Women and Men

by Thomas Berger

  “Wrapped it in an outsized rug, put it in the rear of their panel truck. They started for the New Jersey marshes, but at one traffic light he slipped out, the noise of his escape covered by the deafening din of a Consolidated Edison jackhammer nearby.”

  The snaps had small tolerance; I nicked my own nail.“Isn’t it odd that they never mentioned losing the body of the man I presumably murdered?”

  “I imagine that’s routine,” said Natalie. “The Mafia isn’t nearly as efficient as you might think. Remember that time all their leaders were captured en masse at a cookout?”

  The successful opening of the snaps revealed the tab of a zipper. I had been kneeling between Natalie’s leather thighs, not in this case an erotic posture. At the risk of being coarse, I might say I felt no urge to bury my snout in her horsehide loins. My brief access of lust, perhaps only a substitute for the anxiety relieved by her throwing down the Luger, had been long forgotten.

  Deciding I had done enough as valet, I rose and drifted towards the window. “I suppose you would call it churlish if I asked you for identification.”

  “Undercover agents scarcely carry documents which would betray them were they stripped and searched,” Natalie said behind me.

  The concerns of modesty seemed irrelevant with a girl into whose flesh I had inserted my own repeatedly, and anyway I assumed, in a general sense of things and with a particular consideration for the chill leather, that she would be routinely underweared. But when I turned and saw her, standing, unpeeled to the calves, each of which had its peculiar zipper, I understood the error of my anticipation. She was altogether nude.

  Having lately seen Washburn in the same condition, and in precisely the same place, I asked: “Then you insist that you and Donald the Second share only in the fellowship of crime—for your part, an imposture?”

  Natalie laughed rhetorically, by which I mean not with sufficient energy to agitate her breasts, which anyway were firm cones and not of the pendulosity that is sensitive to reverberations. “If you mean sex again, I should tell you, Russel, that Don’s persuasion and mine do not come naturally into conjunction.”

  “Yes, of course! His dedication to Bakewell, who though octagenarian is yet the exaggerated quintessence of maleness, huge, crude, brutal. His choice of story with which to hoodwink me: Zeus as invert. His first appearance at my office, with open fly; his recent display, his virility the last to be covered…Washburn is gay.”

  “I neither know, nor care,” said Natalie. “But J am.”

  I turned towards the window. A neuralgic fault ran through my forearm; my kneecap seemed unhinged.

  “Hasn’t your wit gone a bit sour?” I asked the Venetian blinds. “No wonder, I suppose, given your vicious associations. All the same…” I checked the impulse to sob uncontrollably, cleared my glottis with a shattering cough, and said: “Well then, Bakewell and Washburn are making their escape, no doubt having exchanged millions of their queer—excuse me, their superficially specious but actually spurious bills for the genuine, in whatever ratio now obtains, and will deposit the real in a Swiss vault.”

  “It’s more complex than that, I’m afraid,” said Natalie. “With counterfeit U.S. notes they will buy counterfeit Deutsche Marks from their German confederates, trading them subsequently to their English colleagues for counterfeit sterling, and those in turn to the Pakistani members for bogus rupees, following which—”

  I finally burst out: “Tell me it isn’t so, Natalie!”

  “I wish I could, Russel, but it is indeed an international crisis, from which not even the Chinese, despite their barrack-room culture, escape scot free.” She was taking clothing from the closet. She had the most impeccable rear I had ever seen among human kind, that bifurcated formation so often in others, as in the Clown’s list in All’s Well, either the pin-buttock, quatch-buttock, or the brawn buttock. It gave me no pleasure to make this identification now.

  “I refer to your asserted Sapphism. Confirm my sense that you spoke in jest—strange japery, perhaps, but these are unique times, in which truth eludes the direct aim, but is reached by tortuous irony, yes? By bad taste, even: I mean no offense in my impersonal characterization of the age. Honest feeling is dumb unless it speaks through the mask of guile and other negative tempers. I could never quite manage that tone in my play; hence it remains a fragment. But Zwingli found something in it—forgive my vanity—I of all people can testify to your robust sexual appetites within the normal range.”

  In my need I exaggerated wildly. Natalie was never truly ardent when playing the white ewe for my tupping; “patient” were the better term for her most passionate display.

  She took from the closet a little blue frock with a scalloped collar; made it, with limber wrist, dance the morris on its hanger.

  “This,” she said, “might well be the right note to strike.”

  “Uh, Natalie, I realize I might well be charged with triviality as seen against the grand tapestry of international crime, but damn me if I can let this matter rest. It has hit me harder—though I know it for a joke—than all the other phenomena of the past two days…You little devil, you.”

  She laid the garment on the bed and went to a dresser, in the drawers of which, in a fashion that could not have been more typically feminine, she rummaged among gauzy stuffs: underwear, I assumed and indeed hoped, abhorring the purposelesssness of the persistent nudity of which this room was the stage.

  Yes, two underthings were found and perfunctorily donned. The dress was lifted and dropped over the fair head. The skirt when lowered did not fall beyond mid-thigh. From another drawer she had taken strips of stark white cotton; these when drawn over feet and up the calves to just below the patellae identified themselves as stockings, the sort that are appropriate only when rising from blunted-toe strap-shoes of patent leather—and Natalie produced a pair of these from a striped box, lined with pink tissue, discovered on the closet shelf.

  Another box yielded a wig: flaxen, pigtailed, and when well seated over her scalp, her own locks tucked up within, gleamingly fringed to the lower extremity of her brow. So haired and shod in the Mary Janes, white-calved and short-skirted, she was, though taller than the mean but credibly suggesting the gangly, a schoolgirl of beginning adolescence—or at any rate the version thereof depicted in movies made three or four decades earlier: a period piece in this day of pneumatic puberty, massive mammaries and brewery-horse behinds being so often the burdens of twelve-year-old baggages.

  She had neither rescued me from existing pain nor put me in more with a clarification of her own sexuality; but now, mincing as a gawky awkward fawn, with flip of skirt disclosing flash of lean high thigh, twists of trunk that peekabooed projections, imitations, of nascent bosoms, and a set of face that diminished those of her features that were obviously mature, she instead proceeded to characterize the erotic state of affairs that pertained to another personage altogether.

  “Boris,” she said, “is a pedophile.”

  She found in a drawer a pair of spectacles rimmed in very thin horn and with perfectly round lenses of a diameter so vast that when the glasses were astraddle her nose,the button of which she buffed to a gloss on a heel of hand, half her forehead and most of her bangs were visible through the perspicuous discs, surely nonprescription circles cut from a window.

  That I was silent throughout the transformation of Natalie Hyde into Wendy Jekyll should not seem strange: from self-proclaimed Lesbian to child-molester’s prey is a stupefying gamut.

  But I found my tongue when I closed my mouth.

  “Boris?”

  “The Russian. But then, aren’t they all?”

  Pondering on that immoderate statement, I could come up with no more than what Viskovatov told Strakhov, who forwarded it by mail to Tolstoy: that Dostoyevsky, who “spent his entire life in a state of emotional upheaval and exasperation that would have made him appear ridiculous had he not been so malicious and so intelligent,” had bragged of having had a little girl in a p
ublic bath.

  “Which,” I added, “might have been no more than the typical vile canard a great man’s lackeys circulate about his principal rival.”

  Three-quarters of this speculation was to, and for, myself, Natalie having given her costume a final survey in the dressing-table mirror and then left the room, already so caught up in her role as to move with a childish gait, knees bumping, heels splayed. I followed her to the living room, entering which she skipped two paces, pigtails flying.

  She retrieved the Luger from the chair. She extended its butt to me. “No place for this in my current garb,” she said. “You carry it.”

  “To where and why?”

  “Teterboro.” She forced me to accept the weapon. Realizing that this episode might thrill a Nosy Parker peering through binoculars from an overlooking building (unshaven man pointing firearm at child), I put it hastily away, though she had not won me for the project.

  “The New Jersey airport?” I asked. “Not bloody likely.”

  “I’m drafting you for government service,” Natalie cried. “By the powers vested in me. I have a GS rating equivalent to a full colonelcy in the land forces and the comparable grade in the Navy.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “The military is mercenary, and I am immune.”

  “After your release from Hus’ custody by GAT, the NYPD put out an APB—”

  “Hus is one of Washburn’s henchmen. I won’t be duped again.”

  “You are already,” said Natalie. “That’s his cover, you gull. You’re wanted for heroin-pushing and the gypsy is prepared to charge you importuned a schoolboy for immoral purposes if need be.”

  “Whose need?” But I realized terribly that the Romany hag in her storefront was another undercover agent no doubt on stakeout to register the traffic at the yoga wallah’s. “The gypsy is—”

  “With a sister agency” said Natalie “but we scratch each other’s backs.”

  Perhaps literally, in view of her self-admitted orientation (and add to that her current roll of eye); but what it meant to me was that I should be successfully extorted into what, if pistols were brandished, might be a lethal enterprise.

  But between Natalie and me at the moment, I carried the only weapon: actually two: each side pocket of my corduroy jacket sagged with hardware, though my little Browning was sterile without its clip. I had been hoaxed once too often by my adversaries, criminal and otherwise, and at this point I could see no distinction: the demands of all were made at the cost of my unique and precious self.

  Therefore I crafted a scheme, but would put it into action only after we had left this place. Too easy here to be cornered. Even Alice might yet prove an undercover agent for some constabulary thus far unrepresented or, failing that, an adept in another area of crime.

  “Very well,” I barked. “I will answer the call to the colors.” I marched to the door and flung it open.

  Natalie crossed the threshold in her giddy new stride. The hall was empty, but I decided to wait until clearing the building before I made my move. The elevator ride was quick and inconsequential.

  Tomas Villanueve still served as genial Latin Cerberus at the street door.

  “Gone to schoo’?” he asked Natalie, apparently not penetrating her disguise. “Learn to be reech, hahaha.” The laugh seemed in no way uncivil, and I returned the amenity with a wish for his good morning.

  “The say to joo, Meester Villanova!”

  “Remarkable,” I observed to Natalie when we had gained the sidewalk and circumnavigated the soft pyramid of dog stool that been mounted before the door during the last hour, “extraordinary how the name of a fanciful personage so persists! At a later date I want your explanation of this choice of appellation for an imaginary character, and for that matter, why you, or Washburn and Bake-well, found it necessary to invent ‘Teddy Villanova’ in the first place, and beyond that, I still have no idea of why I am involved in this complex caprice. But now”—I touched the outside of the pocket containing the Luger—” I must bid you good-bye. I have no intention of serving as nanny to your Alice in Wonderland—Lewis Carroll, by the way, was at least a latent if not a practicing pedophile, and so far as I know he had no Russian blood.”

  “You’re a knave, Russel,” Natalie hissed and assumed a posture, in her schoolgirl dress, virginal stockings, and patent-leather shoes, from which she could deliver one of her karate kicks, but there was some sidewalk traffic now, humorless pedestrians en route to melancholy work, and she was soon jostled violently by a man oblivious to the antics of the underaged at such an hour, and naturally I moved myself out of range as well.

  Physically frustrated, Natalie resorted to a moral weapon. New York passers-by being notoriously stony to the appeal of even the freshly wounded, I sneered with impunity at her anguished screams. But my nerves went to pudding when I saw a police car swoop into the gutter and a blue-capped minion surlily emerge.

  “This old man,” wailed Natalie, “made me an indecent proposal!”

  “Go wan, he woont meet ya price,” the officer growled. “I thought we tole you hoors to stay off our beat.” He was scarcely friendlier to me: “Take off, John.”

  I walked briskly towards the west. Halfway to First Avenue, I turned and saw that Natalie had been sufficiently intractable to require that the second cop leave the car to support the efforts of his partner. It looked as though she would inevitably be subdued and hauled off to incarceration.

  I had never intended such an issue. Before she could get her undercover status confirmed by the Treasury Department, and believed by the New York police, Washburn & Bakewell, and perhaps also the Russian named Boris, would have fled by airplane from Teterboro.

  Thus far I had been less than a hero, unless assessed by a negative gauge, and yet I had accepted a punishment that could be termed Herculean. But suddenly I was in an intrepid mood. I had not been touched by the albino’s shotgun lightning that sent two other souls to Hades. Actually, none of the attacks I had sustained throughout was murderously launched, with the possible exception of the sapping on the Hindu’s threshold, and my proprietary god had deflected that blow from the mortal to the merely painful.

  What I am saying is that, for whatever motives, severally or in combination—greed, the summons of a swashbuckler’s superego, perhaps even a jingoism concerning Western Civilization, which according to Natalie was threatened by the faux-monnayeurs, and two semesters on the Literary Masterpieces of which I had taught at State (from Sappho to The Counterfeiters, the latter by Gide, Zeus to many a Ganymede); and despite my short title for the course, used as classroom joke, seldom understood, “Great Movements in W.C.”—I think I have demonstrated here that I am nothing but a loyal product of my cultural heritage…

  Whatever, when I reached First Avenue, in civilization’s contemporary Western capital, depraved, debased, degraded, and declining though it be, and under constant Vandal siege, I stepped into a gutter full of filth and lifted my arm, not to wave an oriflamme but rather to hail a taxi.

  If this quixotic appeal would be answered at demonic rush hour, I should instruct the driver to proceed with all haste to Teterboro Airport.

  I was immediately run down by a homicide doggedly steering a van.

  13

  Or nearly.

  Having failed, by the breadth of a cuticle, to murder me with a butt of the perpendicular complex of bumper-grille-windshield, the van now lurched to a brake-keening halt that defied the law of momentum, reversed its gears with the sound of Sam’s baseball bat against the boiler, and came viciously back in the obvious intent to plaster me against its broad spine, on which was displayed the painted admonition: SCHOOLBUS—STOP WHEN I STOP!

  I had of course regained the curb and could sneer at the brutal sortie, clutching the Luger within my pocket, should the driver emerge to try by foot what wheels could not achieve.

  The vehicle stopped again when I was just opposite its middle, access to which could be gained by a large double door. It was in fact no
t a proper van but rather a minibus of many windows and, beneath them, a legend, painted in avocado against a mauve ground; STAVROGIN ACADEMY FOR YOUNG LADIES. A cargo appropriate to the sign stared through the oblongs of glass, producing many little discs of oral condensation and squashed dirty-pink palmar surfaces of paws. Here and there a tongue waggled.

  The twin panels of door were forthwith hurled open, and I was summoned to enter by a score of small forearms bearing fistfuls of writhing fingers, visibly an invitation to penetrate a congress of adders, while the ear was smote with the shrieking cacophony in which bluejays couch their peeves.

  Through the flock I could see glimpses of the driver at his horizontal steering wheel. Owing to my fragmented perspective, he appeared initially as an outsized head of animal hair, and though a gorilla would not have been an incredible helmsman for this simian freighterful, I checked my impulse to find correspondences and at last identified him as but a man wearing a large fur hat—in fact, a kind of hussar’s shako.

  He leaned sidewise, angled, and swept three tots from our common route of vision with an arm of gold buttons from wrist to elbow. There were more buttons and embroidered frogs on his thorax, and a set of cartridge loops on his right shoulder, with no doubt, if symmetry were served, a twin on the other bosom yet invisible. I could see one shiny black knee-boot as well. Assessing him in ensemble, I judged that the man was costumed as a Cossack.

  His heavy voice rumbled under the bird cries; his large gauntlet beckoned. Never immune to the lure of the bizarre, I put my head near the entrance, then recoiled slightly from the odor of bananas that the underaged seem to exude.

  “To get in,” called the Cossack. A walrus mustache matched the fur on his shako. Pouches of Weltschmerz hung below his eyes; his heavy mouth was lugubrious.

  “Pardon?”

  “Please to enter, my dear gentleman,” said he.