-You seem a million miles away, Dion said, as they sat boothed in the Elephant and Porcupine Pub, the smell of onion rings filling the dark close room with sad comfort.
-More like two and a half feet, Mary laughed, rearranging the salt and pepper shakers either side of her coaster of an elephant rowing a boat while his fellow eponomynity, mister porcupine, scanned the seas with a spyglass.
She bought him an Old Peculiar and got herself a pretty blue glass of ripest burgundy and she edged him off the specifics of Cyril and onto the What and Why. He started off with destiny and they quibbled over definitions. If it was destiny for Alexander to conquer the world and die choking on his own drunken vomit why was it not destiny for Mrs. Scarborough to drown herself in a shallow basin of water, Mrs. Scarborough being a fictional character but still an adequate stand-in for this argument’s purpose? So perhaps ‘potential’ or even the weak-kneed, lily-livered ‘tendency’ was the better word? Students, apply all three: Dion has the tendency to posit much on his reading of the surfaces of things, the potential to be a fabulous raconteur of brightly embellished tales, the destiny to bring unhappiness down on his own head. (Thus his own offering.) Mary has the tendency to disguise her foxy joyfulness with a hedgehog’s darkness, the potential to be a lousy percussionist, the destiny to be a talismanic slut, recalled by her nicknamed body parts rather than her name. (Thus Mary, on herself).
-That’s so sad, said Dion, shocked and laughing despite himself.
-do you really believe that?
-If Number 25 gets hit by a train on the way home then chances are …
And they talked on and around and beyond and behind a carnival of associative topics, confusing themselves, amusing each other, chatterboxy and punchdrunk.
-How many have I had? Dion asked, holding up his empty bottle even as the bartender signaled another round was waiting.
-Three, no, four. Why? Are you drunk, my dear?
-More than I should be, I’m afraid.
-Good, then we shall proceed, tending to our united potential to get shit-faced while the sun is still shining.
-Shining as she sinks! Dion laughed, and they clicked empties.
Mary held her new glass up to the beveled window, through which the shaded sun cast gold across their many-coastered table.
-Color of blood. By the way, Aquinas had great praise for something you wrote in the latest Der G.
-Which you haven’t read, I take it?
-I will, I will. Or you can tell me about it and save me the effort.
-Well, for the record, the byline is Alastair’s, but it’s a ghost story.
-Ghost story?
-As in ghost-written. By me.
-Sounds like cheating.
-Way of the world.
-So tell me about it.
-It’s a review of that new film by Luc Besson, ‘La Femme Nikita’.
-I love the French.
-I figured. Well, this is possibly the end of French film as we know it.
-That rad?
-Very yankee-centric, I thought. Guns, violence, the erotics of bloodstained lingerie and rubberwear.
-You definitely have my attention.
-Ne’er do well urchin girl is trained as an assassin, if you can believe it? Dialogue as pithy as ‘Le Samourai’ but the blood spatter is prime De Palma.
-So Luc’s been seduced by the Peckinpah wing, is that what you said?
-Yes, but I’m not sure I’d say that now. I saw it again after I wrote the piece and I see less us and more them than I did the first time.
-I haven’t seen as much as I’d like but the new wave guys were a huge influence on me. Godard not as much as Truffaut, but I was wowed by Anna Karina and Marie-France Pisier.
-Oh, they’re classic. Black turtlenecks and more brains than you can … you can …
-Shake a dick at?
Mary laughed to show Dion she wasn’t making fun of him and they talked more about film, which ones they loved, which ones they hated and she monologued a visit to Austin years earlier, a strange pairing at the Dobie theater one Friday night. ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘Adele H.’
Dion, now on his sixth Old P, blurred his eyes at her and agreed that was a strange pairing. Kinda sorta what he mighta imagined Nikita would be if he hadn’t written the review but was just reading it. Mary watched him slowly deteriorate and found herself dropping her voice to a sing song, a lull, but for what end she wasn’t sure. He was still inside there, popping up prairie dog-style, with something bright, if slurred and dyslexic.
-Since it was Austin the clientele had figured out that they could prop open the exit door to the theater and if you wanted you were welcome to congregate back there, blowing your pot smoke down the hall. I’d come prepared in my own way, with an old mouthwash bottle filled with Algerian. I’d been up for like three days, running on joy and speed, so I have to admit that the two movies started to blend in my mind afterwards, when I was describing them on the ride back to Houston. And I still confuse them and rework the stories so that Travis ends up with Adele and the beautiful French jerk ends up with Iris.
-How would that work? Dion asked, slumped happy on his side of the booth.
-Sexually it would be so much simpler. Travis would know what to do, once he had pried off Adele’s girdle and got up those petticoats to find a five-minute quickie and a high-maintenance neurotic. He’d be in heaven! Falling over himself to please her and she’d be pleased to let him, or vice versa.
-I’m not sure I see that happening …
-Trust me. And Iris and the pretty creep? She’d step off those platforms, drop the hot pants and break his heart.
-Nah, I just don’t see it, Mary. You’d have to be really, really, cynical to see that as a happy ending.
-You think I’m cynical, Dion?
-Well, you ought to agree that you don’t have a romantic cell in your body.
-I’m the fucking Empress of Romance!
-Travis and Adele? Monsieur Jerkoff and Iris? Nah …
-Yeah, you’re probably right. And they’d suck as movies, that’s true.
-I didn’t mean to be so …
Mary laughed, mock angry.
-Stick to your guns, Dion! I know I’m not always right so you don’t have to pretend that I am. Friends are supposed to be straight with each other, right?
-And we’re friends.
-Yes.
-And that’s all.
-Yes.
-Why is that?
-The sun’s about to hit the pavement, Mary said.
Dion looked out the window and saw the sun sliding from beneath a billboard for the upcoming Guns, Knives & Ammo convention. Time to get back inside the Loop.