Black Elvis

by Geoffrey Becker

  "I've got a buyer for The Naked Man," I told her. "She approached me in the bathroom. That Broccoli woman."

  "This is her house."

  "I know that."

  "In the bathroom?"

  "They have the bar set up in there. Don't ask me why."

  "What did you tell her?"

  "NFS. I think she might be related to those movie people, the ones who do all the Bond films."

  "That's interesting," said Tina. She didn't like movies. Her paintings were narrative oils depicting imaginary adventures of Marco Polo: as a tourist at a provincial museum full of dusty, strange objects, or being welcomed by beautiful girls to a city that was in fact nothing but a painted set, behind which you could see the crumbling facades of the real buildings. The paintings were about perception and reality, about xenophobia, about appropriation. They took about 150 hours each, and were excruciatingly detailed—she was a big Fra Angelico fan. But the main thing about them was that they were not for sale. In the time we'd been together, she had yet to agree to sell a single one of them. She needed them all so she could try to get into a New York gallery. The irony of this did not escape either of us, although we didn't talk about it much. If she did get a fancy gallery to take her on, and they sold these pieces, it would be years before she'd have enough work for another show. With the kid, maybe longer. Of course, I loved her paintings, even the one with me in it (Marco Polo chooses to scramble off the path I'm walking along rather than confront me, even though the vegetation is all thorns and cacti and there are bees—it was one of her funnier scenes), loved having them hang on our walls when they weren't out at some show. But a commodity is a commodity, I kept telling her. If art is your business, you figure out a way to make it economically viable. You sell your work.

  "Did you eat anything? They have a lot of good stuff. Not just those designer hot dogs. There's veggie lasagna."

  "I'm not so hungry." She sniffed the cookie again.

  "You're always hungry."

  "Thank you. Am I supposed to be worried or not? Whatever you say, I'll try for that. But could you try to be consistent?"

  "Absolutely," I said. "I'll be consistent."

  "So which is it?"

  "We're not worrying." I stroked her leg. "Everything's fine."

  Maybe it really was the drugs. Back in high school, my friends and I always used to joke about the ridiculous things they wanted you to believe, that LSD would screw up your genes (not to mention make you turn into Art Linkletter's daughter and try flying off a roof). Your kids would come out with two heads, or bicycle wheels instead of feet. For whatever reason, I wasn't worried. I was certain that when I decided to have kids, despite my misspent youth, I'd be able to.

  But we couldn't, Tina and I. We started trying right after the wedding. It was late for both of us—she was thirty-four, I was forty-three—but I still expected to knock the first pitch right into the stands. Instead, I struck out swinging. We tried different positions. We monitored her temperature, circled days on the calendar, went out for romantic meals followed by elaborate desserts. After a year, we went in for tests. The results were interesting.

  Oligospermia. Astenozoospermia. Teratozoospermia. Low count, lousy swimmers, misshapen anyway. This, in spite of the fact that my college girlfriend had hit me up for three hundred dollars for an abortion, something I now considered to have been unlikely to have been related to me. Enter "Brad." "Brad" is what I called him, of course. Cryo-Logic, the company we eventually settled on, called him N311. For close to a month, Tina was glued to her computer every night, going through the profiles. Before we'd met, she'd done some computer dating, and she brought all her skills to bear on this new problem. Eye color, education, height, ancestry, religion. It was daunting.

  "I sort of want a vegetarian," she said.

  "I'm not a vegetarian," I pointed out. "Shouldn't you want someone like me?"

  "Of course," she said. "Of course."

  For more money, you could get more info. Some places allowed you to see adult photos of the guys, but I drew the line at that. I didn't want her hearing voice clips, either, although that was a possibility with an upgraded membership. What did they sound like? "Hello, my name is Brad. I like walking on the beach, sunsets, and old Billy Joel songs, from before he met Christy Brinkley. I hope you'll choose me."

  And now, Brad had begot Frick, who had somehow managed to grab onto my wife's uterine wall and ontogenically recapitulate phylogeny, moving from tadpole to fish to alien space-being (we'd seen him at the twenty-week ultrasound in all his Kubrick-esque weirdness, bigheaded and dreaming of world domination), to the restless, waiting child who liked to practice Tae Bo in my wife's stomach while she tried to paint.

  I walked her into the dining area and we looked at all the food. A platter of cheeses, the lasagna, an enormous bowl full of duck and boar sausages, three kinds of mustard, pasta salad, fruit salad, salad salad. I could see into the kitchen, where the caterer was getting ready an enormous chocolate cake.

  A commotion began in the other room. A woman shouted. People drew away and the scene revealed itself. The older painter had the younger one in a headlock from behind. "Worthless little shit," he was saying. They moved together that way, the boy's long frame tilted backward and unbalanced, his eyes tight, his red ski hat riding up on his forehead.

  "Do you believe this?" I said. "What idiots."

  "Post-ironic?" the older one was shouting. "Post-ironic?"

  "This is awful," said Tina, alarmed. "Someone needs to stop them."

  I figured it might as well be The Naked Man. I pushed through a couple of onlookers and quickly reached the two artists. "Hey!" I shouted at the older one. Bill was his name. I think it was Bill. His shirt had little flamingos all over it. Post-ironic, indeed. I pried his hands from around the kid's neck, then got between them and took a deep breath, hoping to inflate myself a size or two so he wouldn't think of messing with me.

  "Ha!" shouted Bill, his eyes lit with delight.

  "Ha ha," said the kid, behind me, who had dropped to the floor and was now getting to his feet. "Ho ho. Oh, man."

  Bill moved past me, and in a moment he and the kid were embracing like teammates who'd each had part of scoring a winning goal. Bill worked the kid's hat around with a muscular hand. "I love this guy," he said.

  "When you come to Atlanta," said the kid, "we're going to roast a pig."

  We hung around until about ten, me tossing back the wine and helping myself to the food, Tina making polite conversation with more of the guests. She'd gained twenty-five pounds so far, but I'd gained ten, easy. I thought it was the least I could do. That and making encouraging sounds for Frick, my mouth pressed against Tina's belly, something I'd done morning and night after the transfer, back when we were waiting to see if we'd gotten lucky. There were two embryos; only one had managed to hang in, which was what we'd hoped for. Frack had just been there to load the odds, which might sound kind of hard, but these are things you have to be hard about, and twins would have broken the bank for us, although we'd have sucked it up if we'd had to. I made the noises with my lips those first few days, just a quiet pop-popping, like what I imagined bubbles sounded like underwater. I didn't want to upset him, I just wanted him to feel at home. Lately, I sang classic rock and soul to him.

  Norma Broccoli walked us to the door. "It's been such a pleasure," she said. "Your work is magnificent. So controlled. Of course the artist herself is just as impressive."

  "You're only glad I didn't stage a fistfight," said Tina, smiling.

  "Absolutely. Thank you."

  Norma looked at me.

  "Sorry," I said. "She won't do it. Although, out of curiosity, I wonder how much you might be willing to pay for The Naked Man?"

  Tina blushed. "We have to go," she said.

  "Ten thousand?" I asked.

  "You look wonderful," said Norma Broccoli. "Enjoy this time. It's very special."

  The walk to the car was cold and silent. "How could you?" s
he said, when we were inside and I'd started the engine. "Paintings aren't sold that way. You know that."

  "Well, maybe they ought to be." I turned on the fan for the heater and put the car into gear and attempted to figure out where the driveway was. We'd parked in a field, and even though there was a net of bright stars glimmering above us, the night was very dark.

  "That was crass. You don't talk money to people. Your gallery does that."

  "And takes fifty percent."

  "They have bills to pay."

  "I can't believe you're worrying about your gallery's bills when you don't even have a gallery yet."

  "And I can't believe you would embarrass me like that."

  "I just wondered. In my world, everyone knows what things are worth. A cheap Mexican Stratocaster costs two to three hundred dollars, period. That kid from Atlanta wants eight thousand bucks for a portrait of his girlfriend with a fake black eye? That should fund a couple of pig roasts. I don't know—" I ran over a big rock, making the whole car bounce up and down. "Sorry."

  "Just don't strand us out here. We might never be found."

  My cell phone rang and I answered it. "Is there a fuse box or something?" Hobey asked.

  "Circuit breaker." My fingers were freezing. "In the basement. Bottom of the steps, on the right."

  "Thanks!" she said, cheerily.

  I pushed "End call." "Circuit breaker," I explained.

  "I still don't feel him," said Tina. "It's been hours and hours. It's never this long. He should be awake by now. He should be swimming around."

  "Maybe art bores him. Maybe he's meditating." Among the things we knew about Brad was that he practiced transcendental meditation. I'd thought this alone ought to disqualify him, but Tina said she got a feeling from N311. Here were some other things about him. He was five foot ten, an inch taller than me. He'd graduated from an Ivy League school, summa, with a degree in history; I had barely eked out a music degree from a second-rate college in New Jersey. He played soccer, basketball, and tennis, all competitively—I'd never been a team-sports type of guy (Tina claimed that this part of his résumé meant nothing to her, but I wondered if the prospect of reproduction had somehow brought out the latent cheerleader in her). His hair was the same color as mine, which was something. His favorite color was orange. That one had really gotten me. I didn't think I had a favorite color. I liked certain colors at certain times. It seemed unreasonable to ask such a question without any context. But orange? What kind of guy would pick orange? I suspected this answer. It was perhaps the one thing I had on Brad—I was certain he'd lied about his favorite color.

  "Hey!" I shouted. "Wake up!"

  She put her hand on her belly for a few moments, then looked at me. "Nothing."

  "It's OK," I told her. "Really, I'm sure of it. He's come all this way, he's not going to give up now."

  "You don't know that," she said. "You don't know anything for certain."

  "Did I ever tell you about the mouse? Years ago, back when I lived in Brooklyn, back in my twenties, we had a mouse problem. It was October, and they were coming in to get warm and I was trapping them at the rate of three or four a day. Then one night I hear this weird sound from the next room. I figure out it's a mouse, only it's got a trap on its tail. I mean, there's really nothing wrong with the mouse at all other than fear, but it's got this big Victory-brand trap attached to it slowing it down and making it impossible for it to slip into some nook or crack in the woodwork. My brilliant solution was to try to drown it. I got this forceps we had lying around to use as a roach clip, and I picked the poor guy up by the trap and dunked him into a Chock full o'Nuts can full of water. It was horrible. I still remember every second of it. He struggled in there and even cried out—I'm serious, I heard little mouse screams from inside the can. It must have taken a full minute, or even longer. It seemed like an hour, I know that."

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  "Because." I watched another departing guest's headlights approach us, momentarily filling our car with light—the side of Tina's face appearing and disappearing before my eyes—then pass away along the driveway. "I'd thought if I just stuck that mouse underwater, he'd turn off—go out like a candle or something. But it's not like that at all. Living things want to live, more than anything. They want to live. It might be the most powerful force in the universe."

  She took my hand and gave it a squeeze. "That's a sad story," she said.

  At the hotel, there were free cookies out in the lobby, so we took some up to our room and ate them on the bed. She cried a little, but not too much, and I turned on the television to see if they had HBO, which they did, but it was some sex show about middle-aged swingers, and so instead I turned on TV Land where there was Andy Griffith. We both thought Barney was one of the great TV characters of all time, and in this particular episode, he was dealing with a station house full of dogs. We'd been talking about getting a dog for Frick, and I said something about that, but she didn't answer. Looking over at her, I realized she'd fallen asleep.

  I adjusted her shirt a little—it looked like it was pulling at her around the neck. Then I let my hand rest on her belly. I had no idea who The Naked Man was supposed to be, exactly—just some resident of a far-off place where people walked around naked. Someone for Marco Polo to encounter, that's all—an extra. In the painting, my eyes had a nervous quality, and I thought back to how strange I'd felt, standing in the studio of Tina's tiny house, the one she'd sold when we got married, staring at the wall pretending to be naked while she took my photo. I was a lousy actor, even in paint.

  "Sugar pie," I whispered. I didn't want to wake Tina up. "Honey bunch. You know that I love you. I can't help myself. I love you and nobody else."

  Something inside her—a finger? a foot?—drew a line straight along my palm.

  Since I was still dressed, and not tired, I decided to take a little walk. I eased quietly out of the room and down the hall to the elevator. In the lobby, a guy in a business suit was sitting staring into the big, roaring fire in the fireplace like he expected it to talk to him. I pushed open the heavy glass doors. It was still and wet and cold outside. I walked a few blocks toward the center of town, thinking maybe I'd get something else to eat, but then I turned around because I wasn't hungry and I didn't want to get that far away from my family. There was a store directly across from the hotel that had a sign advertising "Typewriter and Calculator Repair." I'd been wanting to look in the window. I was in awe of a business even more hopeless than mine. Calculator repair? There they were, lined up on shelves, maybe ten of them, most with rolls of paper so you could have a printed record of your calculations. There were some typewriters, too. I recognized an IBM Selectric, as well as a couple of Royal Electrics, and even an old Corona portable from the thirties. They had ribbons for sale, little boxes hanging from a display rack. Of course, the world was full of calculators and typewriters, and even if most people never gave them a second thought, it stood to reason that there would be someone out there to look after them, to care about them, to be in charge of their little deaths and resurrections.

  Black Days

  Desire had suddenly gone quiet, and the Professor could tell what was coming. They were on the train from Castelpoggio back to Rome, riding facing each other in window seats. She seemed to be working through some deep thought, her eyes narrowed, her fingers pressed together almost as if in prayer.

  "What?" he finally asked. Out the window to his left, hedgerows flew by in a blur of greens and browns.

  "This train," she said. "I'm getting something."

  He looked up through the bars of the luggage rack at their two wheelie bags, hers pink, his black, and his guitar case, which he'd lugged all the way across the ocean for nothing. An announcement came over the intercom, first in Italian, then in English.

  "A little girl. I'm feeling her."

  "I swear," said the Professor, "it sounds like she's saying the train god is in carriage eleven. What the heck do you think a trai
n god is?"

  "What's the matter? You don't believe in the train god?"

  "Not since I was little," said the Professor. He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. It had gone stiff on the plane on the flight over, and had only gotten worse since then.

  "The train god watches over you when you take a train. It's a simple concept."

  He tried to smile. Castelpoggio had been a disaster. There had been no Blues Brothers Band, there had been no Les McCann. Instead there had just been the two of them, left to fend for themselves in a hilltop town in Umbria that had no particular attractions. One hotel, two restaurants. Black Days, the festival for which Desire Jones had supposedly been booked as a supporting act, had been canceled months ago. No one had even bothered to tell them.

  She was staring at him.

  "What little girl?" he asked, wearily.

  "On her way to the camps. Down these very tracks."

  "Desire," he said. "What are you talking about?"

  "World War Two, darling. The murder of sixteen million children."

  "It's six million, and the camps were in Germany. And Poland."

  "You're wrong," she said. "You don't know your history."

  "I teach history," he pointed out.

  "Taught, don't you mean? I'm surprised they let you." She took a Tucs cracker out of the bag they'd brought with them and ate it. She was in her midfifties, although she'd never told him her age exactly, older than he by nearly twenty years. They'd been playing music together since meeting at a blues jam last September, sleeping together since January, right after he'd come back from his Christmas visit to New Jersey to see his kids, which was also when she'd told him she'd lined up her "European Tour."

  "This was a little black girl," she said.

  "In Italy? During the war?"

  "She got taken away to the camp. Apocalypse."