Infinite Absence

By Ronald Ribman

This is a gloriously funny, gloriously serious novel by Pulitzer Prize nominated playwright Ronald Ribman that actually answers the age old question: How is it possible that one man, who has magnificently succeeded as a most brave, honorable, and extraordinarily decent human being, ends up with his head severed and in a pot of honey; while another, given everything, turning everything to shit, ends up blessed by a miracle, given the one true love of his life and the ultimate answer to it all? Ribman has given us a rich and enduring tale, steeped in magical realism, where walls are sometimes quivering membranes to be walked through, and stars can find their way beneath your skirt to ravish you "in all the secret places that are joy!"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronald Ribman
• Release date: Apr 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9780990697336

Book preview

Infinite Absence

Summary

This is a gloriously funny, gloriously serious novel by Pulitzer Prize nominated playwright Ronald Ribman that actually answers the age old question: How is it possible that one man, who has magnificently succeeded as a most brave, honorable, and extraordinarily decent human being, ends up with his head severed and in a pot of honey; while another, given everything, turning everything to shit, ends up blessed by a miracle, given the one true love of his life and the ultimate answer to it all?

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Ribman has given us a rich and enduring tale, steeped in magical realism, where walls are sometimes quivering membranes to be walked through, and stars can find their way beneath your skirt to ravish you in all the secret places that are joy!

Mr. Ribman has long been one of our most independent-minded, moral and daring playwrights.

Frank Rich, The New York Times

A major playwright who should be nationally celebrated.

Martin Gottfried, Vogue

The Journey Of The Fifth Horse: "a work of extraordinary power and humor."

Robert Lowell

Cold Storage: "A beautifully detailed comedy celebrating the miraculous, irreducible essence of life in the face of death."

Jack Kroll, Newsweek

The Ceremony Of Innocence: "The intensity and sustained beauty of the full-blooded prose is a gluttonous feast of the English language."

London Daily Mirror

Sweet Table At The Richelieu: "The remarkable ‘Richelieu’…Ronald Ribman’s mysterious and unsettling play…Sweet Table at the Richelieu is a demanding piece of work about the casual horror of human suffering, and it’s played out in the gilded atmosphere of an Alpine spa…Ribman has imagined a world that has degenerated until there is nothing left."

Kevin Kelly, The Boston Globe

The Final War Of Olly Winter: "A haunting, mordant work of infinite pathos."

The New York Daily News

The most moving original television play of the season…a brilliant introduction of the CBS Playhouse…advanced the artistic horizons of television drama…in all ways an occasion.

The New York Times

A gripping, glowing, emotionally shattering play.

The Cleveland Press

"The Final War Of Olly Winter was one of television’s most memorable original plays of all time, one that enhances the medium and raises fresh hopes for the future."

Memphis Press-Scimitar

High quality, original drama returned to television last night and provided an evening that was worth remembering.

The Washington Post

Television’s quest for quality drama this season took an impressive step forward.

St. Louis Globe Democrat

Ronald Ribman’s first television script would have stood out in the palmiest season of the middle Fifties.

The Baltimore Sun

The Golden Age of Television Drama returned for 90 minutes last night…This was, in the best definition of the term, meaningful drama.

The Detroit News

Title Page

Copyright © 2013 by Ronald Ribman

1st Edition, 2016

2nd Edition, 2021

A Ronald Ribman Book

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Forty Second Street

Words By Al Dubin

Music By Harry Warren

© 1932 (Renewed) WB Music Corp. (ASCAP)

All World Rights, Excluding Europe, Administered By Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.; All European Rights Administered By Warner/Chappell North America Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.

Shuffle Off To Buffalo

Words By Al Dubin

Music By Harry Warren

©1932 WB Music Corp. (ASCAP)

All World Rights, Excluding Europe, Administered By Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.; All European Rights Administered By Warner/Chappell North America Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission. 

Excerpts from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Grateful appreciation is further made to Michael Cheval for creating the cover art; to Duncan Long for designing the cover layout; and to Christiana Miller for her tireless efforts in providing the formatting and interior layout.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For permission requests, contact: [e-mail]

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-0-9906973-4-3 (print book)

ISBN: 978-0-9906973-3-6 (ebook)

For my wife, Alice, whose bright spirit hovers over every day’s writing of this novel; for Elana, my daughter, who put aside so much of her real life to see to the creation of this, my imaginary one; for Jamie, my son, a bedrock forever to be relied on; and to Steven Bloom who pored over the manuscript with a scholar’s critical eye and a friend’s unflagging encouragement.

A young man provoked by the magnitude of recent crimes against humanity, so terrible that they searched our collective conscience, asked a philosopher, Where was God in the concentration camps? He wasn’t invited, the philosopher instantly replied.

As poet-playwright, Ronald Ribman has, throughout thirty years of writing, confronted the questions of what is man’s and what is God’s role, if any, in man’s behavior. Suffusing his work are anger and satire, more often sorrow and haunting mystery, but always the mocking spirit of the grotesque behind the action, be it commonplace or exalted. Ribman’s plays consistently reveal man’s universe as abandoned by God but inextricably webbed into His rules, rules only hinted at as boundless in range and consequence. A corrosive absurdity at the heart of tragedy.

With such infinite possibilities left to human ordering, Mr. Ribman’s people have created many worlds in a great many plays with landscapes both familiar and abstractly bizarre. In these plays reality is created anew each time by characters whose capacity for mythmaking is prodigious and whose anguish at recognizing the recycled essence of their illusions is profound.

Ronald Ribman makes time his ally but erases the arbitrary categories of past, present, and future. What is has been, what was remains. His creation of various modes of reality demands that he collapse all history into the immediate moment. No matter on which century he lifts the curtain, he sees the mutual embrace of lunacy and reason, cruelty and compassion, innocence and cunning. And always he hears the sounds of mordant laughter, the fool’s malicious jests couched in paradox, the cries of pain and astonishment at the confidence man’s swift manipulations of certainties into illusions, and the sighs of the weak yearning for the seats of the powerful. The transformed realities that emerge in his theatre cling to us, embrace us, invade our secret places of self-knowing.

Arthur Hagadus

American Theatre

July/August 1987

Table of Contents

Part 1

Prologue

Clotheshorse

Holes

Trompe L’Oeil

Part 2

Straits Of Magellan

El Lugar De Estrellas

Pinehawk

Part 3

Hideous Face

Mirrielees

Dirty Hands

Part 4

Dried Tubers

Jane In Love

Gay Paree

Dreamfucker

Old Sphinx With Long Green Gazing

Mirabile Dictu

Back Cover

Except for a band of grave-desecrating hoodlums who came one night to drink, knock over tombstones, paint swastikas, and ultimately be sent fleeing for their lives, the burial vault of Hector Helmontos, set as it was upon a gently sloping knoll in the grandest place of privilege above the surrounding necropolis, might have gone undisturbed for a hundred or a thousand years.

But hearing the sounds of life from within its earthen pot, from beyond its honored place atop its marble pedestal, the severed head of Hector Helmontos, floating in a golden sea of honey, drenched through to every pore and channel, began to sing to them!

1

I’ve taken to dressing to the nines. It’s an affectation I picked up in Rome some years back in the summer of 1932, and it suits me. In these gray depressive days excruciatingly prolonged by Mr. Roosevelt’s economic policies, I’m a burst of color and panache, striding about Manhattan in my blown-open cashmere overcoat, my tailored suit, my matching scarf and yellow silk breast-pocket handkerchief. My hat for the day is the Borsalino with the inch-and-a-quarter Grosgrain band. Not my absolute favorite, but a favorite. My absolute favorite these days is my high-crowned James Cagney-style felt fedora done in charcoal gray.

I’m the Peabody in Peabody Industries. When you talk about Peabody Industries, you’re talking about me. There is no other Peabody. I’m the last of the species, tracing my lineage back to my grandfather’s grandfather who began the business operating out of the old foreign concessions of Canton, China around the turn of the 19 th century. Our family was in the China Trade. We dealt in silver and tea, Chinoiserie and silk, and when the Emperor of China decided he didn’t like anything my grandfather’s grandfather had to sell, we sold him opium—which the heathen Chinee came to like a great deal. We bought the stuff sometimes from the British in India—when we could get them to sell it to us—but mostly from the Turks, who were always eager for a good deal from the Americans. It was the best of times for getting rich and we got rich, what with the Royal Navy ruling the seas and its cannons prepared to reduce the Emperor’s cities to rubble over any insult to cargo or flag. When my grandfather’s grandfather came to Canton, the Emperor of China thought his Celestial Kingdom ruled the world; when we left, he knew it was Queen Victoria. The China Trade made the best American families rich, and out of opium we built the infrastructure of the United States: the mines, the railroads, the factories, and the great universities of Harvard and Yale and Princeton.

We’re just a few weeks into 1937—our first board of directors meeting of the new year—and practically every member of the board is panicked, seizing the opportunity of Roosevelt’s second inauguration to make dire forecasts about the current economy and the baleful direction of foreign events. They think the president a charlatan, a dangerous socialist, a betrayer of his class, pied-piping the country to economic ruin. And there’s not one statistic in all their rattling documents to disprove it. After four years of Mr. Roosevelt’s fireside chats and rousing speechmaking, everything’s as bad as it was when he took office. Just lots of make-work jobs that produce no lasting employment or real economic wealth. Consumption of consumer goods shows no sign of rising. Unemployment stubbornly refuses to go down. Production remains as stagnant as ever. On the streets there’s not one less begging hand held out; not one less apple stuck under your nose. As for overseas markets, unmistakable black clouds lour on everybody’s horizon. Herr Hitler shakes his fist in Europe. Mussolini never shuts his mouth. And in the Orient, where we have enormous business interests, the Japanese continue their plunder of China, heedless of the League of Nations’ fulminations and the general outrage of the world.

Listening to these gloomy prognostications, I’m idly reminded of Rudyard Kipling’s admonition that if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, the world’s your oyster—or something to that effect. I’m not sure I’ve accurately quoted the words. I pride myself in never remembering Kipling too exactly. He’s a second-rate poet, and quoting a second-rate anything too exactly is always a trifle demeaning. Nevertheless, the memory of his words impels me to hold my tongue, if only to allow this morning’s corporate drama to build. I feel as if I’ve been set down into a diorama or theatrical piece that has been staged many times before and will be staged many times again. Sometimes I appear as the boy being shown about the business by his father, sometimes the young man fresh out of college, learning the ropes. Today, I make my appearance at the head of the table: chief executive officer and chairman of the board. And when orderly conversation has broken down and everyone is merely exchanging heated words with his neighbor—the pall of tobacco smoke infecting every fiber of clothing—I take my cue and tap my pencil against my water glass.

"Gentleman, I couldn’t agree with you more concerning Mr. Roosevelt. He is certainly everything you say about him and, undoubtedly, some things only decent manners restrain me from saying. But, I beg you to remember, Peabody Industries has prospered in one form or another for well over a hundred and twenty-five years, and that with any luck at all shall manage to survive what can only be Mr. Roosevelt’s final four years as president.

"I should also like to remind you that, since you saw fit in your good judgment to make my brother, Hector, our man in South America, he has done nothing short of accomplishing miracles, bringing us the greatest increases in year-over-year profits these past five years, while at the same time building the most secure economic alliances with those in power. There is also hardly any need to remind anyone of the continuing accomplishments of our man in the Orient, Cyrus Cunningham. Thanks to his untiring efforts, I believe Peabody Industries has little to fear from any expansion of the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere. Our place as a reliable and trusted partner to Japanese industry is unquestioned.

As to the situation in Europe and Herr Hitler, I believe him to be a reasonable man only seeking to redress some of the imbalances brought about by the harsh terms of the Versailles treaty. Once these adjustments have been made, I have it on the highest authority of our friends in German industry that we may look forward to an even more profitable future, and that the German government shall not forget those who stood by her in her economic difficulties…

I continue on in this fashion for some time, finding real pleasure in holding the attention of my board. Not an eye that is not upon me, and often as I speak I can see some of them scribbling notes to themselves upon their yellow pads, or sliding them over to their neighbors for perusal. Although I have made notes of my own on my yellow pad for when I speak, once I get past my notes I know I will be able to go on in a most expansive and easy manner. It’s a gift, and it delights me beyond measure. Truthfully, it almost doesn’t matter to me what I say, as long as I can speak the speech and hear the words and witness the sheer pleasure of my own thoughts carried on my voice. Lighting my cigarette, standing up from my chair and strolling about the room, resting my hand in passing on every man’s shoulder, I speak about Joseph Stalin and Communism, I speak about the prospects of doing business with the Soviets and the excellent series of articles published some years prior in The New York Times by Walter Duranty, praising the collectivizing of the Ukrainian farms. I feel like Henry V rallying the troops at Agincourt.

After they all depart, taking their briefcases and note pads with them, I notice a single pad sprawled on the conference table as if haphazardly tossed, not particularly near any man’s chair, not particularly seeming any man’s property. And printed on its lined and yellow face, in the large block letters of a schoolboy, the single penciled word: ASSHOLE.

2

It’s useless trying to figure out who among them has done this. I’ve tried in the past with other slights and it was never successful. Now, I merely leave it where it lies—and who’s to say for whom it was intended?

In my office it’s a double hit from my brother: a letter from him concealed in a stack of trivial correspondence, and, seated directly in front of my desk, waiting for God knows how long, a female official from his veterans foundation. It’s been almost five years since Peabody Industries took over the responsibility for the Foundation, placing it within the aegis of our corporation and funding its activities as the price for bringing Hector aboard our South American operations. The arrangement has all been my doing, though you might think by the deference I accord my board of directors it was their idea. Not in the least! It was also my decision many years before that to send Cyrus Cunningham to head up our Far East operations. That, too, worked out brilliantly, though in that instance, too, it earned me little credit from my board of directors and cost me the one man I always considered my friend. What can I say? Lacking any particular talent of my own, it’s my genius to recognize it in others. And that is the second of God’s three gifts to me.

The lady before me is in her sixties: no nonsense, no lipstick, her gray hair done up under her hat. I vaguely remember meeting her before, having a drawn-out conversation with her from which there was no escape. But she is unimportant to me, and even when she introduces herself again her name passes by me, making no imprint whatsoever. She has come to thank me for turning over the deed to our family house on West 54 th Street to the Foundation for its permanent headquarters. I haven’t the slightest idea what she’s talking about. I’m constantly set to signing papers. All day they are plunked down on my desk for my signature, and I sign them with barely a glance. But I’m sure I’ve signed over no such deed to the house. In any event, the house belongs to Hector. I gave it over to him many years ago, and he may do with it as he pleases. She evidently confuses him with me, what he has done with what I have not done. But I take the gratitude she is pouring out so effusively and do not in the least disabuse her of her mistake. It makes no difference. She will never discover it, or if she does she will think she has misunderstood or misheard. It will never come back to embarrass me, or haunt me, or punish me. I’m never punished for what I do. Once when I was five, I willfully smashed all of Hector’s dearly beloved toys to pieces against the wall, and the only thing that happened to me was that I was taken out for ice cream. And that is the third of God’s three gifts to me!

Did you ever run into your brother, Hector, while you were both serving in France during the war, Mr. Peabody?

I’m sorry?

I pretend I’m momentarily distracted and haven’t heard her question. I don’t know what she’s talking about. I never served in the military. I never wore a uniform, not even in private school. I can’t even conceive where she could have gotten that idea. During the war I was given an exemption from military service. I couldn’t serve. The draft board said I was too valuable heading up Peabody Industries war effort to be inducted. Maybe I told her I had been in France. I might have said something to that effect. I have summered a number of times in Viareggio and Nice and elsewhere along the French Riviera. I might have said something like that.

I believe you said you served in France during the war, and I was just wondering if you and your brother ever ran into each other while you were there?

No, not really. We were in different outfits.

Maybe you might have met my son, Lieutenant Alvin Forster? First Lieutenant Alvin Forster? He served with the 3 rd Division at the Marne.

No, I don’t believe so.

He was killed at Château-Thierry.

Of course, he was! And how am I supposed to greet this particular piece of news? Her son was killed twenty years ago, and she’s still talking about it? A million men killed each other, and she actually thinks I might have run into her son? No wonder she works for the Foundation. She’s perfect for the job. Or maybe she’s not here at all to thank me for donating Hector’s house to them, but just trying to trap me, because her son was killed at Château-Thierry and she really doesn’t believe I fought in the war at all. But no. There’s never any trapping me. It’s all only an honest outpouring of the heart, a mother’s grief that will not abate.

I can’t tell you how much I admire you and your brother for all that you’ve done for our veterans. So many people don’t realize how great the need continues to be, especially in these times. Your stopping by the Foundation last month to visit with us was an inspiration to us all. And now this gift of the house so that the Foundation might have a permanent home. I don’t know what to say. I…

I’m just delighted when, after some more of this, this elderly lady with her severe, no lipstick, no-nonsense face—now tearing-up in uncontrollable gratitude over a house I have not given away—allows me to put my arm about her shoulders and escort her out of my office. She’s quite made a mistake concerning me, but, as usual, my brother’s everlasting kindness spreads its penumbra over me. To stand in his shadow is to stand, as always, out of the deserved and frizzling blister of the sun.

3

The letter from him is weeks old. It’s made its way up to me from Argentina. Though he fills me in on company activities there, it’s only the briefest sketch, saving, no doubt, more precise and detailed business news for those members of the board he deems more needful receiving it. For me, it’s only needful to know that while he was in Chile he ventured down to Punta Arenas and saw the house he once lived in, visited the graves of his birth parents, and walked along the Straits of Magellan, skipping stones and plunging his hands into the cold water, remembering…

Me! With him it is, of course and always, about me! I am forever needful of his admonition and support: the little boy who never grew up; the little boy who needs tending to. Should I commit the most grave and horrendous act, and for it, be hurled headlong down into bottomless perdition, there he shall also be, no doubt, falling, falling after, every inch of the way uplifting and consoling me!

I would be happy to learn that you have at last found some lovely, charming girl who has captured your heart. I shall not be content until you are blissfully settled down, a devoted wife at your side, all your domestic needs provided for, and, God willing, a child or two about the house. How much I should enjoy visiting you then! Some Christmas Eve when you are all gathered in the living room, and the logs in the fireplace are crackling and casting their glowing light upon your faces, you shall hear a knock upon the door. ‘Why children, it’s your Uncle Hector, come for a visit!’ And I shall be the very best uncle, come with the very best presents from the ends of the earth, and be ever so happy to hold you all in my arms. You see, I have not forgotten that very wonderful Christmas we spent together when we were children at Dr. Lowes’ house, and you bought us all so many amazing and perfect gifts, and our dearest Jane was still alive.

Yes…well…Jane’s not alive, and all my gifts, except that stupid photograph, were sent back! And what would you think of me if you knew what I was pursuing now? What a horror show that would be! What a sad falling off your grand estimation of me, Mon Frère, Mon Semblable! I can’t even bear the contemplation of it! And yet I do it!

4

At first, I thought her only a pathetic creature who took orders and cleaned off the tables in a coffee shop across from a Woolworth. A silent presence whose only concern was slapping down a rag and moving the crumbs into her hands. One of those dumb brutes you encounter so often in 19 th century paintings, raising her head from a field of barley or hunched over a bowl of boiled potatoes. I didn’t even bother to look up.

I’ll have the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich and coffee.

What kind of bread you want with that?

You have rye?

Yes.

Okay, I’ll have the rye.

But before she goes, I notice something peculiar: the price of the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich is 20¢, but the price of the bacon and egg sandwich with lettuce and tomato is only 15¢. It’s 5¢ less if I get it with the egg!

Just a second. You got the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich here for 20¢, but the bacon and egg sandwich with lettuce and tomato is a nickel cheaper?

That’s right.

It’s cheaper if I add an egg?

That’s right.

That can’t be right.

What do you want, mister? The bacon and egg sandwich with lettuce and tomato, or just the bacon, lettuce and tomato?

Suppose I order the bacon and egg and then just toss the egg on the floor when it comes? Will that qualify me for the reduced 15¢ price?

Finally, really looking up, really taking a look at her in order to challenge her and this insanity that charges me more if I don’t have an egg—something just goes in me. Just like that! I can feel it in my throat. I can feel it in the center of my chest. It doesn’t take more than a fraction of a second for her to rattle me. This beautiful mouth. This beautiful skin. Red lips and black hair and dark eyes. She looks like Dolores del Río, the movie actress! And she’s impatient with me, her hip jutting out and her hand resting on it. In the rising and falling of her chest, it’s not even necessary to lower my gaze to be aware that her breasts are thrust against the fabric of her uniform, burgeoning up and cleft together in the V of her waitress uniform.

I…I’m sorry. Never mind. Just the bacon, lettuce and tomato. That’s fine.

I’m happy to just get this much out. My tongue is enormous in my mouth, heavy as a truck tire. Walk my life a second back and she’s a waitress in a nondescript eatery and I’m a customer ordering a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, or a bacon and egg sandwich, and looking for an argument because there’s something insane about the price. And now I’m in a different universe. In this universe the food is any price it wants to be, and it’s absolutely the right price.

The cook says the bacon and egg is 5¢ cheaper because the bacon, lettuce and tomato has more bacon in it than the bacon and egg, and bacon is more expensive, she says, when she returns with my order. Can I get you anything else?

The only thing else I can think of before she walks away again is the stack of donuts covered with powdered sugar on the counter. They make my teeth grit just looking at them. Powdered white sugar does to my teeth what fingernails and chalk do to a blackboard. But in this universe, I like them. I like them a whole lot, because I want her to come back to me. I want her to really see I am an impeccably dressed gentleman, well off and easy and charming with words.

How’s those sugar donuts? I gesture with my chin toward the counter.

They’re good.

You recommend them?

It’s a stupid thing to say. It just comes out of my mouth, and she doesn’t bother answering.

Okay, I continue. I’ll have one of them, when I’m finished with the sandwich. And I’ll need a refill on the coffee, too.

I haven’t taken a sip of the coffee she’s deposited in front of me. It’s still steaming hot with the vapor rising, and I’m already putting in my dibs for a refill! It makes me look like a hog at a trough, grunting for more slop even when the trough in front of him is slopping over. Stupid stuff when a man comes into the presence of a woman who arouses him without even trying!

It’s no different with the lion when he gets to be aroused. He’s out for a stroll on the savanna—not particularly hungry, not particularly in need of anything more than a snack—when there at the waterhole he spots an antelope lapping the water. For a moment it’s only an antelope—the way the water is only just the water, or the tree just a tree—a piece of the landscape, an ordinary part of the day’s arrangement of sky and grassland. Until by some divinely ordained ordinance, watching the antelope—perhaps no more than casually admiring her delicate hooves poised at the water’s edge, her narrow neck and billowed sides—by some magical and irresistible force of arousal given off by the antelope herself, he discovers himself to be enormously and insatiably hungry! And, in a sudden uncontrollable explosion of teeth and claws, falls upon her, disemboweling her from flesh and bone, rending life into lunch.

Or some such. Things work this way. The Almighty Who Shapes Our Ends has designed things so, and who can pass judgment upon Him? And, much as I may be personally appalled by it and wish it otherwise, I also realize I’m not only capable of thinking it, but doing it! Willy-nilly brought to it and doing it! But, unlike the embarrassed housewife with dirty underwear who, by silly force of accident, is brought to the hospital and exposed to view, I’m never exposed. Forever concealed, forever unpunished. And all the writhing in the world will not change it by a hair.

Hunching over my sandwich, sneaking glances at her, I can see she is efficient and practiced. Everything I’m not. She knows her job. Moving from one man to another at the counter, taking their orders, pocketing their nickel tips and pennies with gratitude, she responds with smiles to the joking comments I cannot fully hear, the innuendos directed at her that can only be witless. I can see the money means something to her. It means something to the sweating cook working so hard behind her at the grill. He, too, is a study in practiced efficiency, hustling about in constant activity, passing out the orders in the steaming fog of cooking grease and scraping spatula. A beehive of activity. Not an ignoramus in drooping pants and thick suspenders, dangling his ass over the counter stool, who is not busy, does not know his job!

How was your sandwich?

It’s a long time before she returns to me. But she hasn’t forgotten my order, sliding the sugar donut down in front of me and refilling my coffee.

Enough bacon on it?

Yes. Fine. It was very good.

Worth the extra nickel?

And before I can think of anything smart to say she walks away. She’s been hovering over my table as if she was going to have a few words with me—she did that and more for every Tom, Dick and Harry at the counter!—but with me, she has nothing else to say. I can only think I haven’t been smarmy and suggestive enough to her. Whatcha doin’ after work, sweetheart? How about wriggling your behind over here and freshening my coffee, honeybunch? Those real? You get tired workin’ in this dump, baby doll, I got a job for you that don’t require standin’ on your feet. Ha. Ha.

I have trouble talking like that, but there are evidently women this sort of wit appeals to, and I make up my mind she’s one of them. Why else would she be working in this hole-in-the-wall luncheonette filled with common-mouthed laborers? Are there no other jobs? Does Horn and Hardart not exist? Does Childs not hire waitresses? And why else would she choose to parade herself with smiles down a gauntlet of coarse insults? Wear her uniform so slovenly suggestive, so calculated to provoke? Did her uniform button come undone on its own? Did the fabric stretch tightly across her breasts and buttocks because the manufacturer makes no larger size? I’m certain she is as she is, and cannot make herself any better. Balboa, staring at the Pacific, could not be more delighted.

And when she returns to hand me my check and wipe away the remains of my coffee stains and powdered sugar, I say, Say? What’s your name anyway? And after several more days of this sort of public intimacy, she culls me out of the herd and permits me to escort her home. It isn’t the first time I’ve done something like this, and it invariably causes me a certain degree of personal diminishment and a further tumble from whatever low state of grace yet remains with me. And still I do it! And all the writhing in the world will not change it by a hair.

5

Home is up four flights of darkened stairwell and a right turn into squalor—a claustrophobic place with beaten-up linoleum on the floor. She’s found herself an upright piano of bruised wood and peeling lacquer—God knows what effort was made to haul it up those four flights!—and it stands against the wall with an open beginner’s manual promising proficiency in 12 E-Z Weeks. Unasked, she sits down to play for me, while I hover behind her in impatient silence. After several stumbles and interludes in which she turns about, seeking some slight sign of encouragement to refresh herself and begin anew, she resigns herself to my silence and slowly closes the lid over the keys.

Not much of a place, is it?

Her sudden pensive judgment upon her circumstances startles me. We are new to each other, and I had not thought her much given over to introspection—or much capable of it. She understands what this is about. She’s a waitress. I’m a man far above what usually shows up at her waterhole. And we’re both at our leisure. She gets off early in the afternoon, when the lunch crowd vanishes and her day ends. I get off early in the afternoon when nobody has any further work for me, slipping out of the office for a movie, or an aimless walkabout of the clothing stores and galleries. We’re together for an afternoon’s mutual pleasure. I do not require her to play the piano. I do not require her to engage me in conversation or oblige me to look about her apartment, as if I might find something commendable in her surroundings that would negate her judgment. All this sad hovel does is remind me of those tenement apartments gangsters in the movies are always stopping by, whenever they come home to visit their mothers with unwanted wads of ill-gotten cash—just before they get shot down. But those apartments are always somehow neat and cared for, as if the director was obliged by some unspoken theatrical code to show that even in the meanest circumstances, when life is reduced to no more than a few pathetic sticks of furniture in a bare-bulb walk-up, human beings can triumph.

But there is no triumph here. The place is disordered and slovenly. If the linoleum has been swept clean or mopped down recently, I can’t tell. But items of clothing lie strewn about, carelessly decorating the back of chairs, or fallen to where they have fallen. And from what I can see of the kitchen, plates with the remains of food still upon them lie on the table, while in the sink an accumulated mess of skillets and dishes.

I’m sorry for the apartment looking this way.

She looks where I look, her gaze following my gaze.

I have to be at work by five in the morning to take care of the breakfast customers, so I don’t get a chance to clean up before I leave.

That’s okay. It’s fine.

My once-over of the room sets her into motion moving about, straightening this and that—whatever I’ve looked at. But it’s a half-hearted attempt, and after a short while she just stops and looks at me.

Would you like something to drink? I can make you a cup of coffee, if you like.

She’s already two steps toward the dirty kitchen before I can stop her.

No…thanks. Don’t bother.

It’s really no bother.

No. Really. I’m fine.

For a second, we’re back in the coffee shop: she the waitress, I the customer. Or maybe, no matter how inelegant the circumstances, no matter how stale and commonplace the seduction, this is still her home and she is still the hostess.

I have some soda in the refrigerator. I can get that.

No, please. Don’t bother. I’m fine.

Why don’t we sit down, then?

And clearing off the couch, gesturing to my place on it and waiting for me to sit, she doesn’t sit down herself, but heads for the kitchen.

Excuse me. I’ll be right back.

I don’t know what she’s doing. She’s determined to go to the kitchen. If not for the coffee, if not for the soda, then just determined. I can hear the refrigerator door being opened and shut, I can hear glassware clunking around, her clunking around, and I can only assume I’m about to be presented with something personally prepared within the innards of that culinary pigsty.

Fortunately, it turns out to be only peanuts, a pile of them rising out of an ill-imitated Waterford crystal bowl I can only imagine she’s assiduously collected at her local movie house’s Dish-Nite.

I hope they don’t have too much salt on them.

She hovers over me until I stick my fingers in the bowl and take out a handful.

Sometimes they make them so salty.

No. They’re fine.

Only then sitting down on the couch, she sits down a full cushion away from me, primly adjusting her dress, sweeping closed the billowing space between her legs. Before we left the coffee shop she changed out of her uniform into this blowsy-frowsy dress with flowers big as magnolias. And it is this dress I have followed home. It promises sleazy-easy access. In the slatternly rolling gait of her buttocks it promises lubricious pleasures. Exposed or hidden beneath her street coat, I cannot put away the lickerish mounds and curves of her flowers and offering flesh. I’ve come here to get laid, and she sits with her knees locked together and her feet square on the floor.

So, tell me about yourself.

Which is what Radcliffe girls say, the girls from Smith and Bryn Mawr and Wellesley. You start to put your arm around them, and that’s what they fend you off with. You want to slip your hand over their breasts and up their legs, and they want your social bona fides. Well, my ancestor, Dickhead Standish, landed at Plymouth Rock and provided the turkey and fixings for the first Thanksgiving Day dinner with the Indians, and my great-great-great grandfather’s brother was the guy you see in the painting, rowing George Washington over the Delaware. It takes so long to put them down—if down they end up going at all—that by the time you spill your genealogy and they spill theirs, your dick, which was hard as a railroad spike, is reduced to the stiffness of a sodden breadstick, and it’s time to take them back to the railroad station. But that was twenty years ago and they were the daughters of family fortunes and social position, and Miss One-Cushion-Away is a slatternly waitress, clothed in flowers and the fading remains of a Spanish accent, pretending class.

Well, what would you like to know, Meg?

For such is the name The Drudge answers to. Maybe it’s the diminutive of Margarita or Maria Gonzales Lopez-Faraday, or something equally Spanish-stupid. I haven’t asked. After all, if it’s good enough for the boys in the luncheonette—Hey, Meg, how long’s it gonna take to gimme my Spanish omelet? Hey, Meg, let’s go with the coffee and make it hot—how much better should I be? If that’s all it takes to win her smiles, what more effort should I make? The bacon and egg is 15¢. Why should I pay more without getting more bacon? That’s just the way the luncheonette goes, isn’t it? I’m not the guy making up the rules in the steam and grease. I’m not the guy cooking it all up.

If I sound annoyed, I am annoyed, and I don’t take the trouble holding it back when The Drudge keeps on with it.

I was just wondering what you did for a living.

Well, what do you think I do for a living?

I don’t know.

How about a lawyer?

Yes, if you say so.

How about a doctor? Could I be a doctor, if I say so?

Yes.

Or a philanthropist? Or how about if I’m Howard Hughes? You think I could be Howard Hughes?

The newspapers are filled with his recent exploits, flying from Los Angeles to New York in under seven and a half hours. And I’m just as sure she could believe that’s who I am, as believe anything else. I don’t have his black hair. I don’t go around with goggles on my head, but I’m every bit as tall as he is—six feet three—and I doubt if she even reads the newspapers, unless she’s glanced at some crumpled tabloid some customer’s left behind on the counter. I’ve told her my name, but she’s forgotten it or it means nothing to her. And what’s the difference? All she wants to know is if I’m as rich as I look. And if I’m rich, just how rich, and just how much it might profit her. That’s why she’s brought me home. Who’s loved for himself alone? It’s always the accoutrements, isn’t it? And I only want to get laid.

I just thought…

What?

Nothing…I just thought we could talk.

The Drudge has a wedding ring on her hand. It’s either real because she’s married, or a phony she employs to fend off undesirables. I don’t much care. If her marriage meant anything, or if her husband was expected, she wouldn’t have brought me here; and if it’s all a ruse to separate me from the herd who actually respects rings, it’s kind of flattering to know I’ve passed the test, however low the standards. Still, time is moving on: The Great Caliph’s great caravan of human camels across the desert. I don’t have any particular place to go, but it’s irritating being thwarted this way—the everlasting price you pay for being a gentleman. Everything has to be a song and dance: Wash your hands before you eat. Don’t stick your fingers up your nose. If I were one of those luncheonette apes with his two-ton ass hanging over the counter stool and his hands groping out every time she passed, I’d be buttoning up my fly by now and on my way. I would not be sitting on the couch with a mound of peanuts in front of me and a pair of knocked-together legs that wants to have a conversation.

Talk about what? I told you I run one of the largest corporations in America, that hundreds of thousands of people owe their livelihoods to me, that we’ve got plants and mines all over the world, in Europe, in Asia, in South America, that our revenues are in the billions. Can you even contemplate how much money that is? If you made a stack of hundred-dollar bills—have you ever seen a hundred-dollar bill?—a million dollars would only be a foot high. But if you had a billion dollars, you could make a stack as high as the Empire State Building. Well, that’s how much money I make for my corporation every year. Stacks and stacks of Empire State Buildings! I sit down with my board of directors and I tell them how to make all that money and how to keep all those hundreds of thousands of employees profitably producing so that they can keep their jobs. That’s what I do, so you want to talk about business? You think I might benefit from having a talk with you about business? No? Is that a no? Then how about combustion engines and carburetors and cylinder compressions, because I also have a lot of cars and I’m interested in racing them! You know anything about racing cars? You ever drive 130 mph with the steering wheel shaking like a bucking bronco in your hands and your wheels getting ready to fly off the road? No? Because I would really enjoy having you give me a driving lesson! No? Then maybe you can give me a lesson on the piano? I’m sure in 12 E-Z weeks I could learn to play as well as you. Then we could do a duet for Toscanini. Would you like that? I could introduce you to Toscanini, because I actually know him. Do you know who Toscanini is? Do you have the slightest idea?

Or something like that. I don’t know what I’m saying. It’s just something like that, only politer. And it flies out of my mouth because this trollop, this drudge in a luncheonette who knows nothing, is nothing, who just happens to look like Dolores del Río, has made me angry wanting to talk, sticking a dish of peanuts in front of me, putting on airs, locking her skirt about her legs, imagining she’s Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary or God knows who and somebody promising has come to call.

And I have struck back—as I always do with others—bringing her to hurt, paying her back, if not by tears that immediately flood her eyes, then by a pent-up wetness that blinks upon itself and blinks upon itself and will not loose a drop in my presence. Eyes that stare into her lap. Eyes that contemplate the intertwining fingers of her open hands, as if she held a dumb-show of ghosts upon her palms. Irremediable wounds from within the heart’s core, these trollop’s tears, these drudge’s tears, these tears I cannot help but know a thousand times before have fallen and now can fall no longer.

And it makes me not me! In this hellhole of a fourth floor tenement walk-up where the afternoon sunlight grits through dirty windows, brought down low upon the grimed and peeling linoleum, she has made me not me! She has overcome me, overcome me with want of her and the saving of her, with want of my mouth on her mouth, my expensive suit against the fabric of her cheap cotton dress, her flowers, her breasts, her everything.

In an instant there’s no cushion between us. In an instant I am upon her. In another instant I follow her into the bedroom and wordlessly make the kill on the unmade bed.

6

After that, I’m through with her. She’s far below me—an embarrassment. Can you imagine walking down the street with her—that slatternly walk and public hip-swaying gait!—and encountering some business associate or acquaintance? Can you imagine being forced to trail behind her just enough so that if by chance you bump into the president of the New York Stock Exchange it will not be apparent you’re together? You’re not attached to this creature by the invisible lines of force emanating from her slovenly self and the crooked seams of her stockings?

Sleep is now waking up at three in the morning and realizing that I’ve soiled myself. That my underpants are sticky, and I have to get out of bed to throw them into the hamper and wash myself off. This hasn’t happened to me since I was thirteen. Then, it used to just bubble out of me. Now, it’s she making it bubble out of me! And now I’m forty years old! In my office, when I’m not practicing one of those interminable speeches the board of directors expects me to deliver before another one of my brother Hector’s veterans’ groups, I feel myself lying on top of her, losing myself and the long afternoon inside her black Spanish bush.

Not even an afternoon! More like a minute or two. More like less time than it took her to set the bowl of peanuts before me. Even as I cum within her I’m embarrassed by my performance. I always do much better than that. I’m always in complete control, slow to arouse, studiously pleasuring myself observing the pleasure I give others. But with this waitress-trollop I hardly have time to even put on a prophylactic, or think. I’m just overcome by her, just fumbling to be inside her, and in a thrust or two uncontrollably ejaculating over and over again. It’s embarrassing. She can’t have been aroused yet. I realize that, and yet I cannot withhold myself!

Three days after I’m through with her, I’m in Woolworths, staring across the street at her luncheonette. I’m not even sure she’s there today. The day is cold and the windows of the luncheonette are steamed over. Maybe it’s her day off—if she gets a day off! I never asked. Not one, but three clerks have come over to me, asking me if I need help. They need to leave me alone! They need to get back behind their counters, sell their trinkets, and leave me alone! When I can’t stand the waiting anymore, I cross over the street and enter the luncheonette.

7

Now we meet regularly for our dates. I say dates because I think occasionally of taking her someplace nice: a modestly priced dinner at Childs or Schrafft’s—someplace where she would not feel out of place and I would not likely encounter anyone of consequence. But it never comes to anything. Time is limited. The lady has a husband; I have the afternoon; and after our first date she makes no further attempt to play the piano, or expects me to engage her in adolescent conversation, pretending this is something it isn’t. I’m here to get laid; she’s here because she’s netted a rich man and hopes to benefit from it. On the dresser, not six feet from where we make love, a photo of her and her presumed husband is propped up in a gilt-wire frame. From first glance, he looks like a scrawny pimp with a waistline narrower than a girl’s; she just looks like a child. The picture has been taken on the street. He’s leaning against the wall of some Spanish cantina with his arm around her, staring straight into the camera’s lens, a smirky grin sprawled on his lips. You can just see it in his face—a man with a good thing going. When I ask her about him, she gets out of bed and turns the picture down.

You don’t have to worry about him. He never comes home before seven, and even if he does he’s too much of a coward to do anything but ask you for money.

One afternoon, on my way to getting laid, we pass a confectioner’s shop, and for no particular reason I run in and buy her a box of almond-sprinkled pralines. And as we walk home sharing them, she takes my hand.

I do what I do and then I’m out the door—satiated. And I have been perfectly honest with her. I’ve offered her no encouragement whatsoever that anything can come of it. How can it? She may have her expectations, but I have not given them to her. And no matter what sort of slug she’s married to, or for what reasons, she remains married and—to put the kindest face upon it—we travel in different circles. I don’t think what we’re doing should even be considered an affair. It is merely a getting together, always on the verge of ending. Time and again, descending the flights of stairs to the street, I resolve this time is the last. I don’t need to come back to this place. I don’t need to follow her into that slovenly apartment. Don’t need to feel her legs wrapping around me, her tongue penetrating into my mouth, stopping my speech, the grinding, thrusting, pleasure of her hips and buttocks, while her husband stares down at me from a photo. The world is full of practiced courtesans, Forty-Second Street ladies of a certain class, Little nifties from the fifties bending over their champagne cocktails and martinis, catch-as-catch-can hungry for love and conversation. And I’ve known them all. And I shall know them all again tomorrow. For this is the last time! I swear it by all the gods! Down the staircase, turning and turning upon the landings, I’m finished with her! I will not stand in Woolworths or outside on the freezing street, waiting for her shift to end. I will not take my place at the tiny luncheonette table, pretending I’m hungry, pretending I’m now one of the regulars, so her boss won’t see through the well-dressed gentleman and smirk. But a day passes. No, not so much as a day! Hours! And I’m no longer satiated. I’m only a man compelled to fantasize about her. And I can’t stop until images of our afternoons gone by march across my desk, arousing me in the midst of signing papers, in the midst of lifting up the phone. Satiating me, she arouses me more! Swearing I’m done, I enter the luncheonette and patiently wait to be served.

8

And this is the way it goes with us until one afternoon—much the same as any other afternoon—I’m hustling her home when it begins to rain and we’re forced to take shelter under a movie marquee. It irritates me having to stop this way, even if it’s only till the rain lets up. The luncheonette’s been closed for the weekend, I haven’t seen her for almost three days, and I’m so keyed up to get her home and get on with it that even as we walk along I keep finding reasons to touch her. I can’t keep my hands off her. And, what’s more, I no longer particularly care who sees us. What’s the difference? I never have to pay the price for anything, anyway. And if I can’t have her in bed right now, I’ll just take samples of her along the way, intimations of what she will be providing me in full, shortly. Isn’t that what all this brushing and touching of her amounts to? This putting my arm around her waist, hastening her under the marquee out of the rain? She doesn’t need me to guide her. And I can see from the way she looks up at me that she’s as startled as I am to find me playing the public gentleman with her. We usually come down the street as if she were some tradeswoman I had temporarily engaged for some petty task. It’s only that now my arm around her waist suddenly needs to feel the damp wool of her coat and her body underneath, suddenly needs to escort her to shelter. By the curb, a dozen feet back, I’ve drenched my feet helping her over the rushing rainwater. Now, under the marquee, my arm drops away from her waist and my fingers quite by accident brush against her fingers. How much the same and not the same, this briefest touch and the most prolonged of ravishments she has given me in her bed! Both somehow of a kind, kindred and intimate: penetrating her dark entangling cunt and this casual touching not meant to arouse.

The movie is Swing Time, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It’s not my kind of movie. I’ve seen the two of them before, and it’s always a lot of dancing tuxedos and ball gowns and everybody silly and falling in love.

What a rain, I say, suddenly totally occupied with beating the water from my overcoat, because she cannot have helped notice that my fingers have been lingering upon her fingers, and it embarrasses me.

I’m sorry.

Sorry about what?

The rain.

Why? Did you cause it?

Now, I’ve become all snarky with her. I don’t want her to think that putting my arm around her waist, or helping her over the curb or anything else I may choose to do, means anything in a long-term sense. I pick her up this afternoon or that, when I have time and she’s available. That’s our understanding: I, the rich gentleman; she, the easy lay waiting to make a killing. And that’s what it is, and there’s no point trying to make it something grander. If she’s not worried about her husband, I’m not. She never asks anything of me, but I know what the end game is. Eventually, demands will be made—the chèque du restaurant presented. Monsieur has dined and Monsieur must pay. And when I do, it will be something unexpectedly generous, knocking her out—a fur coat or a trip to the best jewelry store. That’s just the way I am. Monsieur is no cheapskate.

If you like, we could make a run for it, she says, ignoring my petulance, as if she has not sensed it, or if a child had spoken. I don’t mind. It’s only a few blocks.

And I have to grab her arm to restrain her, because she’s already taken a step.

No. Let’s just give it a chance to slow down. It can’t keep pouring this hard forever.

I’m a few blocks away from where I want to be. If her landlord has turned on the steam, the apartment, no matter how sloven, is warm and cozy. I could dry off my socks while I snuggle in bed, fucking her under the covers. If we start in early enough, I can even get in an extra fuck, fucking her twice before her husband gets home at seven—just fucking her. And she’s offering to run out into the rain with me to get there to do this! And I’m telling her to wait?

Let me see if I can get a cab, I suddenly say, not three seconds after I’ve told her to give the rain a chance to let up.

Only I don’t want a cab. I’m being phony-baloney. Even as I step out into the rain to look up and down the street like a turtle with his head out of his shell, I’m aware it’s all phony. I’m actually happy I can’t find any cabs, that all the cabs in Manhattan are busy elsewhere and the rain keeps slanting in under the marquee, bouncing against our legs as we flatten ourselves together against the entrance doors.

There’s never a cab when you need one.

This is my dance with her. I don’t understand it. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers have their dance, and this is my dance. And stupid stuff this dance I’ve choreographed between us. Stupid dance whose steps are even now being re-choreographed against my will