Typical

by Padgett Powell

  It was safer just to say that his wife grew on him. One day he looked up and said into the mirror, “If you married me you would save a lot of money. I would have to drive you around for nothing.” So they got married, and Mario stopped raising the flag on his meter when she got in his cab. And he took her everywhere. In that respect, his proposition might have been imprudent. But otherwise their marriage had been happy, until this fantasy of hers. To see her walking was perhaps the hardest evidence yet that she had lost her senses. It made Mario extremely uncomfortable to be out in the Buffala vineyard working a large sale while subject, conceivably, to a sudden assault by, or confrontation with, his crazy wife. That was private business, to say the least.

  “Your wife, signore,” Mario suddenly heard, making him for a moment wild-eyed.

  “Your wife,” again. It was the Frenchman.

  “My wife what, masseur?”

  “Your wife—does she gesticulate passionately and is she all movement?” With this, curiously, the Frenchman stood unsteadily up and began to paw the ground with his dainty shoe.

  So relieved was Mario that she had not been seen approaching them that he uncharacteristically revealed an intimate matter. “She has great desire and above normal accommodation. She has to. I have large size.”

  “I would like to meet her,” the Frenchman slurred.

  This remark had a most curious effect on Mario. It seemed to come from the mouth of the officer who had spoken of wanting to meet Cicciolina as well as from the mouth of the advanced Frenchman, and it seemed as if this rather hybrid speaker were somehow speaking of wanting to meet the same person. Yet the officer was not the Frenchman, and Cicciolina was not his wife. What a fantastic blend of lunacies that was. He and the Buffala brothers were supposed to be drinking good wine—he wondered if they had made an error and got some of the house stuff. All he could do, under the circumstances, was try to be as sane as possible. That was his advice to himself whenever things got strange: Be as sane as possible.

  The sanest thing he could imagine was that the Frenchman must know something about his wife. The most practical way for that to be true would be if it had been the Frenchman she had run off with. It was a fact that the Frenchman was large-size. Whether he had large size was open to speculation. The sanest thing to do here would be to ask the Frenchman to take down his pants, but that might mess up the Michelin mention. The next sanest thing Mario could think of was that it had been the Frenchman prowling his house the night before, and that he might have seen his wife inside, before she took off on her fantasy. It could, in this light, be a quite innocent question from the advanced Frenchman, under the circumstances. Still, this left the fact that the Frenchman was at least a prowler. It had been dark and visibility poor, especially since Mario had not slowed down when he saw the figure at his windows, but he could have sworn that the man was smaller than the present Frenchman, that it had been one of the wiry variety allegedly good with the wire on the German lines in the war. He really didn’t know what to think, and not knowing what to think—feeling things slip a little in his head—made Mario more nervous than the prospect of his deranged wife rushing up to them and making some kind of scene, possibly involving the relative sizes of himself and the giant, advanced, intoxicated, sweating Frenchman that they so badly wanted to make a favorable impression upon.

  “I would like to meet your wife,” the Frenchman said again, confirming Mario in his belief that there was a connection between his fare for the day and his perambulating wife, and firming his resolve to think as sanely as possible through the mess and act accordingly. He decided that the best thing to do would be to bury the Frenchman alive. Whether they put him in with the mummies, or fed him to the vipers, or burned him slowly to death with hot nuclear wastes, or exploded his giant desire with an overdose of Cleopatra’s aphrodisiacs was of no concern to Mario—you could not predict what would really happen in the mind of a large, advanced Frenchman under a vineyard. They only had to dig a good, fat hole and put the fat frog in it and cover it up. He was suddenly very passionate about his lack of concern for the Frenchman’s fantastic psychology.

  “My wife is of no concern to me, masseur,” Mario said. “I would call some of my large girlfriendship if I had not lost my address book in the burglary.”

  The Frenchman pursed his lips and gave Mario a squinty look he had seen somewhere before. For a moment he thought it was just more of his confusing voices and faces, but then it came to him. Paul Newman had given such a look to a bull at close range in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Frenchman was mocking him! It was beyond the imagination. He had not known the French to be fans of Paul Newman. And the Frenchman was not even careful to pretend to be curious about the burglary. He wasn’t curious, obviously, because he knew about it! You do not say “the burglary” and have normal, innocent people just sit there. It was the best evidence he had that the Frenchman was the very person of large size his cheerful wife was walking hill and dale to find, and this explained why she had been seen near them all day. It was fantastic, but Mario had become the paid escort to the man his wife was leaving him for, and all day he had been keeping the man just out of her reach. It was too much. “It just goes to show you,” Mario said aloud to no one in particular. “In this world, one word says it all.” He had heard this useful line from an American baseball player of Latin extraction. The ballplayer had actually said, “In America, one word says it all,” but Mario figured if one word said it all, it said it all wherever you were. If there was such a thing as universality, this logic was sound. He wished the ballplayer had gone on to say what the word that said it all was.

  Mario planned to strike the Frenchman, but he was going to have to be careful that the Frenchman did not somehow survive the blow and sit on him. Large size was actually an inadequate description of the Frenchman. He was mozzafiato—take your breath away.

  “Jerry Lewis is not an international comic genius,” Mario announced suddenly and loudly. At this, both Germano and Adriano Buffala stood up and assumed crouched positions not unlike runners before the start of long-distance races. But the Frenchman, who had been rummaging briefly in the toolshed beside the hospitality patio, waved Mario off with a gesture of impatience. He emerged from the shed with a shovel, and after quartering about the patio a bit came to a spot he seemed to find significant, and with all his weight sank the shovel into the ground. He stood on the flush tangs of the shovel with a look on his face knowing and confident. Germano and Adriano took off, and Mario casually strolled to his Fiat before firing it up and making haste away from the advanced Frenchman and the vineyard full of stories.

  Mario had no idea how to contend with a large Frenchman who did not care if you insulted Jerry Lewis. The idea even frightened him a little. One might as well be dealing with a Moroccan, or worse. A Frenchman unprepared to defend Jerry Lewis might do anything at all, because he would be a man who was empty inside, perhaps not even a man in the normal sense but a kind of alien—an anti-homme, as he thought the French might put it.

  Mario’s imagination was not equal to the prospect of the empty Frenchman. A non-Jerry-Lewis-loving frog gave him chills, in fact. He rolled up the cab’s windows and had a calming talk with Cicciolina, whose tette—if it were possible—had, since the day before, assumed an aspect of greater lift, greater heaviness, greater size. She was a marvel, l’onorevole Cicciolina, and he was gladdened at that moment to be a modern Italian. It gave you a sense of well-being to have one of your own kind in high places. In a way, though not in an entirely rational way, it was not unlike having your mother run the country. It was like turning the country into a home, a home into a bed, a bed into a passion of large size.

  Mario discovered his wife at table before a plate of steaming pasta. She looked undisturbed, serene, even—if you could imagine it—happy. That was like her. She had the most developed capacity for self-delusion of any woman Mario had ever known.

  She was even wearing house slippers. Thus she ha
d thought to take off and conceal whatever kind of magical running shoes she had worn for the day’s incalculable mileage. She spoke pleasantly to Mario, who waved her off and searched the house thoroughly for these supernatural shoes.

  In the course of his search, he located, in his nightstand drawer where he always kept it, his black address book, which contained the ninety-five names and numbers of his girlfriends. Some of these, Mario admitted, were untried. He had copied them from the secret rosters of local convents. It was absurd to just write all these girls off because they were pursuing a celibate life. Not all of them would become nuns, some would necessarily fall by the wayside, and these girls would be fresh and full of desire. It was like kinetic and potential energy, if you wanted to be scientific about it. Mario’s notebook was a trove of potential female energy. The notebook was where it had always been, and where it had not been the night before, following the burglary. His wife, for some odd reason, must have taken it with her on her failed, foolish quest for larger size.

  He seized the book and intended to confront her with it, and with the absurd note she’d left about his not knowing beans about large size. He would walk into the steamy, happy kitchen full of her weird fantasy and slap both of these documents on the table and tell her that her fantastic lack of sense was at an end.

  But he could not locate the note, and the address book alone did not somehow seem sufficient. A notebook of ninety-five girlfriends’ numbers presented defiantly to a wife seemed vaguely not the perfect thing. It spoke of the kind of damning evidence presented by one side in a court of law that eventually somehow works to the advantage of the other. He left the notebook in the drawer. He would get Cicciolina’s number and that would make it ninety-six.

  He sat down to eat with his wife, who served him cheerfully. She was a marvel of deceit. She then had the temerity to ask him how his day had gone.

  “You are fantastic,” he told her.

  “Thank you, Mario.” She blushed. She blushed. In their previous, honest life together, she always blushed when he complimented her, and here she was counterfeiting the same complex physiological response. Anyone who could do that, under circumstances of running off for larger size, was worthy of Hollywood in Mario’s opinion. Or was crazy. She was either as good as Katharine Hepburn or she was gone. Either way, he had lost his wife. It was perfect, a situation that made perfect sense: he was sitting across from his smiling wife, who had fixed them an excellent meal and was solicitous of him and his petty workday, and he was smiling back, and anybody looking in their windows—as Mario certainly now knew people with black hearts did—would think them happily wed. But the party with the black heart could not see that his smiling wife had said he knew no beans about large size and had spent a night and a day running around cheerfully looking for it and had lost her mind.

  Mario ate normally, the food was her best (wouldn’t it be?), and they retired and had a relationship in which his wife was especially ardent (wouldn’t she be?), and Mario forced himself to satisfy her. But he plotted throughout the relationship (it took some time, because his size did not want to be really large—how could it?) to go the following day to see Sevriano Buffala about his wife. He distrusted psychiatry—in his view you were either crazy or you weren’t, like pregnancy—but he loved the person who had been his wife, and it was worth pursuing the fantasy of modern medicine for the chance of bringing her back to earth.

  The instability of the human mind, its unsteady footing and proclivity to slide down avalanches of delusion, was the thing about human life that most disturbed Mario. Famine, war, genocide, birth defects, violent crime, racism, bad automobiles—all these things paled next to mental instability for Mario. It was a shame. It was one thing not to be able to eat, or to get shot, or to be born with something missing, or to have a car not start, but not to know what was up was incalculably worse. Hell, Mario thought, was precisely that—not having a clue about what was up. He felt so sorry for his departed wife that, when her ardor had receded, he indulged in uncharacteristic sentimentality and kissed her on the forehead. So dire was her state, she appeared grateful.

  In the night Mario dreamed of having to return to the vineyard to pick up the Frenchman. There he found Germano and Adriano haggardly standing beside the supine form of the advanced Frenchman. Beside him was a four-foot-deep hole and beside that a mound of dirt. Checking instinctively and furtively, Mario could detect no exposed spolia of tombs or parts of mummies, and the dirt did not look radioactive.

  Germano said that they were lucky. The Frenchman had dug between tombs. Had he simply pulled up an active, large vine, he would have gotten a mummy. Adriano showed Mario his eight crossed fingers, which he had held crossed by sitting on them all the while the Frenchman had dug, and which now hurt him considerably to undo. “That was foolish,” Mario said. “You could hurt yourself, and what is more, my needle valve is sticking on the way out here, and you are the best at a needle valve. Can you look at it in your condition?” Adriano unwound his fingers and checked them in the air, and they went to take a look at Mario’s carburetor, leaving the Frenchman in his fat, snoring peace.

  Then Mario had a frightening dream. He dreamed that none of his previous day and night had taken place, that it had all been itself some kind of dream. His wife had missed him because he had come home much later than usual, delayed by the officer, and she had gone ruefully to bed alone. She was in the bed when he searched the house but was concealed in the covers. In his search for stolen valuables he had read not a note from her but one of the open passages about modern Italy and the modern Italian. This dream was unnerving.

  Mario had no capacity for multiple levels of illusion, for the kind of layered reality that a dream like this suggested. He began to sweat and toss in now partial sleep, and then the dream sweetened back into things familiar—he and Adriano and Germano were adjusting the needle valve. He calmed down. As soon as his sleep was regular, however, the dream turned on him again. As Adriano reached in to turn the valve, the needle somehow became the gap in the front teeth of Sevriano Buffala, the psychiatrist, whose smiling face, which suddenly resembled the face of Sigmund Freud himself, looked at him from under the hood of the taxi. The face spoke to him: “It’s you who’s crazy, Mario Moscalini. Your wife is a rock of salt.”

  This all made perfect sense, in the dream. Dreams have a way of doing that. Needle valves can look like gaps in teeth, and people being rocks of salt can be perfectly sensible. Mario sat up in bed and marveled at the lunacies he had just accepted as reason.

  When he got up the next morning he decided to postpone his trip to see Sevriano Buffala. He was not really worried that the doctor of bogus science would actually attempt to suggest that the trouble was with him. It was just that maybe he was acting a bit precipitously in taking his wife to see the smiling quack. It was the kind of innocent, well-meaning thing people did all the time in the interest of their loved ones—and sometimes never saw them again. The loved ones went straight into lifelong loony bins. The risks of being irresponsible in matters of unhinged relatives were very high. You had to think twice, or three times, about just how deranged they were. His wife was not, after all, dangerous to anyone, including herself. She had not interfered with his seeing Cicciolina, which at present was what really mattered to him, so why force her to walk a shaman’s tightrope of mental fitness?

  Besides, if he went directly out to the vineyard this morning to catch Sevriano, the chances were extremely high that Germano and Adriano would force him into filling in the Frenchman’s hole. Or worse, if the Frenchman had expired from his august labor, they might make him party to the burial, which might get tedious later in a legal sense if the Michelin company proved attached to their scribe and sent authorities. It would look suspicious, the Buffala brothers and a respected taxi driver burying a fat man in a hole he himself had dug. And his disinterment would rattle the Buffala brothers to no end, for fear that mummies, vipers, aphrodisiacs, or nuclear fuel waste might be discov
ered. Any of that and their vineyard was probably at an end. On top of all this, Mario did not want to develop trouble with his needle valve on the drive out there.

  He got quietly up and repaired to the kitchen and decided to surprise his wife by fixing breakfast for them. She was sleeping late. She deserved it—it could not be more obvious that she was under considerable strain and needed all the rest she could get.

  Mario was a little rusty in the kitchen, but he was confident he could remember his good mother’s recipe for pizza bianca, and he wanted to cook the bread in the old wood stove his wife never used. He liked the smell of bread most when it was cooked over wood. It made bread taste like some kind of airy game.

  He set about rolling the ingredients for the pizza together on his wife’s floured board and soon had a large round of dough that was kneadable in the extreme. He vaguely remembered that the pizza did not want a lot of kneading, because it became tough, but the mound beneath his working hands began to feel good to him. A little more, he decided. As he worked the dough, a sensation of excitement came into his size, and another sensation crept up the back of his neck, as if he were being watched. He wanted to turn to see who was watching him, but the mound of dough held him. He had to work it a little more. It was absurd, but the heavy slag of leavening bread reminded him not a little of Cicciolina’s ample tette, or one of them, anyway. He caressed her, forming her up to him, then mashing her gently, pressing her entire tetta to her chest with both his hands. He would have bent to kiss her but for the absolute need to see who was watching him. You do not kiss the tetta of l’onorevole Cicciolina on a board in the kitchen if someone is watching you. For a second—very brief, but disturbing—the flattened dough then resembled not Cicciolina but a piece of the hide of the white, advanced Frenchman.