Authors: Stanley Elkin
“Nah, if I die, I die,” Benny said and glared at Bale, accusing him with the full force of his doom. “
Are
you in for a pound?” he asked at last. “Are you even in for a penny even?”
“Sure,” Eddy said. “I told you.”
“Why won’t you let me get it out then?”
“What is it?” Eddy asked.
“You sure it’s okay?”
“Yes,” he said, “certainly.”
“All right,” Benny said, “so so far I’m this yid vestal, this kid monk. I’m this fifteen-year-old virgin with this fifteen-year- old virgin maidenhead. Fifteen years, and it ain’t any sure-thing, lead-pipe, dead-cert cinch I’ll ever make sweet sixteen. So what I need to know is how long.”
“How long?”
“It lasts. How long it lasts. That the chemicals work. That a chap can do it. That given the clean bill of health, the normal drives, and what the actuaries say, how long a party can keep his pecker up, Mister Bale.”
Eddy was confused. “Sustain an orgasm?”
“Sustain an orgasm?” Benny said. “No, of course not. I
know
how long a chap can come off. It’s the other I’m not sure of. How long the power’s there for, I mean. How long he has till his knackers go off on him.”
“How long? How old he is?”
“Yeah,” Benny said. “How old he is.”
“Oh, well,” Bale said, “that all depends, I should think. They say we’re sexual until the day we die.”
“Right,” Benny said.
“Oh, Benny,” Eddy said.
“What? Oh,” he said, “is that what you’re thinking? Forget it,” he said, “that ain’t in it. I mean I can subtract fifteen or sixteen from three score and ten and get the difference. I can take away the subtrahend from the whoosihend well enough. That’s not what bothers me. So I miss out on whatever it is, the fifty- four or fifty-five years of what you haul me in here to tell me the shouting’s all about. No big deal, no Commonwealth case. Nah,” Benny Maxine said, “that don’t bother Benny Maxine.”
“What does bother you?”
“That slyboots. That old son of a bitch,” Benny says, almost to himself.
“What?”
“The crafty old bastard.”
“I don’t—”
“Mudd-Gaddis. Here I schlepp him from room to room giving him gazes, giving him ganders, and at his age the little geezer has probably nineteen dozen times my own experience. Pushed his wheelchair, I did. Took him for a ride. Showed him the sights. And him under his shawls and lap robes with his hand in the heather.
Ooh,
he’s the sly one!”
“Benny,” Eddy Bale says quietly, “it’s
not
what the shouting’s all about. Benny, it isn’t.”
“Yeah, well,” Benny Maxine says, “thanks for the grand bloke-to-bloke chat.”
And, when Maxine has gone, Eddy Bale wondering aloud, and not for the first time, “Am I mad? Am I mad?”
(Because he was bursting with it: his discovery. Because, if his hunch was right, he figured he’d found the
real
Magic Kingdom. And, should they be caught, the ancient kid making such a good front and all. And because he thought the old boy was past it anyway. Wouldn’t remember. Certainly not where he’d taken him. Not where they’d been.
(And his hunch
had
been right.
(And Benny blessing his god-given, gambler’s gifts: his luck, his attention to detail, all his boon instincts.
(So the unlikely pair, the one, dying from some Old Testament curse which, since he wasn’t bar mitzvah, he couldn’t even begin to understand, pushing the chair down the hotel corridor, and the other, riding in it, dying of all his squeezed and heaped natural causes, nattering away from the depths of his old-age-pensioner’s, unpredictable, golden-aged, senior citizen’s cumulative heart. “Ahh,” Mudd-Gaddis had said from his congested chest, taking the air, “I do love a stroll about the decks of a morning. Thank you so very much for inviting me, Maxine.
(“What’s a shipmate for?” Benny had said.
(“The stabilizers these days, you’d hardly suspect there’s a sea under you.”
(“Steady as she goes.”
(Mudd-Gaddis had chuckled. “Quite good, that. ‘Steady as she goes.’ Not like the old days,” he added wistfully.
(“No,” Benny had said.
(“No. Not at all like the old days.”
(“No.”
(“Not like any HMS
I
ever sailed aboard.”
(“I’ll be bound,” Benny had said.
(“Not like the East India Company days. Not like the tubs H.M. sent us out in to encounter the Spanish Armada.”
(“Really.”
(“’Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves,‘” Charles Mudd- Gaddis had sung in his high, reedy voice.
(“You could probably have used stabilizers like these on the
Titanic,”
Benny had said, “or when you went off with Captain Cook to discover the Hawaiian Islands.”
(Mudd-Gaddis gave Benny Maxine a sharp look. “I never sailed with Jim Cook,” he told him quietly.
(“No, of course not. After your time,” Benny mumbled, wondering if the little petrified man was having him on.
(“Still,” Mudd-Gaddis said, “it’s not
all
progress. The sea air, for example. The sea air doesn’t seem quite as bracing as it used to.” Through his thick glasses Mudd-Gaddis stared at the corridor’s blue walls. “Indeed, it seems rather close out here. Even a little stuffy, in fact.”
(“Not like the old days.”
(“No. Not at all.”
(“It
is
stuffy,” Benny Maxine said suddenly. “Say, why don’t we duck into this lounge for a bit? It’s probably air-conditioned.” They had come to room 822. Benny knocked forcefully on the door and, hearing no answer, folded Mudd-Gaddis’s chair and hid it beyond the fire doors at the end of the corridor. Returning to 822 and working with one of the cunning tools on his Swiss Army knife, Benny had made short, clever work of jimmying the door.
(“Quick,” he said, “in back of the drapes.”
(“Behind the arras?”
(Benny glanced at his little wizened buddy. “Ri-i-ight,” he said.
(“It’s stuffy here too,” his old friend complained.
(Though, as it turned out, they didn’t have long to wait. Hardly any time at all. But something as outside the range of ordinary luck—though Benny recognized a roll when he saw one—as the two boys were beyond the range of ordinary children. His gambler’s gift for pattern, design. His feel for all the low and high tides of special circumstance, his adaptive, compensatory fortune. All opportune juncture’s auspicious luck levers, its favorable, propitious, sweet nick-of- and all-due-time sweepstakes: its bust-the-bank, godsend mercies and jackpot bonanza obligations. No fluke, Benny had thought, only what’s coming, only what’s owed. And Benny blessing his money-where- his-mouth-was heart.
(And when Benny Maxine heard Mary Cottle at the door he didn’t even have to shush Mudd-Gaddis. Who’d evidently been, to judge from his transformed eyes, beyond an arras or two himself in his time.
(She came into her hotel room—she seemed nervous, she seemed irritable—shut the door behind her, and dropped her purse on a chair.
(It wasn’t stripping. It wasn’t even undressing. It was divestment, divestiture. Orderly and compelled as the speeded- up toilet of some fireman in reverse, or the practiced discipline of sailors whistled to battle stations, say. There was nothing of panic in it, nothing even of haste, just that same compelled, rehearsed efficiency of all mastered routine, just that workmanlike, functional competency, know-how, tact, skill, grace, and craft of adroit forte. Just that same shipshape, green-thumbed, known- rope knack and aptitude of all veteran prowess. She might have been pouring her morning tea or buttering her morning toast or returning home along a route she’d taken years.
(And Benny, both children, amazed who’d only meant to spy on her, astonished who at the outside could only have hoped to trap her in—again, at the outside—some only stiff and formal tryst, some only stilted, silly dalliance with Colin Bible or Eddy Bale or Mr. Moorhead; or, more like it, to catch her smoking what she oughtn’t, in privacy; phoning a boyfriend in England or ordering liquor from room service or bingeing on ice cream, on sweets, and on biscuits; stunned who all along could have hoped only to gather the familiar gossip of their imaginations or, behind the closed bathroom door, to have heard her tinkle, heard her poop. Who hadn’t expected, who, counting only on the auspicious and favorable, the opportune and propitious, even
could
have expected, this gusher of bonanza, this ship-come- in, sweet-sweep-staked, bank-broke, jackpot boon. They were flies on the very walls of mystery, and this went beyond what was coming, beyond what was owed. This was out-and-out hallmark fluke!
(Later Benny wouldn’t even remember the order in which her clothes had come off. Only that blur of no-nonsense, businesslike efficiency. One moment she had dropped her purse on a chair, the next her clothes were hanging neatly in the closet—and when had she removed her panties or, folding them, laid them carefully on the chair beside her purse? and when had she kicked off her shoes? rolled down her hose and set them across the back of the chair?—and she was completely stripped, uncovered, bare, naked, nude, starkers. She stood before them without a stitch, in the buff, the raw—it was, Benny thought, an apt word; she looked in her nakedness nude as meat in a butcher shop—and he was struck by the rare, pink baldness of her body, by its unsuspected curves and fullnesses—and, oddly, oddly because he would never actually remember seeing her like this, she would become a paradigm for all women, up to her thighs in silk stocking, sitting on underwear, a buried treasure of lace and garter belt, all the lovely, invisible bondages of flesh, her pubic hair bulging her panties like a dark triangle of reinforced silk, her sex like a box of unoffered candy, hoarded fruit—and they see her breasts, they see her cunt. She lies down nude on top of the still made bed. She raises her long legs, spreads them.
(Then she rolls over on her side, turning away from them. They can’t see what she’s doing but they see her ass. Her left arm goes down, over and across her body, and it looks from their angle as if she’s clutching a second pillow to her, getting ready for a nap. They watch her behind as it pumps back and forth on top of the bedspread. She’s nestling in all comfy for her bye-byes, thinks Benny Maxine. She’s ’aving a bit of a lie- down. The two boys stare at her ass, study its dark vertical, the two discrete, hollow, brown shadows within her cheeks like halved darning eggs, like healed burns, like hairy stains.
(She is quickly done, shivers all along her body, and bounds from the bed. In the bathroom—she leaves the door open; they can see part of her reflection in the full-length mirror—she sits to pee, pulls a few sheets of toilet paper from the roll, and wipes herself. She washes her hands, slaps water on her face, and, when she returns to the room, she seems completely restored. Even her eyes seem restored too, returned to some neutral condition of peace.
(“I’ve heard of this,” Benny Maxine mouths to Charles Mudd-Gaddis, explaining. “World-class, champion speed sleep.”
(The old gnome frowns at him. The entire time they watch her dress she is still businesslike, still efficient, but now, putting on her clothes, it is almost as if she is posing. As she is, though Benny doesn’t realize this. She is posing for the clothes themselves, moving her body into perfect alignment with her apparel, adjusting straps and cups, seams and undergarments to all those unsuspected boluses of flesh. They get an eyeful. They see her from the side, from the rear, from the front. As she rests a leg on the bed and leans forward to leverage a stocking up along her thigh, they get a brief, unobstructed view of her sex, of her bunched and weighted breasts. But she moves too rapidly.
(Benny doesn’t know where to look first and, worried about any telltale arthritic creaks, glances at Mudd-Gaddis, meaning to steady him, to forestall the chirping of his old companion’s joints, the snap and crackle of his burned bones. But even Mudd- Gaddis’s eyes barely move, his fierce old countenance as absolved of desire and edge as Mary Cottle’s own.
(Which was when he first thought
slyboots, crafty bastard!
And when he first formulated the questions he did not even know yet he would ever get to ask. Not only the one about how long it lasted, when he might reasonably expect surcease, relief, to be disburdened of what he already knew and recognized was to be just one more additional symptom of his life, but the one about preference too, especially the one about preference, offering pelt as he might ante a chip in a game of chance and despising Mudd-Gaddis, the old roué lech and sated boulevardier, who did not even have to trouble to crane his neck or even to move his eyes about, who’d already seen and presumably done it all in his time, who’d had only to wait there in ambush for something wondrous and delicious to come into view, the old bastard sedate and smug as an assassin behind his cross-hairs, settled in his sexual nostalgia—not having to choose, maybe not even
having
a preference, because the old fart knew that choice was a mug’s game—as that woman in her own arms on the bed, and only poor fifteen-year-old virgin Benny burdened forever by his fifteen-year-old turned-stone maidenhead, not knowing the odds but having to place his bet down anyway, the red or the black, declaring for quim, declaring for tush, declaring for boobs or pelt, and hoping, though he knew better, that tush or boobs would come up winners because, let’s face it, if he was ever going to get in the game it could only be by copping a feel. When he knew all along. When he by God knew all along where he had to be, where—for him—the real action was, but until this morning hadn’t even known the geography existed:
the
darning eggs, those elliptical hollows, those two discrete dark shadows, the twin burns, those stinking stains inside the fold of each buttock!
(She is dressed and out, not looking toward the drapes once, not looking anywhere, not even checking—as everyone does, as even Benny does, as even Mudd-Gaddis must do, tapping their pockets or looking into their purses, for gum, for keys or comb or handkerchief or change—the hotel room she is about to leave. Is gone. Totally collected and moving through the room and out of it, as through with and out of any indifferent space, as assured and confident and possessed as she might be passing from one room to another in her flat.