Typical

by Padgett Powell

  He approached his house with caution. Seeing no one, he entered. The house was wide open and well lit. It looked to have been robbed. Drawers and closets were open, some of his wife’s dresses were on the bed, others hanging askew on their hangers half out of the closet. He checked immediately beneath his pillow for his pistol, a German officer’s Luger which he had purchased from a man at a flea market who had restored the finish expertly and filled the barrel with lead. His gun was there. So, for a heist, they had not been cleaned out. The scum had missed the real treasure.

  In the kitchen he expected to find the pasta water on and, by extension, his wife, but she was not there. There was a note on the kitchen table. He looked under the kitchen sink to see if the bastards had found his shoeshine kit. They had not. It was safe. The little kiwi birds on the brush handles looked at him serenely, as if to say, We held our ground.

  He wanted to get the pasta going but couldn’t decide on what type. He stopped just before salting the water, sat down at the table absently eating rock salt, and looked at the note. It was, apparently, from his wife. The salt was very salty, he noticed. He decided to secure the doors and windows against a return of the scavengers and sit in the dark waiting for them. He had seen the American detective Mannix and perhaps Jack Nicholson in Chinatown do this. They couldn’t tell where you were, but you could see them by the streetlights outside. What was dangerous in this case was that they would not be able to see his Luger. If he lit a candle, perhaps they could see the gun, and maybe just enough of him, like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, that he would look terribly menacing and slender. Also, he could read his wife’s note. It was beginning to interest him.

  By the light of the candle, his wife’s note, weighted down attractively by his Luger diagonally across it, was a pretty thing. It was note-sized, a handsome cut stationery, not a hastily torn-off scrap of something larger. His wife’s hand was neat, clear, strong for a woman. She had written, apparently, if this was her writing—he thought it was—that she was leaving, that she had found another man, and that he, Mario, didn’t know beans about large size. Mario shook his head: it was just like her. She was always carrying on about large size. She was the one who didn’t know beans about large size. A boyhood friend of his had been called Hannibal in Gymnasium, “because he comes over the mountain with an elephant between his legs.” But Mario had been called Scipio, “who surrounded Hannibal.” That was large size. “She not to know no bean about no large size,” Mario said aloud in the dark, pointing the Luger at the neat note. “She needs a hole small-size in her brainpan small-size.

  His English was at its best, he felt, when he was stressed by something, and he liked to exercise it in non-conversational modes like this. The feeling it gave him was that of writing poetry. With English, he might have been Petrarch. He had heard that a very similar liberation had visited the writer Joseph Conrad.

  He ate some more salt and thought further of the assassin. Was he this alleged lover? The carrier of large size? He was not the burglar. The burglar would not have been looking in at the mess he had himself made, unless he was looking to see if he had missed something. But what could you tell you had missed from outside when you had missed it inside? That was fantasy. What if the man had not been a taxi assassin or a thief but a voyeur, looking to get a peek at him and his wife having their frequent relationships?

  This was of paramount concern to Mario. The sanctity of their marriage would have been sullied by interloper’s eyes. Holy images would have been bootlegged by a common criminal into the street, perhaps for the amusement of the pervert’s colleagues in scum. He could see a gang of purse thieves in Naples sitting around about three hundred purses talking about his large size and his delirious wife. The delicate sculpture of their fond embrace—joined as artfully as marble, her legs perhaps thrashing over his clenched back—would be dislocated from its hallowed pediment and carried like spoils into the mean secular minds of the equivalent of marauding Gauls. They were the same people who whapped the genitals and noses off all the sculpture of Italy. He had seen sculpted infants mutilated by these people who had looked into his house.

  Mario pulled the drapes and went to bed. It was dangerous to let his imagination go. Besides, he had an early fare, a Frenchman with a travel-guide company who wanted to see Livorno, all of it. It was a flat day rate.

  He went to sleep wondering if there was a subtle way of frisking a man for a wire. He could simply say, Regolazione nuova! and feel him up. There were two problems with this. One, the Frenchman might be—he had heard so many were—homosexual. A man such as Mario could never be too careful in this regard. Two, a wire is hard to feel, certainly nothing like his Luger, an honest weapon. He might miss the wire, relax, even get comfortable with the garrote expert, and, while talking about, say, Jerry Lewis movies with the killer … a knobby, hot chain through his esophagus with two little jerks, left, right—no, he put it all from his mind. He could not afford to let his imagination do irrational things. He needed his sleep. It was a good thing, really, his wife was not present to pester him all night. He would be in no shape to defend himself.

  When he picked up his Frenchman the next morning, he marveled at the accuracy of rana, the pejorative applied to the French, he had always thought, with no basis except in fantasy. Now he saw, instead, that frog was no fantasy, no pejorative even. The man attempting to wedge himself into the cab was jowled, top-heavy, and looking at him through eyeglasses that so magnified his eyes—in fact, his whole upper face—that Mario, looking into the man’s pupils, which were the size of roasted chestnuts, thought he saw things in them. It was crazy, but he thought he saw a yo-yo in the frog’s left eye. It was something round and moving around on a string, that much was for sure.

  The Frenchman packed himself in finally and pushed his heavy, green-tinted glasses up onto his nose, which adjustment made his eyes even larger. It was like looking into windows at an aquarium. Mario saw, deep in the black pools, what he thought were the two little white sphincters of the optic nerve junctions.

  “What are you looking at?” the Frenchman asked.

  “Can you see me, masseur?”

  “Too well,” the Frenchman said.

  Mario was relieved to hear the Frenchman could see. Taking a tourist, much less a travel writer, who could not see around all day to see things was not his idea of fun. “Masseur, excuse me if I appear unkept. I was up most night without sleep.”

  “I see. Your manners are ruined by restlessness. You are all movement even at night.”

  The words all movement startled Mario. He did not know why.

  The Frenchman whipped out a small notebook and wrote something down. On the cover of the notebook Mario saw a small inflated doughy figure of a man he recognized—the tiny, bulbous Michelin man. All movement! All movement and fantasy! From the psalm of the modern Italian in modern Italy who belied the legends. It was fantastic! The man might have even been the writer of the Scripture! Mario intended to ask but was now absorbed by how much the Frenchman resembled not only a frog but the Michelin logo itself, the pneumatic, happy clown that sold tires for the largest tire manufacturer in the world. How had Michelin gotten a writer who just so evoked the company image? Had they based the logo on this man? Had they other men in the employ who looked like the clown? The possibilities were many. It was all fantastic. Suddenly he could see beneath the soft, froggy exterior only his concern of the night before—a piano wire cinched into the corpulence with the apparent innocence of just another ring of fat, of which there might be hundreds. It would be useless to frisk the Frenchman—he would never even detect a gun in all that meat.

  “Masseur, I have dread to give offense, because so presto I seize that you may be a much important writer personally to me. But if you are making to carry a wire, it will be vietato.”

  As soon as he delivered himself of this warning, he felt foolish. The Frenchman was so tightly packed into the cab that his arms were pinned immobile against the doors. Only
in fantasy was there danger. “Anyway,” he said, by way of apology, “one wire would not hurt much.”

  The Frenchman glared at him.

  At the first bar they passed, a favorite of his, Mario jumped out and went in and got himself a caffè, leaving the Frenchman stuffed in the standing cab. He told Neutro, the bartender, that he was tempted to multiply the day rate by three because he had three times the weight of one man in his taxi. “Such a thing would be perfectly legal,” he said.

  “Such a thing would anger. You are not capable of so fantastic a suggestion.”

  “Such a thing must to have a opposite and a equal reaction, Neutro. Newton, Sir Isaac.”

  Neutro shrugged. Mario was forever quoting science to him. They were equals as nonpracticing scientists.

  Mario drank a tall glass of mineral water and announced, “Neutro, I once saw a flea drink a glass of water and swell to twice its original size.”

  “Preposterous. You know full well, Dottore, that the flea would burst. Bernouli.”

  “You contradict me?”

  “Science herself contradicts you, Mario Moscalini.”

  “A cognac portare via.”

  “As you will.”

  Outside, Mario carefully handed in the pony of cognac to the Frenchman, who struggled to get his hands up to take the glass, but appeared to be genuinely grateful. Mario cautioned himself that this might be entirely his imagination. He could not trust a man this large, this unpassionate, this unnimble.

  Getting in the cab, Mario saw, across the street, carrying a large loaf of bread and waving cheerfully at him, his wife. This was curious, because there was no bakery nearby. He decided at that moment to drive the Frenchman first to the large new vineyards of his friends the Buffala brothers, because he knew that the Michelin guide did not yet contain reference to a business so new. And if the Frenchman’s appetite for the morning cognac was any sign—he had poured it smoothly into his mouth in one motion of his tiny, cramped hands and sighed appreciatively, almost whimpered—there was a good bet he might have a good time tasting the Buffalas’ special wines.

  Passing the spot where the sailor had jumped fare on him the day before, Mario again saw his wife. How she got across town so fast was a mystery. She waved to him again but, he thought, not quite so cheerfully this time. She will see, he thought. She will learn. He looped the block several times looking for the sailor. It was fantasy, of course, to expect to find him, but he was prepared to be illogical if that was the only price for avenging yesterday’s loss. He stopped at a second bar for a second caffè and another cognac for the wedged Frenchman. He phoned the Buffala brothers to warn them he was bringing so important a tourist.

  “Adriano, for this one, I suggest you say the wine is radioactive. That is best with a Frenchman. They are advanced.”

  “The radioactive defense, you think?”

  “Yes. You do not want a Frenchman considering mummies. They don’t believe in that. They are advanced.”

  “Well, why not tell him the truth?”

  “Oofah, Adriano. You are fantastic. He wants to believe in the modern Italy, and he is health-conscious. He has a lot to be conscious of, too. He is big. Tap a keg, my advice to you.”

  “All right. I will find Germano and get our story straight.”

  On the way, Mario told the Frenchman that there was an ugly rumor concerning the strange potency and unique flavor of the Buffala brothers’ new wine. “They have had un sacco di success with this wine, my friend. It is a product verily of the modern Italy. But of course, with success, with a sack of success, you have a sack of talk.”

  “How far is it?” the Frenchman asked. “If it is far, stop for another aperitif, I’ll remain aboard.” It was like a clever Frenchman to feign uninterest in the slander of successful wine.

  “It has been said that the heavy bocket and the risputed hallucinogenic quality—a California wholesaler is very interesting in this—is because the soil is refused from a nuclear power station fuel dump and the grapes, they have changed mutationally in one generation or less to a new fruit. Mendel, Gregor.”

  This was all baloney. The nuclear defense which Mario was setting up was just a herring to keep people from thinking certain other theories regarding the weird wine. These theories were all supplied by the Buffala brothers. It was policy to tender the theory they wanted a given customer to swallow, and then to deny it less vigorously than they denied the competing theories, which they discreetly let slip out. Once a customer was sottoed on the wine, and the psychology correctly applied, he believed the wine special for reasons he found comforting, or credible, and bought, as it were, sacks of it. “That is how you have a sack of success,” the Buffala brothers were fond of saying. “You sell sacks of it.”

  What was special about the wine actually varied from week to week. Benzine was getting too expensive, isopropyl was boring. This week they were using ethylene glycol—antifreeze. The third Buffala brother, Sevriano, was a psychiatrist, and he was the technical adviser to his brothers, the true vintners. He was also the originator of all the rumors and the psychology of their applications, and he was the only one among the brothers who did not at least partially subscribe to one or several of the bogus stories at any given moment. Sevriano had taken his training in Paris. Germano and Adriano put the contaminants in the wine themselves, yet they found themselves arguing the logic, and finally the truth, of the fictions, or marketing strategies, as Sevriano liked to call them. What was special about the wine had been summed up neatly once by a redheaded American hippie, who commented after his first two bottles, “Man, this is some bad shit,” and bought all he could carry on his back.

  Mario Moscalini also had trouble maintaining a purchase on what was really the matter with the wine, but he had proved remarkably adept at adducing the psychologies of prospective buyers and getting them to subscribe to a working marketing strategy. He had been so adept that Sevriano had considered making him a Buffala brother, which was not a difficult thing to do, since the Buffala brothers were not brothers.

  To the Frenchman, whose eye was peeled for a bar and another cognac, Mario now delivered the denial phase of the nuclear-mutation strategy. “This mutation calendar is a clear false,” he said. “They found some welding rods on the site. That is all.” The denial was so weak it convicted of the contrary—Mario thought it was like saying, I didn’t kill him, I just shot him a little.

  The Frenchman produced his notebook and made a note in it. “Calumny,” he said, and chuckled. He might chuckle, Mario thought, but it will work. He is a nuclear man if I ever saw one. The French are advanced. After about two bottles of the wine, he would look at the bottle, and then at the ground, and then at his hand that had touched the bottle. The question would then not be far off: “How’d this nuclear waste thing get going, Signor Buffala?” And Adriano and Germano would laugh and deny it all, and the Frenchman would feel so buzzedly good sitting there as they brought him another bottle that he would actually like the idea of a mutant wine, a wine with even a little radioactivity itself in it—that’s how they treat cancer, with a little fire, you fight fire with fire and this fire feels good.

  Today Mario did like the nuclear business, perhaps because he was yet mindful of his radio having blown out driving by a power station. The other defenses were also attractive at times. Some rather romantic, if not downright somber, types went for a strategy that posited Etruscan, or earlier, tombs beneath the vines, and featured the hungry tips of the grapevine roots tubering into ancient skulls, even into still oily bandages that covered 2,500-year-old human organs resembling carrots and peas. An accident in which a tractor had slipped out of gear had resulted in the tractor pulling up a large vine with a whole mummy wrapped in the roots. A giant, subterranean den of vipers could be advanced if the client appeared remotely Satanic, though they had never worked out a responsible scenario for how the poisons might get into the vines—it was preposterous that sensible snakes would bite plants. Oversexed folk, or f
or that matter those that might be judged undersexed, fell prey to an account of a buried cache of aphrodisiacs sent north by Cleopatra during troubles at Carthage. These strategies could be pitted against one another in endless shadings of credibility and incredibility, and it really didn’t seem to matter how they were blended or denied if you could get one honestly laced bottle down the hatch.

  They had no trouble getting a bottle down the hatch of the advanced Frenchman. During the first two—the customary complimentary dosage used to ply a prospective buyer—the Frenchman disported himself about as any other corpulent, half-drunk foreigner. On schedule, he did at one point look at his bottle, then at the ground, and then at the hand that had held the bottle. Most customers here began to compose reasons for being on their way with wine for the road. But the Frenchman drained his current bottle by turning it to the sky, then sighted through the green bottom of it into the heavens and asked that another bottle be opened. “I’m treating myself for cancer,” he announced, a remark that struck Mario and the Buffala brothers as on the nail. Mario could diagnose—he had a fantastic nose for diagnostic marketing.

  Mario and the Buffala brothers continued to nimbly and passionately accommodate the Frenchman. There was of course no calculating the benefit to accrue from a mention in the Michelin guide. Mario was just a little disconcerted at the length of time the Frenchman wanted to drink. This was predictable enough; it was not uncommon for the large man who would think nuclear to want to dawdle. But Mario had seen, while entertaining the Frenchman with some gesticulations about the absurdity of mummies, his wife pass between rows of grapevines several hundred yards from where they sat.

  What was decidedly puzzling about this was that she appeared positively cheerful again. He had clocked her as losing that rosy aspect by now. If she was still cheerful in this absurd dalliance, he wanted immediately to go home and secure the house against her inevitable return. For surely that’s where she would go when all this false cheer wore off, when she came out of her fantasy of wanting another man. Another thing that was fantastic was the amount of walking she was doing. This was not like her. She never walked anywhere. That is how Mario came to marry her. Every day for three months he found her in his cab. Every day she looked better and better in the rearview mirror. Mario knew the absurdity of that—no one could possibly look better each day for three months. Even if you started with some kind of warty witch, in three months of absolute improvement, you’d be somewhere beyond Helen of Troy, whom Mario regarded as the equivalent of the speed of light in women. You do not go beyond the speed of light, in physics or in women.