Villa Incognito

by Tom Robbins

  Dern had looked the colonel in the eye and smiled that flat, distant smile of his that had never been much of a smile at all, and said coldly, “Maybe I preferred that shithole to this shithole.”

  Oh, my! Oh, fine! Suppose the media got their grubby hands on that. An MIA who “preferred” to stay missing. An American hero who rejected America. And who hadn’t denied that there might be others like him. Talk about your nasty buzzard omelet.

  Under the circumstances, then, it shouldn’t be surprising that Bootsey and Pru were warned to tell no one of Dern’s reappearance, nor that those warnings were emphatically repeated and had ominous overtones. As far as the public was concerned—and the public had already forgotten the incident—the drug smuggler arrested on Guam was precisely who he’d said he was: a French missionary, Father Arnaud Gorodish. For the foreseeable future, any information to the contrary would be vigorously denied, the source of such information would be vigorously dealt with. And who besides Pru and Bootsey could have provided that information? Dern had had few friends, and both Foley parents had died in a boating accident soon after he entered the air force.

  When, on the third day, as the sisters boarded an Alaska Airlines jet bound for Seattle, they were in shock. The jolt of finding Dern alive (there were those who suggested that the reason the Foley girls had never married was due to their attachment to their vanished brother) was compounded by the situation in which they’d found him and by the government’s threats, none too subtle, to themselves.

  Although she kept professing that everything would turn out well in the end, Bootsey was in such a state that the flight attendant had to fasten her seatbelt for her—and she, Bootsey, from an aviation family! Embarrassed by her sister, and suspecting that they were being watched by one of Fitzgerald’s joes, Pru immersed herself in the San Francisco Chronicle, almost wearing it like a mask. “Ink is the blood of language,” Stubblefield had said in defense of his preference for the page over the screen. “Paper is its flesh.” Pru made herself a newspaper face. Her frown was the crossword puzzle, her blinks the baseball scores. You could have wrapped a fish in her.

  It was in the middle pages of the Chronicle, near the mouth of the mask, that she chanced upon a short article about the derailment of the circus train in the Oregon hills between San Francisco and Portland. There were no serious injuries, the report said, but several animals were thought to have escaped.

  Exterminating Captain Foley was a definite option. Both Colonel Thomas and Operations Officer Fitzgerald knew how easy it would be to arrange for him to have a “heart attack” in his cell. The current administration certainly had no problem with prejudicial terminations of that sort.

  Of course, they could simply paint him as a pro-Marxist deserter and see to it that he was sentenced to death or to life imprisonment. That, however, would necessitate a trial, and who could guess what he might say in court, or to fellow inmates were it a closed hearing, or to journalists covering his execution? The same problems would arise were they to charge him as an international drug trafficker, which, in point of fact, he was. Yet did it really matter what Foley said? Neither the public nor the mainstream press would take seriously for a moment the twisted statements of a drug-smuggling traitor.

  Still, there was a fly swimming laps in whichever ointment they uncorked; a backstroking, belly-flopping, splish-splashing fly in the person of Maj. Mars Albert Stubblefield and 1st Lt. Dickie Lee Goldwire. For any number of reasons, nothing of consequence could be done about Foley until the whereabouts, condition, and involvement of those particular two MIAs were clearly determined.

  Parting, Colonel Thomas and Operations Officer Fitzgerald (usually called Mayflower) agreed to concentrate on making that determination as quickly as possible. “By the way,” Mayflower said, as they left the building, “how did your cousin’s kids enjoy the circus the other night?”

  “Oh, they liked it fine. Enjoyed the hell out of it. Too bad, though, that that clown got drunk and messed up the animal act.”

  A knowing, insider smile razored across Mayflower’s lips. Leaning close to the colonel’s ear, he hissed through the mineral gleam of his all-too-perfect teeth, “That was no clown. That was a dyke.”

  Knock! Knock!

  “Who’s there?”

  No one replied. The village was at its evening meal, and the only sound Dickie could hear was the bamboo grove, rustling in the dusk like so much Zen gossip.

  Knock! Knock!

  “Sabbaii dji? Sabbaii dji? Who’s there? Who hava yes?”

  Still no response. Dickie was reasonably certain that even if Dern had given them up it was too soon to expect the authorities. Nevertheless, he stiffened. He was standing on the woven matting in the middle of his hut, stark naked, having just bathed and washed his clothes in the narrow stream that rushed past the village on the side opposite from the gorge. Before the knocking interrupted him, he’d been searching for a clean pair of khaki shorts, his normal attire in Fan Nan Nan.

  As he stared, barely breathing, the flimsy rattan door opened a few inches, and a hand sent a cylindrical object rolling across the matting toward his feet. Instinctively, automatically, Dickie looked for a place to dive, but while his hut was spacious by Fan Nan Nan standards, there was no heavy furniture to duck behind nor any alcove in which to escape the blast.

  Blast? Yes, Dickie was so convinced that it was a grenade rolling toward him that his whole life flickered past his eyes. His sixth-grade teacher flickered past, demanding to know where his math assignment was (for a millisecond he was back in dream school); his ruddy daddy zoomed past in one of the convertibles he flogged at the Goldwire car dealership, his mother zipped by on her golf cart; his older sister sashayed by, flashing her bare breasts as she’d done so many times just to fluster him; his wealthy old grandparents, his alcoholic guitar instructor, a gang of UNC fraternity brothers, the psychopathic commanding officer of his B-52 squadron: a whole parade of supporting actors popped in and out of the major scenes that Dickie Goldwire’s brain rightly or wrongly believed had defined his life; and he was wondering of all the places and all the ways that that life might have ended, why in a hut in Laos, naked, fifty-one, blown to bacon bits by an assassin’s . . .

  But the blast didn’t come. And the “grenade,” when it stopped rolling, looked suspiciously like a glass jar with a familiar blue and yellow label on it. This was no flashback. This was not a spectral artifact summoned by his psyche to remind him that he had squandered his life, just as most of us, by refusing to wake up, squander ours. No, it was no more a hallucinatory relic of personal shame—or triumph—than it was a bomb.

  What it was . . . was a jar of mayonnaise. Best Foods mayonnaise (marketed as Hellmann’s east of the Mississippi). And while he was gaping at it, all agog, the door opened a little wider, and someone flung a loaf of Wonder Bread across the room and bounced it off his penis.

  Dickie fixed sandwiches. Not right away, of course. First, they embraced. Next, they discussed Dern’s arrest (Lisa Ko was amazed that he already knew about it; was, though she concealed it, more than a little annoyed that he knew, after she’d traveled halfway around the world, walking out on the circus, leaving her tanukis in the care of an unstable individual, to bring the news). They talked about what the arrest might portend for Dickie, for them as a couple, and for Stubblefield. Then, she got as naked as he, and they made love.

  They made love as fast and furious and noisily as an illegal drag race, each of them climaxing in less time than it would have taken Daniel Boone to skin a teddy bear. Dickie was packed tight as a fist with the pent-up desire left over from his abstinent night with Miss Ginger Sweetie (if the truth be known, he thought of Miss Ginger Sweetie once or twice during his prolonged orgasm), while the only sex Lisa Ko had had in three months had been with Bardo Boppie-Bip, and though that had been new, exciting, and plenty enjoyable, it was different, very different. (Since it was with another woman, it couldn’t be counted against her vows of betrothal, she rea
soned, although for Bardo Boppie-Bip, it seemed to have counted for something.)

  By then it was quite dark, and Dickie made sandwiches by candlelight. He’d once told Lisa Ko that what he missed most about America was sliced bread and mayonnaise. Now, she’d brought those things to him, which in his mind signaled that she loved him more than he sometimes thought she did.

  All Carolina folk are crazy for mayonnaise, mayonnaise is as ambrosia to them, the food of their tarheeled gods. Mayonnaise comforts them, causes the vowels to slide more musically along their slow tongues, appeasing their grease-conditioned taste buds while transporting those buds to a plane higher than lard could ever hope to fly. Yellow as summer sunlight, soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher’s rant, falsely innocent as a magician’s handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, restyling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again, granting them the capacity to delight the gullet if not the heart. Fried oysters, leftover roast, peanut butter: rare are the rations that fail to become instantly more scintillating from contact with this inanimate seductress, this goopy glorymonger, this alchemist in a jar.

  The mystery of mayonnaise—and others besides Dickie Goldwire have surely puzzled over this—is how egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar (wine’s angry brother), salt, sugar (earth’s primal grin-energy), lemon juice, water, and, naturally, a pinch of the ol’ calcium disodium EDTA could be combined in such a way as to produce a condiment so versatile, satisfying, and outright majestic that mustard, ketchup, and their ilk must bow down before it (though, at two bucks a jar, mayonnaise certainly doesn’t put on airs) or else slink away in disgrace. Who but the French could have wrought this gastronomic miracle? Mayonnaise is France’s gift to the New World’s muddled palate, a boon that combines humanity’s ancient instinctive craving for the cellular warmth of pure fat with the modern, romantic fondness for complex flavors: mayo (as the lazy call it) may appear mild and prosaic, but behind its creamy veil it fairly seethes with tangy disposition. Cholesterol aside, it projects the luster that we astro-orphans have identified with well-being ever since we fell from the stars.

  Okay, maybe that’s sailing a ways over the top, yet even its detractors must admit to mayo’s sheen. And nowhere, under no condition, does it shine more brightly than when lathered upon an ordinary slice of bread.

  Wonder Bread was Dickie’s favorite. Lisa Ko opened it for him, the antic spray of red, blue, and yellow dots on its wrapper reminding her, to her guilty dismay, of the circus. She laid out the slices. With a blade more bayonet than kitchen knife, he spread the silky dressing from crust to crust, careful to leave no speck, however minute, of surface uncovered. Dickie, you see, understood the true beauty of the well-made sandwich. Those who allow dry, bare patches to show on their bread, who neglect to plaster the mayonnaise liberally to every edge, are triflers, artless hacks unworthy of the name of “sandwich maker.”

  As for the filling, that was somewhat problematic. The usual suspects—canned tuna, cheese, pastrami, ripe tomato, et al—were absent from Dickie’s Fan Nan Nan larder. He experimented with a boiled rice sandwich, adding chili peppers, garlic, and màak kàwk (a sour, olivelike fruit) for flavor, but while it tasted better than it sounds—thanks to the mayonnaise, no doubt—it landed somewhat short of expectation. A sandwich of nàam phàk-kàat (fermented lettuce paste), mint, and nàng khwái hàeng (dried skin of water buffalo) proved even less gratifying.

  In the end, then, while Lisa Ko shook her head in disbelief, Dickie contented himself with plain mayonnaise sandwiches, the basic kind that he’d fixed for himself as a small boy when his mother was away golfing, his daddy was holding court at the skeet club or the car lot, and it was the cook’s day off. Mmm-mmm! Even after days of international travel, the Wonder Bread was wonderfully squishy; the mayonnaise, for all the aforementioned reasons, a jubilant justification of the trouble to which Mother Nature had gone to embed an oval cluster of sensory cells in the epithelium of the tongue. Mmm-mmm!

  Soon he’d had his fill of sandwiches, though apparently not of nostalgia, for he commenced to take slices of the pliant bread and fold them, twist them, and mash them into shapes as he’d done as a child. Dickie made little animals. Little barnyard animals. He made a pig, a goat, and a goose. Unmindful of Lisa Ko’s guilt about the circus, he sculpted an elephant and a giraffe. Guilt-ridden or not, Lisa was fascinated. She’d never seen anything like it, not even her granny’s origami. However, while he was struggling to make her a tanuki—he experienced difficulty with both its belly and its scrotum—she decided she’d reached her limit of appreciation.

  She kissed him hard enough to get his attention. Then, she crossed to the bed and lay down. She raised her knees and spread her legs. Her glossy black pubis parted like the curtain at a theater, gradually revealing a stage set—architectonic, kind of surrealistic, and as rosy as a classical dawn. Mysterious, apertural, glistening, and crimped, the set semed to be awaiting the entrance of an actor to make its meaning clear.

  Well, having already successfully auditioned for the role, Dickie entered at once, not from the wings but the footlights, and no Laurence Olivier, no James Dean, ever put more of himself into a performance. Lisa Ko gave as good as she got. This time, they made love slowly, thoughtfully, painstakingly, although with the occasional spontaneous flourish. They went at it that way for the better part of two hours, and when at last they uncoupled, they lay panting in a veritable pond of perspiration and sundry other moistures.

  The aftertaste of mayonnaise sandwiches mingled in Dickie’s mouth with the brine of Lisa Ko. He brushed a bread crumb from his stubble, plucked a hair from between his front teeth, and—the uncertainty of his future notwithstanding—fell asleep a glad and happy man.

  When he awoke at daybreak, however, he saw that Lisa was already up and dressed and dabbing perfume behind her pretty, ever so slightly pointed ears. Without asking, he knew that she’d be off in a minute or two to find an aerialist to take her to Villa Incognito. And though that came as no surprise, Dickie’s heart felt suddenly like an iron piano with barbwire strings and scorpions for keys.

  Someone who knew him might ask: in what direction exactly did the green music of Dickie’s jealousy flow? Toward Stubblefield or toward Madame Ko? For the truth is, he loved the man very nearly as much as he loved the woman. He’d loved Stubblefield almost from the moment they met.

  That meeting had occurred in the day room of the officers’ quarters at an American air base on the southernmost island of Japan. It might be useful at this juncture to scroll back just far enough to glimpse the spray of events that had brought Dickie to the air base and that disposed him to be so immediately impressed by Maj. Mars Albert Stubblefield. It’s best called a spray because events are seldom as linearly linked as those who tout “history” would prefer to believe, although in this case, the trail is rather easy to sniff.

  Early in the autumn of his sophomore year at the University of North Carolina, Dickie had been playing his guitar and singing folk songs at a fraternity picnic. He wasn’t entertaining an audience really, just strumming and crooning beside the bonfire, more or less entertaining himself, although four or five students had gathered around him and were joining in on the choruses. At one point, following a rendition of “On Top of Old Smoky,” a young woman, a girl he’d never seen before, stepped out of the shadows and took his hand. “Man, you’re too good to waste your pipes on these ignorant frat rats. I’m gonna take you to a more appreciative audience. Come on, now,” she insisted when he made to resist, “this is a command performance.”

  Well, the audience at the Rhinoceros Coffeehouse in downtown Chapel Hill, though quieter, proved to be only marginally more appreciative than the raucous Pi Kappa Phi picnickers, yet his hesitant debut upon the Rhino stage was to be a turning point in Dickie’s life.

  The girl’s name was Charlene, and while she, with her frizzed brown hair, combat bo
ots, and barbarically kohled eyes, wasn’t as attractive as the cheerleaders he’d dated back in Mount Airy or the coeds who usually caught his eye on campus, she had . . . well, a voltage, a grit, a mystery not one of those others could approximate. In addition, Charlene was both more generous and more expert with her sexual favors than any girl he’d ever encountered, and before that night was through, he realized that he’d been blindly operating in a state tantamount to virginity. Sure, he’d long had an iron in the fire, but prior to Charlene he’d only been toasting marshmallows.

  If Charlene pussy was the metaphoric mayonnaise in his life that year, the ham, the tomato, the bread itself was more cerebral in nature. Dickie, with little effort, had always made good grades in school, but the best of grades are no indication whatsoever that the student is awake. Had you suggested to Dickie before he entered UNC that the Civil War was not fought over slavery; that it wasn’t Columbus who discovered America; that Jesus Christ had never been a Christian; that unique was not a synonym for unusual; or that a screwed-over inventor named Nikola Tesla was the father of both electrical and electronic technology in the U.S., with accomplishments that made Thomas Edison’s look like the putterings of a neighborhood handyman, had you imparted even such elementary bits of knowledge as those, he, like almost everyone else in Mount Airy, “educated” or not, would have regarded you as a lunatic spouting heresy. Now, here he was in a coffeehouse (he’d taken to performing almost nightly at the Rhino, despite the fact that no one, himself included, thought his Bob Dylan covers appreciably superior to those a well-trained Mexican parrot might produce), here he was listening to Charlene and her friends gab about existentialism, assassination conspiracies, Jungian UFO theory, Tibetan death manuals, Gandhian pacifism, and the triple aspects of the Mother Goddess in universal art forms; listening attentively and hardly batting a lash.