pronounce correctly have already been wonderfully successful, and I'm proud to announce tonight that we're opening up auctioning centers in several of our major cities this very month. I'm sure you've been reading about this in the business section of whatever denomination of economic weekly you subscribe to. So far both heads of state and religious leaders have been, to put it mildly, ecstatic. And ripe with their own ideas. One prominent member teetering at the top of the Fortune Forty—or was it a particularly charismatic clergyman?—has posited that suitable parents arrange to have their unborn children sold off to the highest bidders—and what could be a better family value than that?

You might think that this fantastically profitable market might have finally realized my craziest ambitions—but you're wrong. There are yet more territories to conquer. Even today, I was speaking with the well-respected C.E.O. of one of the largest and solidest concerns going, a concern that defines tradition and old—but certainly not moldy—money. You would know who I'm talking about, but I dare not speak his name in any place where lightning might strike me. Though I don't want to go into too many details about how we'll accomplish our goals, I will say that market research has already borne out our hypothesis—that's there's nothing a person won't sell if the price is right. Imagine the security of knowing today where and how you will spend your entire afterlife! Imagine life on earth paid in full and a guaranteed eternity assuring the highest in quality control! You might call it: sell now, pay later. Just a catch-phrase we're kicking around...

But, hush my mouth, I've already said too much and want to leave the rest to your already overtaxed imaginations. Thank you, and onto the questions...

" _If you die, I will take your dead body out of the mud and make you work to return my debt."_

— _Shanti, an Indian slave, quoting her "contractor"_
Punch and Judy Today

Same old story. Punch and Judy are on the outs, even after the couples counseling, the group therapy, and the past-lives regression. It seems once they'd finally discovered themselves they'd also discovered each other was a different person than the person they'd thought they'd discovered in the first place. By the end of the eighties everything had fallen apart around them—they'd lost their jobs, their house, their cars, their self-esteem. It's probably time the marriage went, too, they've both been thinking. Judy has her retreats at the battered wives shelter and Punch has his awareness sessions with his men's group, but something seems to have gone flat in their relationship. Maybe it's simply boredom. Maybe a trial separation is overdue, though neither will discuss the big "D"— they don't talk to each other long enough anymore even to argue about that. It's never been this serious, and here when they'd just scraped enough money together to send the brat off to boarding school and Judy had completed her aromatherapy course. Then suddenly it's the nineties and Punch had to go and write his novel.

It seemed so easy. All his friends were buying laptops and doing it; with all the fancy programs the damn things practically write best-sellers for you. So Punch overextended his credit card once again, hoping to make his money back with a book. He was still drawing unemployment, so he spent half a day at a time staring into the glowing monochrome screen, making it up as he went along. He'd laugh that raucous laugh of his as he wrote, and when Judy came in from her part-time job at the reflexology clinic she'd find him doubled up over his desk, roaring away. It was worse than when he used to drink.

When he'd finally printed all eight-hundred pages out on his state-of-the-art dot-matrix printer she took the long roll of green and white computer paper to bed with her and stayed up all night speed-reading while tearing off the perforated margins. In the morning she hit him over the head with a heavy iron frying pan, just like the old days. She herself was surprised she'd done it.

"What do you mean writing about us that way?" she said. "You make me look like a first-class bimbo, always whining, always acting out my aggressions."

"Come on," he said, leaping up and going for his club, which he'd long ago stored away in the closet. "It's just fiction."

"Then what about the part with the constable? You told me you'd never bring his name up again. Hasn't analysis done you any good at all? Now look what you've got me doing!" She whacked him again, right across his big hooked nose.

He had fished out the club and countered with some deft blows to her broad shoulders. "Every writer has to write about what he knows. I'm expressing myself, you know."

"What makes you a writer? You've only reported the travesty of our marriage! Even the fact that the brat isn't yours! Why share it with the world? Take that!"

"Wait a goddamn second!" he screamed, knocking the frying pan out of her hands with the club. "It's just not working, I'm sorry. I don't get any pleasure out of it anymore."

After a bit of thrashing about she collapsed on the bed. "Oh, I suppose you're right," she said, sobbing into a pillow. "We're not really getting in touch with our emotions this way, are we? It's so destructive. Admit it, we're so damn one-dimensional at heart."

He stared dejectedly at his club. "I used to love just hitting you in the backside with a frozen leg of lamb. Now it doesn't seem to do a thing for me."

"And I loved nothing more than beating you over the head with the brat, but... I don't know, it's really not too self-affirming for the kid, is it? I was mad about your book and I was hoping to get even, but it didn't work. I'm sorry. Maybe we do need more counseling." They both lay on the bed, staring with unblinking eyes at the ceiling, like one of the uncommunicative couples from the fifties...

So Judy got even another way by writing her own novel, all about their travesty of a marriage from her own point of view. It didn't take much imagination or exertion, and logically enough it was optioned for the movies by her agent even before a publisher was found. On the talk shows she's been sporting a rainbow mohawk, very retropunk, very seventies, and the interviewers find it hard distinguishing between her real self and her heroine. "It's good," she told Punch, "that I'm externalizing all this negativity instead of internalizing. I'm finally getting it out of my system." Punch was feeling vulnerable about the whole thing, but he's decided to objectify instead of subjectify and has gone back to scanning the want-ads. Every once in a while he stares at the club he keeps upon a shelf, and thinks a little wistfully about the sting of the frying pan across his forehead. It might be a long time before he and Judy are on speaking terms again, though he blames not themselves, but a dysfunctional world. There's no optimism, no sunshine. After all, it's not the sixties anymore.

So, Punch and Judy are on the outs. Same old story.
Bad Baby

Lawrence disliked the baby from the first. It bawled, it drooled, it fussed, it spat up, it did far worse things, all, it seemed, just to annoy him—he wondered if it ever slept. Like an awkward piece of furniture, it was always in the way. There was something positively bestial in the way it slunk around, skulking under chairs and grazing his ankles. Sometimes he came close to kicking it out of doors. No matter what, he could not escape it: The baby could have easily been quintuplets, for there appeared to be a duplicate in every room.

"Isn't Baby pretty Larry isn't Baby precious?" Lawrence's sister would unfailingly say dozens of times a day, holding the child up to his nose like some awful ethnic art object bought on vacation and which guests are expected to admire. (She would be chewing yet another aspirin for her perpetual toothache.)

Baby would splatter something vile in his face. "Like a Ming vase," or some such thing, Lawrence would say as he blotted himself with a ready handkerchief.

Babies had never disturbed Lawrence much before, but then, he had never lived with one, and such a monstrous one. Although he had rarely paid attention to infants in the past, he was certain this was the worst specimen he had ever seen. Lawrence was afraid to dangle his fingers before Baby's mouth, it was so wide and fleshy and gaping, not unlike that of an oversized bullfrog. In fact, there was something altogether amphibian about Baby, from its slippery skin to its slick, hairless scalp to its big, round, staring eyes. The body was as shapeless as a partially deflated beach-ball, to which were attached stumpy limbs with little digits at the ends always wriggling and grasping. Yet, its parents (though Larry could scarcely imagine his sister, unlovely as she was, ever having given birth to this thing) were always picking it up, cuddling it, kissing its thick, rubbery lips, and—Lawrence shuddered when they did this—telling it they loved it. Enough was enough!

There were other, less aesthetic and more pragmatic reasons why he disliked and distrusted the baby. If he ever left the room before he had finished drawing his bath, he would be sure to discover ashes, cigar butts, and scraps of cellophane—from nearby ashtrays—floating in the water when he came back. If he sat down to play his viola, he would have to separate the music sheets which had been thoroughly masticated from the rest (the Early Rococo masters were apparently the tastiest). More than once he had come to the edge of doom when he tripped over building blocks or toy soldiers left at the top of the stairs. Nearly every pair of his shoes suffered a divorce, and few were reunited. His best ties were reduced to little more than shreds and knots, and so many of his shirt buttons were missing he had to wear sweaters despite warm weather (if Baby were swallowing the buttons in imitation of its mother's addiction to aspirin, there were no obvious ill effects). Lawrence couldn't understand how a creature with such a small cranial area could be so cunning.

Each morning, his brother-in-law, Morris, fed Baby in the breakfast nook; often it was impossible to avoid the spectacle. "Looky here, chum," Mo said one such morning, scooping a heaping spoonful of lumpy applesauce into his child's already bulging cheeks. He was a big gorilla of a man and he did look a bit silly in a flowered apron, leaning over the high chair. "Doesn't Baby look like Uncle Lar?" Mo asked.

Lawrence tensed. The idea! "You don't suppose it's had enough, Mo?" he said, hoping there might be some applesauce left over for him.

The larger man continued shoveling food into his offspring, which hadn't swallowed yet. "Baby's quite an eater. Growing all the time. And Babes loves Uncle Lar, right?"

"Really," Lawrence stated, assaulting the refrigerator for milk, but finding only some moldy cheese, a huge bottle of Tabasco sauce, a few black olives, and about a dozen large pastrami sausages.

"Yes, ma'am, the kid sure loves uncle-wuncle!" Mo chuckled hoarsely and stuffed still more sauce into the child, spilling gobs of it onto his apron. At last, Baby began to swallow, making a sound not unlike a gooseneck drainpipe suddenly becoming unclogged.

Lawrence had paused, half a sausage in hand. "Well," he said, when the baby finished, "it is about time, I believe, to be returning to the city. I've already overstayed my welcome by several weeks, I imagine. The country air has done me wonders and the concerto is just about finished, so... "Actually, he had scarcely been able to pen more than a few bars since his sister had invited him almost a month ago. "And the new symphony season will be starting up soon." In fact, he had two months of sabbatical left, but it would seem many times that if he stayed in this house.

"Nothing doing, chum," Mo said as he wiped the baby's mouth and chin. It was bending a spoon back and forth in its chubby fingers. "You're going to stay put in this good fresh air until you've got those tunes of yours polished up right pretty." Before Lawrence was able to protest, Baby's spoon went hurtling over his shoulder and cracked a windowpane behind him. He was sure it had been reading his thoughts; it looked at him and smiled in that ingratiatingly guileless way only the basest criminals will.

Often during the last week or so Lawrence had been considering infanticide. Not seriously, of course, but in flights of fancy, the way one imagines, say, knifing an obtrusive first violinist in the back and getting away with it. Though he abhorred child abuse, as all good citizens should, it was probably true after all that many cases of infanticide went unreported, disguised as crib death, perhaps, or a self-propelled fall. Especially after the baby had had a bath and lay relatively quiet in its crib, when it looked so flaccid and pasty and, yes, vulnerable, Lawrence hypothesized how swiftly and soundlessly he could clamp a pillow over that soggy, froggy mouth and say nighty-night. Or if Baby were to be tipped into its own bathwater and held down just long enough... It was truly amazing how a baby's sudden squall during the middle of practicing your rubato technique could bring out the worst in a good man.

Yet he knew that by thinking about these things in such belabored detail he was not such a good man, after all. He was a good violist, that was true, and a reasonably good composer, he supposed, but the state of his moral being had for a long time been in doubt. He was an aging bachelor who didn't care for women and not much for anything else except music, and then very little music. Year by year the list of composers he could tolerate had diminished, until now his tastes were so refined or recherché that only a very few Italian and Austrian gentlemen of the Age of Reason held for him any fascination. In a similar manner his circle of friends had tightened, and of other relatives he had detached himself completely. He had not spoken to his only sister in years, so when she read in the paper about his generous commission and invited him to visit the house and meet the husband he had never met, it was more due to guilt and his analyst's urgent suggestions than any actual need for a rural retreat that he went. He hadn't even known she'd been pregnant, no less borne a child, which now was obviously the real reason why she'd wanted him to come—to show off her monster, who might also one day, if they primed the pump well enough, be heir to Lawrence's not inconsiderable savings. So he'd come, armed with presents for the little one. And one by one the toy trucks and stuffed animals had been dismantled and sent to the garbage heap, in much the same way his hopes for a little peace to work in had also been dismantled and discarded.

As surely as an ironic stroke of fate in a gothic novel, when the heroine is forced to spend a night at the castle of the baron she has always despised, Lawrence was asked to watch Baby for the evening, the last evening in fact that he planned to stay with his sister. (Tomorrow afternoon, like it or not, he would pack his viola case and sneak out the back way if he had to.) In the past there had always been a babysitter—a teenage giantess with mannish hands wide as frying pans that were probably just the right things for swatting Baby around a bit, but on this night Miss Amazon was at her school prom (Lawrence could sooner imagine Morris wearing a corsage), and what with the prom there were no other sitters to be found. Morris and Curly were expected at their really really so important civic club meeting. Since there was naturally enough nowhere to go out into what he considered the barrens (especially at night when he didn't know the territory and didn't have a car at his disposal) and he could not think of any excuse quickly enough, his sister had succeeded in electing him to the position.

"Oh thanks Larry we really appreciate it so much really," Curly had said in her familiar breathless style the afternoon before as she was stuffing a glazed goose for supper.

"Are you absolutely certain, now, that there are not any more experienced sitters available?" Lawrence asked for the third or fourth time. He was nervously fidgeting with a pair of green board-game dice, shooting them along the counter-top across from Curly. He rolled. Boxcars.

"Don't worry Larry the kid loves you." Her hands were encased in clear plastic gloves. Her hands would be sweating profusely, Lawrence knew—boxcars again.

"But suppose I have to change diapers?" He had never changed a diaper in his life and had no intention of starting now, no matter how much Baby needed the operation.

"Lots of them in the closet next the playpen. Keep Baby up in his room all night and really you won't be bothered." Curly swept the rest of the stuffing into the goose and deposited it into the oven. She avoided further conversation by munching aspirins and vacuuming. He couldn't understand how she could tolerate the hurricane decibel level of that machine when she claimed that listening to him practice his viola, even though she appreciated it and all, irritated her migraines (he had voluntarily banished himself thereafter to a corner of the furnished basement). At trying times like this Lawrence tried to envision the sister he never really knew decades ago when she was a darling child in jumper and ribbons, but all that really came to mind was Baby in ridiculous ringlets.

When Morris got home from the bakery where he all day long impregnated pastries with sugary cream, Lawrence took him aside in secret and begged him to forget about the Elks or Moose or whatever large antlered quadruped you called them. When the man failed to reason with him, Lawrence found himself overcome with an unreasonable attack of honesty. "The fact of the matter is, Mo," Lawrence whispered, looking about for Curly, "I do not really get along with babies too well. They... they don't seem to like me."

"Not this one, chum," Morris said, sitting on the bottom shelf of the linen closet, smoking a cigar stub. "Baby lights right up when you're in the room. Smart kid!"

"No, please, Mo, listen to me, believe me. Baby simply doesn't like me. I just know." Lawrence looked warily at Mo's simian knuckles, which he was afraid might be saying how-d'ya-do to his jaw before long.

"There's the humble uncle for ya. Baby loves ya, Lar, no bull."

"Listen, Mo.... I'm just, just really not too keen on babies. I mean, I don't particularly fancy them, I guess. Please don't make me watch it—" He was ready to duck.

"You're acting nuts, Lar. Quit joshin' around. Why don't you play Baby some of those songs you're always fiddling around with, if you're so nervous? Personally now, I can't see much in that egghead stuff, but I tell you the little slugger loves it! Maybe someday our kid'll be up there with a stick wavin' it in front of your fancy orchestra."

"Baton—Listen, sometimes when I'm practicing my 'songs' and that creature starts to... " The close quarters, the cigar smoke, an odd sugary smell, and the reek of Morris's armpits were getting to him.

"Get outta here, will ya?"

By now, Lawrence knew he could say just about anything and get the same sort of wide-eyed country-boy response from Morris. What could one say, after all, to a brute who was capable of grinding out his cigar in the palm of his hand? "Don't make me do it, Mo, I beg you. Crying, screaming babies make me want to garotte them. Or myself."

"You big joker. Come on, Curly's got supper on the table. Put the ironing board back now, Lar." Morris stood up, gave Lawrence a mighty slap on the back that knocked the wind clean out of his lungs, and lustily led the way to the dining room, whistling a snippet of the Sammartini sonata his brother-in-law had been playing earlier. Lawrence followed, amazed, breathless, and very pale.

During supper, Lawrence contemplated how he was living with not one aberration of nature, but three. Morris, to his left, with a greasy goose femur in his mitt, was an imbecile and an ape; Curly, to his right, was a whining dotard addicted to cheap painkillers (she had neglected to remove her plastic gloves, which stuck to a goose wing); and in front of him, sucking marrow from a bone, its eyes regarding him with inhuman contempt disguised as innocence, was Baby. Coming to this house had been like joining a freak show. This happy little nuclear family all belonged in jars of formaldehyde. Lawrence bit into something hard in his stuffing—a bone? No, the green dice. They rolled across the table. Boxcars.

For nearly an hour after the parents had left (leaving Baby freshly diapered and milk bottles waiting in the refrigerator) nothing eventful happened—Baby was in its playpen upstairs, bashing away at a tin pie pan in irregular 5/4 time, and Lawrence was ensconced in a molting armchair under the sallow light of a living room lamp shaped like a Conestoga wagon, trying to outguess the detective in the mystery novel Curly had left prone on the end-table: it was the best way he could think of to forget about the baby, which was like trying not to think of that clothes-iron you had left on when you are already halfway to Amsterdam.

By the time he had, with bleary eyes, decided that Miss Crimson had done it in the conservatory with a candlestick, or something like that, Lawrence realized he had not been aware of any noise from the upstairs for an indefinite but suspiciously long amount of time. (Had he dozed off a while between chapters?) Something was strange. Either the little toad was asleep already at this hour—in which case, he must surely see to believe—or it had broken like a wild beast from the bars of its pen. Lawrence knew it was his unhappy duty to check out the situation. He furtively climbed the stairs and peered into the nursery.

Astoundingly, the baby was sleeping quietly. Too quietly. Lawrence moved closer. No. It could not be. He shook the infant. Baby was dead.

His flourish of relief was followed by a crescendo of guilt and horror. Baby was dead. Baby was dead and he would be blamed. With great displeasure he picked up the sticky bluish thing and shook it, as one does a watch to start it ticking, but nothing he did would start its heart going again. A firing squad could not make him press his own mouth to that awful cold mouth and pump in air. The baby was beyond resuscitation, obviously, anyway. Its misshapen head bobbed uselessly on its neck like a rag-doll's. How could it have happened? Lawrence asked himself, carrying the lifeless body downstairs—he was struck by his thought of how much heavier the baby seemed to be growing. His arms, he reasoned, were getting tired. If he had not known it was impossible, he would have sworn Baby was gaining weight—probably only an abnormal amount of postmortem swelling. Lawrence had heard of babies dying unexpectedly in their cribs, and this one had chosen a fine time to do it. He remembered telling that gorilla Mo in so many words how he hated Baby enough to kill it. What a fool he had been for saying anything like that! Now his fingerprints would be all over it; with sudden ominous foresight, he set the baby (which indeed appeared much larger now than it had in its playpen) at the top of the stairs and hurried down the steps to wash his hands and think the matter over before the parents returned.

A few minutes later, he remounted the stairs with his hands in Curly's plastic gloves and a plan to bury Baby somewhere in the woods back of the house; he would explain how it had disappeared, gotten out of its crib somehow and crawled away, and how he had looked everywhere for it. Curly and Morris were stupid enough to believe him, possibly even too stupid to call the police right away.

Baby, however, was not at the top of the stairs. There was instead a wet smelly spot where Lawrence had left it, and the liquid was trickling over the edge of the top step like runny icing on a multi-tiered wedding cake. For a moment, it looked feasible that Baby had melted away like putrid snow, but Lawrence knew that was not likely. What was more likely was the baby had been playing possum, a morbid little game to antagonize him. He had to think. All civic club meetings must come to an end. What would he do if he were an overgrown, conniving infant out to get its uncle? Well, he had to think harder. Then he noticed something. When he examined the floor tiles carefully, he could detect a gluey sort of trail, like that left behind by a very large garden slug, which led down the hallway. So it wanted to play hide and seek, did it? Lawrence would find and throttle the demon—a lesson to be taught with his bare hands.

Crawling now on all fours, Lawrence followed the mucous path, which wound through the nursery and—now he could hear a wheezing, spluttering sound and smell a distinct, nauseating odor—into the adjacent bedroom. It was too dark to see, but he knew immediately he was in the same room with Baby, who was in a far corner, sputtering like a faulty fountain. His elbow jostled a blind alongside himself and it snapped up, letting in the searchlight of a moon. What Lawrence saw then was really too awful, too hideous, too grotesque for subtle description. Baby squatted opposite him, large, hairless, and blubbery as a walrus, its many teeth gnashing and all its flushed flesh aquiver with infantile rapaciousness—Lawrence, still cowering on his hands and knees, felt like a helpless child confronting a nightmare monster escaped from its closet and become very real. He was altogether too stunned to cry aloud when the walrusy thing reached out a moist paw and scooped him up. Alas, before Lawrence could reflect upon his chances in the afterlife, Baby had neatly bitten off his head as one might do with a giraffe in a box of animal crackers, and soon stuffed the rest of Uncle into its mouth. With a slobber of satisfaction, Baby swallowed him in several hungry gulps.

A taut string snapped mid-symphony in Lawrence's mind, and he woke with a jerk in the armchair he'd fallen asleep in like a marionette whose limbs have all been yanked at once. He stretched, and the nightmare repeated itself (edited version) in his mind as if he were riffling again through the pages of a picture book he'd already read once. The paperback he had been dallying with lay spread-eagle at his feet on top of the music paper discarded there previously, and he felt that gratitude toward whatever convenient master of reality (himself or God) the dreamer feels when he's been welcomed back to this world after having been shown, like paintings in a gallery, the horrors of another, slightly less rational world. How preposterous a dream! Lawrence was sorry his analyst wasn't Freudian—certainly they could have had a lot of fun with this one. Suddenly two plans formed themselves instantly and simultaneously in his mind, like gestating twins which have nothing in common but their parentage: firstly, the concluding ritornello of the first movement of his concerto, and secondly, most importantly, a foolproof method to rid himself of the responsibility of watching Baby any longer.

Just then Lawrence realized Baby was howling upstairs, a recurring theme on a sliding scale very much like that of his ritornello, he reflected before ascending the stairs.

Perhaps he wouldn't need to do the devious deed after all: mix just a pinch of Tabasco sauce with the baby's milk so he could call the Moose or Elks lodge and tell Morris and Curly to rush home to their sick child. (Surely just a pinch would only make the child appear sick without actually being sick, wouldn't it?) He entered Baby's room, prepared by his dream for the worst.

"You're certainly not going to pursue this sophomoric hot-sauce idea, are you, Uncle?" Baby asked in perfect broadcasters' English from a corner of his crib. Lawrence was not certain if he were more astounded by Baby's ability to speak or by Baby's apparent ability to read his mind. Baby looked no different, and the only other explanation would be that this was a dream-within-a-dream, which seemed unlikely given the brightness of the room, the sharpness of the details, and Lawrence's realization that his entire conscious history still lay neatly folded in the recesses of his mind and not jumbled or misplaced, as it is in real dreams. That is, he could still recall that his middle name was that of the father he had always laughed at, it was the tenth of June, his baby sister had once fallen ill after accidentally tasting some Tabasco sauce, and any number of trivial facts or crucial pieces of mental orientation.

"Oh, don't bother being surprised by my faculties," Baby continued as coolly as any trained orator. It was not a child's voice, but that of a self-assured, reassuring adult, the voice of a therapist or counselor. "And please get rid of that musical theme spinning around in your head. It's horrid."

"But how can you?" Lawrence was at last able to say.

"Why shouldn't I? How very boring you are, Uncle Dear. And you have the nerve to think of me as some sort of polliwog and my parents as stooges. Who are you to speak? Look at yourself—an old, unattractive, only modestly talented invert who can't even tolerate one dear, sweet, cuddly infant, his sister's only child. A twisted, frustrated artist who plots grand schemes against this same helpless, defenseless child. Now you tell me who's the monster here... Who are you, anyway?"

"Are—are you the voice of my conscience? Is this a delusion I'm having because I'm going insane?"

Baby gave him a long contemptible stare, rising and grasping the wooden bars of his crib. "Don't be so simple. Oh, I'm afraid you're still tolerably sane, Uncle. Though I doubt you'll stay that way much longer." Baby was now sucking meditatively on a large plastic mushroom-shaped pacifier.

Lawrence recognized now who Baby looked and sounded like—the hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, and he felt every bit as meek and morose as Alice. What could he possibly do now—jump out the window?

"That would be messy, wouldn't it?" Baby said. "And I'm afraid it wouldn't be so appetizing for me to eat you, either. But see here, let's strike a deal. You want to leave. I want you to go—after all, you are bigger than me and could conceivably do a certain amount of damage. So why not call a cab? Now. My parents will be home soon enough, but you know they'll make you stay against your wishes for weeks longer and I'd love to destroy that miserable concerto of yours. This is your only chance to escape before I let on something's wrong and they think you've gone quite mad. I'll be fine, don't worry. Just hurry and pack your essentials and Mother will send on the rest, so go immediately and I'll never bother you again. Make a clean break, as you adults say. Now if you don't mind, unkly-wunkly, I'd like to return to my nappy-nap." With that, Baby curled itself up in a corner of the crib and burrowed under a blanket, making a small muffled bleating sound.

It did not matter if this were another hallucination or not: that would be something to pay ninety dollars an hour to discuss later—Lawrence just knew that if he didn't escape now, he would find himself attempting to smother Baby next, and things would get even stickier than they already were. He did not even bother to phone a cab out of fear it would not arrive before Curly and Morris; the bus station, he remembered, was only a couple of miles away—he could walk (better yet, run).

After stuffing an overnight bag, there was just one thing he simply could not leave without—his viola, and it was in his basement corner. On Lawrence's way to the door, he hesitated for a moment—what exactly was he doing? Leaving an infant alone in a house because he thought the infant had ordered him to do so? Was this the breakdown he'd long been warned of—did it really go all the way back to the day his dullard father had caught him dancing naked as Nijinksy to "Afternoon of a Faun"? Was he overworked? He decided in his hurry that he would think about it later, on the bus. But alas it was because he was in such a hurry that he did not notice the set of blocks piled methodically on the top step of the dark and steep basement stairs, and even if the lights had been on, it is doubtful he would have noticed that the blocks, either by chance or design, spelled out:

"B Y B Y."

Epilogue

When Curly and Morris returned from their lodge, Baby was snoring adorably in its crib, plastic teething ring grasped tightly in its tiny fingers. Curly took off her nutria-fur coat and picked up the infant, which seemed to her prettier than it had ever been, all pink and robust like a cherub hovering above a Florentine Madonna on a Christmas card. She kissed the smooth white brow and the soft rosy petals of its eyelids.

Morris took the child from her daintily, as if it were an invaluable vase, and propped its drowsing head against his shoulder, being careful that his cigar ash fell on the opposite shoulder. "I wonder where Larry went to," he said to his wife.

"I don't know. He left his glasses and his music paper lying on the table in the living room you know him he probably got tired and went to bed. God I hope he doesn't walk in his sleep again tonight." She was chewing on an aspirin, circling Baby's warm waxy ears with the tip of her finger. Then she kissed the finger and touched it to the infant's tiny nose.

The touch awoke Baby, who emitted a polite burp. The parents agreed it must be mild indigestion, kissed and hugged their one and only child yet more, and together put it back to sleep.
Last of the Casanovas:

The Golden Age of Porfirio Rubirosa

A Semi-Fictional Biography

Our Playboy's Thanatopsis

His death came with the style and speed of a small, super-charged sports car—in this case, a silver 1962 Ferrari. As if our divinely detached screenwriter had taken a cue from the appropriately flashy and tragic ends of other hard-living moderns like James Dean, Albert Camus, and Jackson Pollock, our heroic antihero unwittingly crashed into a chestnut tree in the Bois de Boulogne within a half-mile of the tree his friend and fellow famous international playboy Aly Khan had fatally crashed into not five years before. Most likely this playboy was still hiccoughing on the bubbles in the Bolly: The previous night had led him from restaurant to discothèque to bar, in celebration of his polo team's winning of the Coupe de France that afternoon in the Bois. It was July, 1965; Porfirio (Rubi) Rubirosa, former Dominican diplomat known all over the world as much for his affaires d'amour and social finesse as for his habit of marrying fabulously wealthy and/or fabulously beautiful women, was a (reputed) fifty-six.

The bar had closed at 7:30 a.m., and the attraction of revisiting the site of what would be his last triumph was irresistible—no matter that the road is tortuous and he probably couldn't see straight by this time and must have been exhausted. Perhaps he was thinking of that glove he had dropped on the field. Just a few hours before, he had raced his polo pony over the turf—who can own a Ferrari and not race the accelerator as well? It was a glorious crack-up. The gendarmes said he would have survived had he been wearing his safety belt. (Rubi use any safety precautions? Surely you jest!) The day was perfect and golden and the Parisian dailies all mourned with tombstone-sized epitaphs. More than 250 celebrities, including a few Kennedys and wealthy entrepreneurs such as Rochas and Dubonnet (but none of Rubi's ex-wives) attended the funeral. You see how splendid and cinematic and ridiculous it all was, how it is impossible to write of his life without sounding a bit like an old documentary narrated by a stentorian moralizer both in awe and scornful of his subject? Future audiences, we present to you Señor, Monsieur, Signor, Herr, Mister Porfirio Rubirosa in the lifetime they've yet to remake!

Casting Call

What we need is the Latin-lover type, not particularly bright or overly handsome, but with undeniable charm—the raffish, sporty sort men will admire and women will love. As his first wife put it, he should be "gay, vain, [able to] play the ukulele, and do an Apache dance." There should be much of the gigolo about him, but little of the gigolo's unctuousness. When around rich women he will look surprisingly like a whippet, lean and sly, tugging at the end of an invisible chain, leading them on though they think just the opposite. Even portrayed well into in his sixth decade he will be lithe, wiry, toujours pret as the French say, quick with a lighter and a left hook, casually cool, coolly casual most of the time, hot-blooded on occasion—perhaps, like any lounge lizard, depending on how long he's been in the sun. He will play an athlete and an aesthete. Lover and loner. Musician, pilot, skier, dancer, race-car driver, boxer, soccer-player, singer, socialite.

All the actors (and Rubi himself was an aspiring actor) who might be deemed somewhat suitable are either dead or too old: Chevalier, Fairbanks, Romero, Belmondo, Mastroianni, Montalban, Depardieu. It will have to be someone new but not too young or too sensible. With the right direction, though, you must believe he's a god come down from Olympus in the form of an erudite diplomat in striped trousers and top hat to raid the boudoirs of the wealthy and celebrated—not any major god, thank you, but one along the lines of Pan or Eros. Yet there is something so pure and unabashed about him a minister might be tempted to answer that call, leaving him alone with his daughter in the parlor—but only tempted.

Lights, Camera...

There must be various stock-shots of tropical lushness and West Indian primitivism—jungles, seascapes, haciendas and palm-thatched villages, banana and sugarcane plantations stretching toward the stilled, hot horizon of Hispaniola—the inevitable clichés of an exotic birthplace and a murky family history. Somewhere in the middle-distance, fading in and out of focus, one might catch glimpses of his parents and siblings, though if they were rich or not (indeed, if Rubi was ever really rich or not) will be an ever-unsatisfied question. His father was, we do know, a planter, an army officer, and a diplomat, in that order, and was able to give his son an expensive European education. However, when Rubi's brother was imprisoned in Greece for trying to smuggle funds out of the country, no one in the family was solvent enough or at least cared enough to raise the bail.

A merciful cut to Paris, where the "dark, politely feral Latin" (as Time will someday call him) spends the majority of his years as an on-again, off-again secretary and diplomat, depending on Dominican leader Trujillo's whims. The youthful days as university student, army officer, polo captain, and budding romantic are all potentially exciting, but must be cut for time—perhaps we will eventually see them grandly fictionalized in an action-packed "prequel." Rubi is challenged to duels, he is shot at by rivals, he is nearly sliced in two by a spurned mistress with a decorative saber she seizes from a wall. But on any typical evening he is most likely to be seen at Maxim's or the Ritz or Lido or Lapin Agile with an ingenue or chanteuse he has picked with the same connoisseur's care the orchid he pinned to her décolletage was picked moments before. Paris is the city for lovers, we all know, and any bedroom scene (there must of course be many) with a priapic Eiffel Tower looming over the balcony in the moonlight would have that special ambience we have come to expect of such romantic dramas. Imagine if you will M. Rubirosa at the night-desk, or to the concierge: "Any suite with a view of the Tower will do."

Scene One, Take One

Sunrise, and a whistling Rubi enters the tasteful salon of his apartment overlooking the aforementioned tower, the Arc d'Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Île St-Louis, and various other of the City of Lights' landmarks (time must be collapsed here—there have been several apartments with several different views, and this one must serve to represent them all). Darkly beautiful Esposa Primera, his flower of gold and the generalissimo's daughter, is awakened, in full dress (Pocard or Christian Dior) and unruffled, from her repose on the chaise. Remonstrances, accusations, and a dispassionate kiss that chafes instead of assuages follow. This is a scene that will be replayed again and again throughout his lifetime: that of the wayward husband and the stay-at-home wife. He will not change; his wives will.

Just as marriage is so often the end of the romance, divorce is, with Rubi, the only possible resolution of marital discord. Flor de Oro was just seventeen when he married her; perhaps she was foolish even for a lovestruck girl to think one who plays so well the stereotypical role of a macho Caribbean Casanova will ever consent to a life of domestic serenity and (dare we say it?) Just One Woman. The lovely teenage bride will threaten him with a vase, stamp her little feet, and tear at the blinds to shut out the light from those fantastic windows. But where is Rubi? He's already flaneuring down the promenade for a café assignation with a dancer from the Folies Bergiere, no doubt.

A Marriage Montage

1932: Most certainly, a large wedding in the Catedral Nacional or similar place (a bank holiday having been declared), the bride in her grandmother's mouse-gray gown completed by a magnificent train held up by twenty sullen bridesmaids, lieutenant groomsmen in full dress uniforms crossing swords over the betrothed, a Babel tower of a cake, and Niagaras of champagne. Picture Cpt. Rubirosa lustily shoving a slice of cake into his bride's kisser, the bells, flowers, doves, waiting limousine, and other standard Hollywood accouterments real people have come to expect of such splendors. It never hurts to marry the dictator's daughter unless you believe in assassinations and divorce. Off to Berlin, and soon after, Paris...

1942: After many cunning maneuvers between the Nazis and the Resistance, between Paris, Vichy, and internments in Bad Nauheim (a spa cum "concentration camp" for the elite of war prisoners) and other scenic detention centers (where he spent most of his time skiing), Rubi and his French "cinemactress" Danielle Darrieux (called the most beautiful woman in the world, though surviving photos don't prove it) take the vows, this time still in a church, a smaller one, true enough, but with more reporters. Both parties probably believe they are marrying into money. Both parties could be seriously wrong.

1948: A small ceremony redolent of big bucks. Rubi calmly smokes an unfiltered cigarette throughout (well, the bride, Doris Duke Cromwell, is heiress to a hundred-million-dollar tobacco fortune) and slips the ring she purchased onto her very steady finger. A prenuptial agreement has already been made public, stipulating that there will only be love, not money, exchanged in this romance—but even prenuptial agreements can be broken. The couple is soon flying down to Rio (where Rubi has been appointed ambassador) for thirteen unlucky months of dining, dancing, and drinking—succeeded, naturally, by divorce.

1953: All the periodicals remark on how sad or tired the Woolworth millionairess, Barbara Hutton Mdivani Haugwitz-Reventlow Grant Troubetskoy looks (and wouldn't you if you had to sign a name like that—result of marriages to two counts, a duke, and a movie star—to all those official documents?), more like a widow than a bride in her black Balenciaga; they remark on how moon-pale and nervous she is, how her hand shakes as she holds her glass of Moët, how she testily denies that she looks "lovely." It is a civil ceremony this time, performed in Spanish at the Dominican Consul General's Park Avenue apartment, and Rubi thrusts his hand idly in his trouser pocket. "I give them six months!" Zsa Zsa Gabor wagers from Las Vegas, where she is busy with her sisters' nightclub act. Babs breaks her ankle on their wedding night, supposedly running from the "appalling" sight of her naked husband: Guess how far off Zsa Zsa was? (Rubi's account of the debacle was carried by Hearst—who says you can't syndicate heartbreak?—and the "five and dime heiress" gave him a two-million-dollar settlement, which he soon gambled away on stocks and roulette bids.)

1957: A quick wedding, his fifth and last, to a nubile nineteen-year-old, another French actress; her name is Odile Rodin, a wide-eyed waif in black leather pants and a T-shirt borrowed from James Dean or Johnny Hallyday, and no money or history to speak of (one wonders if her stage name isn't a twist on the symbolist artist Odilon Redon and just what sort of artistry she has practiced on Rubi; later she will be romantically linked with both JFK and the son of Ari Onassis). Let there be birds twittering, gamins and gamines galloping in the streets, Paris cabs tooting for this one; let it be all light and optimism, for his final years will be happy but quick. Women might still love him, but from afar now, and the afterimage of camera flash-bulbs will gradually fade... Though more trouble will come with a broken neck as a result of a polo fumble and American discontent over the fact that the Rubirosas visit, with Frank Sinatra, the Kennedys at Hyannis Port. There will also be rumors of "money problems," and as someone dares to say, "A poor, old playboy is hardly welcome on the international scene."

Having lost his job for good with the fall of the old Dominican regime, Rubi will be left alone in the house on the Rue Bellechasse (the one Doris Duke's money built), where the piano (the one on which Doris practiced the jazz chords which maddened Rubi) plays in the reception room and Odile memorizes her scripts in the tiny garden—future dreamplays that won't be given the chance to come true.

What People are Saying about Porfirio Rubirosa

Dispersed throughout our biopic's dialogue will be these asides and assurances, a few of them spoken by still-living characters we all know well, the rest by skilled mimics. If this were a more conventional documentary, one might well see them lounging in gazebos or by their pools, lapdogs in laps or wrists tilting daiquiris. But let's meet them instead among more stylized surroundings—for instance, sprawled out amongst vast silk and satin cushions like odalisques, or swathed in ropes of pearls and jewels or sleepwalking like phantoms in a Delvaux, through shadowy colonnades and galleries peopled with the faded portraits of Café Society—for these aristocrats and eccentrics were even more surreal then than they are now. Perhaps some of them will look a bit taken aback that the subject was brought up in the first place, as though speaking of dead playboys were in improper taste. In the end, their remarks are for the most part surprisingly trite and tempered to be about someone so decidedly intemperate.

Elsa Maxwell, society hostess: "He's so unbelievably charming and thoughtful that you are off guard before you know it .... They say a woman isn't the same after a night with Rubi."

Rafael "El Benefactor" Trujillo, assassinated in 1961: "He's an excellent diplomat because women like him and because he's a liar."

Earl Wilson, columnist: "He's a helluva swell guy."

Doris Lilly, author of How To Marry A Millionaire: "Rubi's got a nice personality and is completely masculine .... Everyone I know thinks Rubi is a sweetie pie."

Sloan Simpson, fashion model and socialite: "He's a man of gentleness, modesty, dignity, and quiet charm."

Jolie Gabor, mother of the Gabor Sisters: "Rubi is a spender. Rubi loved to do nightclubs .... a beautiful creature, but unreliable!"

Bill Helburn, photographer: "He can meet you for a minute and a month later remember you very well. I imagine the devil has a similar aptitude."

John Perona, proprietor of El Morocco: "I'm really quite fond of him, despite everything else."

As for those he swindled, lied to, cheated on, or jilted: "No comment!"

Zsa Zsa's True-Life Confessions

The speedway of Rubi's life takes a sudden, sharp detour. From her headquarters at the Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Hungarian supper-club "entertainer," did the first and best thing a modern female celebrity who has been shamed by her paramour thinks of: she calls a press conference. Outside it is a hundred degrees and here inside it is like the Arctic. Zsa Zsa is stunning in jewels and eyepatch. The jewels are gifts from present husband George Sanders (who will later marry sister Magda and pen the Memoirs of a Professional Cad) and all those who came before, the alleged black eye and bump under the patch all a $600-a-month diplomat can offer (never mind that nebulous Rubirosa family plantation and Dominican dredging company, the African merchant fleet, Argentine cattle ranches, or any number of other business enterprises Rubi has always been so mum about before the press). Incidentally, the honeymooners (Barbara and Rubi) had gone from chartered jet to Palm Beach villa to yacht to silent separation in a matter of hours. Hoisting an ice bag to her eyepatch, Zsa Zsa explains that Rubi struck her only when she jilted him: "The fact that he hit me only proves he loves me. A woman who's never been hit has never been loved." (Exactly who wrote those lines has yet to be tried in a court of law.) An hour after zonking her, Rubi filled her room with a hundred red roses and a note reading simply, "Au revoir."

Rubi had been flitting like a moth around Zsa Zsa's lambent flame for several seasons between wives, and (as always happens in this type of metaphor) she ended up singeing his wingtips because he had not thought to propose to her until the eve of his marriage to Babs Hutton. Nevertheless, their romance continued and was barely interrupted by the mere seventy-three days of the Hutton marriage; Rubi was already phoning her up her during the honeymoon. "Rubi is for me like a disease," Zsa Zsa said to the Hollywood Reporter, "a disease of the blood."

Zsa Zsa did show a certain loyalty to her fickle West Indian sweetheart. She had been his constant defendant in his days as a frequent correspondent in divorce courts—Rubi was tagged "the other man" in the legal proceedings of first another tobacco tycoon, R. J. Reynolds Jr., against his wife, Marianne O'Brien, and then in the suit "society golfer" Robert Sweeney brought against his wife, Joanne. The former case was unsuccessful; the latter wasn't. In neither case did Rubi ever cease to smile and win the hearts of the girls in the gallery. Those were the days—the glorious days of contested divorces and even more hotly contested diamonds.

When it became apparent after the Hutton divorce that Rubi and Zsa Zsa would be an "item" once more, topical writer Irene Corbally Kuhn bared her claws in a snippy little article she wrote for The American Mercury. "These two exhibitionists," she complained, "will milk all the publicity possible from their public goings-on. We can look for an extended period of public petting and pouting, fights, recriminations, separations, reconciliations, all timed and staged to hit page one." Snippy, even vitriolic, yes, but accurate. In 1954 Rubi and Zsa Zsa suffered a nasty but publicity-generating scandal in Mauritius when she mistook the local beach for a topless one, an understandable error if you are a glorified burlesque attraction. Another time, in Majorca, Zsa Zsa was arrested for slapping a police officer, decades before she would gain further notoriety for doing exactly the same thing in Los Angeles. "I just have a bad reputation," she protested, "and [like Byron, we suppose] it's hard to live up to!"

Jolie Gabor, matron of the Gabor family, testifies in her 1975 autobiography, Jolie, that she was the one who kept Zsa Zsa and Rubi from eloping, despite the fact matrimony was nothing new to either party and Jolie claims to have adored Rubi: "Immediately I saw him I felt every girl must be madly in love with him." But all that driving back and forth from Paris to Deauville at 150 kilometers per hour in his race car must have made her worry for her daughter's life and her suitor's sanity. Once Rubi came to the Gabors' door in the middle of the night and tried to abduct them and their guests to Santo Domingo for a weekend fling; "No, Rubi," Jolie told him through clenched dentures in her thick Mitteleuropean accent. "I am afraid this is too much. You have been drinking heavily. You have polo ponies in the plane with you and then you would have me and my Hungarian friends and it is late at night and we must leave immediately and you are still fresh from your split-up with poor Barbara Hutton and it is ridiculous." We must presume even Rubi was left speechless—wouldn't anyone? Later, despite herself, Jolie provided a refuge for the lovers in her New York pied-a-terre. When they decided to depart for Paris and found the place surrounded by reporters hoping to get the scoop from Mama Gabor, Jolie came up with the brilliant idea of dressing Rubi up as herself to sneak him out—wrap-around mink coat, big hat with veil, and high boots would do the trick. The image of the supermasculine Dominican diplomat in drag is almost too delightful to believe, as if we were to suddenly step out of this feature attraction into _Some Like It Hot_. "When it came time," says Jolie, "I put lipstick on him..."

An inherent problem in this imaginary photoplay is making these Gabors believable—only they could ever play themselves, after all—though they were so long impersonating themselves for the public, who would be able to see clearly through so many layers of reality? One wonders if Rubi ever did, or could have.

(Still, what can one make of a woman such as Zsa Zsa at this late date, while she is at the time of this writing still alive? What precisely did she do to gain her early fame and glamor? This is the former Ping-Pong champion of Hungary who once went shopping down Bond Street in London naked on an Arabian racehorse, the star of stage and screen who once accepted a $17,000 chinchilla from Rubi's old boss and everyone's favorite dictator, "El Benefactor" Trujillo of Ciudad Trujillo. One imagines there is a special part of hell reserved for the likes of women like her—a merry hell, surely, for she's not at all wicked, one opalescent with casinos and health spas and racetracks—but, alas, where all the men are poor.)

In His Own Words (Or His Press Agent's)

Now comes the time for our hero's dramatic soliloquy, culled from various interviews at various times—the particulars of date and place don't really matter here. Imagine the deep, mellifluous voice, its Spanish intonation softened and slurred by years of French (diplomatic and conversational) and stumbling over a few of the more guttural English diphthongs. This monologue, made all the more wistful with the appropriately weepy string arrangement, might serve well as a running narrative accompanying old still photos and silent footage of his, as they say, life and loves. Or perhaps we will see him astride his favorite polo pony, mallet over his shoulder, helmet shadowing his face as the late afternoon sunlight filters through the leaves of the Bois de Bologne while he recites his dolorous Rubirosary of romance:

"As in any good script, Flor de Oro and I found ways of getting letters to each other. Finally, my mother, sick of my mooning around the house, went to the president and explained that we really were in love. She persuaded him to give his consent to the marriage. I was twenty-three. I had no job and little money, but the president looked after us ....

"As soon as we arrived in Paris, invitations began pouring in. I was out every night, often alone. My wife objected—she could not keep up with me. We had a fight and she moved to her cousin's house .... She said she wanted to go to Santo Domingo on a holiday, and I agreed. Then I had a letter from her saying she did not think she would come back. Later she divorced me ....

"If a thing is over, it's over—That's how it is, whether it's a marriage, a love affair, or a business deal ....

"With Danielle and I, it was a very big love and we had said the moment it stopped being such a thing we will separate. We will not ruin this thing. So we separate ....

"I am not a millionaire. Most men's ambition is to save money. Mine is to spend it .... Why should I keep it? I have no children ....

"Doris—it was love at last.... But you get separated from all the things you like, all the people you love ....

"Barbara brought sincerity to my life. Apart from being one of the world's richest women, she is also one of the most generous. I had a practically unlimited bank account. There was nothing I could not have had. Pobrecita Barbara! I married her because I loved her—it may have been conceit, but I really believed I was the man who could change her into the lovely, intelligent, elegant woman she can be.

"Almost on the day of our wedding I knew it could not be. There was nothing I could do to beat off the sickness and sadness that engulfed her. I was a bachelor and very happy between my divorce and marrying Barbara and I did not want her to change. I fell in love with her. It was fine and it was fun. And then she said, 'Let's get married.' I said no, because I was afraid she would change. She said, 'I promise not to change.' But she did change. It was no good—she stays in bed and reads all day. It's a very boring life. I like outdoor sports ....

"Was it callous of me to rush at once to the lovely Zsa Zsa? I suppose so, but that's the kind of man I am .... I like to get seventy seconds out of every minute ....

"Never again shall I marry a woman of wealth. Perhaps it is better that I marry a poor girl. This is what I will do with Odile ....

"I have loved and been loved by some of the world's most beautiful women. It so happens that two of them were also among the richest in the world .... But I have plenty of money of my own .... I married them not because I wanted to, but because women want to marry. Women don't want to be concubines—I try to make women happy. I try to be happy and make them happy. A woman does not like to be merely pawed. She likes to be... uh, liked."

Sobriquets and Epithets

All fairly predictable, as so much of his life was in following its tabloid-fodder, sensationalist outline: Last of the Famous International Playboys. Last of the Red-Hot Latin Lovers. Last of the Casanovas. The Caribbean Casanova. The Continental Casanova. Romeo Rubirosa. Don Juan of the Twentieth Century. The Dominican Don Juan. Hamlet of the Boudoir. The Boudoir Menace of Two Continents. Rubi of a Great Price. Big Dame Hunter. The Playboy of the Western World. The Great Playboy. And so on...

And they called him all the other usual things: lady killer, womanizer, seducer, wolf, rake, letch, leech, roué, rogue, etc. Just plain "Rubi" seemed to suit him best, however—Rubi the Ruby: the red-hot gem of passion, such a complement to the lady's diamonds.

Quentin Crisp, considering sex and style and how seldom they meet, summed him up this way: "It was the charm and courtliness of Porfirio Rubirosa, the last of the great playboys, which made him so attractive to some of the world's richest and most beautiful women. They were attracted to him not because he was 'good in bed,' but because he was good everywhere else."

We guess Quentin hadn't heard what Truman Capote told people about it being as thick as a man's wrist and as long as a man's forearm!

The Legacy—Roll the Credits, Please

Porfirio Rubirosa, though he indeed once lived and breathed and philandered on this earth, is today for all intents and purposes an imaginary creature, an extinct imaginary creature at that. A unicorn. He no longer exists in the public mind, and most younger people have never heard of him; for those who have been around long enough, he is a dimmed memory from rotogravures and Sunday supplements, society columns and kinescope reports. He could no longer exist. Men have changed. Women have changed. The world has changed, or so people say. No one has of this writing bothered to write a book about him, though he does figure peripherally in several recent biographies and autobiographies. What little one can learn about him today must in the greater part be extracted from old microfilm and microfiche files, where life is reduced to inconsequential, minuscule dimensions and it becomes apparent the journalists took for granted information that is unknown, lost today. His life was too well-documented for him to take on the status of cult figure (for such figures need more of a mystique and less of the amusing public exposure that Rubi once garnered) and it has been insufficiently assessed by scholars (because there is no present reason to grant him such perspective) to be of historical importance.

Despite the lack of attention, he is an archetypal figure who doesn't really deserve to be completely forgotten, not at this time when legends are so easily manufactured. Someone has got to make that movie, forge a myth from the memories, and bring to life on the big screen what was so charismatically, comedically, and unselfconsciously portrayed down here among the little people of the very unreal "real" world. And when that is done we can concentrate on the myth and not the man, which is, as we all know, so much more interesting and rewarding.

Our Playboy's Divine Assumption

Credits over, but let's not end our little low-brow, high-concept newsreel quite yet. A sort of sneak epilogue might be revealing. The last hours of Rubi's life must be given more detailed consideration. Somewhere, somehow we might pick up on a clue to his approaching demise, a crack in the gilded sky. We see him then in the morning with his pet Chihuahua in the third-floor gymnasium of his maison de ville, playfully sparring with Odile in the regulation-size prize ring. We see that particular round winding up in bed, amidst coffee cups and morning editions. We see him out on the polo field that afternoon, leading his team to victory. Somewhere he drops a soft kid glove. We see him late in the day, dressed in Lacoste shirt and pleated flannels, jacket over shoulder, on his way from the Tour d'Argent restaurant to do some twisting with Odile at New Jimmy's. We see him whisk her home at five a.m. and take off again for a sandwich and a few drinks at La Calvados, where he sings Latin love songs to the clientele until the bar closes at 7:30 a.m.

Now is the time for our ideal director to use his unlimited-by-any-budget imagination. Who will well-lubricated Rubi be dreaming of as he heads from the Avenue des Champs-Élysées to what will become his own Elysian Fields, the Bois de Bologne? Zsa Zsa the lost love or Odile the last wife? Or just a pretty grisette he saw bending over to fasten her stocking's ruffled garter that afternoon in the Tuileries? Will we have a telescoped review of the romantic and political high points of his life, with echoing voices and funhouse camera angles? There he is as a twenty-two-year-old army palace aid lovesick for the dictator's daughter, here as a European sophisticate in his thirties at the Auteuil races, and there as a middle-aged sportsman with a starlet for a bride. And here he is now, his hands gripping the warm tooled leather of the steering wheel, a carnival reeling in his head.

Jumpcuts à la Godard: Roaring down the cool empty streets, sideswiping a parked sedan in the depths of the woods, cursing as he loses control of the car, crashing into the fatal oak. Suddenly party balloons, champagne bubbles, confetti, glitter, gold dust—life bursts in a bright gay musical explosion and birds are flushed from surrounding bushes to cry into the summer sunrise. Now we see him lifted bodily from the wrecked Ferrari and into a bustling, bejewelled heaven (which looks surprisingly like Monte Carlo), where an officious maître d'hôtel opens wide the gates and says, "This way, sir; your table is waiting..."
The Big Beat

He finds himself looking into mirrors. Many mirrors. In the reflections in other people's sunglasses, in boutique windows, at his tailor's, even in his lawyers' shiny brass doorknobs. He puckers his lips in his hair stylist's mirrored walls. He frowns, in the morning, at himself in Jacquí's illuminated vanity mirror. Later, looking over Jacquí's shoulder into her compact mirror. He combs back his hair in the rear-view mirror of his third gold Ferrari. He is always finding something new in his face, something he has not noticed before. Often it is something to admire, such as the way his perfect teeth seem to glow irresistibly in hotel saloon mirrors. Less often, it is something to improve, or even, like that purplish mole tucked high into the corner of his left temple, to eradicate. Only yesterday he noted that his eyes seemed to have changed from a lustrous brown to a lackluster olive green.

Bryan B. Sterling stares into the mirror of his office's private bathroom as he grooms and inspects. Chlorophyll toothpaste, Jacquí's Yardley of London soap, a Tokyo Hilton towel, safety razors, and Aqua-Velva. His pupils have contracted into tiny black pinpoints, small as the receding point of light on a switched-off television, as if they wanted to shut out all light, all life. Bryan glances at the toilet behind him in the mirror. He thinks about the blue and red capsules he has flushed down that toilet, and he thinks about his doctor, and tries not to think about his heart. He places his palm over where that so-often defective organ dwells. He can feel the warmth and moistness of his palm on his chest through the Egyptian cotton, but no heartbeat. Hand pressed deeper into the flesh, he checks to make sure he has the correct side. He knows mirrors can be confusing. Suddenly, he can indeed feel the beating of his heart. It seems to be strong. What time is it in? he wonders—4/4? 3/4? And how many BPM?

Three Negro girls are singing in WamBam's Studio Number Two. They wear matching bouffants stiffened with hairspray and slinky rayon dresses with plunging, but not quite immodest, necklines. The girls are Shana and the Shanelles, Mr. Sterling's major act of the moment, the one he favors the most to wrap his dense layers of sound around. They sing in high, plaintive voices that add the right amount of top-of-the-pops vitality to their rhythm and blues beat. Their "sound" has until very recently created a large demand, and enabled the girls and Sterling to hang five very shiny and very gold records on the wall.

Shana and her two matching Shanelles are dubbing in the vocals over a rich, muddy mix of recorded accompaniment. It sounds like there are pianos, guitars, strings, even glockenspiels, though the ear is never quite sure. But there is always the drum, especially the bass drum, looming both above and below voices and orchestra, forging a beat that is as incessant and insistent as it is loud. The beat is so familiar it is called the "Sterling Silver beat" by those in the know, and it brands his popular productions as much as these thick fireproof curtains of sound.

The girls are singing: "You said you'd be true, baby, How come you made me blue, baby? You said you'd be mine, baa-bee, Where do I draw the line, baa-bee..."

The voices surge into the chorus: "I'm only giving you one more chance, I'm only giving you one more chance, I'm only giving you one more chance To come back (da da) And dance (da da) With me..."

The girls are bouncing along now. Shana's eyes are closed tight as if she were still singing in her church choir, though her face is contorted as if in erotic pleasure with each vowel. The Shanelles look as if they very well might swallow their microphones, they are so, as the musicians say, into it. The drumbeat is rising in intensity, carrying the swirling strings and punching trumpets along until the song climaxes in a sudden upsurge in volume and tempo and goes out with a powerful crash which echoes on and on against the studio walls and down the corridors.

Bryan B. Sterling smiles behind the glass partition of the recording booth, his fingers still on the sliding levers of the control board. He hopes that this will be hit number six for Shana and the Shanelles, and that his name will soon be spinning beneath theirs on a million turntables. He is alone and happy behind the soundproof glass, having expelled, as usual, two engineers and a resident pianist-composer. "Great, girls, great," Bryan praises over the P.A. His amplified voice is unexpectedly trembly, trebly. "I think that'll be the take we'll use. All we have to do now is mix it down into mono. It'll sound fantastic on a dinette jukebox. Thanks."

In unison, the girls reply: "Thank you, Mis-ter Ster-ling!"

Bryan does not look forward to the next session. It is with a group he has not worked with before. He took their contract hesitatingly; he does not like their music, not at all. The company honchos insisted that they had "potential."

He removes the plastic radio from his pocket and unplugs its plastic "invisible, flesh-colored" earphone.

"—was Donna Falotta," the disc jockey announces, and Bryan recognizes the name of one of his recent, promising acts. "And she sang "Mulberry Messup," which has taken a dive from number twelve to number nineteen this week on the Big Top Forty! Ouch! That's gotta hurt! Now here's a message from our good friends at—" The radio is abruptly clicked off.

The morning has already been frustrating enough for Bryan. He leans back in his chrome-armed swivel chair in the recording booth and tries to enumerate the events which have occurred since he first loped down the hall to his office at eight sharp, tries to pinpoint where what went wrong. He could picture himself, in his moss-green mohair Perry Como cardigan and Sta-Prest pants, a jaunty bronze medallion swinging from his neck. Just like any other guy, he had been snapping his clove gum, snapping his fingers in rapid-fire motion, in time with a high, tinny sound emanating from something plastic and "flesh-colored" in his left ear.

Things had not started to go wrong, yet. He spun, he hopped, his elbows slapped against his hips in suave syncopation to the staccato (his mother would say vulgar) clicking of his tongue. His chin bobbed up and down mechanically, in a similar fashion to the kinetic figurines some waggish people place in the rear windows of their sedans or town cars. This was his morning ballet, his ritual. He was one with the music. Had photographers been near, shutters and flashbulbs would have whirred and burst in time, as well.

Yes, he had all the right moves, all the calculations that looked utterly incalculable. There was a certain ultramodern cool, a coy sophistication to his style; in the hall, typists and envious errand boys, used to this eccentricity, paused to admire him as he passed. They were still in their teens and he had been one of them not that long ago. "You better turn around," a distant voice sang, "and stop before it's too-oo late!"

Bryan dipped and jived into his office's reception room, still keeping perfect, if a bit too self-conscious, rhythm. His secretary, Colleen, was painting her long nails in a muted puce he considered very dullsville, very last year. She huffed on them and looked up as he entered the room.

"Any news from Mars?" he asked.

"Lots of mail and messages, like always," Colleen answered, swaying her hands about like a hula dancer. "And Mr. Pearson—oh, sorry."

He pointed to his left ear and pulled the beige nipple from it. He allowed the ear-speaker to dangle from his sweater's pocket, a tiny voice buzzing from the pendulum.

"They were just playing 'Teenage Queen,' " Bryan said. "Remember that one, don't you?"

"Oh, sure.... It was.... Bobbi and the Belmonts, right?"

"Betti and the Belltones. Number one three weeks in a row! Four million copies sold! Shoulda seen them on Sullivan. What's come in, now?"

Colleen slapped her palms on her desk. "Just the usual, nothing urgent—except Mr. Pearson called and wants to see you in his office at two."

"Forget Pearson!"

"He says it's very—no, make that extremely—important." She was staring cross-eyed at her short-hand pad.

Bryan took a good long look at Colleen. He handpicks all of his secretaries, and they are all perfect copies of his favorite sort of fashion model: Scandinavian extraction—blonde, leggy, with big mouths and perfect teeth. They, alas, speak with Midwestern accents that grate upon the Bronx-trained ear. So when Mr. Sterling believes he has heard enough of one voice, he fires it—and hires another almost exactly like the former. He believes he has heard almost enough of Colleen. When he first hired her, they had spent a lot of time taking dictation together after hours, but lately that same tiresome voice had begun to cancel out any carnal attraction. He now realized that, implicitly and explicitly.

"So, want to keep me happy?" Bryan insisted, drumming his fingers on his chest.

"Oh—right, sure, sorry, here's your studio schedule and your trades and a couple letters and stuff. I guess that's all."

"I guess so—" Bryan opened the door to his office.

"I'm sorry—I almost forgot. Jacqueline rang and wants you to ring her."

"Jacquí. It's Jacquí. Spells it with an accent. Not like Mrs. Kennedy. Like, French."

"Oh, sorry. Really!" The door slammed shut.

Bryan crossed the Chinese-red carpeting in his office, past his Noguchi desk and the fake Eames and the genuine Eero Aarnio, to turn on his television sets, as he did every morning. There are three of them, each affixed to one of the three major networks, each singing and talking and making noises and spectacles to vie for his attention every waking hour of every day.

Bryan stared at them a minute or two, then went to his high fidelity radio-phonograph console. He tuned the dial, as usual in the morning, to his favorite pop music station. (By the end of the day he would tune it back again to a news station, for the financial reports.) It wasn't always that easy to locate his station, as every pop station had the same-sounding disc jockey, who ranted like a demon or politician between forty-fives.

Bryan placed a record on the hi-fi. The record was an acetate demo from a group that hopes he will produce them. It was not done very professionally, and a clavioline's wobbly wail pierced like an irritating insect through the other sounds.

Bryan backed away from his media center and began shuffling through the previous week's teetering pile of mail atop his desk. He glanced at each letter or magazine or brochure, consecutively letting them all drop to the floor until his Florsheim mocs were buried in the discards up to their tassels.

He saved Cashbox magazine for last; it was his most favored of the entertainment-industry journals. Today, it announced that his latest important production effort, an album by The Surfin' Six, for which he had nurtured especially high hopes, had slipped into thirty-eighth position. Long-players weren't so important, but still... He threw the magazine into the face of a trim woman chasing a Hines Cherry-Go-Merry X-Tra Lite Cake though the air like a balloon on television two, and proceeded to click off each of his distractors in rapid succession.

He went to his bar and mixed a tall Tom Collins, clanging his spoon sharply against the glass and ice cubes, and retreated to his slippery white Naugahyde desk chair. Yes, it was very early even for him to be drinking, but this was an exception; he had not often seen his product slip so disastrously into the lower echelons of the charts so quickly. Perhaps it was the folksingers' fault; the whole pack of them had been receiving a lot of press lately, but all that protesting and all those earnest acoustic guitars bored him silly.

"So-so bor-ing," Bryan half-sang in his own protest of them all. He was well aware that he does not usually become bored with self-imposed routine, but that he does easily become bored with life in general, if he allows himself to. He was now allowing himself to do so. Such times, thankfully, are few, and they are far apart. They are certainly not planned. But sometimes he feels incapable of doing anything that really matters. Sometimes, he cannot find a surprise or an escape. And sometimes, there is nothing to do; the parties have run dry, the cake has gone stale, the music has run down.

Bryan's infrequent states of boredom are not pleasant states: this must be remembered. They are ugly, depressing hours for his associates and secretaries to bear witness. The associates will shake his hand and find his right palm chilly, not in its regular state of heated anticipation. They will ask to reschedule their business luncheons. His secretaries will just know and invariably ask for the afternoon off. His star singers will run from him.

For when Bryan B. Sterling is bored, he is silent. There is no music. There is no conversation. There is not even a tapping on pleather armrests or linoleum flooring or Formica countertops. It is as if he is stranded in a boat in the middle of a frozen ocean, thousands of miles from any other living, talking, singing thing.

Bryan took a measured swallow of his drink and turned in his chair to part the paisley drapes behind him to the scene outside, more than forty stories below. Members of the urban anthill rushed about, stumbling on curbs, carrying packages, bumping into each other, sprinting down sidewalks, getting in and out of taxis. Bryan enjoyed the view—he always enjoys the city. Country life and pastoral vistas are among the many things capable of boring him; skyscraper skylines, however, always thrill him anew with their neon and incandescent and fluorescent opportunities.

His friends and colleagues look aghast at him and cannot understand why he does not take extended vacations in Bermuda or the Bahamas, why he does not choose to occasionally "get away from it all," as the travel posters with tall, tanned girls in bright bikinis on empty tropical beaches say.

For one thing, Bryan explains, he does not have time for lazy excursions into equatorial zones. And another thing, if he did, he would spend his vacations in the city, amidst the taxi drivers and bankers and prostitutes and drug-dealers who are always offering him new scenarios, new rhythms and stimulations. So enthusiastic is he about life in Gotham, he leaves many of his jet-setting admirers fearing that their peripatetic habits might become passé, after all.

Bryan thought of the city, the wonderful city, the city in which he nightly stalks the wildest au-go-gos, the daring new singles bars, the supper clubs with the loudest jazz combos. He haunts the swingers' soirées, the executive cocktail hours, the playboy fêtes like a society revenant or a vampire in a blue satin tux, in search of that eternal high, that everlasting arousal. A novel sound on the jukebox, a covergirl's expensive musk, a plutocrat's knowing wink: these are the small things that speed the mechanism of his desire.

He sipped at his Tom Collins, which he is partial to, along with mai-tais, Singapore Slings, highballs, Manhattans, and, occasionally, gin twists. But he does not drink until inebriation, especially at this early hour, for that would just deaden and blur the heightened sensation the city injects into him. He drinks just enough to slacken his tongue and become more aware of the constant rhythm of his heart's contractions and expansions.

Bryan went over all these things in his mind and it gave him a certain satisfaction that he was such an expert, perceptive student of that refined human organism known to the world as Bryan B. Sterling. This time, his boredom had swiftly and silently faded. There were things to do. Places to go. People to meet. There was the studio and Jacquí and inevitably or not, Preston Pearson the Third. He drained his novelty glass down to the topless choreen smiling up from the bottom and rose from his chair.

Colleen entered his office at the same time. She looked at Bryan in that way he'd seen too many women look at him lately. "Is everything all right?" she asked. "Is everything ok? Sorry, it's been so quiet around here."

"I was just, like, thinking.... thinking metropolitan biz and other things. Turn on the radio, will ya?"

"Sure. Okey-doke." Colleen flipped it on.

The disc jockey was laughing sardonically at a woman whose prominent words were "disgrace" and "sacrilege."

"Yeah—it is a mess, the metro and this city. Worse than Chicago. Or Detroit, even." Colleen held her hand out to Bryan. A small orange and blue medicine container rolled in her wide farm-girl's palm. "I almost forgot—"

"You did forget, sugar."

"Well, the doctor—your doctor, but he's mine, too—sent these over. He told me to make sure you take them. He says one ittle-bittle tranquilizer every—"

"Give 'em to me. Now, watch, Colleen, and I'll show you where these suckers belong..."

"Sure. Okey-doke."

Bryan opened the door to the adjoining bathroom. The secretary reluctantly followed him to the doorway. He lifted the toilet lid and uncapped the plastic bottle. Bryan looked back at Colleen (whose mouth was open wide enough for him to see her silver-plated back molars), tossed the cotton plug to the floor, spilled blue and red capsules from the bottle, all of them, into the blue water, and flushed the toilet. Colleen came closer to watch the bright swirl of pills disappear into the depths of the New York City sewer system.

Bryan opens his eyes from these recent recollections and sees that the recording studio is no longer empty. "I want to know what this is," a girl demands of Bryan, safe on the other side of the glass, as he stands and acknowledges her presence. She is Toni of the Tonettes, an act that today consists of just the girl, a guitarist with a goatish little beard, and an upright double-bassist who wears dark glasses and sings harmony. There really is nothing "folkie" about them at all but their carefully done late-beatnik look; they are supposed to sing teenage ballads, as do the majority of his acts.

The girl is pointing to a drummer who has set up his instrument in the middle of the acoustic-tiled room. The drummer is a well-known session musician who is chewing on a cigarette and tapping the back of his head with a drumstick.

"That is what we in the business call a drummer, miss," the producer answers into the P. A. as the drummer stubs his cigarette out on his cymbal. For the first time he notices that one of the disgraced engineers in back, fiddling with various knobs like a Flash Gordon at his supersonic cockpit.

The girl stomps a sandal. "I know that. What I want to know is what's he doing here." Toni is a mournful-looking girl in black leotards and a headband keeping her long ironed hair in place; she pauses and looks meaningfully into Bryan's nonplussed, formerly brown eyes. "I thought we agreed—no extra accompaniment now that my sister's gone and we have our new image."

"Come on, man," Bryan coaxes, scratching his pompadour. "You still got to have a beat. The beat's the thing."

"I suppose you'll be dubbing in the whole goddamn London Symphony Orchestra next," the quiet-looking but very vocal bassist joins in, facetiously rapping out a tympanic tattoo on the hollow body of his towering instrument.

Something snaps inside Bryan. "Lunatics! Lunatics!" he cries, picking up a box of paper clips and dashing them against the booth's glass partition, in the general direction of this new "folk" group. It is as if he has just been switched from "blend" to "pulverize."

"He is known for his short temper," the guitarist whispers to the bassist.

"Amateurs! Posers!" The producer tosses another and another box of paper clips against the glass. (Why are there so many boxes? Who put them here?) "Do you want a hit record or do you want a collector's item? 'Cause that's all you'll get without the beat, do you hear me? The beat! The beat! The beat! Get the goddamn beat!"

Bryan then composes himself all at once, and his voice shifts easily from falsetto to tenor. "Now, will you try it my way?" he says almost tenderly. "After all, I got you up to number three last time." He looks at the musicians. The girl sits uneasily at her stool under the Damoclean microphone, tracing a run in her leotard tights. The guitarist and bassist shrug synonymously. The well-known drummer stares off into space.

"All right, then—let's rock."

The reels begin to roll, the musicians run through the intro, and Toni begins to sing, shakily at first, but gradually gaining confidence and volume. The song is in a style which is currently popular: the singer tells a sad story of his/her girl/boy-friend's tragic death in a car/motorcycle accident. These modern threnodies are in vogue, most popularly, with young girls who long for just such a dashing dead young beau to mourn.

"And now he's gone and I wear black," Toni sings, "He said he loved me but he won't come back, He's with the angels but I'll love him 'til We can kiss again... We can kiss again..."

Bryan tells the engineer to boost the bass some more. But that doesn't do enough; strings and horns will have to be added later if the song is to have any impact at all. Besides, he concludes, the singer needs to put a lot more "soul quality" in her voice. All in all, it takes fifteen attempts to get the right take.

Even with that done, Bryan worries whether the A&R men will be able to take yet another teenage-death ballad... and if such tripe is worth his time at all.

Bryan B. Sterling is watching a matinée movie on television number three as he signs duplicates and triplicates spread across his desk. His eyes shift back and forth, from desk to television to desk, as if he were watching a tennis match.

"Are we getting anywhere?" Loretta Young asks William Holden. They are on a barren, sunny seashore, possibly after the nuclear apocalypse. "Or should we go back and start all over again?"

Bryan B. Sterling. The signature is done rapidly but carefully.

"Face it—it's leading nowhere, babe." William Holden sighs and cups his hand over his unshaven chin.

Bryan B. Sterling. The line is wide and open, but with nervous angles. Bryan B. Sterling. The perfect name to reflect his personality—to think his mother tells him plain old "Bernard Steinberg" was good enough for his father!

"I wish we could stop. I wish it had never started." Loretta Young drops to the sand, her gown still immaculate .

Bryan B. Sterling. Bryan B. Sterling.

"Too late for that, kid."

"Mr. Sterling?" Colleen's chirp over the intercom.

"Yes." Bryan's pen pauses over a legal-sized page.

"Mr. Pearson is here to see you."

"Send him away."

"But, sir—"

Bryan unplugs the intercom. "We can begin again," Loretta laments. "It's our only way out."

"Sterling." Mr. Pearson pokes his head through the doorway.

"Damn, I forgot to lock that door," Bryan says. "Preston, did you have to interrupt my afternoon break?" He regrettably punches off the television with the tethered remote control.

"I knew you wouldn't come to me, Sterling, so I came to you .... as usual, you little punk." Preston Pearson is a stout man who looks as if he has grown considerably since he put on his suit that morning, though he always looks that way. He can't decide where and how one is supposed to sit on the Aarnio chair and settles instead into the imitation Eames near Bryan's desk while shielding his eyes with his hand. "Red rug, paisley, orange polka-dots, purple stripes—I'll never get used to your taste in decor. What my Doreen would say! It's a wonder you don't go blind."

Bryan manages a weak smile, thinking of all the others who have failed to see that his interior decorator was simply creating a thoroughly atomic-age "atmosphere" in the room. His secretaries, on the other hand, usually proclaim that the decor is simply "kicky" or "kooky" and never have trouble adjusting their false-eyelashed eyes to the office's psychotropic jungle.

"What is it, Preston?"

"I know you are a direct person, Sterling, so I will get right to the point. You have been a top producer, the top producer, at WamBam for several years now. We owe much to you. All those gold records on the walls here..."

"All that money."

"That, too. Also, a place in the public's mind, prestige in the business sector—"

"And all that money. Doreen's chinchillas. Your Caddy. Your golf caddies, too! Listen, Preston, I made you and WamBam. So stop beating around the friggin' bush... please."

"We realize that you've been having... having issues lately. Both physically and sales-wise, you know that. Now, there is a connection between the two. And you ought to know we've talked to your doctor—"

"My doctor?"

"Well, he is my doctor, too. Everybody's doctor, in fact." Mr. Pearson chuckles and plucks anxiously at the zircon-studded cuff-links on his tight shirt-cuffs. He looks at Bryan, whose eyes are wide and expectant.

"Bryan, let me put it this way: you're a forty-five playing at seventy-eight, you're on a merry-go-round you can't get off—a fast hot-rod with shoddy brakes. You're a, a—"

"A perfectionist? A fuckin' genius?"

"Bryan. God! Far from perfect."

"Me or God?"

"It's, it's just— Well, chocolate-covered cherries."

"Sorry, I'm allergic to chocolate. And to people like you." Bryan turns and faces the blank and more accepting face of a television screen.

"No, no, I mean to say that your records are like chocolate-covered cherries. They're rich and sweet and the public just devours them."

"Holy Moses, and to think I thought they only played all those platters."

"Bryan, the point is—"

Bryan swivels in his chair again to face the much older man. "Mr. Sterling, if you please, Mr. Pearson."

"Bryan, come on. Haven't you ever eaten too much of something you loved? What do you feel like when you're full?"

"Overweight. Just like you. For cryin' out loud, Preston—"

"But that's just it! In a way, you see, the public's eaten too many chocolate-covered cherries. It's time they went on a diet." He tugs at his pinstriped waist. "Me, too, I admit."

"You want less calories in the vinyl?"

"No. Fewer. I mean, no! I mean, the board here at WamBam thinks that we've oversaturated the airwaves with your product. And we've got other producers who are dying for a chance to charge our sales with a new sound... If it weren't for Shana and the Shanelles... That's why you haven't had a number one record in..."

"Three and one half months... You're saying that I'm as out of fashion as hoop skirts, aren't you, Preston? That's what you're getting at, isn't it? Well, you're wasting my time and yours. I've got to be back at the studio at—"

"Bryan, we think you need a rest," Mr. Pearson says rapidly and softly. "Let the public's ear rest, make them demand more, after .... a while. You've heard of a comeback, surely."

"Right. Like I'm fucking Judy Garland."

"Are you—fucking—Judy Garland?.... Oh, I see what you mean."

Bryan's eyebrows have descended lower and lower. His forehead feels very cool. "You're saying that I should quit working, aren't you?"

"Not forever. Just until your heart—your condition—improves."

Bryan sneers and asks, "Where should I go, Preston, huh? Acapulco? Catalina?"

"Well, actually, I have two roundtrip tickets right here for Honolulu. Everyone's right—it's a really swell vacation spot. Doreen and I went there last winter, you know. Saw all the new flags and Martin Denny, too. Here—take anyone you like. Stay as long as you like, all expenses paid." He hands the tickets to Bryan, who immediately rips them in two and shoots them into Mr. Pearson's convex lap.

"I guess—I guess we'll have to talk together some other time," Mr. Pearson says as he gets up and walks to the door, as careful to avoid Bryan's gaze as Lot was Jehovah's.

"Get out," Bryan says very, very quietly.

"Excuse me?" Mr. Pearson asks meekly, opening the door and looking down at the impossibly red carpet.

"Get out, you god-damn moron!" Bryan says with his lips, his voice now almost completely gone.

"Before I go I should remind you once again that the board of directors and I have decided upon this matter, and do not wish to see you for at least another, say, three or four months. Have a pleasant vacation." Bryan reaches for the television remote-control device, an object as large as a paperback book, and points it toward Mr. Pearson. He gives it a sharp and angry click, and Mr. Pearson, looking up at last, jerks just a little.

After that aggravating exit, Bryan goes into his bathroom and opens the medicine chest in back of the mirror above the sink. There is only one bottle of Bayer's best on the shelves, beside a stray bottle of Colleen's fingernail-polish remover. Bryan takes the aspirins and shakes them like a maraca. His heart feels tight and sore against his rib cage. It seems to be swelling to the size of a football and, conversely, shrinking to the size of a marble. Bryan dumps the six or seven tablets left in the bottle into his hand and shoves them into his mouth. He swallows them all with the benefit of a handy bottle of Scotch.

"This ought to cure one hell of a headache," he whispers to his reflection in the mirror, and suddenly is reminded of Jacquí.

Bryan dials the number of his penthouse on his pastel-pink Princess phone. Waiting for the other side to answer, he is calmed just a bit thinking of his latest "pad." He rents the penthouse on the more desirable end of Fifth Avenue, near the Park. It is equipped with all the necessary luxuries of modern life in the early nineteen-sixties, from the new "lava" lamps to photovoltaic burglar alarms. Of course, Bryan seldom has time to welcome fragments of the in-crowd into his foyer, or supervise the shampooing of his wall-to-walls. He is always at the office or the studio or on the streets, spending what little time he does at the penthouse in the bedroom, managing a retinue of girlfriends like actresses waiting for their next cue. The girls, all conveniently dumb and very blonde, have names which sound left over from the burlesque stage, like Lola and Trix and Cookie, to which Bryan adjoins endearments such as Candy and Sweets and Sugar. He keeps a vow with himself to never get serious with more than two girls at a time, however. He makes love, his girlfriends claim to their girlfriends, for hours and hours and then "it's just like in the movies!" But even though such foolish things are waltzing through Bryan's mind at the moment, he knows that none of it matters when he has things to do.

Jacquí Simmons finally answers the phone, after it has rung at least eleven times and Bryan has thought of as least as many former girlfriends who were much more prompt. It was about time he got an answering service again.

"Hul-lo?" Jacquí says slowly with her husk of a voice.

"Jacquí?" Bryan asks, unsure for a second if he'd remembered the right girl.

"Is this you, Bryan? Uh, aren't you busy or, uh, something?"

"Where were you?"

"I was.... I was, uh, taking a nap."

"Who's that talking in the background?"

"Uh—no one. Just the radio—ha-ha, yeah, the radio. Wait a sec and I'll turn it off." Jacquí leaves the phone for a minute, there is what might be whispering in the background, and then, silence.

"Are you on the level, Jacquí? Are you two-timing me?"

"Get real. I'm fine. Everything's just fine, ha-ha. How about you—have you, uh, been taking those pills or whatever?"

"I feel like shit right now but I'll be better—hey, Juju Bean, let's go dancing tonight, ok?"

"Why, of course, Bryan baby, if you want to. I could always use the practice between tapings. But do you, uh, think you should be—"

"I'll change clothes here and pick you up sevenish, allrighty?"

"That's a little early.... but yeah, that's all right, ha-ha, if that's, uh, the way you want it."

"That's the way I want it. See you around seven, Jacquíbelle. Preen your feathers and polish that halo."

"Yeah. Ha-ha! G'bye."

Bryan puts down the receiver, sighs, and slides back into his sympathetic chair. An unexpected, deep sleep overtakes him, and he dreams as he usually dreams, of images borrowed from stock footage: sun-blanched islands and shimmying palm trees and tall, dark-skinned hula girls who keep their eyes wide open while they kiss him.

When Bryan B. Sterling wakes, a tinge of sadness hangs over him from those furtive, unfinished dreams. There is no sun now and the room is almost dark in the twilight of the forty-third floor. He listens for small sounds in the empty offices around him. There—beneath the flickering hum of fluorescent striplights—a rhythm seems to be generating, maybe from somewhere far away.... but soon he realizes that it is only his heartbeat again. The only other sound is the passing of cars and buses on the street far below. "Sssshhh," he hisses in imitation of rubber tires on asphalt. Like waves on pearly sand.

"Sssshhhhhh..."

He goes to his bathroom mirror and stares again into his eyes. The pupils have enlarged in the dim glow of early evening. He looks tired and wan. "Sssshhh," he sighs, running a comb slick with Wildroot Cream-Oil through his jet-black hair (much sleeker than the rodenty brown he was born with). Fearless Fosdick? he asks the mirror. Not quite.

On his way down in the elevator, he gazes at the small, illuminated buttons which signify each floor. He smiles bashful as a boy at his reflection in the stainless steel panels and presses half a dozen of the little buttons at random. While riding up and down in the elevator he begins to hum and then to sing, like a menthol-choked lounge crooner: "I had a little drink about an hour ago and it went right to my head... Hey, won't you show me the way to go home?" He finds his sadness, or rather, that echo of sadness he had felt, glimmering away, for he does not allow such states to last long, and then they slip away from him as easily as Jacquí's culottes do from her luscious hips. The elevator shudders. Like a jarred cocktail shaker, his heart jumps a millisecond during the rapid descent, but he believes he is, tells himself that he is, feeling fine. He knows that there will always be new chartbusters to thrill to, new fashion models to admire, new foreign race-cars to rocket down the boulevards, new dances to try out...

Jacquí and Bryan drive to their destination in his latest citron-yellow Fiat coupe. The radio is on and playing an infectious little number by another new beat group from Britain. The pink styrofoam dice Jacquí had once gleefully and ironically hung from the rear-view mirror bounce along with the tune.

Jacquí and Bryan are both more than happy to be in each others' company, for their current relationship is giving the most-informed of Manhattan's social elite some enticing gossip to murmur about over apéritifs and olives. Jacquí, especially, having had much experience with the new art of i paparazzi, knows the importance of making the scene and getting the right people to notice. She is, after all, the girl who wears silver nail-polish, silver eyeshadow, and silver mirrored micromini, the girl who dances in the clear acrylic bubble on the network variety show "Potpourri." Very Space Age, her best friends, most of them homosexual set-designers, tell her. She helped make the twist and mashed potato popular and just a micromoment ago introduced a new dance sensation called the jerk which all the kids are doing already. Jacquí considers these things her major accomplishments in life and no one could dispute her. She and Bryan had, until recently, been regularly making the rounds of Manhattan discothèques, where Bryan's records play and she often clears the dance floor with her Jiu-Jitsu kicks and unanticipated cartwheels.

Jacquí checks out her new lipstick in the mirror, balancing herself on Bryan's mod-styled jacket's shoulder. The lipstick color is somewhere between white and silver. Platinum? She is wearing large, hooped earrings with good luck charms hanging from the centers, and they, too, swing with the sound.

"Listen to that song," he says; "I can't believe they're a bunch of Limeys. Fuck, could I produce these guys.... they'd sound great with a good sax section."

"Uh-huh. They sound a little nutty to me. Hey, I saw.... I saw my analyst today."

"I like it, I like it!" Bryan sings with the radio. "I don't know—maybe it is my production. Maybe Pearson's right—I'm not keeping up with the times.... sounds are changing so fast. You know the biz."

"He says it would do me good to get away from the city for a while. Something about 'bad vibes,' whatever that means. Ha-ha!"

"Good, you can retire along with me." Bryan yawns and scratches the hairy back of his neck. The car has stopped at a red light.

"—and here we have Jay-Lynn Jones with 'Broken Hearts Come in Pairs,' " the radio announces.

"Retire? What, Bryan?"

"Shh. Listen to this song. Talk about misdirected production... Now, I could have made this a real hit..."

"Can't you ever take your mind off the music racket?" Jacquí reaches to turn off the radio, but Bryan covers the knob with his hairy-knuckled hand and frowns at her.

"No. I can't," he states.

"Are you sure you want to go dancing? Tonight? We haven't gone dancing since you found out about, you know.... your, uh, condition. Didn't your doctor say your heart—"

"What doctor? Why can't you and everyone else mind their own hearts, if you have hearts."

"Uh, Bryan Babe, I just wanna—"

"From now on I'm on my own, Sweets. I decided that today. I do what I want. Going independent."

"Well, I was talking to Mitzi and Bruce the other day. They said that before, uh, you were supposed to be—"

"This song has no beat!" Bryan exclaims as he brings the Fiat to a sudden halt outside the Peppermint Palace, the hottest new discothèque in New York City. As he helps Jacquí make sure that her go-go boots are unscuffed and her sequined net stockings are smoothed, pretty perky young Miss Jay-Lynn Jones sings:

"Why can't we be ha-appy together?

Why can't we be ha-appy apart?

Why must there always be two broken hearts?"

Bryan and Jacquí share several watery martinis inside as the crowd thickens. From time to time, Jacquí shrieks and waves her spangly hands and jiggles her bangly elbows at people she recognizes, and as the night progresses, at many she does not.

Bryan peruses the couples coming through the doors of the Peppermint Palace, and notices that one out of every three females is wearing large, hooped earrings with good luck charms hanging from the centers. He knows that Jacquí herself has perpetrated the fad on national television. He has had his share of trendsetting himself, only with wide wraparound sunglasses, but such "fashion statements" no longer excite him. "Who cares about ephemeral fads?" he asked Jacquí not long ago, in a rather redundant rhetorical manner. But Bryan is careful at watching the same fads' rise and fall.

He keeps time with the music by clicking his rings on the side of his glass, an icy sound which can somehow be heard even above the loud music and makes Jacquí slightly apprehensive. He knows Jacquí cannot hold her drinks, a fact which has consistently amused and disappointed him. Finally, he can no longer take her "yoo-hoo's" or this idle costume-inspection, and so grabs her by her thin, bedangled wrists.

They emerge onto the dance floor and are greeted by a chorus of restrained sighs and even one or two camera flashes. The Times or Women's Wear Daily?

"Let's dance!" Jacquí giggles, throwing her long shapely arms into the air.

"We are, we are," Bryan says into her ear as he keeps an eye on her heels and synchronizes his movements with hers. Around them lights pulsate and perfumed, cologned bodies writhe, colors transform into other colors, appendages writhe around other appendages, and the air grows hot and humid. Girls catch glimpses in the mirrored walls and push back fringes from their eyes. Their boyfriends flash their teeth and rub their sweaty palms over Maidenform straps.

Bryan and Jacquí dance through the top ten, rayon sticks to skin, skin to rayon, Wildroot runs and mascara streaks, until, with hairdos and maquillage destroyed, they look something like disco zombies out for the kill. Bryan begins to feel his heart beating like a metronome racing towards its fastest setting, but he is determined to match Jacquí's energy and drive with his own.

"Bryan, uh, we'd better stop now," Jacquí says at last between numbers. "This can't be good for you."

"Like hell!" Bryan roars above the introduction to the next song. "I could dance all night—until the sheep come home!"

"Cows, cows, Bryan! Ha-ha!"

"Them, too!"

"Come on, honey, this ain't no dance marathon!"

But she cannot leave him yet, and so they dance and dance until the crowd has peaked and then begun to thin out. Bryan rests his head on her breast during a slow weepy number and she mops his brow with his shirttail—Sea Island cotton, powder-blue, polka-dotted.

"Please, let's stop!" she cries into his ear.

"Not yet, not yet. I'm just starting, baby cakes... "

"My God! I can feel your heart pounding right through me! And besides, my feet are killing me. These new boots."

"Ok, ok, that was the last one... "

"Good, come on—" She takes him by his powder-blue waist and begins to stumble off the dance floor with him. The music shifts at once into one of Bryan's biggest hit productions, a song even Jacquí knows, as Bryan has so often pointed out, has sold more than seven million copies. As the unmistakable opening riff takes off, the in-house disc jockey declares over the loudspeakers:

"Before we close up, here's an oldie-but-goodie by the Troubadour Four called 'Little One,' produced by Mr. Bryan B. Sterling, Esquire, who we understand is on our premises tonight. May we dedicate this song to Mr. Bryan B. Sterling and the lovely Jacquí Simmons!"

"Just one more dance," Bryan pleads with Jacquí, pulling at the plastic pearls around her throat. "They're playing it for me. One more, toots..."

"No! We're killing ourselves! My feet hurt! I've got a headache. I've had enough, Bryan." Jacquí tears herself away, knocking over a martini glass or two in the process.

"All right, then, I'll dance by myself." Bryan steps onto the dance floor, bows a mock bow to an audience that isn't watching, and sways dizzily in the strobe lights for a moment. A spotlight shines on him as he makes his way to the mirrored corner and begins a distorted twist, thrusting his hip into the glass, against his twin's hip. Move out a little from the corner and now there are three Bryans. Which is the real one? The floor is nearly empty but for him. Some of the people on the way out begin to laugh nervously; Jacquí looks around, runs up to Bryan, and takes him into her arms.

They dance in slow motion; "Little One" seems to be going faster and faster: "Take me up, Little One," the Troubadour Four sing, "Hold me tight and keep me right, Dance with me all through the night, Little One."

Their limbs swing back and forth automatically, rigid as windup dolls. They seem to be falling and choking but they remain upright as the bass line charges ahead, as the bass drum marches on, and then Bryan is falling and clutching at his chest as if it is on fire. The whole place, the whole damn city, he senses somewhere, is on fire.

He awakens in a room where everything is white or off-white, and faces, pale and out of focus, hover far above him. A cold, metallic object is pressed into his hand though he cannot tell what it is. He keeps thinking of the time he spent in a dentist's chair several months ago, having his teeth capped. They had anesthetized him and he kept laughing at the most inane things, the buttons on the dentist's white jacket or the Muzak on the overhead speakers, until he fell into darkness. This is like that time, but it is different. He feels like he is falling from the diving board in his penthouse pool, only he is falling up, rising higher and higher. Oh, the trite and the ephemeral and the inane! How had he given his life to such effervescent pursuits... Then again, maybe he hadn't yet entered the empyrean.

"I guess you can't fight him," a resonant, familiar voice says somewhere. "He'll kill himself faster if he doesn't work than if he does."

"You're wrong," a higher, huskier female voice says, '"He needs a change. He's got to slow down. Even I can't keep dancing forever without the teensiest rest. Ha-ha! He's got to, uh, get outta this place. All these bad vibes, you know."

"You can argue all you want," another, more irksome female voice says from farther away. "Whatever he does, he'll do it by and for himself, on his own terms and in his own way. I know Mr. Sterling, I've worked with him long enough and my girlfriend Cyndi did before. All this'll only make him better. Yeah, I know Bernie Steinberg, boy wonder from the Bronx. Watch him respond to this."

Something small and round as an apricot-pit is placed within his left ear. The object makes a sudden transition from silence to whining pop music.

Bryan has heard the song before, although it seems like it was long ago, in dreams or a childhood memory. Maybe he was standing in his mother's kitchen rattling pots and pans to Bill Haley and the Comets or maybe he was tinkering on a pianola in someone's high-rise. High, incredibly high, voices are singing:

"I'm only giving you one more chance

I'm only giving you one more chance..."

He remembers now: Shana and the Shanelles, his top act, the act he discovered and groomed and produced, the greatest act in the world! His fingers begin to snap, he moves his right foot up and down with purpose, as if he is pumping the kick-start of a motorcycle. His head rocks back and forth in time as the Shanelles swing into another chorus: "I'm only giving you one more chaaaance..."

"The deejay says it's sure to be number one, and it just came out," someone above mentions.

Bryan B. Sterling repeats to himself aloud, in pace with the new, somehow different pace of his heart: "Number one.... number one.... number one... "
Do the Ennui

So it was like this: I was murdering time down at the Auschwitz Bar, wasting my inheritance on pain-threshold machines and minding other people's business when she walks in. Angeline FZ 108-99, I mean.

She was wrapped up and strapped up in some sort of rubber sarong with lots of sharp little fishing lures holding it together, and her hair was downright dangerous; it was like the razor-sharp crest of an exotic bird, with a little tiara attached to it made out of rhinestones and rusted barbed wire. When she sidled over to the seat next to mine my eyes began to water, her musk (or whatever it was she exuded) was so strong—she smelled like a tire factory on fire, and I've got to admit she got me as aroused as a pyromaniac.

"Light?" she hissed, igniting a blowtorch before my face. Somehow I couldn't talk straight off, as if my mouth were full of little red-hot stinging ants. Her unblinking serpentine eyes stared hypnotically into mine, a cobra before its prey, a Lamia who's sensed something tasty in her pool.

"Smokes?" I managed to say at last, trying to keep my cool, though my eyebrows felt singed and I must have tied a knot in the straw of my monotony cocktail (the house drink). Suddenly there was no one else left in the club; even the bartender had called it quits. But I'm tough enough—I work in the neutron-waste dumps—and I figured Angeline was just another bombshell I'd have to defuse.

She plunged a foot-long cigar into my mouth and lowered a welder's helmet over her kohl-lidded eyes. The cigar tasted like road tar. Angeline FZ 108-99 was famous around these parts of town, but I'd never had the pleasure (if you could call it that) of running into her before. They said she made a sport out of gunning down guys like me from within her monstrous jet-black speedster. I had seen that car, once—a souped-up Man Ray with spikes on its wheels like those Roman gladiators used to put on their chariots—shooting past me at twice the speed of light, with what sounded like screams coming from within. No wonder I was a little shaky around her. She reminded me of the female of the praying mantis—and I was beginning to wonder how long it would be before she'd have me saying my prayers.

"So, you're into death-trips?" she purred, pursing her ebonized lips and crossing her stilettos (they had heels on them long and lethal enough to kill a man).

Things were going to happen, I told myself. Angeline paid the bill and soon we were off in her gleaming juggernaut of a car, slicing down the wet night streets in hot pursuit of a little cool action or cool pursuit of a little hot action, whichever came along first. The Ray was something like a torture chamber on wheels: there were racks and ropes and chains in the back, though all she had done so far was handcuff me to the dashboard. We were in a hurry; the night was melting around us fast as ice cubes in a fire-eater's mouth. I think she had me mixed up with somebody else, but I was spaced from too many monotony cocktails and in need of a little shock treatment. Angeline's face shone in the sick green light of the control panel like a horror film still, and I found myself at the doorstep—naw, make it in the foyer of love.

"I know what you're thinking," she said, looking into the rear-view mirror and adjusting a kind of chic sequined widow's veil over her brow. "I'm thinking what you know."

She revved the car into sixth gear, then sixteenth, then sixtieth. We must have broken the sensation barrier. I went numb all over, the way I like it. "Bored?" she teased.

"Very," I said, trying to keep my head from crashing through the windscreen.

"Vapid? Vacant? Vacuous?"

"Very, very, very."

"Vice, venom, vermin... " Her words faded into the windswept caverns of the night, echoing on through time and space and beaming to distant planets, where I could imagine receivers picking up her ghostly voice, droning on forevermore out there among the crazy stars. Then I noticed that she had seized the retractable steel clutch bar and was moving it seductively over her pyramidal breasts. More tears came to my eyes, and my black leather jumpsuit creaked over my hot skin; I felt like a fruit about to burst its rind. The car blasted on faster and faster through all the red lights, and its sonic vibrations rocked my entire body. The castanets dangling from my neck clapped together—the sound of two lovers' hearts beating in unison.

Angeline unzipped my suit, and I took a switchblade to her sarong. She responded by strapping something onto her that looked like a rhino's aphrodisiacal horn. We proceeded to pretend that I was the little silver ball in the pinball machine and she was the hammer mechanism. Matches and gasoline were introduced to curious effect, but I was too gone-baby-gone to care. It was only when she blindfolded and gagged me that I began to wonder where along the autobahn she would dump my wretched body. But somehow it was even more exciting that way, because not only could I not feel anything, I could not see or say anything. Then she made me play the charging rhino. She felt wonderful and debased, she told me a short while later; it hurt nice and good and she was left nauseated and out of breath... Nothing else thrilled her like that except driving fast at night after doing a whole vial of thantos, when she could sense the powerful pistons of her Man Ray pumping in and out of their atomic exploding chambers and the G-forces felt like they were pounding her skeleton to a powder.

She is falling in love with me, too, I thought. We did everything again, for hours.

And hours. Then there was a magnesium flash, a teenage gang of cannibalistic necrotics (hungry-eyed and high on thantos—which makes you feel like a superman, but is like shooting tiny piranhas into your bloodstream) slunk by in the searing lights of the megalopolis, and we were there.

Me, I'd never been to Club Hell, where the beat-beat-beat (as in black and blue) goes on. I'd heard all about the gyrating dance floor and the quadroptic sound. A lot of the cats I knew went on the prowl for canaries here, and few of those birds ever made it back to their cages without getting at least their wings clipped. To have Angeline FZ 108-99 there with me at her hip, like Judith bearing Holofernes' head, was a beloved nightmare come true. She led me through the gates harnessed like a drugged ocelot, but I was glad now to be just a shadow in her shadow, another of her fashionable accouterments. The doorman was a one-eyed giant who branded us with a red-hot poker—so we could get back in just in case we ever made it out alive, of course. The two-headed bouncer was over in a corner chewing on something that wasn't quite dead.

The joint was so jammed and jumping they were piping oxygen through the ducts, and still I had to press my mouth against Angeline's just to get some cool air. The music was thick and distorted, ear-splitting and rib-crushing. You couldn't hear the music above the music. After doing some thantos just for kicks, we hit the dance-floor, which was at alternate times spinning far above our heads or plummeting into the depths of the earth, whereupon cries (of delight or anguish, it was impossible to tell) rose dizzily to our ears.

The music launched into the exhilarating tempo of chains slammed against steel drums, and Angeline clung to me like a waif in a storm, except of course that she was no waif and the storm was only, to infuse my hyperbole with rancid romanticism, in our hearts. Our separate, sterilized and deodorized sweats merged into one great, salted Danube, which we tenderly licked from each other's bluing lips during our gloriously decadent ballet.

It was so hot in the club fires were starting all over the place; people frugged madly with their clothes aflame, and all this only added to our excitement. As for ourselves, we danced in slow, lumbering steps, as if our limbs had been anesthetized. Angeline crushed my toes and warbled in my ear: "My little drone bee," she said, "mon chien amour." We heeled into a reel, worked up to a watusi. The whips and chains were getting louder and more insistent as the thantos kicked in and we grew more animated; I had to hold my eyes and close my breath as we tore into a twist, flung ourselves into a fling. Oh! how she beguiled me with her beguine, and oh! how I tempted her with my tarantella!

"You bore me," she meowed, "and yet I want more. But if we... " The upcoming fox-trot drowned out the rest of her words, presumably to be beached on some coral-rimmed, metaphorical shore.

We did old dances, new dances, dances not yet named. Dances we'd done all our lives and dances we invented on the spot. We did polkas, promenades, polonaises, pasodobles. We did the conga, congo, rumba, rameau, samba, tango, mambo, sambo. The mashed potato, the bossa nova, the pony, the swim. The herk, the jerk, the herky-jerk. The hip-hop, body-pop, and slip-slop. The black-bottom—the top drawer. The gavotte and garrote. Cha-cha and chi-chi. Soft-shoe—hard-sole. Hula-hula, hoky-poky. Hunky-dory. Hoochy-cooch. Can-can't. Shyster shuffle! Aryan armbend! X-ray! Y-gene! Zed-grade! Shut-up! Shut-down! Bunny-hug! Jitter-bop! Shimmy! Shammy! Clog! Trog! Slit! Stomp! Stab! Thug! Crush! Bam! Boom! Biff! Pow!

And so it went for hours.

And hours.

And we were both still bored out of our skulls. Suddenly (as can only be expected in a beddy-bye fable like this) during a free-style three-step pogo-hustle, I daringly swung Angeline out and away from me. For the last hour or so I had had her fingers tight around my neck and her face buried in my shoulder, and when she tore away from me, her fingernails (which she kept filed to nasty points) left ten tracks of welted skin (I saw in the mirrored walls) around my throat, as if I had just grazed the guillotine blade several times previously. The pain was slightly immense. It was a while before I noticed that Angeline had sunk to the floor, her mouth fallen slack and exposing a gleaming keyboard of carnivorous teeth. The dance-floor was on fire all around us, and her hair was smoking. She was, to put it mildly, dead. Succumbed to suffocation sometime during a sarabande, I suppose.

The music had shifted into the rhythms of what I knew to be the latest dance craze, the Ennui. Spike-heels and combat boots began to mar Angeline FZ 108-99's beautiful blanched face, and people were starting to complain. The fire was growing higher. I had no choice but to scoop her up into my weary arms and hold her fragile body, cooling like a light bulb, close to my brazen chest—because, you know, when you're doing the Ennui you just can't stop dancing.

1978, for no particular youth movement
Assassins

Tomorrow will be a day to remember, for tomorrow he is ours. And, by extension, he is yours. We will use three small but effective handguns equipped with silencers, fired by expert marksmen from strategic angles as he walks through the massive gates of his new estate. It will all be over quickly and relatively painlessly—a noble and fitting end to the man we all love.

He is no longer young and healthy. He is not likely to put up a fight. He will succumb without a struggle, but if we know him, not quietly. Therefore, our audio technicians will lower the boom to his lips. What will his final words be? A poignant farewell? Garbled nonsense? Soon-to-be famous last words?

Our camera crew has been instructed not to disturb him after the shots are fired. We want things to proceed naturally, with no interruptions. The cameramen will work in close coordination with the marksmen and commentators. There will be discretion on the part of our camera crew; we want to assure our viewers there won't be much blood.

A doctor and a coroner, highly respected in their fields, will of course be on hand to certify his death.

Won't he see us coming? you might ask. Not likely. His eyesight is not what it used to be, and he'll probably be too busy talking to one of those famous friends of his to notice. Our marksmen, by the way, have been advised to take this into account: the famous friend must not be harmed. The crew has been asked, as well, to take special notice of those first few seconds of surprise and anguish on the friend's face. And if our target should run, which isn't likely, we will set loose the Dobermans.

Our most trusted commentators will narrate the action as it happens. They will be informative, but not intrusive; we believe in good taste and restraint. The research team has done a considerable amount of legwork on our man. They have discovered quite a few items about his personal and social life that will be sure to fascinate. That last tiny twitch on his face may very well speak volumes.

Several guests known to us all will be on hand. They are certain to be of great interest to you: We've got most of the interviews on tape already, and what they have to say about him is sometimes shocking, sometimes heartbreaking, often quite amusing. They were his best friends, after all, so here's your chance to hear what those closest to him really thought about him all those years. We're proud to say they've all been very understanding and cooperative.

We will also have a documentary summary of his life, with some exciting re-enactments of crucial scenes. Our reporters will visit his old neighborhood, talk with relatives and classmates, and attempt to piece together the details and events that shaped the man we know so well. What was it about him that made him so famous? Where will his place be in history books? Why must we care? An attempt will be made to answer these and other provocative questions; you will get to understand him better as both private man and public person.

Back at the studio, our guest psychologist (you'll know her by name) will analyze just what his final few minutes meant, from a psychological standpoint. She will also present an in-depth study of his motivations, desires, and fixations. Be prepared to hear some intriguing revelations about his personal habits!

But why now? Why him? Because if we don't, our rivals might, and we all know they would do a much less professional and less entertaining job of it. This project has been in the planning stages for months, and only now is he at the right stage of his life before the public's eyes for us to take this important step. He has the personality, the charisma, the talents we don't want to see wasted on an unexciting finish, and neither do we want anyone but the most deserving man. He will be ours, yours and ours alone, and you will be glad we got to him first.

But when you come right down to it, there is his life. We would not take it with anything less than consummate skill and irreproachable integrity—as you have been shown, our entire staff has worked long and hard to ensure you'll be nothing less than pleased with our presentation.

So be with us. Watch with us as he falls to the sidewalk, clutching at the air, bleeding from the vital organs, perhaps crying expletives, as he has been known to do (don't worry—the censors have been alerted), perhaps more resigned to his fate. And for your pleasure, we will repeat the performance several times in stop-motion, and in slow motion, with especially scored music. Tomorrow, yes, we will take a life. But we will do it with unsurpassed style.
The Boy Who Painted Himself as Christ

Here we see our boy. The boy who painted himself as Christ started off painting himself in thick gouache and clotted oils as Lucifer. The eternal rock and roller in leather and high-heeled boots. Smoke out the ears. A burning guitar. The whole bit. Cloven hooves on a mountain of skulls. Or on heaps of dollars and coins. Tail wrapped around a biker chick. Fire you see of course in his eyes.

The paintings he told his mother are my diary. Someday they'll tell you what my letters can't. I'm sorry I'm not what you expected after I left school. I'm sorry I can't come home now. But I think I can learn to like it here.

He wanted to toughen up. Carry a switchblade. Roll old ladies maybe. Steal gold from altars. Shoot up in tenements the way he'd read. Hide out under an overpass. That sort of thing. Something far too gentle about him though. The most he could do was nick paint from the art store. Sometimes pocket someone else's tip. Or jump over the subway turnstile.

His mother sent him money for food. Please baby you can always come back. He cashed the checks and spent it all on canvas and paints. Self-portraits began filling up his tiny room. Windows painted over black the way he'd always dreamed. Candles on the sills. Loud dark music on the radio. Blankets on the floor. He wanted to get to know what death might be like. Told his mother he wasn't going to church anymore. She cried in her letters I'll pray for you then. Like a bad movie life was turning out to be. Sometimes he washed dishes in sad little restaurants. Sometimes he merely begged.

His paintings changed. Angels took over the foreground. Black angels in rags and tatters. Scars on their faces. Blood on their hands. Sometimes a saint too. Lost eyes. Scenes of martyrdom. No crowns of gold though no goddamn halos. Every painting got bleaker. Darker.

Would he ever show them to anyone? No. They would find him. Some day.

It was only logical that he came to paint Jesus Christ himself. No models so again he used a mirror. The stations of the cross. The scourging. The crucifixion. None of those happier days with the apostles. All the portraits merciless. An ugly Jesus. All of them looking like himself. All splashed with black like an acid or mold eating through the canvas. Smothered in more black. Red only for the wounds. It was cold in the room. Freezing sometimes.

Are you all right his mother wrote after weeks of despair. It's been so long since we've heard from you. You must be working too hard. So am I. Here's some money please eat something. Please tell me you are happy.

Now he had to steal whatever he ate. When he ate. Everything went for the rent and what supplies he couldn't steal. But his crimes gave him no thrill. Only guilt knowing he must make amends. Heal the sick some day. Bless the poor. Meanwhile he was wasting away. He was bleeding himself into his paintings. Don't be so crazy he told himself. Couldn't stop though.

So he decided to just get it all over with. Retreat into that blackness. What's the use of life anyway. No money no friends no interests just boredom or fear. First to paint one last masterpiece. Christ again. Leave it to a world that would regret its indifference. No one to raise himself from the dead but himself this time.

This time in a colorless desert. Starving. Hollow eyed. Tempted by our old friend the Devil. Naked and bleeding under a hot sun. Face burnt. Hair falling over his eyes. A white relentless sky and all the world blanching white too. In fact so white it was like the glare of sun on gold. It would consume him like fire. He could already feel the flames circling him. Giving himself up to grace. Ready to go beyond this world. Madness maybe or what he's always been waiting for.

And then his mother after a long tiring bus ride. Found him in his room and took him in her arms and spooned food into him. Sponged his hot brow with cool water and wrapped him in shawls. When he woke at last she was gone maybe for good and the room was filled with what you might call ironic sunshine. He still had his knife though and it cut through all the canvases with a pleasing ripping sound. Then threw them all down the air-shaft. He was not happy but he was alive and the air felt good in his lungs. Outside the windows was the city with all its noise and danger and beyond that the world.
Indigo Blue

a tale for a latter-day Yellow Book

The slender, languid young man sighed a barely audible sigh, exhaling just enough breath to keep a feather afloat in the air, had there been a feather. The telephone on the end-table was still ringing. It had been ringing for God knows how long. Reaching the table from where he lay on the chaise longue had taken incredible effort; it might very well be an impossible effort to hoist the leaden mouthpiece from its cradle to his ear. The young man sighed again and looked down at his hands.

The polish was not quite dry. He splayed his pianist's adroit fingers and blew gently on the shiny indigo lacquer. His fingers looked rather naked without their rings. He had taken them off since they felt so tight when he finally summoned the nerve to get up. Hangovers sometimes left him feeling puffy all over. He waved his hands before his eyes like Japanese fans; the indigo blue did so nicely complement his eyes, but he was not certain the color was truly becoming.

The phone still continued to ring, as if he hadn't commanded it to shut up already a half-dozen times. It would not stop until he answered it, he realized now; they were always so persistent. No reason, however, to be in a hurry.

Nevertheless, he did summon strength; he did reach the telephone and take it to his side. He did this with such idleness, such calculated lassitude, that not the smallest amount of cologned air which surrounded him was stirred.

He sat a moment, holding the telephone on his lap like a cat, regaining the energy which had been so dearly taxed. He glanced at the waxy white flowers on the dressing table—he never knew what kind they were, they were just white flowers—and saw they had already begun to close and wilt, though he had placed them in that Waterford vase just a few minutes before. It must be the heat, he concluded, admiring the florist's box with its green crêpe and unfurled ribbons that was stuffed into a nearby wastebasket. It was definitely the heat, not any hangover: That's why he felt so, well, beastly.

"Ye-es," he said into the mouthpiece (which he held a good six inches from his lips, staring at it as if it were a viper he had seized). "Yes, yes," he repeated, as if it had already asked a question of him.

"Aubrey? Is that you?" The voice coming over the wires sounded only vaguely familiar.

"Of course it's me. Who did you expect—the Queen Mother?"

"Aubrey, we've got to talk. In person." Oh, they always wanted to talk. In person.

"Are you quite sure?"

"Why, yes, Aubrey. You got the flowers, didn't you?"

"Flowers?"

"The gardenias. And my note. I had them delivered this morning."

"Oh, yes, I suppose I do remember seeing some flowers around here someplace." A little vellum envelope had come with them, too, but he had not bothered to open it. The afternoon had been exhausting enough already.

"You don't sound too chipper, Aubrey. Did I keep you up past sleepy time last night?"

Last night, last night.... Of course—cocktails, dinner, cocktails, movie, cocktails, dancing, more cocktails... Perfectly beastly, all of it. And worst of all, Byron. He was easy enough on the eyes, but oh what a bore.

"Are you still there, Aubrey? Did I say something wrong?"

He breathed in deeply, exhaled slowly. "Yes, you said the words 'last night.' Do not ever mention those two words in the same sentence to me ever again. They are the very worst words in any language."

"There, I was afraid so. But it wasn't my idea to punctuate the evening with so many cocktails, darling."

He thought about Byron's hand on his knee all through dinner, Byron's hand over his hand all through the movie, Byron's hand on his shoulder as they danced. Byron simply had no control over his extremities. And he had no tact. "On the contrary, the cocktails were the only thing that got me through the night. But if you want to know, I do feel the teensiest bit lightheaded." His head felt as if it might very well detach itself from his neck and float away.

"Well, I'll never forgive myself now for not pulling on the reins sooner. If I had any sense of gallantry in me I'd throw open the window and jump to my death."

"Silly boy. We both know you are on only the second floor of that dreadful hotel. Broken bones, that's all you'd get for your trouble." He picked up the fingernail polish bottle—something cheap he had purchased at a local drugstore on a whim—and picked at its label. Perhaps the shade was somewhat common...

"Well, are you going to allow me to come over? I've got something important to say and I don't like talking like this over the phone, never did."

"Please don't bother, really. It's too too terribly hot for any of that now. And I was just about to ring up Bitty and have him come over and rub some talc onto my shoulders. They're absolutely raw; I fell asleep next to the pool a while ago and now I'm paying dearly for it." He arranged himself more comfortably on the chaise, admiring the interplay of colors and patterns: white fingers, indigo polish, yellow silk kimono, pink and mint-green floral chintz. It then occurred to him that there was an important party to go to later that day; thank God Byron would be there with him, charming but vacuous, to help him cut a good impression. If he was good for anything, Byron was good for show.

"Poor thing," Byron was saying. "Well, I'm on my way, then."

"No you don't." He laughed then for no reason; he just liked the sound of his own laugh: bourbon over ice. Oh, but it hurt to laugh; the sound echoed on and on in his head as if through the chambers of a cavern. This was all Byron's fault...

"But we've got to talk."

"Isn't that what we've been doing?" He had spread his hands before his face again like fans opening and closing. "By, do you think I have nice hands?"

"Of course, they're outstanding hands. I've always said so, or at least thought so. They're your hands... They're lovely hands. You perform so marvelously well with them. But that isn't what—"

"It's just that sometimes I need a little reassurance, you know?" He had picked up the lacquer vial again, reading its fancy embossed label carefully: _Marca registrada_... Why ever couldn't they just use plain old English?

"Sure, I know. I'm the same way about my eyes. They are my strongest feature, aren't they?"

His fingers tightened around the vial. He was suddenly thinking of all those juvenile wisecracks Byron had made about the headwaiter last night: wondering if he had just flown in from Transylvania, and so on. You could not even call it a sense of humor. Why did he keep bothering to go out with Byron? "Yes, yes. But then I suppose you have so many features... Do you know what I've done? I have gone and painted my fingernails and I can't really say why I did. I haven't done anything like that in years, since I was far less well-adjusted than I am now." He picked up a thick, glistening fashion magazine off the end-table and began to leaf through it skeptically, stopping at a full-page ad for a bergamot oil skin-toner. Byron was going on and on about how a friend of his had once worn eye shadow every day for years until they stopped making the only color she could wear and then she had a nervous breakdown or something—

"Why do they choose such models, Byron?" he interrupted.

"What models?"

"Models like in this ad. Unpleasant-looking creatures if ever I saw one. There is no excuse for it, really. I hate to look at unpleasant people, especially in advertisements, especially in magazines I used to be able to trust. It's like those people in television commercials who claim not to be actors, as if you couldn't tell. I would rather have attractive actors pretending to be as unattractive as real people, if you know what I mean. Though I suppose with these models it's a matter of taste. Too bad whoever chose them had none... " And off he went on one of his favorite topics of conversation—comprising but not limited to what might be termed a polemic on the decline of aesthetic evaluation in the modern world, though he wouldn't put it quite that way—for some time before Byron boldly managed to interrupt.

"Listen, Aubrey, I really should be coming over right away."

"Well, there's no excuse for it, that's all." He sighed deeply and critically, examining once more his pale naked fingers tipped with the deepest of blues, shining darkly like little periwinkles. There, he thought to himself, these are your physical manifestations of inner insecurity. Why have an analyst when you can do it all yourself? "What were you saying, dear?"

"I need to talk to you before it gets too late."

Only blue, only fingers, after all. Though they might coax the loveliest ember-glow from Poulenc.

"Aubrey?"

"Don't be melodramatic—and don't come over, please. I'll be in bed. I'll have Bitty ward you off. I'll be gone." He supposed he should decide what to wear when Byron came over.

"All right, then. Maybe I shouldn't."

" _Excusez-moi_?" There was that new peacock-patterned tie he had been dying to try out in private before exposing it to the public...

"I said I won't come over, then. What I have to say could just as well, I suppose, be said over the phone."

"Oh. Well, then. As I said, I do have Bitty to rub in that lotion. But what in the world is it that can't wait?" He hoped it would not be another one of those messy professions or protestations, whatever—though it was just as well to deal with the matter surgically, over the hygienic telephone. Economical as well to have it over and done with: breaking a heart from a distance might not be so tiring—though it did always help to hold their hands a while before letting go for good.

"Oh, Aubrey, I really do feel like taking an elevator to the fortieth and leaping from there! After all we've meant to each other this past week it's so unfair. But you see I'm leaving earlier than I thought I would for Europe and I might not see you again for quite a while, if ever. God, it's so tragic!"

"Europe? What on earth are you talking about? Europe can wait. There's simply nothing there, nothing waiting for you. Beastly place. Leave it alone." The bastard! He had to admit that despite it all Byron was exceedingly handsome.

"I live in Zurich half the year, Aubrey, remember? You know, it's really absurd but last night after the taxi dropped me off I got a phone call from an old friend—"

"You mean an old lover."

"Call it what you like. Anyway, we met today for breakfast, realized just how wrong it had been for us to ever part in the first place, and one thing led to another, and, well, he hates ever staying in America for more than forty-eight hours. Imagine the packing I have to do!"

Suddenly the slender, languid young man felt uncomfortably hot. He threw down the fashion magazine and rose himself with a shove from the chaise, holding the telephone base to his side like a weapon. "You expect me to believe that? Nothing happens that fast. Why play games with me? If there's something that's preventing you from seeing me, why don't you just come out with the truth? Is it because you're afraid you've gone in over your head too soon with me? Listen, what am I going to do about that terrace party this evening?" His voice had barely risen.

"Go by yourself, Aubrey, and have a wonderful time. You might meet someone far more honorable than myself. But whether you believe me or not, I can't help you. The flight to Geneva's tomorrow noon. I'm only sorry we didn't get to say goodbye in person."

"My, but a terrific migraine just came over me like a sledgehammer. And when I get a headache my jaws go positively numb."

"It's too bad it has to be this way, Aubrey. You don't have to be so angry with me. I never knew we were anything serious. But I do still like you and if you wouldn't mind I'll send a postcard of the Alps or something—"

" _Auf Wiedersehn_ , then. Goodbye, Byron. A bientôt, too, darling, though I doubt it very much." Without waiting for another word, he pushed the receiver hard back onto its cradle, kicked at the magazine on the floor, brushed back his dangling blond forelock. What a liar that Byron had turned out to be. People just do not meet old lovers and decide to run off to Europe with them in a day, even awfully flighty ones without any permanent address like Byron, roaming from one hotel suite to another, one country to another. What an amateur ruse; the handsomest ones are always the worst, too. Now he would have to go to that tiresome party alone this evening; it was too late to call anyone else and save face. Damn that Byron, that utter bastard.

He walked to the window and switched on a small antique electric fan sitting there. From a friend's really quite nice mid-century design shop. There was something about an old office fan he liked, the whir of its blades, the masculine scent of oil from its motor. He rotated before its breeze, lifting a tuft of hair from the back of his neck. Still Byron did not leave his mind, but spun there like the blades of the fan. How dare he...

Then he noticed that he was still holding the bottle of fingernail lacquer in one hand. He looked down at the bottle, at his ridiculous painted nails. Bright indigo against the saffron yellow of his kimono. Insecurity, repulsion.

It was then that he did what he immediately realized to be an impulsive and foolish thing. With all his strength, he pitched the bottle against the nearest wall, where it shattered and fell to the floor, leaving a bright indigo-blue splatter, which dripped slow, bright indigo-blue drops down the surface of the pure white wall. It was, after all, a rather unbecoming shade.
Another Abecadarium

ANSELM was determined, however painfully, to forget her. He read overlong books. He tended the bettas in the sculpture garden's pond. He spent long hours poring over his stocks, estimating and re-estimating his net worth. Lately he'd tried his best to become more impulsive: doing without his horn-rims, shoplifting chocolate samplers, buying scads of tuberoses for his wife. Still the face of the girl in the pearl-gray cloche who had laughed at him in the bank elevator would not go away. Still, he regretted that he had neither kissed nor smacked her.

BEVERLY's eyes ran with tears and mascara. She fled from the ballroom, tearing off her already wilting corsage, and blindly hailed a taxi, barely knowing what she was doing or where she was going. How could Denton have insinuated that during the cotillion's very first waltz? It was much too much to take anymore! Somehow she managed to keep from bursting into tears—until the driver asked if she really did want to be let off at the pier.

CASPAR had bought her a racehorse and a cabin cruiser and named them both after her. He had given her Rio when she caught a chill, Oslo when she complained of the heat. Wardrobes came and went with the seasons. If she wanted excitement, there was the Grand Prix; if she wanted laughter, then there were those guests in the west wing. She had been lavished with rubies like bonbons, sports cars like Cracker Jack prizes. Once he had even hired a traveling opera company to sing "Happy Birthday" to her. Caspar gave her everything and all she gave him was headaches: "You don't love me," she had said on the way back from Wimbledon.

DULCIE awoke with a start; her luminous Cartier said that it was not quite four, meaning she had slept barely an hour. Burying her head under the pillow embroidered with "His," she ruminated again upon all they'd said. Were she and Jake through, then? What about Jake and his manicurist? And was that a creaking on the veranda below?

EPHRAIM, cheroot burnt to his fingertips, was struggling to keep from going under. She must have put a soporific in the mousse. He tried desperately to remember the delivery van's number, but everything was dissolving fast. Images swam before him like the enlarged, soft-focus faces of actors on a movie screen. As he collapsed to the carpet, he saw Natalie as she burst into the room, like Esther Williams surfacing from a Technicolor pool.

FELICIA giggled. "Mine's Felicia," she said, giggling. "And I'm Antoine," said her blind date's rather attractive friend. She giggled again. "Oh," he said, "it must be my tie. I'm afraid it's a trifle... " She suppressed a giggle. "No, no," she managed to say, "it's just that—" And the giggling began all over again.

GILES saved the tallest, the prettiest, the very blondest for last, just like a dessert.

HERMIONE felt somewhat giddy afterward. No one had ever told her it would be like that. Walking to the premiere, where Eduardo's family would be waiting, she was struck by her reflection in the window of a milliner's. She choked back a gasp—one of her false eyelashes was still floating in her unfinished highball back at Vinnie's studio!

IRVING spoke first. "Yes," Mrs. Pierpont, I am sorry, but it was all Mimi's— Yes, I apologize about what Monsignor Martin saw—or thought he saw—happening in the grotto, and I'm sure the fountain can be repaired, but Mimi was the first to take off her— Indeed, indeed, Mrs. Pierpont, that little incident in the maids' quarters was entirely uncalled for, but really, Mimi—"

JUSTINE took her place before the firing squad, left hand placed firmly over her newly swollen belly. They had never guessed this comely young subaltern they had captured was actually a woman. "Haseem," Justine whispered as in prayer, "wherever you are, I willingly die for you. I love you always and will wait for you in the afterworld with our dear child... " Meanwhile, in Tangier, Haseem rolled over among the pillows and discarded clothing. "Once more," he said, and kissed his latest paramour's wet mouth.

KERMIT had waited for the moonlight, the snowfall, the warmth from the wine; what he had to ask now must come from his heart and not his head. On bended knee, he held Miriam's hand, careful not to force too brusque a kiss on it. The moon and snow illuminated her wan and lovely brow. All his life he would cherish this moment of moments. Now if only she would quit chattering on about that hairy danseur with the damned Ballet Russe!

LAUREL tried on a dozen ensembles before she decided to "make do" with the apricot taffeta and matching heels. She'd been putting on and taking off nail lacquers for hours before a certain hyacinthine hue seemed to suffice. Richard, who was pacing before the conservatory windows, would of course be furious. He was "that way" about a lot of things lately; he had been "that way" about his last wife, too... Well, never mind all that, what could she possibly do with her hair?

MAURICE listened absently to the judge's sentence. After the murmurs from the jurors' box died down, two guards led away the accused. Maurice watched his wife's viola-shaped back recede from sight, and then his lips revealed the trace of a curl, as if smiling...

NORA stood within the shadows of the porte-cochère, waiting.... waiting.... waiting. If the man from Berlin with the goatee and eyepatch didn't come soon, what would she do with the counterfeit earrings? Suddenly there was gunfire, and first one, then another earring fell soundless upon the autumn leaves below.

OSWALD contemplated. What could the duplicate candle-snuffers, the lock of red hair in the aspic, the cryptic warning in lipstick on the boudoir mirror, the overturned credenza, the footprints leading to—but not from—the badminton courts, the interrupted phone call, the torn calling card, the scarab in the shattered glass paperweight, and that resentful shrug of Lydia's shoulders all mean?

PENELOPE's thin white fingers gripped the arm of the chaise until they were whiter still. The silver-embossed invitation slid from her lap and drifted slowly, soundlessly, like a white moth, across the solarium floor. Three words formed on her silent lips: How .... dare .... she....

QUENTIN sighed, stared out the porthole, and searched the sky for the Southern Cross. Where were they now? Off New Caledonia? Whatever, she was half a hemisphere away by now. He could picture her humming the sad tunes of the palm court orchestra or weeping alone in their honeymoon suite. Oh, but he had not intended to become wistful. Softly he tucked back his handkerchief and held back another convulsion, thinking of the scene he had created last night at the captain's ball.

REVA crushed her penultimate cigarette into the leopard-skin rug and took the telegram from the mantel once more. The fire was dying, so she was no longer able to read it. But she had instantly memorized the painful message; she would never forget it, just as she would never forget that final, horrible accusation in Peter's eyes... At last she fed the telegram willfully to the hungry flames.

SEBASTIAN touched the end of his Gauloise to hers. She slowly drew in, as if she were drawing part of him in, too. Their cigarettes glowed crimson in the half-light, and he watched her smoke-rings rise and dissipate. She was unutterably charming, true—the way she lowered her violaceous eyes when he looked into them, the way she mispronounced certain English vowels. He wanted to take her in his arms, to undo all those awful buttons and clasps, to tenderly, but forcefully— "For the light I thank you," she whispered in his ear as she rose and left the emptying depot.

TAMARA slammed the door behind her. Goodbye to you, she said to herself. Goodbye to you and your Turkish pipe tobacco and your houndstooth vests and your poker every Wednesday night and your sailing anecdotes and your receding hairline and your priceless Caruso seventy-eights. Especially your damnable Caruso. She ran, not walked, to Hilma's patiently waiting Mercedes.

URBAN wondered if the girl in the mauve sailor suit might not move down three or four feet from her place on the quay. From where he lay, in the shadow of a bathing machine, she seemed to be emanating a sort of mauve-ish aura that was most disconcerting. The beauty in the sailor suit bit her bottom lip and—naturally—consented.

VILMA, the woman in white, strolled through the magnolias and damson blossoms of the formal gardens. Nathaniel was watching her from the oriel, sensing already that something was wrong, terribly wrong. Vilma halted before the sundial and bent over to loosen the straps of her espadrilles. It was at this very instant Nathaniel accepted the fact that nothing would be right between the two of them again, ever. He saw her place the cool back of her wrist against her fevered forehead just as the sun obligingly dipped behind a cloud.

WALLACE was, quite honestly, tired of it all. These Americans were insensitive monsters. As far as he was concerned, he had scoffed at his last review, toasted his last fête, bedded his last ingénue, and pasted the last sticker on his steamer trunk. He had had enough. It was about time to bring down the curtains for good. But how to commit the final act? These things must be done with panâche, with a certain grace. There were so many methods, so many variations, so many pitfalls.... and then of course the headlines would probably misspell his name once again...

XENIA stopped screaming when she saw that the cracked crystal doorknob had begun to turn.

YVES left the club's library early, going out into the gathering twilight. The gaslights came on one by one along the esplanade, and her name repeated itself in his head like a saxophone refrain. He hated all the happy couples he passed, but hated most the merry music wafting from all the cabarets. He had met her in a cabaret and later paid the gondolier to accompany her on the mandolin. He truly regretted that he came from a class so beyond her reach. Only when he paused before a sequined mannequin in a dress-shop window did he realize there were tears in his eyes.

ZELDA took another cocktail and then another canapé and strained to think. Barnabas always made her feel so guilty, such as that time she had blithely said yes to the baklava when she simply must know that he abhorred anything remotely Hellenic. Maybe this time would be different, though, maybe this time he would not mention the grand duke again and what had transpired at the villa. But she doubted it even less than she doubted the world would end that night. When he stepped to the podium she wished she had a very small but very accurate pistol.
