King of the World

by Thomas Berger

  “Women,” said Harry, perhaps fortunately paying no attention to Cornell’s embarrassment, “are more intelligent than men, but less emotional. They have to run the world; they do not have the time to squander on personality. They must deal with things, with issues, and with people as things and issues. How could the President, for example, cope with international problems if she were personally vulnerable to every little slight, real or imagined? You must admit, if you are honest, that the fundamental concern of a man is his own vanity.” Harry smiled. “Now, of course, that, or rather what comes from it, can be charming, so charming, in fact, that it can even lure certain women from the stern path of duty—”

  Cornell frowned. “I’ve never managed that,” he said. “I’ve read about it in novels or seen it in pictures, but in life I can’t recall distracting a woman for more than fifteen minutes. Or maybe I’ve always met the wrong ones. Raving egomaniacs, most of them. You listen to them talk about their work and politics and sports and their bank accounts and their fascinating friends—whom, by the way, you never meet, any more than you get access to their bank accounts—and then you try to talk about what interests you or even about your troubles, I mean, you can be in the most distress, and what do they do? Listen? No, they begin to paw you.”

  He restrained himself. He was getting too bitter.

  “Women, Harry,” he said, “are by nature very selfish people.”

  For some reason Harry’s genial smile broadened into almost a laugh. Then he quickly straightened his mouth to say: “Well, I’m just acting as devil’s advocate here. We should know our enemy—that’s my motto.”

  “Enemy?” asked Cornell. “That’s a bit strong, isn’t it? They certainly can be painful, but then so can one’s fellow men. One thing can’t be said of most women: they’re not spiteful or backbiting. And then if you think of it, what’s the alternative? What kind of world would it be if men ran it? Mary!”

  Harry squinted at him. “You’re talking treason to the cause, now, aren’t you? Isn’t that what your bunch wants? ‘Power to the men!’” He balled and raised his little fist.

  Cornell said quietly: “There you go again, Harry. You’re doing it again. I’m just not going to argue any more. If you insist on calling me a male-liberation revolutionary, in spite of my protestations to the contrary, what can I do? It’s impossible to prove you’re not something. I just hope the court is not as stubborn as you.”

  Harry smiled again. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that you don’t seem all that upset by the accusation.”

  “I try to control my emotions,” said Cornell. “I used to get hysterical a lot when I was younger, but that sort of thing ages you rapidly. I’m going to be thirty soon. I have to get some dignity to replace my lost youth.”

  He stared at Harry. “One of those detectives you mentioned said I was a cool customer…. How did you know I was a head taller than either of them?”

  “Huh?”

  “You mentioned the detectives.”

  “Oh. Well, they brought you in here last night, didn’t they?”

  “I was unconscious.”

  “Yeah, and they took off your clothes and put you in the uniform. They looked like rough customers. I pretended to be asleep.”

  “Did you see them give me the truth-serum shot?”

  “I imagine you got that at the precinct station.”

  “Was I talking when they brought me in here?”

  Harry shrugged. “Well, yeah. I heard the name ‘Charlie,’ to be honest.”

  “Oh, Mary.”

  “You couldn’t help it,” Harry said sympathetically. “You probably named the others, too.”

  “Poor Charlie,” Cornell groaned. “I wish I could be sure, though. There are lots of Charlies.”

  “Charlie Harrison. He works at your company,” Harry said.

  “I just told you that.”

  “You said it last night, too,” Harry replied quickly. “I was just confirming it when I asked you before. I was hoping you gave them the wrong name. My heart really fell when I heard you confirm it now.”

  “You think he’s been picked up?”

  “It’s simple to find out,” said Harry and went to the steam-pipe and tapped at some length. Then he listened to the brief reply. He shook his head in admiration.

  “Those fellows know more about this jail than the superintendent, I’ll bet.”

  “Well?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Harry. “Charlie’s in a cell near them.”

  Cornell lowered his head to his knees. He had not wanted certainty. He had asked for it in that hypocrisy by which one hopes to delude fate.

  “Life has been pretty rotten to him,” he said to his lap. “He was once a streetwalker.”

  “That’s only a misdemeanor,” Harry said in an automatic, official kind of voice.

  [The female hyena] is dominant over the male…. She is larger, stronger, takes leadership. And as if to emphasise the irregularity she has through natural selection developed false testicles, masses of fat; and her attenuated clitoris hangs down in excellent imitation of a penis.

  ROBERT ARDREY, 1972

  4

  CORNELL COULD NOT get to sleep. The narrow cot, the thin mattress, the sour odor of the blanket, the memory of the greasy mess of the third feeding, were scarcely conducive to rest, nor was his recurrent guilt about Charlie. But he was kept awake by thoughts of Harry.

  As Cornell had prepared for bed—a splash of cold water on the face, a wetted finger for a toothbrush—Harry as usual did nothing about himself. Harry did not visibly wash and yet looked clean; had not eaten all day and yet seemed healthy; had been generous, warm, tender—and aggressive, cold, hostile. He was a mercurial type. You never knew where you stood with him.

  The cell had got chilly and damp, or perhaps it had always been like that and Cornell took notice only when he was faced with the period of compulsory repose. After the trays from the final serving had been handed out through the slot, Harry informed him that the light would shortly be extinguished and the cell kept dark for seven hours.

  Cornell shivered, went to the steampipe and felt it: dead-cold iron.

  Harry spoke sharply: “What are you doing?”

  “It’s cold in here.”

  “Let that pipe alone,” said Harry. “Gillie and Randy will think it’s a message.”

  “I just felt it,” Cornell said. “I didn’t tap.”

  “Just get away from there.”

  Cornell’s hand went to his hip. “Listen here—” He did not intend to take orders from a rapist. But then his basic reason overcame his pride. It made no sense for them to be at each other’s throats within this narrow enclosure. He dropped his hand and smiled.

  But Harry leaped across the cell and seized the bosom of Cornell’s dress.

  “Don’t you ever talk to me in that tone,” Harry cried. “You little punk!” Though he was considerably shorter than Cornell, he pulled Cornell in close, then thrust him away.

  Amazingly enough, this attack did not threaten Cornell’s control. He astonished himself by going limp. He was operating on some sort of instinct.

  “When I tell you something I don’t want any lip,” Harry said furiously. He pulled Cornell in again, nose below his cellmate’s chin. “Get that and get it good, buster.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Having blurted this unthinkingly, Cornell remembered the source of his instinct: years before, he had had a teacher who handled him similarly.

  Harry roared: “You fresh punk.” He brought up his knee and drove it at Cornell’s groin, but owing to the difference in their heights, he struck too low—a miscalculation the teacher had never made, nor for that matter Dr. Prine, who often employed this technique in her therapy.

  Still being politic, however, Cornell pretended he had been damaged, howled, clutched his midsection, fell onto the cot, and wept. The light went out shortly thereafter.

  Eventually Cornell straightened out, pulled up the blanket, pulled
it down again slightly after he smelled the leading edge, and lay there looking into blackness. Harry remained silent. Cornell considered apologizing. He had had no ulterior purpose in addressing Harry as a woman. Pure accident. Violent and female were complimentary adjectives, as even Harry would admit. In blunt-instrument and knife murders, cherchez la femme was the investigatory principle. Yet as Harry had pointed out, they were smaller than we—though not than Harry himself, who was only five-four or five. He must have raped a tiny woman. He was undoubtedly helped by surprise. Perhaps he had been armed. He did not seem terribly strong, could never have pushed Cornell around that way without cooperation. Which was another reason for Cornell’s failure to fight back: he had not felt seriously threatened.

  Cornell frowned, and was conscious of the lump on his head: diminished, less sore now, but still tender. Corelli had been strong enough to give him that, but a blackjack would be effective in the fist of a child.

  Harry was still quiet. You couldn’t even hear his breathing. Should Cornell apologize? It would be awfully uncomfortable if they stayed on the outs, with only nine feet square between them. But then it really wasn’t fair if Harry considered himself the injured party. He didn’t own that steampipe. Pervert! Cornell stuck out his tongue in the dark. The blanket had ridden up again and he got a very unpleasant sensation as he tasted the wool.

  Poor Charlie was now in jail too. What must he think of Cornell? Perhaps Harry could send a message through the steampipe explaining the seeming betrayal. Else Charlie might think it the issue of spite. No man could be blamed for what he said under truth serum. However, Cornell was relieved that he had not been tortured into making the revelation. That would have led to the same end, and he would have suffered considerable pain on the way. He abhorred pain. That’s what he so hated about sexual intercourse: it hurt.

  “Hyperaesthesia is a symptom of your sickness,” Dr. Prine had told him.

  “But it hurts!”

  “You only think it hurts,” the good doctor would say.

  “But if I think it does, what’s the difference?”

  “Georgie, Georgie…” Then she would proceed to hurt him.

  Cornell had lost his virginity at eighteen. In his last year of secondary school he had majored in art appreciation. His term paper in the senior year dealt with the meaning of that enigmatic simper on the face of Leonarda’s Mono Liso. “Leonarda was a Lesbian,” wisecracked Jimmie Wilhelm, a smart-alecky classmate. “That made Mono laugh.” But Cornell had been very solemn about it, humorless adolescent that he then was. He remembered writing: “Leonarda was undoubtedly madly in love with Signor Liso, but he was promised to another. Mono, however, was touched by the devotion of the great painter, and his smile is one that endeavors to apply the unctuousness of pity.” The teacher struck out the misused word and red-penciled “unction” in the margin. She gave him a B-plus for the paper, the highest grade he had ever gained.

  For a while thereafter Cornell had worn his hair in the style of Mono Liso’s and daydreamed of breaking the heart of some great painter. With this vague project in mind, he had on graduation listed himself with the Employment Facility as seeking “work in art on the administrative side,” and as luck would have it, a midtown gallery needed a boy to do clerical work. Cornell applied and was hired. At the end of the first week, he repelled an attempt at rape by the gallery owner, a husky, hairy Greek-American named Basilica Dondis, who had made a fortune in shipping and retired from commerce at fifty to indulge her love of beauty by a tax-deductible means.

  She fired Cornell forthwith. Weeping, he adjusted his dress and left the gallery, running, literally and figuratively, into the outstretched arms of Pauline Witkovsky, arriving to hang her current show of epic battle scenes. Witkovsky was at this point in her career toeing the threshold of fame—this was to be the show, indeed, that established hers as one of the essential names on any roster of contemporary pictorial greatness.

  To naive Cornell, however, product of an art-appreciation course that had only just reached Thomasina Gainsborough by the end of term, Witkovsky looked a pudgy nonentity in turtle-neck and paint-stained jeans.

  “Hey, wait a minoot,” she said, thrusting him back for inspection. “You look like a nice piece of cooze. How’d you like to be fucked by a famous artist?”

  Cornell made himself rigid. “I’ll scream if you don’t let me go!”

  “Bullshit,” she said, breathing garlic at him. “Half my show is sold out before the opening.”

  He went limp. “You’re not Pauline Witkovsky?”

  She released him. “Just got the word,” she said. “Time’s review will be a rave.”

  Cornell gasped in admiration, hand going to his hair, which he knew must be disheveled from Basilica Dondis’ pawing.

  “I’m Georgie Cornell,” he said. “I consider it a privilege to meet you, Miss Witkovsky.”

  Witkovsky goosed him. “You call me, kid, when you get hard up. I like your obsequious style. I’m in the book. If I ain’t too busy, you come to my studio and I’ll throw a fuck at you.” She swaggered into the gallery.

  Cornell had no success in finding another job in art. Perhaps Dondis had blacklisted him with the other galleries, or perhaps there were merely no openings. Those to which he applied were already staffed with one or more youths of his age but of another order of sophistication, as he could see by their languid bodies and charred eyes. He also went around to the newly organized Municipal Museum, to form which the old Metropolitan, Modern, Guggenheim, Whitney, Frick and eleven other degenerating institutions had been combined, the fat trimmed from the assembled collections (the forgeries discarded, the second-rate daubs, as determined by the new school of multum-in-parvo criticism, destroyed; the stolen works returned to their rightful owners or the heirs thereof), and the remaining twenty-five pictures and six sculptures displayed in the new facility, those tunnels of the old Columba Circle subway station which had not fallen in during the general collapse circa A.D. 2050.

  The guard collected the ten-dollar entrance fee and laughed in Cornell’s face when asked directions to the personnel office.

  “We only hire three people, and the waiting list is two years old.”

  Cornell turned to leave, and the guard said: “Don’t you want to see the stuff? We don’t make refunds.”

  So he went on in, the guard, having bolted the door, following him with her shotgun. When she was satisfied that he was neither thief nor vandal, she took the weapon from his back and used it as a pointer.

  “Nobody but nobody understood paint like old Carmen,” she said, pressing the twin muzzles against a canvas labeled, with ball pen on a three-by-five index card Scotch-taped to the cracked wall, “Philippa IV—Carmen Velasquez.”

  “Fabulous,” said Cornell. “Too bad it’s damaged.” There was a rent in the mouth of the depicted face.

  “Whatchuh gonna do?” asked the guard. “Hooligans get in somehow, no matter how close you watch. They punched a hole there and put a cigar in it.” She shook her capped head. “Young girls with too much time on their hands, poolroom toughs, car-strippers. Hold up candy stores, mug old people, rip paintings. Oughta put ’em in the army. It straightened me out years ago, I’ll tell you that.”

  At the end of one corridor that was blocked by debris, Cornell suddenly felt the guard’s hand on his buttock. They were alone in the museum. He had to use all his diplomacy, make a date for after closing time, indeed, to get out intact. There seemed to be a surfeit of dirty old women in the art world.

  Not that Pauline Witkovsky was clean, mind you, but at least she was under thirty-five. He boldly decided to call her, found the number in the book, but chickened out several times in the phone booth, losing a series of zinc dollars in one of those installations that, like the museum, gave no refunds. Finally, with his last coin, he took the plunge.

  Witkovsky answered on the first ring.

  “Fuck you,” she said. “Whoever you are.”

  He gave his
name.

  “Have I fucked you?” Witkovsky asked.

  Cornell explained how and where they had met.

  “Listen kid,” Witkovsky said in her raspy voice, “I wouldn’t remember you if I had fucked you. So you better get your ass over here.”

  … Cornell’s reminiscence, in the darkness of the cell, was disturbed by an odd event. He heard Harry get up and walk across to his cot; he felt him look down, heard him say softly: “Georgie?”

  Undoubtedly he wanted to apologize for his earlier performance, but now Cornell saw nothing to be gained from quick forgiveness. Let him wait a little—a spiteful decision, maybe, but Harry must understand that moodiness was no excuse for bad manners. Cornell remained silent in voice, but breathed audibly, regularly, as if in slumber.

  Harry did not ask again. After a long moment his slippers were heard gliding away. He was next at the cell door, scratching thereupon. The bolts were soon thrown; the hinges faintly squealed; light entered and was corrupted by Harry’s exiting shadow; the door clunked shut.

  Harry had left the cell.

  This event was so extraordinary that Cornell was immediately discouraged from making any effort at all to explain it. He was stunned in the present, and escaped to the past…. The phone book listed Witkovsky’s address as Chase Manhattan Plaza, a long walk from the fleabag men’s residence where Cornell was then living, at 70th and Fifth.

  Harry had left the cell? That made no sense. Cornell called his name, rose, and felt the other bunk. It had been no illusion. The man was gone. He groped around in the dark, found a pail, and peed in it. Too late he remembered that he had forgotten to ascertain whether it was the slop bucket or the one with the drinking water. In the grip of that horror he was of course desperately thirsty. He crawled about the concrete floor on his knees. No, there was the other bucket, the dipper handle protruding. He gulped some metallic-tasting liquid, which in the chill of the cell was yet tepid. The combination made his teeth chatter.