Three Wogs

by Alexander Theroux

  “Conference,” Which said flatly. “Conference? Ahh, conference!” he suddenly exclaimed, holding his drink to the light to see the ruby dancing in it. He sipped, held on his tongue a puddle of cognac, then swallowed. “Your pending marriage, yes, of course.” Which spoke the word marriage as if he had just then bitten into a year-old macaroon.

  “I weel want to be married.” Cyril downed the entire drink and looked up grinning. He looked like a Fuseli goblin, his eyes beaming like light bulbs.

  “Yes.” Which coughed. “Well. We’d best funnel it through a bit, don’t you think? The wisest minds in history have told us repeatedly that haste makes waste, and those same minds would have it that marriage is nothing but a permanent contract based on temporary feelings, not that they’re incorrect, not that they’re correct, mark you, they are just the wisest minds, you see.” He thought of St. Engulfus, patron saint of traduced husbands, improvident males, and/or the combination thereof. “No big thing,” he pontificated, “but in your case, well, what about your case, my dear fellow? I shall go right ahead and put the question to you. Is this simply spring fancy? A crucial need?” He sat down and raised an eyebrow, the slimmest of. “Or just naked whim?”

  “I want to wive.”

  Which stood up with a sigh, went to the large mirror, and, rotating his head, vacantly slapped his jowls as he did every morning to worry away some fat: thap, thap, thap. He could still taste in his mouth the Moselle wine he had used as a dentifrice that morning. Mornings, to speak of them generally, disoriented him, and on this particular one he did not really know where to begin. It occurred to him to ask Cyril where he was getting the money for all his plans, but he thought he might save that question for trumps. It would be a symmetrical coup, at the pinch.

  “Why not knock the ball directly through the wicket and ask what it could be you really want from marriage?” He waited.

  “I want to wive.”

  So we’re going to be that elemental, thought Which. What a nasty mind. He poured Cyril another drink.

  “To drag her about? To hold on to? To grow old with?” he asked exasperatedly.

  “To hold on to,” Cyril beamed.

  “To hold on to what?” asked Which. Vagueness he abhorred.

  Cyril siphoned in the whole glass of cognac in one suck and focused on a horizon somewhere beyond the room.

  “Her tits.”

  Good grief, thought Which, wouldn’t that be just up his street? The simplicity was shattering.

  “Splendid,” Which managed to say with a sedulously contrived chuckle. “A not uncommon predilection, Cyril, if a trifle, how shall I say, nimis naturae? Not to worry, there can be nothing whatever gained by frosting an eggshell, and, that by way of preface, I feel it’s only fair to tell you that marriage is based on love, love faith, and faith, according to the mad tentmaker Saul—not only a Jew, but a treacherous pedant in sex matters as well—is defined as ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,’ the misunderstanding of which is invariably the first casualty of—but I’ve lost you.” Which knew Cyril was in sight but out of hearing, cracking his knuckles, as he was, with sickening alacrity.

  In a muddle, Which scratched his head. “Let me come to the point. Love, it might be said”—he scanned the ceiling philosophically—“has the same quality as good English toilet paper: it grips”; whereupon, he suddenly found an apt analogy in the plastic arts and pointed to the firm grip Dietrich had on her knee in the glossy behind his ear. “On the other hand, wouldn’t I be the perfect sophist,” Which added, “in failing to note for you that the word ‘grip,’ noun from the Middle English, is also connotative of spasm or seizure. Such, you see, is the ambiguity of love.”

  Which feared a lapse of tact, but he hoped to re-establish that private and joy-driven spontaneity they formerly enjoyed during the nights of choir practice when, directing, Cyril shook the chancels like the ghost of General Othello as he whirled his long arms through a red gown, and, a silhouette in yoking waves and natural mummery, he bounced his magic orphics high and wide, up to the very heaven. Then, for the first time in his checkered life, Which had seen himself as an epopt to those Eleusinian Mysteries that transfigured the commonplace and made of reality magic. All that now seemed a precarious memory, rifled, it was all too clear, by this recent misdirected charivari with a girl who could just as easily in two or three years be performing jack-flips on a runway in Great Windmill Street at a half-crown a go, a Salomé who’d divest down to the bone for a posy bag of shillings.

  “Procedure,” Which continued with an affectionate, and prolonged, squeeze of Cyril’s femur, “requires that in every Pre-Cana conference, such as this is, the prospective groom be shown The Visual Aids. You may want to ask why. Then again, you may not want to ask why. Either being the case, however, I could only shrug and point to procedure.”

  Which sat down, crossed his legs, and drew from a nearby drawer some clipped sheets he had thermofaxed from a bulletin that had been printed with ecclesiastical approbation and filtered into the diocese in a very limited edition. The sheets were covered on both sides, much in the fashion of shadowgraphs, with pen-and-ink combinations of stick figures mimetic of The Act of Kind: each set numbered, captioned, and rubbed of all colour, physiological detail, and contour. They were clinical as opposed to emotional, and the object was to instruct rather than to incite. Which held them up high between thumb and forefinger like some perfected self disengaged from the tensions another might see in the little dramatic puzzles; then he wondered if he was showing them upside-down, a matter he quickly put aside, for doubtless it was an axiom in the positions of sexual union that there was, in fact, no dogmatic up, down, right, left, back, or front.

  Cyril grabbed the sheets and sat bolt upright with a kind of kaleidoscopic goggle. He smacked a thigh hypotrophied from the abuse of his bicycle and shook with an inner storm of laughter and delight.

  “Each one, of course, is considered an act of homage, Cyril,” murmured Which with a kind of muffled dismay. “Or so they say, huh?” He gave a cluck of discord as he reviewed with Cyril all the pictures of these stick-couples upended in a network of oddly rendered limbs and protruberances. Even a perfunctory game of Ombre with his mother seemed a saner pastime. “That is what they say, isn’t it?” Another louder cluck, like a pulled plug, drained the question of much of its power.

  “Yes.”

  “If that’s what one’s looking for.”

  “Yes.” Cyril’s eyes gleamed.

  “I’m not, you see.”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps you aren’t either.”

  “Yes.”

  Which leaned over and up into Cyril’s face and saw in his eyes a kind of cretinous stupefaction, the index, possibly, of a mind gone elsewhere.

  “Yes yes or yes no?”

  “I like to do this,” said Cyril, and he pressed his large black thumb on Figure Nine, an interlaced squiggle of sticks that the Oriental imagination, Which knew, had affectionately designated “The Ripsaw.”

  “To be sure,” answered Which with a gravely calculated coo bitten off sideways like thread. “And even if she wakes up of a morning looking a perfect fright, even when she’s eighty years on, you see, you’ll be obliged to, well, what shall I say, wet the tea?” Offering that contingency, Which sat back. “So will you?”

  “God’s blessings will assist. He watch out,” replied Cyril, spellbound utterly over “The Loganberry,” a position that required not only the imagination of a polymath but a body of Indian rubber. It looked like a cat’s cradle.

  Omnivideotic though God might be, Which reflected, how could He even bear to watch? Even in heaven, surely, must occasionally wave the Flag of Distress, and what better reason could there possibly be to run it swiftly up the pole? Which Therefore then noticed Cyril huddled over another diagram: his hands were rammed together as if frozen in prayer or at the moment of intense applause captured in still on a photograph. He was perspiring into
his collar. Perhaps, Which inferred, Cyril had finally become totally repulsed (Which’s intention), as was certainly inevitable, by the withering and terrible jests that man invented for his crazy ministrations: the dumb, primarily nocturnal formations that wired together, in a crucial grasp, Man and Woman in that wolfish scrimmage, born not of adoration, only greed. Figure One—“The Common Sandwich”—was distasteful enough. That was standard. The variations, infinite, were unbelievable—and those carnal acts were especially to be feared which did not have a name.

  An ambiguous silence hung in the air. Which walked over and hovered behind Cyril who remained silent, still, excruciatingly poised, it turned out, over Figure Thirteen: “The Strutting Cusp.” “The Strutting Cusp!” “The Ripsaw,” yes, most everyone loved: it was direct, relatively planless, foundational. But was there man alive who would not gingerly flee to the ends of the earth rather than be called upon, not only to perform, but even to admit he had heard of “The Strutting Cusp?” Only a fortnight previous, one young husband-to-be stared upon that Medusine figure and, after retching all over himself, was stunned into an immediate indifference about his forthcoming marriage, while another couple, a few days later, instantaneously ran into separate rooms, where they stayed for almost three hours—and rumour had it that the groom, on the following week, bought an airplane ticket to Copenhagen where he was summarily docked like a puppy, an alteration perhaps explicable in terms of, and not surprisingly followed by, a radical obsession for angora sweaters, lisping, and eventually a job in the kick line of the Danny LaRue Revue at the Palace.

  “Strong Medicine, what?” Which said with a serious, knowing wink, but, bug-eyed with wonder, Cyril then hurtled from the chair with a piping whoop of gayety and, on long autocthonic legs that looked like flexible ducting, flew around the room in looping skids, looking much like Proust’s Agostinelli taking flight in his black rubber suit. The indication, it seemed for Cyril, was that life finally made sense.

  “Whooooeeee! That were plenty plenty wingding, I tell you,” Cyril gasped, dropping back flat as a flawn into his chair. The coon, Which thought, the absolute coon. Then, as if that were not enough, Cyril proceeded, with a frown of busy craftsmanship, to agitate his fingers into stitches and webs that attempted, by manual reproduction, a simulation of “The Teplitz Pretzel”; the just-about-manageable “Texas Roll,” to which was added a list of erotic phonemes to be hooted at the moment of crise; and “The Granny’s Knot” (contrived for the geriatric set); though he was quite unable to get around, as few could, “The Rajab Delay,” which involved a fungo bat, two deck chairs, and, it was suggested, a jar of wintercream. Which noticed, such was his perspicacity, that Cyril invariably singled out for comment—and perhaps future use—the most convoluted positions, from which the medical profession, with the foresight characteristic of them, suggested the obese and puritanical abstain.

  The priest pulled away the sheets and locked them up. He walked to the window, his hands locked behind him in the manner of a grave and deliberating constable.

  “I want to ask you,” Which cleared his throat and turned on a forensic heel, “ I must ask you, actually, if you have had any carnal knowledge with—” He paused.

  “Miss Anita the girl.”

  “So you have.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  Which heard from the direction of Cyril a low snoach, very like sour flatulence.

  “Could you help yourself?”

  “She say help myself.”

  “And, of course, you did.”

  “I grabbed,” asserted Cyril, and he followed this with a mischievous honk and peeped through his fingers. “Miss Anita, she show me jive, I tell you. She laugh so good. Not like with English girls who give you huge shindy.”

  Which winced, pulled back. “Have you ever enjoyed, enjoyed?, yes, enjoyed English girls?”

  “They are afraid of our bananas.”

  Not really Grace, monocled and gloved, thought Which, as he stared wildly into his drink. “And Anita isn’t, apparently.”

  Cyril bit off a laugh. “She say help myself.”

  “And you—”

  “Grabbed.”

  What powerful expression there is in a limited vocabulary, the priest thought as he poured himself a double. He had a vision suddenly of these two expatriates, black as thunder, playing in silence you-show-me-yours, I’ll-show-you-mine, growing as hot as an afternoon on the feast of St. Lubbock, and then rutting in lower-class bedrooms the size of matchboxes in Bayswater or Spitalfields until tomorrow come never. He emptied his glass.

  “I must tell you,” said Cyril straightening up, “Anita the girl is no tart.”

  “Perish the thought, my dear fellow.”

  “She shag only me.”

  “Of course,” Which replied.

  Of course, she was a tart, Which thought, but he was somewhat resigned to the impossibility of trying to resolve conclusively the distinction Cyril was trying to make. Which simply knew that the girl who laughed was taken already; the rest was a matter of logistics. What a tiresome process is the night excursion, he thought with horrified amusement, and how vulgar! People were so dreary, conventional lust so implex. He had a thought touching on those whom Milton called “the Corinthian laity.” A ballerina, a princess, a meter maid: was not each merely a page in that chapter of world accidents that documented inevitably the fateful chain of events that made of invincibly ignorant girls mattresses? Perhaps there were exceptions. He called to mind St. Wigefortis who grew a beard in order to maintain her virginity. But he could never quite forget Dr. Lushington’s vivid homilies to the seminarians and saw in his mind’s eye streets filled with fat, painted prelatesses in grey sacks and slim anorectic queans with gamboge complexions guarded by cruel Maltese and blubberlipped Negroes in pinstripe suits, ca. 1950, who smoked dirty cigars, pushed opium up their nostrils, and loafed around the brothel doorways of Grant Road, Bombay, Sister Street, Malta, or the Wahdi District of Cairo. Sex? Love? The definitions were as tiresome as frequent. It was an intellectual gimcrack that merely raised the question similar to the one that sought the ratio decidendi between nude and naked. So much rubbish. Sex was only the bum crying out for suppository. Love simply supplied it.

  The tota errant via tack in those crusades whereby pastors sought to splash explanations of reform on the fires of mindless passion were, in fact, only so many sleeveless errands that eventually gave way to the more realistic and doubtless simpler absolute that love lost was really habit broken. It was a class problem, anyway—and therefore insolvable.

  “How will you support your bride?” it occurred to Which as he heard himself ask the question. This money business bewildered Rev. Therefore. “You lost your position last month. At the jellied-eel stall in Bermondsey, wasn’t it?”

  Cyril extended and shook a long finger the size of a small tree. “This English proprietor, a damn fool, traipse over and say to me daily, ‘Hey, chocolate face, you smelly! Hey, chocolate face, you smelly!’” How piquant, thought Which.

  “How nasty,” said Which. “But why, in the name of heaven?”

  “His claim, the rogue, was that as I worked I was the devil for singing out loud. Drat on himself, too, I say,” said Cyril who flagged his hand in a gesture of futility. “Then he hound me like you don’t know, man, and call me vagabond and a big ass. I have eaten his salt, O boy. I make no headway.”

  “Did you call him any names?”

  “You bet, what else.”

  “What?”

  “An insolent weevil.”

  “And?”

  “A forest pig who top his mother.”

  Cyril clapped his hands and shoved a tumescent thumb high. “That make chuckles for you? Is also chuckles for me. He say I pilfer. I say trash to that. But then, you see, I’m hot at mathematics. Before I come here, they tell us everything not honey. We in for shock. Chipped potatoes, fog, no spitting or pissing into the wall, mathematics everywhere you loo
k, all that.” Cyril smirked through a proud blush. “But I look sharp. I’m a Christian, I believe in Baby Jesus, sure. For English, man, you look sharp, else you just be like other prawns of fate, with no end. Push. Shove. Goodby, man. So much argy-bargy, I tell you.”

  It was a small Magna Charta. Which was almost amused. He pictured Cyril in his white paper hat, wearing a frayed undershirt that revealed swatches of axillary hair, and, cracking with happy music over the canisters of pepper and vinegar, scraping jellied-eels, cockles, oysters, and winkles into mounds on the trays, and scooping rotten whelks, in their turreted shells, into cut sheets for anybody with sixpence and an indiscriminate appetite.

  “Anyway,” said Which to console him, “it’s all rather small beer, that.”

  Cyril suddenly burst into huge toothy laughter. “But anyway, I have told Mr. Proprietor to please go leak into his shoes.”

  “You told him that?”

  “To piss off, yes.”

  “Extraordinary. But of course he didn’t. He let you go is my point.”

  “He give me flap.” Cyril licked his moustache.

  “Then let you go is what I’m getting at.” Which felt that in his guinea head there was a pound’s worth of ideas sheltering a shilling’s worth of knowledge.

  “He get hot,” Cyril shrugged. “He sack me.”

  “Yet that was all punchable money, wasn’t it?” exclaimed Which, knowing in his heart that Cyril didn’t, couldn’t, was destined to never know what money was, and that should he, then and there, spread out a ten-pound note, Cyril would doubtless get up and colour it.