The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  You got your wish! Now you’re nice and brown!

  In another part of the same city, the crazed chemist had prepared a huge vat of clear molten plastic. He shoved his wife into it, drowning her and sealing her in the goop as it solidified. She was fixed in the posture of thrashing, her legs apart, her mouth choked open.

  You said you never wanted to grow old. Now you’ll be young forever!

  The justice of it, the morality of it, the desperate husbands pushed over the edge; but I stared at the women’s bodies, their tortured corpses, still beautiful in tight bathing suits.

  “Andy?”

  Evelyn’s voice on top of the pictures made me flustered. I shut the comic book.

  “Brought you some fudge.”

  She stuck her arm through the tent flap, with a small brown paper bag, three squares of flat crumbly fudge.

  “How did you get over here?”

  “Through the hole in your fence.”

  After she went away I heard her talking to herself, something she wanted me to hear, but it was only a meaningless murmur to me. Later I saw the missing pickets.

  The next day just before dark she came again, saying, ‘Anybody home?”

  “I don't want any fudge.”

  “Didn't bring you any.” She put her face through the parted flap of the pup tent. “Can I come in?”

  She was on her hands and knees in the grass, her face forward, her hair damp, and dampness on her face.

  “I guess so.”

  She duck-walked into the tent, knelt for a moment, then sat down on the ground sheet, her pleated skirt riding up her thighs. She smelled of soap and bubble gum. She wore her hair in braids, a ribbon at each end, and twirled one braid with a stubby finger. With her other hand she gave me a wrapped piece of Dubble Bubble.

  Chewing the gum and unfolding and smoothing the small wax-paper rectangle of jokes that was wrapped with the gum, I pretended to read it. But all the while I was glancing at her skirt and her legs, her pretty lips, her smooth cheeks, her small shoes and white socks.

  She was daintily dressed and so clean, with a slight film of sweat on her face from the summer heat. Her blouse and the socks were pure white, and there were a few crumbs of dirt on her knees.

  I was lying on my side and was both eager and fearful of her lying next to me.

  “What's that supposed to be for?”

  She meant the army flashlight. “So I can read after dark.”

  “My mother hates comic books,” she said, seeing the Tales of Terror I had tried to hide.

  I liked looking at her legs when she was turned aside, the way her little skirt was creeping up her thighs as she squirmed, interested in something else. Every time she shifted I saw her pink panties, the edge of them, trimmed with white lace, tight against her skin.

  “Other books, too.” I showed her Trap Lines North and watched her fingers as she turned some pages. Her small nails were painted with pink polish.

  “No pictures in this one.”

  I took the book from her and showed her a one-page photograph of a stack of muskrat pelts, and another of a cabin in the snow.

  “It’s about fur trappers. And Mounties.”

  She had picked up the horror comic and was leafing through it, looking disgusted. “That’s wicked.”

  A woman was being strangled by a crazy-eyed man. The woman’s arms were flailing, her mouth wide open, her tongue sticking out, her eyes bulging, her legs apart, her blouse torn.

  “She kills him with a hatchet on the next page.”

  “You can even see her bra,” Evelyn said. The word, and the casual way she dropped it, excited me. She smiled at me and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  I stared at her tongue lolling between her lips.

  “Just tinkle.”

  She got onto her hands and knees and turned away from me. I watched her bottom twitch as she wriggled out of the pup tent. She hurried away through the space in the fence with the missing pickets.

  I was glad she was gone, so that I could think hard in the darkness about what she had boldly said. I wanted to remember and repeat her exact words, and see her face, her lips, the way she had smiled saying them. Then I switched on my flashlight and tried to read Campcraft, but I kept hearing Evelyn, Just tinkle, and seeing her face.

  That night at dinner I said, “Can I sleep out?”

  “Something wrong with this hotel?” my father said, still eating. “You got a nice bedroom. Your mother works hard to keep it clean. Now pass the mouseturd. And get a haircut—you look like a girl.”

  “I know she—”

  “Don’t refer to your mother as ‘she,’” he said. “So this hotel isn’t good enough for you?”

  “Louie snores.”

  Louie was three, a little kid, and my sharing the bedroom with him made me feel like a little kid, too.

  “Quit your bellyaching.”

  That night, like every other night, I made a tent of my blanket and read Campcraft with my flashlight. How to purify water, how to cook wild plants, how to notch trees in the wilderness so that I would never get lost when I was out trapping animals, how to tie a sheepshank, how to tramp in snowshoes, how to read a compass and orient a map, how to smoke venison, how to identify poison sumac. I wished for a gun.

  And the next day, like every other day, I lay in my pup tent that was pitched in the far corner of the yard, near the part of the fence with the missing pickets, and I read comic books.

  I was in my tent reading Weird Fantasy—another bad marriage, another henpecked husband and cruel wife with a beautiful body. He stabbed her during an argument and dismembered her, cutting her into chunks, wrapping each piece in paper and taping it, and putting the whole pile of little parcels into his refrigerator. Then he was called away.

  His poor relatives, stuck for a place to stay, used his house one weekend and raided his freezer. You saw them feasting as the phone rang. We ran out of food! Hope you don’t mind our eating that meat in the freezer! You saw the man in the last panel holding the phone, his cheeks blown out, saying Yech.

  “Andy?”

  I stuffed the comic under the ground sheet.

  “Can I come in?”

  I was lying on the lump in the ground sheet as Evelyn Frisch crawled in on all fours, biting her tongue from the effort and pushing at her skirt. When she lay down I sat up, squirming, so that we wouldn’t touch.

  “So what's up?”

  “Nothing.”

  She pretended to yawn and said, “I'm going to take a nap.”

  Holding her hands together across her white blouse, she closed her eyes, faking sleep, while I watched the way the pleated hem of her skirt was rucked against her thigh. I wanted it to twitch higher, to get a glimpse of her panties.

  “I might not be able to stay too long,” she said, but kept her eyes closed.

  “How come?”

  “I might have to go to the bathroom.”

  I did not recognize my pinched and strangled voice as I said, “Maybe you could do it here, behind the tent.”

  She sniffed and said, “If you promise not to look.”

  I promise.

  Sitting up and snatching at her skirt, she got onto her hands and knees again and poised herself like a monkey and scuttled out of the tent. When I stuck my head out I could not see her, but when I looked behind the tent she was squatting, her panties stretched across her knees.

  “You promised not to look,” she said in a grunting voice.

  So I lay and listened to the low notes of dribbling music, her spattered leaking onto dry leaves, not a stream but a songlike sound I had never heard before in my life, which bewitched and aroused me.

  “Bye.”

  She went into the half-dark of dusk, and I was glad she was gone. Alone, I could think about her, what she had said, what she had done. She came the next day. I was happy when Evelyn Frisch visited, and I liked it when she left. The same things happened: the same words, even “Don't look,” as if she ha
d not said them before, though the second time, when I lay in the tent listening, she said “I'm tinkling” just before the patter and dribble came.

  No one else knew our secret. Yet for me something had changed. At first I had needed only the pup tent, and I had been free and happy; but Evelyn Frisch had taken an interest. Her visits had been an intrusion. Then I had counted on seeing her. I wanted her to slip through the gap in the fence and visit me in the pup tent. I wanted her to tease me. I began to think that I would never be a fur trapper or a Mountie.

  Now, in the tent I saw as my freedom, I lay feeling restless, waiting for Evelyn to show up, wanting to be near her, afraid to touch her.

  Still I dreamed of sleeping out, of staying in my pup tent all night, not coming in: living in it as comfortably as I did under my blanket in bed.

  “Louie keeps coughing.”

  But it was worse than that. I hated sleeping in the same room with him.

  “Your poor little brother's got a cold and you don't even care.”

  “I do care, but his coughing wakes me up.”

  “He can't help it,” my father said, shaving at the kitchen sink, scraping the razor down one cheek, filling the blade with whisker-flecked foam.

  “I wouldn't hear him if I slept outside.”

  “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.” My father wiped the blade of his razor and said, “It's going to rain to beat the band. You’d come into the house as soon as it got dark.”

  It was a dare, I could see, my father swiping at his face with the razor and chuckling. I pretended to be unsure, so that he would feel confident in his bullying me.

  He said, “Then you’ll appreciate what we do for you,” seeing my sleeping out in the pup tent as a sort of punishment.

  “Tonight?”

  “It’s a school night.”

  The following weekend I slept out. It was harder than I had expected: the ground was stony and flat under my back, and after a few hours the air was cold, the dew settled on the tent cloth and wetted it and made it sag, and I could hear the wind.

  I lay in the stifling dampness of dusk, the stones pressing into my back through the wadded ground sheet, my head against a knotted bath towel, the oily smell of the pup tent’s canvas in my nose. I was tempted to crawl out and hurry into the house. But I held on, I stopped smelling the smells, I stopped feeling the discomfort of folds and stones, and I slept. Around midnight, the rain came down, pattering on the pup tent, dribbling down the canvas, puddling on the ground, a pleasant water song that made me drowse in the humid interior of the tent. When I woke in the darkness, feeling heavy against the ground, I smiled and turned over and scratched and slept like a dog until sunup.

  “Look who’s here,” my father said that first morning at breakfast. He was at the sink, stropping his razor, working the blade on the leather, a white beard of soap foam on his face. His voice was rueful. He began to scrape at the foam, holding his razor with his fingertips like a musical instrument. His voice was toneless, for he was shaving and tight-faced. “Wash your hands.”

  He knew that he had lost me, that I had another life. I liked the pup tent best when it truly sheltered me and looked used, when birds shat on it, streaks of green-flecked white, when neighborhood cats were baffled and repelled, when it was scattered with twiglets from the overhead trees, with blown leaves from the Frisches’ poplars, when it shed rain, when it concealed me. I was free there.

  Evelyn Frisch came back, always in her short skirt and tidy socks, half pleading to be let in, half mocking when I hesitated, offering me fudge or bull’s-eyes, penny candy she’d bought at the corner store.

  No one saw her come. No one saw her leave. We were hidden in the pup tent.

  “My mother would kill me if she knew I was here. Wouldn’t yours?”

  I hadn’t thought of it, I never thought of such things here.

  But we did nothing except sit, or lie down—not touching; marveling at our boldness, being in this place apart.

  “I’ve got new panties,” she said one day, and lifted her skirt. I was stirred by the sight but pretended not to be. Clasping her close, they were purple, trimmed with white lacy tape.

  “I have to tinkle,” she said another day, and I was flushed and went breathless as she slipped out of the tent, and I listened, pretending to read Weird Fantasy, wondering at the word “ghouls.”

  One night a week, usually Saturday, I slept in my pup tent, my father sitting in the house listening to the radio, looking defeated. Most afternoons I spent there, and when my mother yelled at me I fled there. I was safe, I was alone except for those times when Evelyn Frisch showed up, I was still too young to take the pup tent into the woods, where I sometimes hiked.

  Hurrying out of the tent one evening, I had left my flashlight behind, switched on, and when I looked back I could see the pup tent glow, a magic place suspended in the dusk, a shining refuge, a small sheltered island of light.

  Anything I read there I remembered. Ideas I had there stayed in my memory. Food tasted better in the tent. I brought oranges, bread and baloney, Drake's cakes and Hoodsies. I ate out of my army mess kit, I drank water out of my army canteen, and the battle-dented canteen made the water taste of struggle. Evelyn Frisch joined me, bringing slices of Velveeta cheese and chocolate milk in a small waxy carton. We sat cross-legged, keeping our knees from touching, our heads brushing the canvas.

  “I’m not even supposed to be here,” Evelyn said one late-summer evening, licking her fingers. “I’m supposed to be home, taking a nap.”

  She was a year younger than me, but even so—a nap?

  She said, “If you eat a lot of trashy food does your mother give you an Ex-Lax to get rid of it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Mine does. Or an enema.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Yup.”

  She was lying confidently on her back, her hands behind her head, a slash of light across her body from the crack in the tent fly, not the sun but lamps shining from the back windows of my house.

  “I’m taking my nap here.”

  I wanted to object but I couldn't find the words.

  “Like my new panties?”

  White ones, with a pattern of tiny rosebuds, and pink trim of silken ribbon, small tight bows on the sides, the smug bulges of her bum and a wrinkle-smile between her legs.

  “Don’t you want a nap, too?”

  I lay down beside her, being careful not to brush her with my arm. There was less room in the pup tent with two of us inside. I liked her there, and I liked lying next to her, my hand near the pink bows on her panties; and I wanted her to go away and leave me alone in my pup tent.

  “Andy?”

  “Yuh?”

  “I have to tinkle.”

  I went anxious and damp-faced and mute. She said nothing more. She duck-walked through the tent flap and I heard her moving in the bushes, not talking but somehow fussing audibly.

  Finally she said, “If only I could just see something.”

  I took my army flashlight and crept out and shone it at her.

  “Not in my face, silly. Shine it down there.”

  She snapped the elastic of her panties with her thumbs and pushed them down, stretching them between her knees, and in the same movement squatted, sitting on her heels, while I lighted her white legs and the smooth white smile between her legs.

  The day had grown dark and we crouched like conspirators in the shadow thrown by the pup tent and the lilacs with old withered blossoms. An accelerating car in the street labored from gear to gear, the crackle-gulp of a cricket started and stopped, my hand was shaking.

  “Only don’t look at me,” Evelyn said, teasing me with a giggle, but she was looking down, too, concentrating on the lighted earth between her legs.

  She sighed and the next sound was a splash, an uncertain spill and a sideways piddle, and my flashlight made the falling droplets flicker like drizzle against a street lamp, not a stream but a leak that came in spurts,
in an interrupted spill. Evelyn was squatting, hunched over and marveling like a monkey with nothing else to look at.

  Suddenly she stood up, pulling at her panties and hoisting them into place, snapping the elastic and setting the pretty bows on either side of her thighs.

  “See ya, Andy.”

  She walked into the darkness and through the gap in our fence where the pickets were missing.

  In the tent my mind was racing. I could not think. I picked up Weird Tales but let it drop, and turned off my flashlight. I lay in the dark and reflected that what I had just seen was stranger than anything I had ever read. And that bold and unexpected oddness beckoned to me. I wanted her to come back and do it again; I wanted a better look. I had had no prior notice of it, and only a little glimpse when it happened, yet the sight filled me with thirst and eagerness: I wanted more.

  Entering the house that night, I squinted in the glare of the kitchen, my eyes dazzled and half blinded after the darkness outside, and saw in a terrifying blur my mother and father watching me from across the room. My father had just finished shaving and he was fingering his cutthroat razor, easing the blade into the tortoiseshell handle, folding it like a jackknife. Without a word, my mother turned her back on me, saying something sweetly to Louie, who was at the supper table.

  My father’s eyes were dark and unreadable, he watched me closely, and I was blinking and wiping my eyes as I grew accustomed to the light. The better I saw, the more frightened I felt.

  “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”

  Of all my father’s repeated phrases, that one held the severest warning.

  I braced myself, narrowing my eyes at the brightness.

  “What’ve you been doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Shame on you.”

  My mother’s face was hidden in her shoulder as she held Louie; but I also had the feeling she was fearful of my father’s anger, and her timidity made me afraid.

  “You should be horsewhipped,” my father said, “within an inch of your life.”

  Now I was shaking, nervous, afraid, clutching my dented army flashlight.

  “Your body is a temple. You’ve soiled it with impurity, you’ve blackened it. God is everywhere, God sees everything—you think that’s funny?”