11.
Scamander had descended into the safety of his home like a eunuch pursued by the Furies. Now he stood in the hallway, umbrella in one hand, tote-bag over his shoulder, and shouting for the house-boy.
-Eufemio! Eufemio!
His voice echoed down the hall.
-Eufemio?
The strap of his tote slid down onto the crook of his elbow, the bag swinging inches above the dark polish of the wood floor. He remembered Eufemio would be seeing his mother off at the airport and would not be back until 9:30 that evening.
He went into his study and set his things down on the couch.
-I must talk to Farotitius, he said aloud.
It was Farotitius’ roommate who answered.
-Hello, Crystal? This is Scamander. Is Farotitius in, please?
Crystal Panther’s disembodied voice crept over the line.
-I’m afraid Farotitius isn’t in right now, Mr. Katzenbaum. He left a half an hour ago and didn’t say when he’d be back.
-Will you let him know I called? There’s something I need to, uh, discuss with him.
-I’ll let him know, though, as I said, I don’t know when he’ll be back.
-That’s all right. I’ll try back later.
-If you like. Goodbye.
Scamander sat on the couch without moving, his hands limply at his sides. Twenty minutes passed and he telephoned again. This time there was no answer. They were there, both of them, he knew they were there, just sitting, looking at the telephone, listening to it ring, knowing it was him.
His lunch had disagreed with him but Scamander told himself he must eat something. Or bathe. But not both. He decided to bathe. Twice he was forced to turn the water off while running his tub when he thought he heard the bedroom telephone ringing.
After he had bathed and put on his mauve smoking jacket Scamander felt better. In the kitchen he prepared himself a pot of tea and two pieces of charred, unbuttered toast. He had always enjoyed puttering about his own kitchen but he was sorry Eufemio was not here to do it for him. He managed to get from the kitchen to the study with only one shattered tea cup on the way.
Scamander looked at the dial clock on his desk. 8:01. He had been sitting in his study for two hours. The toast lay heavily in his stomach, the teapot was empty, and in its place stood a bottle of medium-priced scotch, two-thirds of which remained. He poured himself another and lifted the telephone receiver for the eighth time that evening.
Scamander was feeling sad. Drunk and sad. He had always liked Crystal, on the few occasions he had met her. Now he hated her. It wasn’t just that she was protecting Farotitius, no, there was something else. A malice, a menace. Why had he never been more curious about her? Surely Farotitius would have told him? Rather, he had simply accepted his lover’s account of his relationship with his roommate. Purely Platonic, purely economic. And had not Farotitius told him that she had almost become a nun? But almost was not the same as actually becoming a nun, was it? What did St. Jerome say about that ….. think, think.
-Hello?
It was Crystal.
Scamander’s mind went blank.
-Please, he said.
-I’m sorry, Crystal started to say.
-No, no. Please, Crystal, please listen to me. Don’t hang up. I know Farotitius is there …. no, that’s all right, you’re only doing what he’s probably asked you to do because he’s angry with me. But could you tell him I’m not angry with him. I just want to talk to him, just for a moment, then he can hang up if he wants to.
There was a pause and then he heard Crystal’s voice, saying something into the room. Another pause, Crystal’s voice again and then Farotitius was on the line.
-What is it, Scamander?
His voice sounded weak, as though he’d been crying.
-Oh, my dear boy, Scamander said. I’ve been so worried. I need your help ….
-Please, Scamander, there’s nothing I can do.
-I don’t mean it that way, Farotitius. I mean I need someone to talk to. I understand it’s a bit of a shock and I admit I’ve been a foolish, stupid old girl. I’m not asking you to do anything you don’t want to.
-Well, how can I help you?
-I’m afraid, you understand, it’s something I can’t really discuss over the phone.
-If I come, you promise you won’t try and make me stay?
-Not a minute longer than you want to. Word of honor.
There was a long pause. Scamander could practically see Farotitius’ face: tear-stained, sincere, troubled.
-Okay. I’ll be there in half an hour.
12.
Scamander looked at the mirror beside his bookshelf. He had bought it in the Zona Rosa in Mexico City a dozen years ago, enchanted by its flamboyant bad taste. The mirror itself was a small and common oval surrounded by a baroque enormity of grillwork, tin fluorescence, and silver blossoms. It reminded Scamander of the hideous, ornamental headdress of a sacrificial virgin. He peered into the depths of the tiny warped oval and saw the pocked face of a disheveled, if beautifully dressed, nervous old bird. A dissipated eagle, not a nightingale after all.
Scamander turned to the bookshelf, his eyes falling from shelf to shelf along the colored spines, the titles pricked out in gold, maroon, white. ‘Pantheon Of Ghosts, Pavilion Of Desire’, ‘The Purple Youth’, ‘Confessions Of A Cannibal’, ‘Scurrilous But Unbowed’, ‘Baron Laster And The League Of Priapus’, ‘The Michelin Guide To Little Boys’. From the lowest shelf he lifted his oversize volume of ‘The Early Architecture Of Ipswitch’ and carried it to his desk. He opened the volume somewhere near the middle and flipped a few pages until he found it. There, between two leaves of onion skin was the contact sheet. What he had told Farotitius about but not shown him and what Farotitius had so precipitately told Polonius about.
Scamander lifted the contact sheet gingerly by its corners and held it up before him. He could not help but think of it as a work of art. ‘From Innocence To Ambiguity’. And it was ambiguous, up to those final shocking frames.
Scamander’s eyes returned to the upper left-hand corner. It was a new experience for him, this second-hand voyeurism. He found he liked it. Perhaps he had let it get out of hand, but there had been no real harm done, had there?
In the first frame Tippy stood with her back to the camera, half-obscured by the black rectangle of the drape. The balcony railing was level with her waist. Another frame, similar to the first, where Tippy now gestured with a throwaway hand across the room. Further on an exchange of places, as the second woman appeared where Tippy had been standing, a slender wine glass like a dark flower in her lifted hand. Across the room Tippy was leaning upon a chair, looking over her shoulder at the other woman and pointing to the back of her leg, bent gracefully at the knee. A run in her stocking? Girl talk. There was more of the same, half of one body, half of the other, occasionally the whole, crossing and recrossing the room, standing, talking, crossing, recrossing. It was as though the two women were circling one another.
Scamander looked closely at the other woman. In the frame he was examining the two stood at the center of the room, the bow and pillar of a harp in the right corner composing a two-dimensional symmetry with the edge of the sofa on the left. Tippy stood with her hand near the other woman’s face, who inclined her cigarette to Tippy’s flame. The other woman pleased Scamander. She satisfied his detached requirements of female beauty. Her black hair fell to either side of her pale face, she held it back from the flame with a curved hand, a pianist’s white fingers. She was wearing a dark dress, brocaded at the bodice, padded shoulders and constricted waist, the hemline below her knees. Tippy looked very small though the other woman was not much taller. They made a nice pair in their black stockings and high heels, the one’s pallor and darkness to Tippy’s blond, blue-veined youth. Scamander had begun to think of them as his ethereal girls. Tippy’s irreality was that of a girl who was occasionally not at home behind her eyes, while the other …. but what did he know? They were his art objects, his ethereal girls.
Second to the last frame. Sometime since the previous frame a Persian rug had appeared in the room. At least it looked Persian, it was difficult to tell in black and white. Tippy stood in the center of the rug, without her shoes, the upper portion of her dress undone, a thread of shadow underlining a revealed breast. Her blond hair trailing over her shoulders as if touched in a strong breeze, her expression a mingling of surprise and trance-like ecstasy. More surprising still was her posture: arms flung upward like a double-jointed Jansenist Christ, her thin arms taut and outstretched, her fingers reaching. The other woman sat before her on a delicate cane chair, slender legs crossed, mouth slightly open as she gazed up at Tippy. One could not read her expression, there was only that intense, provocative profile.
And the final frame. Scamander paused, buoyed up by currents which thrilled and troubled him. He had passed most of his adult life surrounded by pornography, the visual depiction of desire achieved, some of it art, much of it not. But he had never been moved in the way of that final frame. There was, in that slightly out-of-focus and inexplicit image a freedom and an unnaturalness that was nowhere to be found in any of the poses the Champlin brothers had coaxed from their lovely, defiled, under-aged models.
With her back to the camera Tippy knelt before the other woman, still seated upon the chair which had been turned to face the open window. She was naked from the waist up, her shoulders tapering to the narrowness of her white back. The sleeves of her dress splayed behind her like the arms of an abandoned corpse. Tippy’s left hand circled the other woman’s ankle, her right hand out of sight of the camera. The woman’s other leg was drawn up against Tippy’s right shoulder and between the line of her dress and the top of her black stockings was an exposure of white thigh. Tippy’s head was level with the woman’s breasts but whether she was looking up or down one couldn’t know. The other woman was sitting with her back straight, her hands hidden from view. It was her face that so moved Scamander. Her head was slightly back and to one side, her hair fallen away behind her except where several strands made a black slash across her throat. Her eyes were closed and her lips were drawn far back, revealing her teeth. It was a look of pain and of something else, a something else which Scamander recognized from innumerable faces in innumerable prints and photographs and paintings.
Scamander glanced at the clock. 8:34. Farotitius would be here any minute now.
13.
-You’ll come then? Opima asked, breathless from her long flight through the garden.
-Yes, if my sister so commands, Apollo replied, laying his Sanskrit grammar down on the bed beside him.
Opima, not unaware that she now had his full attention, sat down on the edge of the open window and began to fan herself with her short skirt. Apollo leaned his head back on a pillow and continued to watch her.
-Tell me, Opima, do you girls never wear underwear?
-Oh, some of the nymphs do, my lord. It all depends.
-What does it depend on? And please call me Apollo.
-Thank you …. Apollo. Oh, on the weather mostly, and whose service one happens to be in.
Apollo smiled.
-Yes, I see. It certainly wouldn’t be good form to have one’s rose petals too much on display if one was attending to, say, my sister Artemis.
Opima gave a high squawk of laughter and covered her mouth.
-So, Apollo went on, dear Venus requires my assistance. Personally, I don’t see why she can’t leave well enough alone. She insists on throwing these dismal mortals into their usual sexual turmoil and then gets so flustered when she sees them in trouble.
-I don’t understand, Apollo, Opima said, scratching a spot high on her inner thigh and gazing at him with large, puzzled, blue eyes.
-Don’t worry, Opima. I was just musing aloud. It’s my nature. Come sit beside me, would you?
Opima stood up from the window sill and skipped towards the bed, biting her lower lip. She bounced upon the soft bed and instantly flung her arms around his neck. He lay back as she settled her head upon his chest. She drew her knees up towards his side, her small breasts warm against his belly. Apollo ran his fingers slowly through her blond hair. He touched the curve of her ear, sliding a finger down along her jaw to the smooth curve of her throat. Her skin was soft and cool. After a moment he slid his hand into the wide sleeve of her frock and touched the damp hollow of her armpit. He could feel the beginning swell of her breast. He pressed gently, surreptitiously touching the bulge between his legs with his free hand. As he caressed her, Opima moved her hips slowly and lazily. Apollo could imagine the little line of her ass, straining against the thin cotton of her frock.
-Um.
-Not falling asleep, are you?
-Nnn.
Apollo’s fingers butterflied from his crotch and alighted on the hem of Opima’s frock, gently lifting it to the small of her back. Turning slightly he pressed his groin lightly to her. Through the thin material her skin was smooth and cool against his flesh. Tightening his sphincter the broad lip of his cock flattened against the little ridge of her hip. Relaxing his muscles he felt a raw tingle as his erection lifted from her skin. As he repeated the movement he glanced at Opima’s profile. Her cheek was dimpled and he could see the white gleam of her tiny mouse teeth as she parted her lips. Venus had shown him what to do, long Olympian ages ago. The pressure of a man’s cock against her hip was such a pleasant tickle, she had said, like a sweet heavy worm pleading for attention. Opima lifted her rear from the coverlet. Then suddenly rolled away and leapt off the bed, turning to face him as the frock slid down over her thighs.
-I’m sorry, Apollo. I really musn’t be late meeting your sister!
-I’ll gladly explain. If anyone is going to understand it’ll be Venus.
-Thank you, that’s very sweet. But really I must be going! See you tonight!
And she was gone, throwing him a running kiss.
Apollo sat up. His fingers were still wet from the girl’s armpit. He sniffed. A pleasant bitter perfume that made him ache. Snarling, he reached for the Sanskrit grammar and flung it out of the window. He felt a little better. His voice was low with desire and phlegm:
-There once was a sweet thing named Opima,
who was lethal as damp emphysema.
When one was about
to whistle down south,
she was off on a mission to Lima.
14.
After April had sent Tippy away she returned to her apartment, brandishing her certainty like a sin. She unlocked the door carefully, taking care that as little light as possible fell from the hallway across the living room floor. She closed the door and latched it, still without turning on the lights. When her eyes had adjusted to the darkness she walked down the corridor to her bedroom. After making sure that the curtains were completely closed April turned the dome of the bedside lamp towards the wall and switched it on. She lay the porcelain figurine of Trismegistus on its side and shook from the base its contents. A half-dozen uncut diamonds, a small cellophane packet of brown powder, and a key. With the key she unlocked the bottom drawer of the narrow cabinet in the corner beside her dresser. It took several blind reconnoitering thrusts before key found keyhole and slid in and over with a faint click. The deep drawer contained two items. Folded on top was April’s pale blue wedding dress worn by her for five hours one winter morning several years earlier. Hidden from sight in the folds of the dress was a postal envelope which contained a Czech revolver and another key.
After restoring her bedroom to its previous order and extinguishing the lamp April carried the envelope with the revolver into the kitchen where she lit a candle and set it upon the counter. She dusted off the box of cartridges from the toolbox beneath the sink and loaded the gun slowly, dabbing an idle speck of grease from the butt with the edge of a damp hand towel. The mechanisms were still clean from the last time she had used it.
Setting the gun down beside the candle, April went into the living room. Parting the curtains with a finger she looked out at the high rise across the way. All was dark.
Returning to the kitchen April placed the gun and the key in her jacket pocket and blew out the candle. She unlatched the front door and crossed to the curtains, drawing them open. Moonlight, starlight, and pale neon fell across the floor.
April stepped into the hallway. Reaching her hand back in she flicked the lights on, shut the door behind her, locked it and descended quickly towards the lobby.
15.
Edmund Windrose Eliot sat holding a cup of tea on the yellow loveseat beside the window which overlooked the front garden. He had been home for nearly two hours and the faint rustling of the rose bushes below prefigured twilight’s mute approach no less than the almost imperceptible thrill upon the surface of his tea.
There was no order to Eliot’s thoughts, running amuck like naked, pointing cherubs, disastrous in a cut-glass museum.
Ten minutes earlier it had occurred to Eliot, while boiling water, that he had not yet seen his wife. Leaving his tea to steep he had climbed to the first landing and paused to listen outside the library door. Tippy had a habit of humming to herself as she read, a habit Eliot found at once irritating and deeply comforting. He had heard nothing and so, after what seemed a suitable pause, he continued up the stairs to the bedroom. He knocked once and entered. All was light and stillness. Light and stillness, but no Tippy. Eliot glanced from the unmade bed to the bathroom door which stood slightly ajar and from which emanated a fading scent of orchids. Assured that he had not simply overlooked his wife Eliot returned to the kitchen and his darkening Russian Caravan.
Now, as Eliot sat sipping from the delicate china, a bare-bottomed putti peeped from behind a display case of Sevres mustard canisters and directed his attention with a flurried pantomime to the subject of his absent love.
For perhaps the eighteenth time in the six year tenure of their marriage, Eliot considered whether his wife was having an affair. The possibilities must be there he knew, if only with an amateur’s ignorance. She was lovely, was she not? And young? And highly-strung in the area of passion and desire, to which his inadequacies had proved Gargantuan, or rather, Lilliputian.
Eliot’s boyhood had been an awkward and an ugly one and fear and nature had conspired to de-sex him thoroughly by his nineteenth year. But Eliot loved his wife with a single-minded, if paralyzed, devotion. He sometimes thought of her as a daughter, needful of his protection, but somehow exposed to violations he found it distasteful to dwell upon. He did not know if she had been unfaithful to him and though he cared he did not mind. He wished only that she should be happy and youthful and free of guilt, free also to confide in him if she wished, however negligible his help might prove to be. He sipped some more and let Tippy softly fade.
Eliot thought of his father, whom he had also loved. A cruel and intelligent, insensitive old pervert, malevolent and cynical, oh, how Eliot had loved him. He reenacted the deathbed scene as penance for having been born.
Ambrose Windrose Eliot: -So, Edmund, just you and me, boy. My least favorite child shall be the only witness to my grand farewell. Another of God’s little ironies, eh? Well, my poor Caliban, what words can the old man leave you with? Wasted, wasted. They’d be wasted on you, Edmund, you know that don’t you? There’s a good dog, just nod and whimper, nod and whimper. Are those tears, Edmund? Oh really, don’t disgust me. Take pity on a dying old man, even if he is responsible for inflicting you on the world. What day is it, Edmund? Oh, never mind, never mind. How old are you now, Edmund …. Eighteen? When I was eighteen …. eighteen, Edmund? And still not had a woman no doubt. What a waste, what a waste. Yes, yes, hold my hand you useless little dog, hold my hand ….
Through a hot glaze of tears Eliot saw Tippy moving along the hallway towards him.
-Ah, Eliot mouthed, rising to greet her.
-Edmund, Tippy said, stopping at the edge of the room.
-Edmund, there is something I must tell you.
16.
Cecily Flayed ascended the stairway upon silent high heels. When she had reached the relative shelter of the darkened porch she turned and looked both ways along the street below her. a puddle of oil reflected the lamplight upon the sidewalk and a cat shadowed itself along the curb.
Instinctively Cecily touched the tips of her fingers to her tongue and tried the handle to the door. It gave beneath her stealthy hand and she stepped into the hallway of Scamander Katzenjammer’s house. After closing the door behind her Cecily removed her shoes and began to tiptoe down the hall towards the stairs, illuminated by a pastel and gentle light. As she came level with the study a telephone rang from behind the closed door. Cecily froze, the hairs upon her neck quivering ceilingward in arousal. The phone rang a second time and then stopped. Her childhood dream: a wide staircase leading down, down into the great whorl of a seashell, a gigantic human ear.
She went on, up the stairs, down another corridor, around the corner towards the blue light at the bottom of the final ascent. There was, if she remembered correctly, only the one room on the floor, projecting like the bridge of a ship through the roof of the house.
Cecily ran up the stairs and went into the room. She closed the door and leaned back against it, breathing hoarsely. It was half a minute before Cecily noticed the figure of a man standing in the bathroom doorway. She clicked on the light.
The man was naked, and wet, toweling his dark hair slowly as he watched her.
-Hello, Eufemio said, continuing to dry his hair.
-Who are you? Cecily asked, her voice an octave lower than normal.
-I’m not the shoe repairman, if that’s what you’re after, Eufemio said, thrusting his chin languidly towards her.
Cecily looked from Eufemio to her shoes and then back again.
-Oh. Sorry. I can explain.
-I’m really not interested. Would you like a glass of wine? Eufemio asked, lifting a muscular arm and toweling vigorously his armpit.
-Sure, Cecily said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. She was feeling a bit weak in the knees. She watched as Eufemio dabbed with increasing detachment along his legs before flinging the towel onto an armchair. He crouched before a small cabinet and brought out a white bottle and a single glass. As he uncorked it he stood with his back to her, as unselfconscious as a Michelangelo nude.
Cecily set her shoes down on the floor and took the glass from his hand. The bed bounced slightly as he moved beside her.
-It’s a Chilean wine, he said, sliding her raincoat gently from her shoulders and caressing the rough material of her blouse with a soft hand.
-let me know if you like it, he went on, freeing the edge of her blouse from the waistband of her skirt.
Cecily sipped as he continued to murmur, somewhere near her midriff.
-I had some extra cash and I told myself ‘why not be impulsive’, you know?
His hair smelled clean. His shoulders as well.
By the time Eufemio’s tongue had made the first smooth circuit about her exposed right nipple Cecily had decided it was quite a nice wine. She closed her eyes as the rim of cold glass slid along her lower lip.
-Why not, indeed.
17.
Polonius was sitting up in bed, hugging his knees, trying to still the pounding mechanism of his frantic heart. In the darkness of his room the electric fan whispered overhead like an enormous sleeping insect, each rush of its wings shivering dry the sweat upon his skin. He had awakened from a horrible dream to find the sheets soaked with his blind love for Tippy.
They had been at a party and he had been failing to impress her with monotonous consistency. Suddenly he had gone beastly and his conversational lovemaking had turned to something else, something public and nasty, a wild hairy scrabbling of clumsy male paws and the swooning sorrow of torn and ravished fabric, his beloved Tippy borne down beneath him with a look of horror and hatred in her wide pale eyes, her little tongue aflutter with weakening whimpers.
Polonius sat, huddling his knees to his chest, rocking gently back and forth, trying to make himself cry, to feel the release of his lovesickness in some way that was not shameful.
He knew well enough what the matter was, for he suffered from that medical and fetid malady, the gross idealization of woman. And there was the double curse of his incurable heterosexuality, made the more menacing by the atavistic indolence of his imagination. Polonius had lived in ignorance of what the “other world” was all about, and his age now precluded enlightenment. Among the bright and cynical charmers who made up his peers, he was not only ill at ease, he was incapable of disguising that unease. For him there was none of the tacit and shadowy smirking, none of the knowing laughter of the initiated, however voyeuristic or inactive that initiation might actually be. Polonius was flayed without mercy by nocturnal demons, devoured by the leopards of his own ravenous desire. And yet to voice or even to meditate consciously on the degree to which Tippy could serve as the vessel of his enlightenment made him dizzy with self-loathing.
He regretted his outburst in Scamander’s office that afternoon. To uncage his demons in such a way had been an act of betrayal: of his friend, Farotitius, of Tippy herself, and finally the most deeply unavoidable treachery of all, that of Eliot. But was not Tippy also a traitor? Was that not the spark which had devastated his world in an inferno of chaos and anger, upon which confusion his lust now uncontrollably fed?
Polonius howled into the blackness of his little room and covered himself with the bedclothes, pulling them tight over his head. He was ash, he was nothing, he was shit! No less than Scamander himself. No less than …. No, not that, what had he been thinking? That he was no less vile and wicked than Tippy? The huge insect of doubt gnawed as his festering heart.
Beneath the covers Polonius lay wide-eyed. His pulse steadied and he felt the doors of reason opening at last, cracking wide with the honeyed light of dissolution. He was capable of anything now: murder, rape, a broken heart. His eyes moistened and filled.
Above Polonius’ dormitory, in the evening sky, the Goddess of Love made her unblinking ascent. With pale green eyes she gazed upon his sleepless form. Unperturbable and serene she gazed. Gathering her attendants about her, Venus continued her unhurried circuit, glancing now and then to the east, in expectation of her radiant brother, the golden-shirted Sun God.