The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  My dear Figaro, seduction is an art, to be learned, practiced, adapted, and improvised according to the situation, and, like other arts, it will not desert you late in life.

  “Seduction is a lie, and as we get older, we get tired of lies,” said Figaro. “We know them all and they’re not amusing anymore.”

  Seduction is a sweet story, and if the listener wants so much to hear it, then it is no lie. Seduction is a mutual endeavor in which I conspire with a woman to give her an opening to do what she wants to do without reminding her that this goes against her principles. A woman’s principles and her desires are constantly at war, and if there were no one to seduce a woman, she would have to figure out how to do it herself. Her principles call for her to remain aloof and uninterested until she meets a man who makes her faint. Her desires are otherwise. She wants to say, “That man, there. Unwrap him and send him over here so he can love me.” She cannot say this. So I try to help her. I say, Zerlina, I would like to hold your hand for two minutes and then you can shoot me and I will die a happy man.

  She laughs, but she does not turn away. She rolls her eyes. She says, “Oh, phoo.” She gives me her hand.

  I say: The greatest tragedy is to be cut off from intimacy, from touch, which is the most human of languages, Zerlina, and the most honest. There is no lie in a touch, a caress, never. The language of the body is a language of the purest truth.

  She is amused. I put my other hand on her shoulder. She turns and leans against me. “You’re something,” she says.

  Zerlina, I say, there’s a bottle of champagne waiting on ice at the Olympia Hotel, and a couple dozen oysters. When we get there, we’ll order up a big salad in a wooden bowl, with basil and spinach and fennel and cilantro and radicchio, and we’ll have it with olive oil and vinegar and pepper and garlic. Then a steak tartare, with chopped onions and an egg yolk. And then we’ll undress quickly without shame, as adults, and jump into the big bed and amuse each other as only adults can do. And afterward, we’ll eat an omelet. And then do it again.

  Her hand twitches in mine, and I guess that I have touched a chord—This is the best time of year for oysters, I say in a low voice, and one should never eat them without erotic plans for later.

  She tells me to be real, but even so, she is reaching for her purse, putting on her coat, checking her lipstick. “You’re outrageous,” she says, and now we are almost to the hotel, and then in the room, she says, “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this.” But she is. She is. A wonderful occasion, Figaro. The sort of evening that someday, as you lie dying, you will remember and it will bring a smile to your lips.

  “You slept with her? Zerlina? But she is married to Maseppo,” said Figaro. “I can’t believe this!”

  I may have slept with her, I may not have slept with her, I only mention her as an example. Zerlina, Marilyn, Marlene—what’s the difference? A woman.

  “Having an affair is not the same as marital happiness,” said Figaro.

  You are right. Marital happiness is briefer and it has a sword hanging over its head. The happiness in marriage is fitful, occasional. It is the pleasure one gets from the absence of the pain of not conforming exactly to the wishes of your wife. A married man walks into the room and his wife looks up and smiles—he is dressed and groomed exactly as she has trained him, his gait is perfect, his personality is champion quality, and he is prepared to converse on topics of her liking, a neat trick it took her years to teach him—and for the duration of her smile, he is happy. But her smile is brief. She spots the flaw: the spiritual emptiness in his eye. She has warned him against emptiness, but there it is. He must think of a way to fill up his spirit.

  The man with the heavy eyelids reappeared in the door, an envelope in his hand. “Time to go, Giovanni,” he said, setting his big hand on the table. “Yer outta here. You broke the deal. Yer history. The job’s over. Move it.”

  The Don sneered. What a relief to get out of this mausoleum, he said. I am, he said, the greatest romantic pianist of all time. But a romantic pianist in Fargo is like an All-Star shortstop in Paris. Not a priority item.

  “Go to hell,” said the man, and he stamped his foot on the floor. Figaro looked down. The man had hooves instead of shoes.

  The Don stood up. Gladly, he said, it would be better than looking at your ugly face.

  The man strode to the back door by the piano and opened it, and Figaro saw the orange glow of flames in the basement, fingers of flame licking the doorsill.

  “Stop!” he cried. “No! Giovanni! Repent!” He took the Don by the arm. “It’s not too late. Repent!”

  The Don put a hand on Figaro’s shoulder. Believe me, he said, it’s easier simply to go. And compared to marriage, it isn’t that bad. Farewell, mon ami. And he took off his great silver jacket and gave it to Figaro and walked to the stairs, put his hands on the door frame, and then, with a mighty cry, plunged down into the fiery abyss.

  “Your hair smells of smoke,” Susanna said to Figaro when he arrived home. “Where were you? In a bar? You stopped in a bar on your way home? I thought you had outgrown that, darling. And what are you going to do with that hideous jacket? My gosh. You can put it in the garage. It reeks of shellfish. I don’t want it in the house. Go on. Take it out of here.”

  So he did. He put the silver jacket on a hanger and hung it on a nail next to the rakes and shovels, and it stayed there for years. Twice she threw it in the trash and twice he retrieved it.

  3.

  TAKING A MEETING WITH MR. ROAST BEEF

  The discovery of Guy Noir, Private Eye, was a breakthrough on A Prairie Home Companion, the character done in a tough-guy voice. He is a heavy-set fellow in a rumpled blue suit and a porkpie hat, with a bottle of bourbon in the file drawer, electric fan whirring, and a theme song (“He’s smooth and he’s cool, he’s good with a gun, a master in the boudoir. A man in a trench coat who gets the job done. . . .That’s Guy—Guy Noir”). Tim Russell played Jimmy the bartender at the Five Spot, Lt. McCafferty of the St. Paul P.D., Rico, and various other heavies, and Sue Scott was the girlfriend Sugar and the landlady Doris and various bimbos and femme fatales, and Tom Keith did the ringing phone, the door knocks, the footsteps, the gunshots, the sirens, and also played Mr. Biggie. And I got to be Guy, who said things like She was tall and beautiful. She gave me a look so sweet you could’ve poured it on your pancakes. She wore jeans so tight I could read the embroidery on her underwear. It said “Saturday.” And she wore a Mount Rushmore T-shirt, and let me tell you, those guys never looked so good. Especially Lincoln and Jefferson. He was perpetually broke and in love and ever astonished by the greed and cruelty and general cluelessness around him. This is the first chapter of the novella Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny.

  Call me a cynic but there is nothing can clarify a man’s thinking quite like looking down the barrel of a revolver in the hand of a man who is seriously irked with you and considering homicide as a solution to a problem. This has happened to me occasionally in my so-called career as a private eye in St. Paul, Minnesota, and each occurrence promoted clear thinking, inconvenient though it seemed at the time. Christians try to find clarity through prayer but you don’t really know what prayer is until you meet someone who’s eager to shoot you. I am referring to an afternoon last February when an eighty-two-year-old mobster named Joey Roast Beef sat in my office on the twelfth floor of the Acme Building with a cocked pistol aimed at my chest and ordered me to tell him something that I had no intention of telling him because it involved large sums of money that I would be reaping a percentage of. His hairy finger was coaxing the trigger and he yelled “Talk to me!” and suddenly everything got clearer.

  Moments before, on this particular February day, I was in my twelfth-floor office, high above the poor souls on the street struggling through the snowbanks, and reading a trashy novel in which a twenty-three-year-old fashion model is attracted to a heavyset sixty-four-year-old g
uy in a wrinkled suit. I was thinking about ordering a hot pastrami from Danny’s Deli and hoping Danny would add it to my tab though my tab was long, two or three hundred bucks, which is not good but business was slow and a guy’s got to eat. Preferably pastrami on a kaiser, slice of onion, and a squort of hearty mustard to clear the sinuses. So I’m in a Cloudy State of Mind when I hear heavy thumping on the door and the thumper yells, “Hey, Noir, open up. I know you’re in there, you snake in the grass.” And it was him, the Senior Citizen of Organized Crime.

  “The office is closed, Joey,” I said calmly.

  “Not to me it ain’t.” And he threw open the door and stomped in, all 340 pounds of him. “Forgot to lock your door, Noir. What a genius you are. It’s amazing someone didn’t rub you out a long time ago.”

  He was draped in a blue seersucker suit like a toad in gift wrap and a yellow shirt and pink tie, his thinning black hair slicked back, peering out through thick black horn-rims, and he looked like one of those fat guys with a chestful of medals who run South American republics. The jacket lapels had traces of smutz on them but his beetle brow was set for battle, his jaw jutting out, his dewlaps quivering. He was also wheezing—as you or I would if we were 5 feet 4 and weighed 340 pounds and carried an oxygen tank with a plastic tube stuck up our nose.

  “No Good Morning?” I said. “No How Are You?”

  “I know how you are. You are in big, big trouble, Smart Guy. I’m done with you. If you don’t tell me what I need to know, you’re going to be sleeping in the dirt and making friends with the maggots.” He lowered himself gingerly into my old oak chair, which groaned under him, and pulled out his Colt .45 and aimed it at my sternum. It appeared to be loaded. With bullets.

  “I’m expecting visitors, Joey,” I said in the same quiet tone. “So I don’t have time for an extended conversation.”

  It was a lie, of course, but when dealing with an angry armed man you’d like him to think that witnesses could arrive at any moment.

  “This won’t take long. About two minutes. The word on the street, Noir, is that you are holding out on me on a very lucrative deal involving millions—and you made a big big mistake thinking I’m such a dope I wouldn’t find out about it, which is an insult. I’m insulted. And I’m going to give you about two minutes to tell me what is going down exactly and what your take is gonna be and when you will split that with me,” he said. “So out with it.”

  “Give me a hint,” I said. “I got no idea what you’re talking about. You want to know who to pick in the seventh at Belmont? You want the formula of the atomic bomb? What you want, Joey?”

  “It involves you and that dancer at the Kit Kat Klub named Naomi Fallopian. The one who got her Ph.D. and now she’s teaching women’s rights or something at the U. So let’s start with her.” He shifted his enormity in the chair and it groaned, so I could imagine it collapsing and him sprawled on the floor and me leaping up and whacking him senseless with the desk lamp. I could also imagine the shock of the fall twitching his trigger finger and a poof of flame and the bullet hitting me in the frontal lobe and turning me into a cauliflower. The second possibility seemed just as likely.

  He cleared his throat. “Don’t make me repeat myself, Noir. You are walking around about to make a killing and retire to a penthouse somewhere with a revolving king-size bed under a ceiling mirror with you and her in a pink peignoir reflected in it and that’s okay, I don’t begrudge you the comforts of life, I’m only looking to collect my share, otherwise Miss Fallopian is going to be wearing a black suit and a hat with a veil and crying into a hanky as she gazes at the china vase containing your ashes.” He set the pistol down on the desk and adjusted his air hose, which was taped to his upper lip.

  I said, “Joey, I respect your perspicacity in most things, but as to this bum information somebody sold you about me and Miss Fallopian, Joey, you are woofing down the wrong rainbow, there is no pot of gold at the end, just an old private eye with lower-back pain and a pocketful of breath mints, namely me. There is no killing about to be made. Whoever whispered this in your ear is pulling your leg. I say this as an old and dear friend. This is delusional thinking, Joey. If you’re not careful, you’re going to wind up on the funny farm, talking to the window shades.”

  I was hoping to build doubt in the man’s mind but his firm grip on the peashooter told me I was not succeeding. He was in no mood for storytelling.

  “Tell me what’s going on, Noir, or else you are going to get you a new buttonhole. Right in between those other buttonholes.”

  It occurred to me just then that Life Without Parole might not be a deterrent to one in such bad shape as Mr. Roast Beef. A hospital is a hospital, whether it’s Mount Sinai or Sing Sing.

  “If I were you, I would go home and ask the beautiful Adele to fix you a Reuben sandwich and then lie down and take a nice nap. You’re obviously under a lot of stress right now so don’t have a coronary.”

  “You’re going to be under even more stress when this bullet hits your rib cage,” he said. “The last man who double-crossed me is wearing the pine kimono, mister. He’s taking the dirt nap. If you get my drift. Start talking or I’m going to roll the credits.” And then he cocked the pistol.

  That little metallic skritch and click clarified my thinking but good. I am not going to beg for my life. Au contraire. I will try pushing Joey’s buttons and rile him up so he can’t think straight and maybe shoots himself in the foot.

  “Listen, Fat Man. You ever hang out up around One Hundred Second and Broadway?” I says. “That’s where I grew up. Good old New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice. We used to use guys like you for footrests. You’re darned right I have hit pay dirt and it’s mine, Lard Ass, no freeloading. Your mooching days are done. You can wave your little peashooter all you like, I am not going to allow a schtoonk with an air hose and piss on his pants to horn in on the deal. No freebies.” I said it quiet but I said it straight.

  He was mightily peeved. “Time is running out, buddy boy. You take this wiseacre attitude with me and I will mash you like a grasshopper.” He stamped his foot so hard the tassel came off his shoe, and the exertion squeezed his hemorrhoids and he let out a yelp.

  “You ought to see a proctologist,” I said. “They can snip those hemmies off with a pair of pinking shears and cauterize them with a curling iron and you’ll be pain-free for years to come and it’ll probably add twenty points to your bowling score, too.”

  He shifted the pistol from his left hand to his right and suddenly his tone changed. He was pleading. “You and me go way back, Guy. I have been like an uncle to you. So many times when Rico or Tony wanted to run you out of town on a marble slab, I told them, ‘Hands off Noir, he’s family.’ I did that for you. More than once. Otherwise you would’ve been floating down the Mississippi in a barge full of soybeans and processed into tofu and eaten by skinny women in hundred-dollar jeans and evacuated into the sewers of San Francisco and out to sea. Is that what you want for yourself? To be sludge on the ocean floor?”

  I suggested that I could take him into the deal as a consultant. He snorted. “I had a cat once and I had him neutered but he still went out at night and served as a consultant. Not me. Stop wasting my time.”

  I suggested that we go to Danny’s and talk about it over a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a hot Reuben.

  He thumped the pistol butt on the desk and wheezed from the effort. He whispered, “You got ten seconds to talk, Noir. You’re trying to cut me out of the gravy train and I don’t want to do it but I’m not going to take that laying down.”

  I corrected his grammar and pointed out gently that laying is a transitive verb, it takes an object—you lay down your head on a pillow, but you yourself lie down on a bed, so what he should’ve said was lying down—and Joey did not care for this. He shifted in his seat as if to get better aim at my aorta and he landed smack on those painful hemmorhoids and whim
pered and I grabbed his right arm and twisted it and made him lay down his pistol on the table. And then I pinched his oxygen tube to make him lie down. Which he did. He laid his big noggin down on the desk and his body let out something long and hissy that smelled of fried automobile tires.

  “Sweet dreams, pal.” I crimped the tube for forty-five seconds, long enough to shift his synapses into neutral, and then released. He opened his eyes and blinked. “What you doing with my gun?” he croaked.

  “Just borrowing it for a day or two,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

  I helped him to his feet. “Lulu LaFollette called, Joey. She’s upset that you forgot you said you’d meet her waiting for you at the Hotel Cranston. Room Seven Sixteen. She’s got her green chiffon nightie on and she’s all hot and sweaty thinking about getting her ashes hauled.”

  He grinned and heaved himself to his feet. “My memory isn’t what it used to be,” he whispered. “Thanks, Guy.” And he lumbered off to perform amatory wonders on the buxom bombshell—who, for all I knew, was back home on her sheep ranch in Stanley, North Dakota.

  A minute later, he was back.

  “Lulu who?”

  “LaFollette.”

  “The name is familiar.”

  “The singer, Joey.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  And I put a hand on his shoulder and sang—

  Even those who write prose do it.

  People wearing all their clothes do it.

  Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love.

  Some intertwined centipedes do it.

  In winter, even Swedes do it.

  Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love.

  Gorillas deep in the mists do it,