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by Thomas M. Disch

  Finally, he realized, it was his own moment and could not be shared any more than it could be, in just the same way, repeated.

  It never was repeated, that moment, even approximately. Eventually he was able to forget what it had been like and only remembered the remembering of it.

  Some years later Boz and Milly were sitting out on their balcony at sunset. Neither had changed radically since Peanut’s birth. Boz was perhaps a bit heavier than Milly but it would have been hard to say whether this was from his having gained or Milly having lost. Milly was a supervisor now, and had a seat, besides, on three different committees.

  Boz said, “Do you remember our special building?”

  “What building is that?”

  “The one over there. With the three windows.” Boz pointed to the right where gigantic twin apartments framed a vista westward of rooftops, cornices, and watertanks. Some of the buildings probably dated back to the New York of Boss Tweed; none were new.

  Milly shook her head. “There are lots of buildings.”

  “The one just in back of the right-hand corner of that big yellow-brick thing with the funny temple hiding its watertank. See it?”

  “Mm. There?”

  “Yes. You don’t remember it?”

  “Vaguely. No.”

  “We’d just moved in here and we couldn’t really afford the place, so for the first year it was practically bare. I kept after you about our buying a houseplant, and you said we’d have to wait. Does it start to come back?”

  “Mistily.”

  “Well, the two of us would come out here regularly and look out at the different buildings and try and figure out exactly which street each of them would be on and whether we knew any of them from sidewalk level.”

  “I remember now! That’s the one that the windows were always closed. But that’s all I remember about it.”

  “Well, we made up a story about it. We said that after maybe five years one of the windows would be opened just enough so we’d be able to see it from here, an inch or two. Then the next day it would be closed again.”

  “And then?” She was by now genuinely and pleasantly puzzled.

  “And then, according to our story, we’d watch it very carefully every day to see if that window was ever opened again. That’s how it became our houseplant. It was something we looked after the same way.”

  “Did you keep watching it, in fact?”

  “Sort of. Not every day. Every now and then.”

  “Was that the whole story?”

  “No. The end of the story was that one day, maybe another five years later, we’d be walking along an unfamiliar street and we’d recognize the building and go up and ring the bell and the super would answer it and we’d ask him why, five years before, that window had been open.”

  “And what would he say?” From her smile it was clear that she remembered, but she asked out of respect for the wholeness of the tale.

  “That he hadn’t thought anyone had ever noticed. And break into tears. of gratitude.”

  “It’s a pretty story. I should feel guilty for having forgotten it. Whatever made you think of it today?”

  “That’s the real end of the story. The window was open. The middle window.”

  “Really? It’s closed now.”

  “But it was open this morning. Ask Peanut. I pointed it out to her so I’d have a witness.”

  “It’s a happy ending, certainly.” She touched the back of her hand to his cheek where he was experimenting with sideburns.

  “I wonder why it was open, though. After all this time.”

  “Well, in five years we can go and ask.”

  He turned, smiling, to face her, and with the same gesture, touched her cheek, gently, and just for now they were happy. They were together again, on the balcony, on a summer evening, and they were happy.

  Boz and Milly. Milly and Boz.

  Angouleme

  There were seven Alexandrians involved in the Battery plot—Jack, who was the youngest and from the Bronx, Celeste DiCecca, Sniffles and Mary Jane, Tancred Miller. Amparo (of course), and of course, the leader and mastermind. Bill Harper, better known as Little Mister Kissy Lips. Who was passionately, hopelessly in love with Amparo. Who was nearly thirteen (she would be, fully, by September this year), and breasts just beginning. Very very beautiful skin, like lucite. Amparo Martinez.

  Their first, nothing operation was in the East 60’s, a broker or something like that. All they netted was cufflinks, a watch, a leather satchel that wasn’t leather after all, some buttons, and the usual lot of useless credit cards. He stayed calm though the whole thing, even with Sniffles slicing off buttons, and soothing. None of them had the nerve to ask. though they all wondered, how often he’d been through this scene before. What they were about wasn’t an innovation. It was partly that, the need to innovate, that led them to think up the plot. The only really memorable part of the holdup was the name laminated on the cards, which was, weirdly enough, Lowen, Richard W. An omen (the connection being that they were all at the Alexander Lowen School), but of what?

  Little Mister Kissy Lips kept the cufflinks for himself, gave the buttons to Amparo (who gave them to her uncle), and donated the rest (the watch was a piece of crap) to the Conservation booth outside the Plaza right where he lived.

  His father was a teevee executive. In, as he would quip, both senses. They had got married young, his mama and papa, and divorced soon after but not before he’d come to fill out their quota. Papa, the executive, remarried, a man this time and somewhat more happily. Anyhow it lasted long enough that the offspring, the leader and mastermind, had to learn to adjust to the situation, it being permanent. Mama simply went down to the Everglades and disappeared, sploosh.

  In short, he was well to do. Which is how, more than by overwhelming talent, he got into the Lowen School in the first place. He had the right kind of body though, so with half a desire there was no reason in the city of New York he couldn’t grow up to be a professional dancer, even a choreographer. He’d have the connections for it, as Papa was fond of pointing out.

  For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America.

  The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years.

  Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possib
le. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised.

  “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.”

  But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.

  They settled on the Battery because, one, none of them ever were there ordinarily; two, it was posh and at the same time relatively, three, uncrowded, at least once the night shift were snug in their towers tending their machines. The night shift seldom ate their lunches down in the park.

  And, four, because it was beautiful, especially now at the beginning of summer. The dark water, chromed with oil, flopping against the buttressed shore; the silences blowing in off the Upper Bay, silences large enough sometimes that you could sort out the different noises of the city behind them, the purr and quaver of the skyscrapers, the ground-shivering mysterioso of the expressways, and every now and then the strange sourceless screams that are the melody of New York’s theme song; the blue-pink of sunsets in a visible sky; the people’s faces, calmed by the sea and their own nearness to death, line up in rhythmic rows on the green benches. Why even the statues looked beautiful here, as though someone had believed in the statues in the Cloisters, so long ago.

  His favorite was the gigantic killer-eagle landing in the middle of the monoliths in the memorial for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen killed in World War II. The largest eagle, probably, in all Manhattan, his talons ripped apart what was surely the largest artichoke.

  Amparo, who went along with some of Miss Couplard’s ideas, preferred the more humanistic qualities of the memorial (him on top and an angel gently probing an enormous book with her sword) for Verrazzano, who was not, as it turned out, the contractor who put up the bridge that had, so famously, collapsed. Instead, as the bronze plate in back proclaimed:

  IN APRIL 1524 THE FLORENTINE-BORN NAVIGATOR

  VERRAZZANO LED THE FRENCH CARAVEL LA DAUPHINE

  TO THE DISCOVERY OF

  THE HARBOR OF NEW YORK

  AND NAMED THESE SHORES ANGOULEME

  IN HONOR OF FRANCIS I KING OF FRANCE

  “Angouleme” they all agreed, except Tancred, who favored the more prevalent and briefer name, was much classier. Tancred was ruled out of order and the decision became unanimous.

  It was there, by the statue, looking across the bay of Angouleme to Jersey, that they took the oath that bound them to perpetual secrecy. Whoever spoke of what they were about to do, unless he were being tortured by the Police, solemnly called upon his co-conspirators to insure his silence by other means. Death. All revolutionary organizations take similar precautions, as the history unit on Modern Revolutions had made clear.

  How he got the name: it had been Papa’s theory that what modern life cried out for was a sweetening of old-fashioned sentimentality. Ergo, among all the other indignities this theory gave rise to, scenes like the following: “Who’s my Little Mister Kissy Lips!” Papa would bawl out, sweetly, right in the middle of Rockefeller Center (or a restaurant, or in front of the school), and he’d shout right back, “I am!” At least until he knew better.

  Mama had been, variously, “Rosebud,” “Peg O’ My Heart,” and (this only at the end) “The Snow Queen.” Mama, being adult, had been able to vanish with no other trace than the postcard that still came every Xmas postmarked from Key Largo, but Little Mister Kissy Lips was stuck with the New Sentimentality willy-nilly. True, by age seven he’d been able to insist on being called “Bill” around the house (or, as Papa would have it, “Just Plain Bill”). But that left the staff at the Plaza to contend with, and Papa’s assistants, schoolmates, anyone who’d ever heard the name. Then a year ago, aged ten and able to reason, he laid down the new law—that his name was Little Mister Kissy Lips, the whole awful mouthful, each and every time. His reasoning being that if anyone would be getting his face rubbed in shit by this it would be Papa, who deserved it. Papa didn’t seem to get the point, or else he got it and another point besides, you could never be sure how stupid or how subtle he really was, which is the worst kind of enemy.

  Meanwhile at the nationwide level the New Sentimentality had been a rather overwhelming smash. “The Orphans,” which Papa produced and sometimes was credited with writing, pulled down the top Thursday evening ratings for two years. Now it was being overhauled for a daytime slot. For one hour every day our lives were going to be a lot sweeter, and chances were Papa would be a millionaire or more as a result. On the sunny side this meant that he’d be the son of a millionaire. Though he generally had contempt for the way money corrupted everything it touched, he had to admit that in certain cases it didn’t have to be a bad thing. It boiled down to this (which he’d always known): that Papa was a necessary evil.

  This was why every evening when Papa buzzed himself into the suite he’d shout, “Where’s my Little Mister Kissy Lips,” and he’d reply, “Here, Papa!” the cherry on this sundae of love was a big wet kiss, and then one more for their new “Rosebud,” Jimmy Ness. (Who drank, and was not in all likelihood going to last much longer.) They’d all three sit down to the nice family dinner Jimmyness had cooked, and Papa would tell them about the cheerful, positive things that had happened that day at CBS, and Little Mister Kissy Lips would tell all about the bright fine things that had happened to him. Jimmy would sulk. Then Papa and Jimmy would go somewhere or just disappear into the private Everglades of sex, and Little Mister Kissy Lips would buzz himself out into the corridor (Papa knew better than to be repressive about hours), and within half an hour he’d be at the Verrazzano statue with the six other Alexandrians, five if Celeste had a lesson, to plot the murder of the victim they’d all finally agreed on.

  No one had been able to find out his name. They called him Alyona Ivanovna, after the old pawnbroker woman that Raskolnikov kills with an ax.

  The spectrum of possible victims had never been wide. The common financial types of the area would be carrying credit cards like Lowen, Richard W., while the generality of pensioners filling the benches were even less tempting. As Miss Couplard had explained, our economy was being refeudalized and cash was going the way of the ostrich, the octopus, and the moccasin flower.

  It was such extinctions as these, but especially seagulls, that were the worry of the first lady they’d considered, a Miss Kraus, unless the name at the bottom of her hand-lettered poster (STOP THE SLAUGHTER of The Innocents!! etc.) belonged to someone else. Why, if she were Miss Kraus, was she wearing what seemed to be the old-fashioned diamond ring and gold band of a Mrs.? But the more crucial problem, which they couldn’t see how to solve was: was the diamond real?

  Possibility Number Two was in the tradition of the original Orphans of the Storm, the Gish sisters. A lovely semiprofessional who whiled away the daylight pretending to be blind and serenading the benches. Her pathos was rich, if a bit worked-up; her repertoire was archaeological; and her gross was fair, especially when the rain added its own bit of too-much. However: Sniffles (who’d done this research) was certain she had a gun tucked away under the rags.

  Three was the least poetic possibility, just the concessionaire in back of the giant eagle selling Fun and Synthamon. His appeal was commercial. But he had a licensed Weimaraner, and though Weimaraners can be dealt with, Amparo liked them.

  “You’re just a Romantic,” Little Mister Kissy Lips said. “Give me one good reason.”

  “His eyes,” she said. “They’
re amber. He’d haunt us.”

  They were snuggling together in one of the deep embrasures cut into the stone of Castle Clinton, her head wedged into his armpit, his fingers gliding across the lotion on her breasts (summer was just beginning). Silence, warm breezes, sunlight on water, it was all ineffable, as though only the sheerest of veils intruded between them and an understanding of something (all this) really meaningful. Because they thought it was their own innocence that was to blame, like a smog in their souls’ atmosphere, they wanted more than ever to be rid of it at times, like this, when they approached so close.

  “Why not the dirty old man, then?” she asked, meaning Alyona.

  “Because he is a dirty old man.”

  “That’s no reason. He must take in at least as much money as that singer.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” What he meant wasn’t easy to define. It wasn’t as though he’d be too easy to kill. If you’d seen him in the first minutes of a program, you’d know he was marked for destruction by the second commercial. he was the defiant homesteader, the crusty senior member of a research team who understood Algol and Fortran but couldn’t read the secrets of his own heart. He was the Senator from South Carolina with his own peculiar brand of integrity but a racist nevertheless. Killing that sort was too much like one of Papa’s scripts to be a satisfying gesture of rebellion.

  But what he said, mistaking his own deeper meaning, was: “It’s because he deserves it, because we’d be doing society a favor. Don’t ask me to give reasons.”

  “Well, I won’t pretend I understand that, but do you know what I think, Little Mister Kissy Lips?” She pushed his hand away.