The Age of Cities

by Brett Josef Grubisic

  Winston could tell that he was procrastinating, and began unbuttoning his shirt. He removed and folded his trousers, and placed them on the lid of the toilet seat. He lodged his cufflinks deep in a trouser pocket and set his shirt atop. The strangeness of the circumstance gave him pause. Giddily, he considered his predicament. Here he was, standing practically naked in the bathroom of a mere acquaintance and about to put on a costume and talk with other complete strangers dressed as characters played by a dead movie star to whom he’d never paid close attention. The whole imposing scene made a trip to the Belle-Vu seem like child’s play.

  It was the kind of predicament Lucille Ball would stumble into, he decided. The difference was, his adventure would not neatly wrap itself up by the end of a half-hour episode. It might not be side-splittingly funny, either. Though he had attended exactly three costume parties over the years in the Bend, he’d done nothing like this before; it was nerve-racking, but he trembled with excitement too.

  Winston returned to the mirror and ran his index finger along its scalloped top. There was no dust. So close that he could not see his face, his view ran from the band of his underpants to the shoulder straps of his undershirt. As always, he was taken aback and dismayed by the tenacious hairs—tendrils like black moss—that leapt from beneath the edges of the undershirt’s smothering field of white. He posed, arms sharply angled in the Charles Atlas style, and noticed the pungency of his armpits. Nerves.

  Other librarians he had met were soft stoop-shouldered men heading toward jelly or else stick-like and abstemious, but Winston recognized that he was trim and firm, robust even. In the mirror, he could not help tracing the halo of fur on his arms, shoulders, and neck. Alberta had it right when she had talked about animals and hibernation; his coarse dense pelt would certainly bring to mind the word “ursine.” Ursa Major, he thought, indulging in a nonsense thought of himself arranged as a heavenly constellation. That hair had the good sense to quit, thankfully. His nose remained properly fallow and pink and his ears showed no sign of pig’s bristle. And the hair had its benefits: unlike his colleagues—struck hard and frequently by chills, colds, coughs, and complaints between November and March—he was never bothered by low mercury in winter and only rarely ambushed by the maleficent germs that lurked like kamikaze pilots in the high school’s corridors.

  “Dilly-dallying,” he reminded himself, using one of Alberta’s longstanding favourite words of approbation. He opened the bag that held his costume. For shoes, Alberta had sewn him moccasins from brown felt. He had bought thick leather bootlaces, and wound them in for an authentic touch. At least narrow strings of animal hide seemed apt. It might be closer to Robin Hood than Edward, they had conceded, but those two Englishmen were not that distant, historically speaking. Besides, shoes? What did they wear then, who could say? The illustrations from history books revealed a Jesus-haired bearded man with a perfectly aquiline nose who wore a bandeau and fortified his vulnerable body with a heavy cape or else a jupon emblazoned with elongated lions and fleurs-de-lis. Masons shaping his likeness at Canterbury Cathedral hadn’t cared much about footwear; they were trifling details, Alberta had decided. It was the regal countenance staring bravely into the afterlife that mattered. For posterity, and all that.

  Winston looked down at the leggings, then at his underpants—a recent invention, surely. A Victorian development, most probably: sensible and decorous. He could not recall any book he’d read in which underwear was mentioned. It was unmentionable. He snorted. Stop by stop, Hadrian’s tours of the far reaches of Rome’s empire had been duly recorded, but knowledge of his intimate apparel was forever lost. Invisible. Beneath all that leather and chain-mail and wool padded with horse hair, what was there? If his own underwear proved to be an anachronism, he would live with it. He’d feel too exposed without any. He was no Errol Flynn, after all, prepared to shuck his clothes and leap stark naked into water without a moment’s hesitation, alone or amidst a crowd of onlookers. That might be the reason for all the drink, Winston thought. Magnificent Captain Blood’s secret weapon: high jinks and courage available by the bottle.

  Drawing the rest of his clothing from the bag, Winston had small hopes that he could pull off costume and character. He’d pored over a few books in the library to get a deeper understanding of Edward the Black Prince, and had come to learn only that historians made him fit into the standard heroic mould, less an actual breathing person than a type or ideal. Winston had also grown to think of Edward as sullen and enigmatic since all the images he’d encountered were dour funerary effigies, carved in stone or cast in bronze or plaster and fastened to joyless church walls and family tombs.

  He’d guessed a historian studying the fourteenth century was not faced with a surplus of evidence to sift through, and concluded that it was no surprise that Edward’s personality was muted and so indistinct. It wasn’t as though the Black Prince had left a diary so that future generations could read about his innermost hopes and desires. He was no gushy, self-dramatizing schoolgirl. Nor an ink-happy Augustine roiled by guilt. Edward’s was an era of grave talk and decisive action, not poesy and romantic navel-gazing. A question like, “How do I feel today?” or “What is the meaning of existence, I wonder?” had probably never been forged in his stalwart’s head. Centuries after the fact, no one could say what he felt. What time was there for feeling when there was territory to safeguard or seize? Small wonder the history books painted such a hazy picture.

  Alberta had sewn a padded tunic for Winston after he’d decided a cape was too showy. It was an approximation based on a photograph he had located in a Bend school district textbook, The Ancient and Medieval World. The jupon, as they’d learned to call the garment, had originally been worn as protection from the rain that caused armour to blossom with rust. It had also prevented the wearer from sizzling like a barbecued steak during summertime skirmishes.

  Winston pulled the jupon over his head, and struggled with its tight awkward shape. Why had buttons taken so long to be invented, he wondered? Judging the final result, Alberta had recommended a red satin diagonal sash because the costume was drab, the wormy brown of mud flats. It gave him a menial appearance. With a smirk she’d said, “Needs a splash of royal pomp. You look like you scrub castle chamber pots.” He pulled at the sash until the seam aligned with his hip.

  Standing at the mirror, he puffed up his chest in mock-heroic style. He mussed up his hair. Edward might have been gaunt, club-footed or pigeon-chested, Winston imagined. Books had offered little guidance; Edward was a heroic warrior who may or may not have earned his name by girding himself with black armour. C’est tout, as Alberta said. Fond of pig’s liver, a wandering night owl, possessing a pronounced lower lip or missing teeth: no researcher would ever uncover those significant details. What else was there to interpret? He lived with lineages, foes and friends, strategies, alliances, and battles, some won, some lost.

  Winston supposed he would be highly disciplined and even prone to violent outbursts and drunken venting. If he even possessed one, his sense of humour would be crude, all sleight of hand and jester pratfalls; otherwise, he would be rigid, uncreative, and demanding, grabbing what he wanted and chucking away anything or anybody in his way. Charismatic, probably. Winston had met a few locals who had become officers during the war, and to a man they were marked by such characteristics, though not as pronounced as they would have been over half a millennium ago. Civilization had advanced, at least on the surface. Then as now, success in the military would come easier to some personalities than others, Winston thought.

  Besides, he wasn’t meant to be Edward, but rather the Black Prince as acted in front of a camera by Errol Flynn pronouncing words he’d half-learned—the star’s inability to prepare for scenes and remember lines was another notorious tidbit Alberta had fed him—from a screenplay written by some man who might have consulted the same books Winston had skimmed through. And all of it on a wood and plaster of Paris stage in sunny California. The liberties taken
were no doubt as enormous as the gap between flesh and blood actuality and the mute carved figure on a tomb in England.

  If nothing else, Dickie’s Peggy La Rue Satterlee had made it clear that rifle-range accuracy was not the true goal. Inspired performance was. Winston frowned, thinking he might get by with an occasional thee and thou sprinkled into his conversation. It’s not as though anyone would think to criticize him; it was irreverent and fun, he thought. That pixie notion of silliness was what he’d already come to admire about this group. He decided that a few references to the times—the Black Death, the Hundred Years Wars, the bastard French king—would keep partygoers occupied. Plague would be better than war for a few stories—nobody would care a fig about a century of complicated skirmishes and shifting alliances that occurred thousands of miles away over 600 years ago. But disaster and strife always keep people riveted, regardless of the epoch; older folks still spoke in reverent tones of the devastating Spanish influenza of the Great War. He would describe the lingering deaths of helpless servants and courtiers. Religious mania and bizarre rites of mortification. Filthy straw beds hopping with fleas. He’d throw in roaming packs of vermin too. Corpses with rigor mortis. There were definite possibilities.

  A rapid-fire knock on the bathroom door interrupted his forecasting. “Almost finished in there, Gorgeous George?” a man’s voice asked.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, his mouth close to the door. “I’ll be just a minute.”

  He used a kohl pencil Alberta had purchased for him to draw a moustache, and then speedily sketched in a hairy point on his chin, smoothing away the clean edge of the lines with his fingers. He could have grown a beard in a week, but it made him feel unkempt and ragged. Kohl would wash off in a second. With hurried and rough strokes, he parted his hair in the middle. Even in statuary, Edward’s hair was never neatly combed. Alberta’s leather and foil bandeau completed the transformation.

  Standing back to grasp the full effect in the mirror, he pronounced judgment: “Idiotic.” He reminded himself of one of the mole-like serfs of The Time Machine. “King of the Morlocks.”

  Winston picked up his street clothes and shoved them in the grocery bag. Looking around for a storage place, he chose the bathtub. They would be secure there.

  Swinging open the door, he stared into the hallway. Dressed in a sharply pressed khaki army uniform, the man who had knocked was leaning against the wall. Winston smiled at him and apologized: “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “Don’t fret it, squire,” the man said as he pressed close to Winston en route to the bathroom.

  Winston walked down the short hallway into the living room. As he expected, the room was crowded, filled with conversations, moving bodies, a blue haze of cigarette smoke, and the world-weary voice of Dinah Washington, who while now upbeat was complaining about her run of bad luck and lousy people. The woman had such a hard life, if her songs were to be believed.

  He saw that two tables had been butted together in a corner. One was cluttered with glasses, bottles, and a miscellany of juice, lemons and limes, an ice bucket, sugar. The other one held oranges, and nothing else. What must have been a box of them had been carefully stacked into a stupendous pyramid. He imagined them as a cairn that announced vital news in a foreign tongue. Winston headed toward the arrangement, curious. It had not tumbled apart and he wanted to find out why.

  Someone grasped him by the arm, and Winston turned to see a smiling Johnny, who had also outfitted himself as a one of the many historical Flynns.

  “Welcome, dear traveller,” Johnny said as he clasped Winston’s right hand heartily with both of his heavily ring-laden hands. He looked around the room for a moment and continued: “I hope Dame Slatternly wasn’t being a bother at the door. I can have her dispatched post-haste if you desire it, honourable sir. A pox on her scurvy hide.” Johnny was dressed in tights and a cape. He wore a woolly beard that seemed to be glued on to his face, which Winston thought was well complemented by his eye patch. Grasping him like they were old buddies, he walked Winston toward the table. Winston realized Johnny was already thoroughly drunk. “You see, that jade hasn’t been quite right in the ol’ head”—he tapped two fingers against his temple—“since the statutory rape trial way back during the War. Too much fame and attention for her tiny doxy’s brain, methinks. As the Bard would have it, she’s a subtle whore / A closet, lock and key, of villainous secrets. Ya gotta watch her closely or she’ll swallow ya whole.”

  Winston guessed that Johnny was a swashbuckling pirate. “Captain Blood, I presume?” he asked.

  “Sir, you insult me. I am honorable, no bloodthirsty hoodlum. It is I, Robert, Earl of Essex. Yonder is my fair Queen, Elizabeth Tudor.” He gestured behind his shoulder vaguely. Winston saw no monarch, fair or dark.

  “Let’s get you something to drink. Catch up with the rest of us. We came over early to help her set up, and, well, had a few to get us in the mood.”

  “I was hoping that there might be something with less kick. A bottle of beer perhaps?”

  “Oh, no, nothing doing, sire. I’ll pour you a mean vodka Collins. Got the recipe from Judy Canova herself. It’s fruity and sweet. You won’t taste any of the hard stuff in it. Smooth as silk. You’ll be fine.”

  “Thank you, kind sir.” At the table, Johnny poured and stirred. Winston gestured toward the display of oranges and asked, “What’s this all about?”

  “You have to ask Slatternly for the actual details, but on the set of I think The Roots of Heaven our man Flynn was trying to dry out … so drunk he could barely stand. Memorizing lines wasn’t going too well. So the studio ordered everyone to help out. Prevent him from drinking, more like it. Dumped out his cache of bottles. Watched him between takes. And so on.”

  Watching Johnny squeeze half a lemon into the shaker, Winston felt his tongue contract. “Anyway, no fool, Flynn had a friend who delivered orchard fresh oranges ‘for health,’ and they’d all been injected with shots of vodka. Used a hypodermic needle so that no one would suspect a thing. Kept him suitably pie-eyed while the studio imagined he was on the road to clean and sober living. So they’re atomic oranges, I guess.”

  “Here, this nectar will cure what ails you.” Johnny handed the tall glass to Winston. Love bloomed like a flower, and then the petals fell, sang Miss Washington.

  They clinked glasses. “Salut,” Johnny said.

  “To your health,” Winston said, and took a trial sip. The cocktail was tangy yet sweet, just as Johnny had promised, and yet had no kick.

  The Earl offered to take the Black Prince on a tour of the kingdom, to study the lay of the land and meet the little people.

  Winston in tow, he started toward the balcony. “We’ll take a gander at the highlights as well as the lowlights,” he said.

  Parked in a corner near the balcony, a hairy man wore a belted bathing suit and nothing else. He had apparently brought his own nylon strap lawn chair from which to view the room. Straining its aluminum frame, cocktail resting on his abdomen, he was none other than a tubby Hogarth grotesque or a figure of horror in a wax museum. But animated, an automaton. Winston did not have to guess; he’d just seen the photo on the door. The man’s pale eraser nipples leapt out from an inky mat of hair. Winston’s eyes were captivated and appalled by the man’s companion, who, he knew, might instigate a stampede in the light of day. Deplorable. Here, the infamous protégé was dressed in a short indigo blue kimono kept loosely tied to reveal a bikini, navy blue with yellow polka dots; a fine line of downy hair ran along the soft thin torso. The bikini top was not stuffed and the bottom bulged. The combination was obscene, Winston thought, indecent. As brazen and unnatural as Nero, the fat man rested his hand on his date’s hairy and sinewy thigh. Swallowing a titter, Winston chided himself for his lack of sophistication: clearly, no one else saw the scene as untoward.

  “Miss Aadland here finds our bustling city by the sea something of a bore,” Johnny said to Winston.

  “Well, it’s no Beverly Hil
ls, I suppose,” Winston nodded, sipping eagerly from his cocktail. He was examining the bright yellow strands of wool she wore as hair, and the garish makeup: its over-emphatic colours—pink pearl lips, a rouge orb on each cheek, a dark flock of summertime freckles—were a cartoon of a teenaged girl.

  The couple had been speaking to a man with a camera hanging from his neck. He’d turned to Essex and the Black Prince as they came close and blinded them for an instant with the bulb’s white flash. “Greetings, gentlemen, Bill McBride, Ace Detective Agency,” he’d said, holding out his hand. “The alarmed parents of a certain young lady have hired me to keep an eye out….”

  “You know, honey, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.”

  Bette Davis, in a hoop skirt, pouting and spoiled as she had played it in Jezebel, was explaining why she’d bothered to make an appearance. A moment before, Winston, feeling looser now that he was nearly finished his second Judy Canova Collins, had mentioned that Errol Flynn did not actually star with her in that movie. He had thought to say she didn’t look like Miss Bette, either, but changed his mind. It was rude; and he was certainly no double for Errol Flynn. Still, her makeup was pallid and thick. Pie dough. No hint of Dickie’s talent in evidence. Winston had first tried to place her as a nun or a Puritan—all drawn unsmiling features and severely restrained hair—but could recall none from the Flynn repertoire.

  Bette held a cigarette between her scarlet-tipped fingers and leaned heavily against the kitchen counter. She radiated gardenia. Turning to her girlfriend Peggy La Rue Satterlee, she exclaimed, “Sister, what sad times we live in. Don’t anyone know that a gentleman ought to offer to light a lady’s cigarette?”

  “Well, you’re looking as lovely and sprightly as ever, Bette, but you ain’t no lady,” Essex said. He held out a lighter and expertly flipped it open.