They swayed to syncopated Ellington. Despite the air-conditioning, they warmed in each other’s arms.
“Popular music,” Bari eventually said, halting him and nodding at the stereo.
“Meaning?”
“Ellington was a jazzman. Jazz is an American invention, born in whorehouses and gaming casinos. But you find it listenable, this bastard child of”— wrinkling her nose in a fetching parody of high-minded distaste—“pop culture.”
“Sure, I like it. Much of it, anyway. To what should we be dancing? Gregorian chant? Bach? Wagner?” He smiled. The notion that a man of his education and taste could appreciate only concerti and sonatas was absurd.
“You think this stuff, our grandparents’ pop music, is good?”
“A lot of it. Ellington, almost always.”
“Then isn’t it possible that The Mick’s favorite music—some of it, at least—could also be good?”
Xavier laughed. “You’ve turned Socratic on me. I guess it could. Why don’t we find out for ourselves?”
“How?”
“By replacing the Duke with one of young Menaker’s hoodluminati bands.”
An inspired idea. Xavier visited The Mick’s room, riffled through his collection, and returned with the CD Subways by a group called Up Periscope.
Off the turntable came “Mood Indigo”; then, out of the player next to it, came a raucous love song, “Tickling the Man in the Boat,” followed by “Dangler’s Fandango,” “My Bleeding Beauty,” and “Sexual Secrets of the Higher Primates,” this last featuring the refrain “Hugga-mugga, hugga-mugga, / I always did think / I’d be in the pink / If I gave her a banana tonight.”
Xavier didn’t know if Up Periscope was a favorite of Mikhail’s, but scratches on the CD case suggested that the disk got a lot of play.
“Enough,” Bari pleaded.
“You see,” Xavier said, removing Subways and putting the Duke’s sophisticated swing back on, “despite what Alaïa claims, there is vulgarity, demoralizing vulgarity, and these yahoos”—waving the CD’s play list—“typify it.”
“Try another of Mikhail’s favorites, Xavier.”
“Another?”
“Try one by that band whose concert he took in. It has to be better than”—nodding at the Up Periscope disk—“that.”
“It’s all gangsterish garbage, Bari. Why waste any more of our time on it?”
Acting on principle, he returned Subways to The Mick’s room and pointedly closed the door. Then, sitting on the carpet beside his coffee table, he and Bari ate. The candlelight dancing in Bari’s eyes flickered to the rhythms of “Solitude,” “Satin Doll,” and “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good.” Xavier felt that they had outwitted vulgarity, that the woman with him was an Eve without flaw, that the world was well-ordered and serene.
*
“Marry me, Bari,” said Xavier. His heart was pounding like the timpani section in an overture by Tchaikovsky. Despite the perfection of the evening thus far, he quite sensibly did not expect either a straight yes or an outright no. Bari was not a predictable quantity. Her unpredictability was part of the reason he’d fallen in love with her, but the part, yes, that most troubled, sometimes even dismayed, him.
“Why?” She put her plate into the dishwasher and turned on him eyes as large as Andalusian olives.
He took her hand and led her back to the sofa.
There, he used all the time-honored formulae for winning over a coy mistress, not forgetting heartfelt avowals of undying love and crafty updatings of the carpe diem snowjobs of Marvell, Lovelace, and Suckling.
“Xavier, Xavier,” Bari said. “We’ve already ‘sported’ us while we may and are ‘like’ to do so again.”
Xavier was glad to hear it, but assured her that it wasn’t only the slaking of his immediate lust that mattered, but also the forging of a permanent bond with the legal imprimatur of the state.
“Why?” she asked again.
Love, he began. Love, he continued. Love, he concluded. (Her questions were confusing him.)
“Look,” she said, putting her hands on his collarbones. “I’ve got this hunch that you see yourself as a superior specimen of Salonika’s maledom and me as your female counterpart. The First Man and First Lady, so to speak, of the Oconee intelligentsia cum Beautiful People.”
“Bari—”
“Forget that some would regard ‘Oconee intelligentsia’ as an oxymoron.”
“That’s not how I see us. I want you to marry me because of the exaltation I feel when I’m with you. But even if I did see us as a well-matched pair of superior specimens, what would be wrong with that? Maybe we are.”
Bari went to the antique secretary in Xavier’s living room and picked up his well-thumbed copy of Nietzsche. “Do you want me to be your partner in some egotistical eugenics experiment?”
“My partner in what?”
Opening the book and paging quickly through it, Bari said, “To quote your favorite German philosopher—or, that is, to take the words right out of his Persian mouthpiece’s mouth: ‘Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution—it is called pregnancy.’ ”
“Gak,” Xavier protested.
“Do you believe that?”
“Nietzsche was a brave and uncompromising man, but he had some blind spots, his atheism being one, his attitude toward women another.” The evening, along with the likelihood that Bari would say yes, seemed to be slipping away from him.
“Sadly, Xavier, there are too many times when you come on like that Nazi’s ass-kissing acolyte.”
“He wasn’t a Nazi. He hated Wagner for his anti-Semitism. And I’m no fawning devotee of every line he wrote.”
“No?” Smiling, Bari returned his copy of Zarathustra to its spot next to a leather-bound Bible.
“No. Most emphatically not. How could I be? He disparaged my profession. Listen: ‘Just see these superfluous ones; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper.’ And I don’t buy the ideas of the death of God, the inferiority of women, or the tawdriness and insipidity of journalism. No, I really don’t. What I do buy is Nietzsche’s arguments that although we’re nearly always less than what we should be, we always have the capacity to become Übermensch.”
“Übermensch. Overman.” Bari ran her hands through Xavier’s hair. “You’re the man I’d like over me.”
*
Later, the evening’s perfection almost restored, Xavier was loosing the strap on Bari’s gown (with the same finesse with which he would dismember an imported artichoke) when his scalp began to writhe and an itch unlike any he had ever known assailed the soles of his feet and the insides of his thighs. Horrified, he hopped away from Bari, alternately clutching his head and raking his nails down the inseams of his Italian slacks. Dimly, he understood that his body chemistry, addled by his absorption of the radiation that Dr. Nesheim had told them of, was betraying him again.
“I know what’s happening.” Bari seized him to keep him from unsocketing his arm or throwing a hip out of joint. “We’ve been pretty stupid, actually.”
Xavier kept jiggling, flailing, twisting. His various itches were so excruciating they had reduced him to a spastic automaton.
After pinning his arms, Bari pushed him down onto the sectional sofa. “The dinner, the music, your silken approach to eroticism—they’ve rekindled your private Philistine Syndrome.”
“Bari, help!” He had pulled off his socks and trousers and was pivoting on the sofa cushion on the top of his head, struggling to halt the writhing of his scalp.
“We should have eaten sardines and crackers. We should’ve done the Freddy, the fish, or the funky chicken. We should’ve ripped each other’s clothes off, greased up with Crisco, and committed two dozen cheap unspeakable acts in as many minutes.”
“Bari!”
“Criminy, Xavier, we’ve been a pair of total goofballs!”
“BARI!”
Quickly, she gathered several silk ties and a twenty-fi
ve-foot extension cord and bound him half-naked to a chair. Xavier gradually calmed, meanwhile recollecting that Bari had done this to keep him from injuring himself and that animality in sexual relations had always struck him as déclassé. He continued to think so, but tonight he had reasons to forsake his Apollonian standards and to let Dionysus romp. In two dozen minutes, in fact, the itching had ceased. But only the physical itching.
“Bari,” he said, “am I going to have to move into a cold-water tenement flat? Is that what’s indicated?”
“I don’t know, lover. But you may have to redecorate.”
17
Pickup and Disposal
Environomics Unlimited took longer than Teri-Jo had expected to come after the Therac 4-J that she wanted removed from the clinic. According to the company’s telephone rep, the delay was the result of taking care of vehicle maintenance here in Oconee and a raft of backlog contracts in other parts of the country.
Eventually. a pair of men in khaki coveralls showed up, one evening between eleven and midnight, to carry away the obsolete treatment machine. One of the crew was Will, whom Terri-Jo recalled from the radium-waste pickup that had saved her reputation with her boss and so her job. The other was a young Chicano, “Gooz,” who worked with speed, efficiency, and care, as if to make up for Will’s sluggish approach. Will looked bad, sallow and exhausted, and he was touchier than he’d been before—not with Terri-Jo, but with the world in general. But Will’s irritability was no less puzzling than the truck that he and Gooz arrived in. It wasn’t a trailer truck, a van, or a panel truck, but a candy-apple-red pickup with a rollbar and enameled gunwales. It lacked markings identifying it as an EU vehicle. It lacked even a regulated medical waste sticker.
“Awl our company trucks’re tied up in this big taxic-waste jab over by Jurja,” Will said. “This un’s th’ bass’s.” With Gooz doing most of the lifting and steering, the two men removed the Therac 4-J as if it were a decommissioned deep-freeze. Neither man wore the butyl-rubber suits that had so boggled Teri-Jo on EU’s last pickup.
“Two thousand ’Mericon greenbocks,” Will said on the loading dock. Gooz, meanwhile, was tying the Therac 4-J into the loadbed. “Payable awl at wunst.”
Teri-Jo already had the check in hand. She passed it to Will. “Three thousand less expensive this time.”
“Less work,” Will said. “More likely praafit.”
“What, exactly, is your company going to do with it?”
“We’ll pull th’ source conister and send it to a low-level rad dump. Simple. Th’ rest of that thing’ll be checked for any signs of leftover radioactivity, and whot can’t be used’ll jes’ be scropt.”
Gooz shouted, “Le’z go!” He leapt down from the loadbed and climbed into the truck’s passenger seat.
“G’night, ma’am,” Will said.
Watching the truck turn out of the clinic’s delivery area, Teri-Jo suddenly felt the check she’d given Will was either too much or too little for the service just performed. She was glad to be so quickly rid of the obsolete, potentially hazardous Therac 4-J, but also vaguely dissatisfied with the paperwork given to her to sign—it seemed perfunctory, incomplete—and with her suspicion that Environomics Unlimited stood to realize a healthy profit on the discarded therapy machine, a profit unrelated to the flat $2,000 fee to remove it.
*
Over the remodeled bridge near the Hemisphere, Will drove Gooz and him straight to Satan’s Cellar, where they bumped through a series of cobblestone alleys that eventually debouched on a brick warehouse on the Cellar’s western outskirts. Oconee countryside was near enough you could smell the clayey loam of farms and hear the occasional eerie screech-owl wail. The warehouse’s narrow windows, under its eaves, were painted white or grey, or else crudely plywooded.
Gooz had dialed the truck’s radio to a Spanish-language station broadcasting from New Orleans. The station played Andalusian flamenco music: loud guitars and scale-running Gypsy cries that made your neck hair prickle, the whole shebang coated with an overlay of static. When they stopped in front of the warehouse, Will had an episode of nausea that had grown on him for the past twenty minutes. He hopped out of the truck, stumbled to the warehouse, and retched into the weeds and broken glass edging its cracked foundations. Gooz hurried over.
“Weel,” he said, “jou hokay?”
Will wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Kill that music, would ya?” Flamenco strains floated into the night: lovely, haunting, unbearable.
Gooz returned to the truck and clicked off the radio. Rotating one hand, Will told him to slip behind the steering wheel and shine the pickup’s headlamps on the building’s huge swinging doors. Gooz obeyed. Will, still shaky, stood in the overlapping cones of moted light and keyed open the doors’ padlocks.
The warehouse contained a shadowy mountain of burlap-scented soft goods and oily machinery. Gooz drove the pickup in, and the men undid the Therac 4-J’s bindings and manhandled it out of the loadbed onto the clay-dirt floor, where it crumpled with a muffled crash that lifted acrid dust and sent a platoon of rats or mice scurrying through the stacked-up crates, gunny sacks, building supplies, and machine parts.
Gooz eased the pickup out of the warehouse, back into the owl-haunted night on Satan Cellar’s edge. Will wrestled the warehouse doors shut and climbed in on the passenger’s side. “Coupla poke dens still open,” he said. “How ’bout a faceful, Gooz? Lemme stond you to some salad gas.”
“Nossir. I’m takin’ myself home.”
“Drap me off, then. ’T ain’t far from here.”
“Gonna haffa get your own ride home, Weel. I ain’t waitin’.”
“Sure. I don’t wont ya to.”
Gooz bumped the pickup back toward the river through a maze of alleys to a neon-lit enclave of pokeweed clubs. On the sidewalk in front of one of these bistros, Will waved at Gooz as Gooz headed down another alley to his wife and daughter.
18
Flamingos
Over the next few months, Xavier tried not to review all the concerts, dance recitals, art-exhibit openings, theater events, and novels that ordinarily he would have killed to attend. He traded off with Lee Stamz, the Pop Culture editor, to take assignments that, once, he would have avoided as if they were rabid chihuahuas.
He reviewed disease-of-the-week TV reruns, the latest volumes of “Garfield” and “Heathcliff” cartoons, paperback reissues of Robert E. Howard’s works, three different lounge-lizard singers at three different lounge-lizard nightspots, an Edward D. Wood, Jr. film festival at Ray Kleiner’s theater, all the laughable stand-up comics booked into Hooter’s during this period, and many other tacky amusements: the finals of the tri-state tractor pull, a designer-sleaze cyberpunk sf novel, the Brother Rutherford Q. Weems Municipal Tent Revival & Stock Market Symposium, mud wrestling at Orton’s DiscoTech, and the menus of two new (loathsome) fast-food franchises.
Back from these outings, Xavier wrote vitriolic, revulsion-drenched notices that hiccupped with contempt and hummed with outrage, that reviled and chastised. They also provoked so much angry mail that Walt Grantham, his section boss at the Urbanite, congratulated him on awakening the masses. He even encouraged him “to keep on trucking.” Circulation was up, mostly from newsstand sales and vending machines.
“I can’t keep doing this,” Xavier said.
“Sure you can. Everybody hates you, but they love how you zap them for their lowest-common-denominator tastes.”
“It’s killing me, Walt.”
“You look great. Your cheeks’re rosy, your step’s light, even your hair seems thicker.”
“Inside, I’m a hand grenade with the pin pulled.”
“Impossible. A nervous fella, an uncertain man, couldn’t write with such indignant authority.”
“I want to listen to Berg again, look at the lovely Rodins at the Upshaw, reread Middlemarch.”
“Sorry, but you can’t. I thought you and Stamz were loco when you pulled this switch, but it’s working out so
well you guys look like journalistic geniuses.”
Gak, thought Xavier, mentally machine-gunning his glumness: Gak, gak, gak, gak, gak.
It was August. Bari was in Italy, showing her winter line to international buyers at the Milan Fair. Her designer friend Romeo Gigli had invited her to the show, and she would not be back until early September. Because she had repeatedly tabled Xavier’s marriage proposal, some of his current funk, he realized, had its seeds in the fact that it was still hanging fire.
The Mick passed their long, hot summer in ways that Xavier couldn’t help seeing as unhealthy: slope-wall surfing at Skateboard City, playing computer games, listening to CDs, and reading, if you could call it that, comic books. The same old diversions that had occupied him since the conclusion of school. Impatience welled in Xavier, an impatience tinged with contempt. “Why don’t you go to the library?” he demanded.
“To check out what? Henrietta James? Fucking Scott Fitzgerald?”
“Sure. Why not? You’re smart enough.”
“Too smart to do it. Contrariwise, why don’t you go to the library?”
Xavier stalked out of Mikhail’s sanctum. He couldn’t go to the library or visit the Upshaw or put a Beethoven string quartet on the CD player. If he did, he’d react, as the boy well knew. His question had been a taunt, which Xavier resented just to the degree that it manifested The Mick’s lack of compassion. Hurt, he retreated to the living room and paged through a copy of the Instigator:
LONG AFTER CRASH,
RECOVERED AMNESIAC FIGHTER PILOT
SAYS, “ETHER ALIENS TO BLAME!”
SPEECH ANALYSIS PROVES NEW JERSEY SENATOR
IS “CHANNEL” FOR SUMERIAN PRIESTESS DEAD 3,000 YEARS
REVOLUTIONARY ZEN MASSAGE FROM ORIENT
GUARANTEED TO CURE INFERTILITY, IMPOTENCE
The Mick appeared before Xavier looking about as repentant as a would-be hoodluminatus was able. “Sorry, Uncle Xave.”
“Forget it.”
“I get deep-down fucking bored. Makes me testy.”
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