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The Woman Thing ....(90k)    by Harriet Daimler

CHAPTER I

"Macdonald, can I turn on the light now."

"Absolutely not."

He hunted for her body and found it by following the descent of the mattress to the precipice where she had to be.

"Then you turn it on, please," she let him pat her wet thighs and her dry belly and then graduate up to her breasts.

"Sleep!"

"I can't sleep. I must talk to you."

"Does a tropical disease prevent you from hearing your voice in the dark?"

"That's just it," she detached him from the nipple stuck between his irregular teeth. "I can feel me reabsorbing my voice. I want you to hear it."

"Attention is a child of darkness." Macdonald mumbled into his yawn.

"You'll go to sleep." Martha sat up on her side of the bed collapsing his in a landslide. "I know you'll go to sleep. You always do when I talk serious."

"I go to sleep," her ingratitude woke him sharply, "after elevating my love to an ecstasy of pleasure for seventeen hours. Does that seem abrupt?" He labored to regain his own pinnacle.

"But we're always either sleeping or fucking," she moaned. "I can never talk seriously."

"Martha," he asked in fatalistic calm, "is this going to be the same as last week's conversation?"

"With variations."

"Then just rattle off the variation without the rest. I swear, I haven't managed to forget one consonant."

"If you won't turn on the light, can I open the curtain? It might still be day," the girl bargained.

"Keep your revolting facts of nature to yourself," he said, pinning her to the bed. "You Americans, no timing. Just this appalling accuracy. Clocks where your cocks should be."

"Cunts," she beggared.

"A detail that wouldn't give nerves to a poet."

"You're not a poet, you're a doctor."

"I've forbidden you to use that word in this bed," he snapped at her, shutting his eyes at the unforgivable trespass.

"Why did you stop being a doctor?"

"I couldn't stand the image of myself, tall, slender, humorous eyes, vital hair, nervous intensity, quick competent movements-and then that long white coat, so obscenely attractive women got sick at the sight of me."

"Do you ever think of all those sick neglected patients?"

"People have a right to be sack," he said darkly.

"Also a right to be cured."

"Absolutely not."

"That's nonsense and you know it."

"I know that you're trying to keep me awake," Macdonald lifted the arm from her flattened body and scratched his eyes open, "when you've got my complex glandular system alerted, you'll sneak into that monumentally meaningless conversation of yours, the whole serious thing, variations and theme."

"Even if I had nothing else to say," Martha extracted her body from the tangle of damp, tobacco stained, wine stained, yogurt, coffee and come stained sheets, "I'd still say nonsense."

"Congratulations."

"Nonsense."

He listened to her bare feet pressing cigarette butts on the tile floor. "If people are healthy, they're healthy," he delivered himself of a quotation no one would ever quote, "and if they're sick they're sick, disgusting egomaniacs, all their ingenious little diseases that it takes generations to cultivate. Fuck them."

"What about being bit by cars," she fought for the masses.

"Each man to his own bad habits," Macdonald reached above his head and squeezed forty watts of electricity into his eyes. "I frankly prefer livers decomposed by excessive drink and insanity caused by sleeping all night and struggling to stay awake all day. Martha, there's enough light in the room. If you touch that curtain and one sliver of day falls across my exhausted form I will consider your death a suicide."

She took a chance and pulled back the curtain. Had the window been wide enough to frame an adult skull or the curtains full enough to form one fold, her gesture would have achieved significance. Squinting one eye she tried to focus it through the architect's esoteric joke. "It's a glorious day. I think there's sun somewhere, but of course not in Paris."

"Of course not," Macdonald reached for the Gauloises, "you want to turn tourist agents into prophets."

"It's that wall, Mac," Martha stayed sentinel at the rampart through which the enemy could not be spotted until he'd shot the pinks of her eye, "the whole world could be raging with peace and we'd just see the wall. Why," she turned her imploring naked search on him, "now why would the French build a hotel against a wall and then put a microscopic vaginal slit in all the rooms facing the wall when so many painters are screaming for commissions?"

"When this hotel opened, little one, daylight was recognized as vulgar and ill flattering to fair complexions," he stared back at her, "and how wise were our ancestors is confirmed by your revolting appearance."

"Then why did you become a doctor?"

"Have I missed my cue," Macdonald apologized to his fellow players, "or did I just have a monotonous chat with myself about walls?"

"Well, why? Did you love humanity?"

"Never," his laugh turned into a nicotine addict's hackle, "humanity, those nauseous gases that solidified into you."

"But why?"

"Who can fathom nature."

"No, the other why."

"Come back to bed," he said, "I can see you too clearly at this distance."

"I look like hell?"

"The enamel is cracking a bit," he admitted. "You look like the Mona Lisa that didn't get returned to the Louvre."

She rushed her face to the piece of mirror over the sink, "you're right," her fingers forcing the cracks to fuse and disappear. "I must put on all fresh powder."

"Women," he marveled, "how with the mysterious and subtle changes of your delicate inner life and metabolism you create fife's only calendar."

"Also I'll have to make some more black for my eyes."

"Oh Christ," he moaned, "you're going to smoke all the concierges out of their electric eyes."

"Well, I can't go around like this," she glared at him out of yesterday's ruined mask.

"Get back into bed."

"Why did you become a doctor?"

"So I could study my body," he relented, "without everyone getting suspicious. I was always mad for my body."

"Is that all?" She stood leaning over the bed looking for the opening, and then finding the corner where the blanket appeared to be in contact with mattress, crawled in.

"Oh no, my precious Penelope, also to study female parts. I reasoned that if I could memorize all my vitals and then progress onto females', I'd make a fortune giving frigid American ladies, who sometimes came to our modest but picturesque village, orgasms. At the time I chose that livelihood," his words were aimless but his fingers on her sex sure, "Like most of my ignorant Scots neighbors, I thought that all frigid American ladies were rich. You, of course," he released a torrent of accusing smoke in her direction, "are only one of the examples confirming that youth should not be left to choose his own destiny."

"Macdonald."

"The voice I hear is not of my present love but speaks like a specter out of last week, and the week before that week."

"Macdonald, are you the only man who can make me come?"

"I wouldn't be surprised. I've always had rotten luck with my successes."

"Then it must be because we have a profound relationship."

"It must be."

"See," she pulled the burning cigarette out of his mouth. "See, you're going to sleep with a cigarette and the light and window and everything. We must have this discussion."

"Discussions," he groaned, "couldn't you write down your thoughts, leaving wide margins on either side of the paper for me to blue pencil in my corrections."

"Why were you the only man to make me come?"

"Because I'm clever. Because I have an iron and tireless prick."

"Nonsense."

"That phrase keeps recurring."

She increased the agony of the bedsprings and turned to him. "I think I was ready. I used to believe it was your skill or my great love that made me come, but I've been reconsidering. I'd become less neurotic in Europe, any man could have done it."

"Why my sweet," he reached gently for her hand, "and have I been the last to try? I never dared to ask or to hope."

"Well practically."

"Practically? You equivocate, have there been impractical results?"

"No one else can," she said bluntly.

"And the thing you wish to know is if this is a curse or a blessing? You are wondering if it will be necessary for you to throw your body on the burning pyre in the unfortunate calamity of my demise preceding yours."

"Yes, that's what I'm wondering."

"I can see your dilemma," he picked up another cracked mirror that fate had deposited on the bedside chair-table-crate and studied his ravished teeth, "and when you allow for the modern savagery of inhumation, I marvel at how you maintain a calm. Then you don't really maintain, do you."

"Badly."

"You would like me to assure that you will be the first of us to go? Is that what's haunting our idyllic relationship?"

"Do we have a relationship, Macdonald?"

"I knew it was a mistake to use that word." He spat on the insolent mirror, "I forgot about all the books you've been reading. Would you tweeze my eyebrows, Martha?"

"Do we have anything, Macdonald?"

"Sure, all kinds of things." He carefully replaced the gilt mirror on the marble top balustrade, and just as carefully separated her golden thighs. "Among which I sadly cannot include money."

"Macdonald, speak seriously to me, are we together because we love each other?"

"Is this famous discussion of yours an elaborate plot to make me impotent? Because that question would require a serious answer," he warmed his hands at the barricade, "if it made any sense at all."

"It makes great sense," she held him out, "it's the only thing that does make sense. Why are we here together in this bed?"

"Whereas the other answer would have to be too serious, this one is too obvious."

"Just to fuck, Macdonald, is that all?"

"You'll weep at that preposition when you hit sixty."

"But why each other? Why for three years each other."

"We pretend to enjoy it."

"Is pretense everything?"

"I'm not prepared to deal with everything, just fucking."

"And will we want each other tomorrow, Macdonald?"

"Don't be impatient, sweet. Let's wait and ignore that question tomorrow."

"But it makes everything so tenuous," she wept, "it makes every day so arbitrary, and then so identical."

"You want a reason bigger than either of us, my little one?"

"I want an answer."

"I can't give it to you." He wrestled with her hand that fell away like a sloppy drunk from the solid support of his offered pole.

"Thank you," she said grimly, "you can continue sleeping now."

"I have no reasons."

"You made that clear."

"I think reasons are so unreasonable."

"Love would be a reason," she shrieked.

"Is that a reason to love? Just to be neat and have a reason?"

"It would be the other way round."

"My suspicions are so strong as to be convictions."

"Hate would be a reason."

"So would geography, economy, chemistry, philosophy, or sodomy. So pick any one, or even two that satisfy you. I won't turn state's evidence."

"I'm a woman," she insisted into his calm face. The man next door put down France-Soir.

"If you're a woman," Macdonald surrendered on her desert-dry sex, "why don't you go to work like all the other women and give me some pocket-money and peace, then I'll be strong and beat you."

"That wouldn't mean anything."

"It might hurt. I'm bigger than I look."

"If you'd beat me out of jealousy or lust ... "

"Bring me my strap. I'll try."

"Oh Macdonald, it's so weak our being together. It's as if once three years ago we got into bed and neither of us has had the energy to get out since."

"You exaggerate, darling. We get out at least seven times a week. Ask any garcon at the Deux Magots."

"What's that?"

"It's a cathedral on St. Germain des Pres, across from the other Cathedral St. Germain des Pres, not far from that other Catherdral St. Sulpice."

"I think," she jumped out of bed in a flair of intensity, "that people should be together because they can't be apart."

"Like in prisons and mental institutions?" he suggested.

"I mean there should be an urgency, an inevitability, a decision that makes them be together."

"Tension is a good word."

"Yes. Tension, attraction, love."

"I hope my secretary is getting this all down."

"It's so easy to be cynical," she said contemptuously, reaching for another cigarette and lighting it slowly and attentively, letting the sulphur fumes burn away and inhaling the clean heat. He watched her carefully and approved.

"I want a man who needs me as a woman."

"You read that somewhere," he accused.

"A man who will accept being accepted as a man."

"You've been sneaking copies of Readers Digest out of the library, naughty girl."

"Shut up," she hammered at him, "I'm not a child anymore playing fuck. Let's play fuck. We're too old for running bases so let's play fuck."

"Sure," he enthusiastically brought out his equipment, "get back into the bed."

"Macdonald, I want to commit myself."

He pulled his body back against the Greek pillar that the hotel outrageously disguised as a pillow. "It sounds very dangerous."

"And I must commit myself to someone."

"My toenails are a sight," he complained, "pedicure me."

"I want to say to someone, I accept you and have him say back to me I accept you. Simple but difficult."

"That one you overheard on a bus of sight-seeing goldfish."

"What do you know about buses," she shrieked hopelessly, "when have you ever been on a bus?"

"Is that what you've been getting at for all these weeks," he sighed, "you feel I'm not enough of an adventurer, an explorer, a hunter. You want to lie on this bed thinking all day of ways to comfort me while I transfer like a madman from buses to metres to taxis and stagger home to you bulging with brutal worldliness to grind my knee into your cunt. And then you want to say that's my troubled man grinding his knee into my healing cunt."

"You're twisting it," her voice flew like a wild horse around the room looking for something unbroken.

"You want the serenity of abuse," he pursued, "you're afraid I'm not sufficiently amused by you. You want to be beaten into my digestive system."

"No, no, no."

"Figuratively of course," Macdonald calmed her, "none of us have that much energy left."

"We won't talk any more," her voice quivered.

"Don't boss me around," Macdonald continued. "I'm no pervert. Just because you can't be dependent is no reason to become independent. I feel like talking."

"Shut up, please shut your stupid mouth." She threaded the thick cord through the hole punched in the top of the tin sardine can and silently began to manufacture eye shadow.

"All right, when I get my second breath in three years we can talk some more."

"We shall never discuss anything again," she poured in the olive oil and lit the wick watching the black smoke rise. With priestly precision she erected a shed of tin over the smoke to catch the soot.

"Good."

"You're too disgustingly negative."

"And not at all positive."

"You leave so much out," she stood still but her rage trembled. "Don't I."

"You leave responsibility and family and faith out."

"Completely."

"You leave the world out."

"I knew I overlooked something."

"And you and me out."

"What carelessness."

"Macdonald, why you and me?" she exploded. "It goes back to why you and me."

"We happened in the same world that I left out."

"So did everybody else."

"But we're accident prone, we met."

"Thanks," she bent her head over the small smoking furnace.

"Your tears will excite me into surrendering myself," he warned, "I'll say that I'm your man and you my woman and apart we have no existence till death do us in and give us eternal life together."

"I never knew beauty," her two tears dried in long slate exclamation points on her chalk cheeks, "until I heard your words."

"Words," he said contemptuously, "incantations, you want to make a dedication out of fucking and use your body as a living altar."

"What else does a girl dream of," she demanded, "during her painful Brooklyn adolescence."

"You want me to prove that I'm better than you, so that you can really soar when you prove that I'm not."

"What could be easier."

"You have to be sure it's God's prick you stick on your pikestaff."

"You and your miserable balls."

"Get into this bed and shut your blasphemous mouth," he commanded.

"Never!"

He wrenched her on the bed in one graceless hurdle. "Put your woman's magic hand around my cock and make me feel good all over like that nauseous child in that nauseous book about that nauseous Uncle."

"I wouldn't touch your filthy prick."

"When are you going to stop listening to your own words. Haven't I taught you that. You're revolting when you're serious, your entire Jewish ancestry comes squatting all over your face."

"You haven't taught me anything, except that a man and a woman can mean something together and we don't."

"I'll worry about your education after I fuck you."

"Don't come near me."

"How authentic, I have to rape you."

"You twist and vulgarize everything," she pounded his oncoming chest, "fucking should be a unity, where two people become one ... "

"And you hate me so much you're unwilling to become me. Look darling, don't ever get confused about where I end and you begin," in infuriating calm he lit a cigarette. "I don't. That may be the clue to your reluctant orgasm. Good title. Maybe none of your former heroes made the distinction and you didn't want to be an old spoilsport and point it out to them just when they were having the best time."

"Can I only be satisfied by someone I despise?"

"I mean that you come with me because I leave you alone to enjoy yourself."

"That's masturbation," the scandal thickened her alarm.

"With an audience! Can you feel yourself turning indigo and going blind?" he squashed out the three hundred and twenty-fourth cigarette of the week. "Come, your great mind has stimulated my great cock."

"I want to sleep," of all things.

"Later," he pulled her against him, "I've had enough of being together, I'm sick of you. Let's fuck and be apart. Let me suck your cunt and forget you're here," he jammed a finger into her. "A few minutes' peace, then we can be lovers. Do you like when I suck your cunt?" he snarled.

"You know," she relented, feeling the brush of his head between her thighs.

"Then I'll begin neglecting you there."

"You make me feel so alone."

"Be a big girl, now," he sank his lips over the protecting pinkness of her pulsing womb, whispering an answer.

"I don't want to be alone," she pressed against his skillful mouth, down to her deepest secret. "Don't leave me alone," her lips rotated in perverse obedience to Macdonald's insulting tongue. His fingers punctured her anus and hooked her sex higher and tighter into his sucking mouth.

"I'd rather be a slave," she whispered, "than be so alone. And you're so alone, you don't even want slaves for company. Fuck me, Macdonald, fuck me with your prick." He moved up to her in the bed and she sucked her female juices from his lips. "Fuck me, Macdonald, be with me."

"Don't eat me up," he warned. "Just be a bitch and fuck me till I'm dead."

It turned into a very serious session, no memorable jokes or clever ideas. He just stayed on top of her, embracing her buttocks to get her pressed against him and opening her warmth with his broad stift'staff. He got the head of his rod into the center of her sex, and stayed on it, rubbed on it, without mercy. She pressed her insides against it, revealing all her girlish secrets. He just ignored her the first time she came, persisting in deep indifferent thrusts. Her spread legs pulled together and locked him to her, and her perspiring body got ready for the second time. It was all very serious, Macdonald had lost his sense of humor.

He loved her until she was a hot river, until he could feel her not knowing or caring who or what that thing inside of her was, just plunging it up and down inside of her with lavish fascism. Then he forgot her and let his body turn into an enormous staff that went where it wanted to go as fast and as deep and as hard as it could.

Her first words, when she could see that there was someone else in the world were, "I'm so hungry and there's nothing to eat."

CHAPTER 2

"Well, if I were a woman," said Macdonald, removing his overused body from the waves of sea gray sheets, "I'd never have that problem."

"And I wouldn't have it if I were a man," her face the white foam on the crests. "But I seem to be a woman and I seem never to have any money and I seem to get hungry every now and then."

"Now and then," his laugh was a triumph of morbidity, "if you lost your appetite for two seconds you'd die of terror. But we'll have no panic," he promised, "as long as I'm decaying here in Paris I guarantee you daily, one revolting French phallic sandwich."

"Could you go down and get something now, Macdonald?" Martha lifted her head from the round log of a cushion. "Just some bread and cheese, a hard cheese," she fell back ecstatically, "maybe a cantal or a gruyere. Imagine butter," her eyes dared him. "Imagine bread and butter and cheese?"

"My imagination doesn't extend to that," in an attempt to poison hers he yawned in a treacherous display of surreal calcium formations. "Anyway it must be that large section of the afternoon when every shop is shut."

"No," she insisted, unaffected by the cave of weird hanging stalagmites, "there's an Italian charcuterie on rue Monsieur-le-Prince that never closes. People are in there all day buying olives and hams and roast chickens and tongue and veal," she completed her catechism into the pillow, "and ca-memberts, and tomates farcies, and champignons a la grecque and pizza and spinach."

"You're disgustingly carnal," Macdonald reminded her, "you'll never achieve spiritual anesthesia or my admiration." He pulled on his pea-green trousers and exerted his hand into its torn pockets. "I know I had five hundred francs yesterday."

"We bought a pack of Gauloises," she reminisced, "and you had a rum," she pronounced resentfully.

"You don't mention your Perrier. Why you dissolve money in water when even this hotel has taps full of it."

"Perrier settles my stomach."

He grunted.

"And my nerves."

"You have no nerves, my dear, I grant you the stomach. A bottomless insensitive vulcarion stomach."

"I can't continuously make love on an empty stomach," she shouted.

"Of course you can. Sociologists have discovered that starving nations reproduce at the greatest rate. That's the only solution to hunger, fuck."

"I like eating."

"There was a time," he wandered around the room picking up rags that turned out not to be his sweater, "when you'd lie in bed for three days and not move out for coffee. Just wanted to have me in you all the time, till you began to stink of decomposition."

"It was different then," Martha said meaningfully.

"Why different."

"Because then I had money. I never get hungry when we have money. It's just when we have nothing that I get famished."

"What a very cooperative unconscious you have," he patted her thigh. "Should make some masochist very happy."

"Don't start talking intelligent," Martha warned, "whenever you get that wise look on your face I get so hungry I get sick."

Macdonald sat down on the edge of the bed. "Rum," he figured, "forty francs, Perrier ninety francs, now that is ridiculous, Martha, ninety francs for water, cigarettes one hundred and five, that's one ninety-five and forty, two thirty-five."

"Two forty-five," she corrected. "Shut up you idiot, you're as accurate as an induced miscarriage. My divine Circe, my noble

Sibyl sacrificing your secrets for a piece of bread and cheese."

"Look in your jacket pocket," she said, spread magnificently on the mattress, "maybe you put the change in there, and hand me a Gauloise too."

"It's here. What did I say, two thirty-five, that leaves two sixty-five." He spread the round discs over his palm and held the assortment close under her nose. "Smell Dr. Weiner, two sixty-five." Then he pawed with his free hand for the cigarettes. He ripped away the top of the package and counted. "Seven cigarettes. Should I buy another pack and get food for one fifty-five, or should I blow it all on cheese?"

"Of course buy cigarettes," she said primly. "We wouldn't want to break any of our habits."

"What kind of bread."

"Black."

"White is cheaper."

"Then why not eat the plaster of the walls?" Her voice trembled with the pain of the proselytizer. "Just as much food value, just as constipating. I want the unexpurgated wheat, only forty francs anyway. Then cantal. I guess cantal is cheap enough."

"You're sure that's all, madam?" he pulled the pullover over his flat hairy chest, and his head reappeared still talking, "you sure you wouldn't like me to kiss your precious bowels."

"Yes," she said petulantly from the nuptial folds, "kiss my ass, it's such a long time since you've kissed my ass, Macdonald."

"Because you're such a bore," he apologized and unlocked his way out of the room.

"Macdonald," she shouted after him, moving nothing but her wide unpainted mouth, "Macdonald," her voice trailed after him down the suicidal stairwell, "check if there's any mail."

"No."

Exhausted by the dramatic futility of her request Martha led her buttocks back into the cavern hex weight topped by Macdonald's weight had carved into the mattress and eroded into the springs. The joints of her knees had calcified into abrupt angles and she massaged them horizontal. Impoverished men, she upbraided destiny, why always poor men? They're certainly not more intelligent, they're not more amusing, they're not at all amusing. And so plentiful. They multiply, they destroy, they're like white cells in my blood stream. My parasites of poverty. And they have no style, so dedicated about having nothing. Treating everyone like wives-men, women, children, animals, birds, reptiles, fungus, concierges, their misery marries them to everything. Till finally he begrudges me a glass of water. I'll soon be drinking his piss, she thought lasciviously. Tomorrow, she fought fate, I'll put on a skirt and go sit in the Ritz bar. I'll take baths in Perrier. First rich man who comes up to me and says: What will you have? me sitting distracted behind a Scotch will say, I'll take a bath of Perrier. Create a fantastic reputation for myself. Become a myth, have poor girls from all over the world coming to drink my bathwater the way they do at Lourdes. Charge them for each sip, charge the

Perrier people for the publicity, charge the rich man for the honor, charge general admittance, have virgins making wishes and throwing coins into my tub, just soak in that Perrier day after day swelling with wealth. Bottle what they don't slurp right out of the tub and call it Mother Martha's Money Maker.

She picked up the mirror that Macdonald had abandoned and tried to be critical rather than familiar. She prepared herself for imperfections, but not for the pathos of her wrecked image. Instead of smashing the idol, with heathen intensity she lined up the paints and brushes and began the daily ritual of resurrection. Yesterday's mascara and black crayon smeared mushroom tan on the boned eye sockets. Her nose protruded in protest, and holding the mirror close to the repulsive tapestry, she doubted. The surface would have to be scraped. This was a structural disaster that could not be covered. Discarding the treacherous mirror, Martha smeared her face with a thick layer of cream. She vanquished her past, rubbing away the black experienced smears. Then she looked at the slightly ruddy and reddened skin, deftly layering it with a white powder. Her personality disappeared in the eyeless white mask so it was without recognition that she stabbed the razor sharp crayon into the dazzling blank field. She could landscape the suburban quietude of untrod lawn, or cultivate the dark secrets of the jungle. With one sure oval swing of the pencil, then another, she chose the pagan tropics. Now she could look directly at the familiar reflection. With a smile of recognition she blackened the curved brows and pressed the point of the weapon with cruel intensity into her immaculate temple. She was happening. A quiver of satisfaction adjusted her metabolism. The pale powdered mouth greeted her, and holding her neck taut, the throat poised for any social phenomenon, she was almost ready. Twisting and piling the vibrant red hair into a snake pit of poised insanity, she joined the forces of the furies, prepared for action, eager for admiration, desperate for coffee.

"Are you still in bed," Macdonald shouldered open the never closed door. "Aren't you afraid you'll be neglected by art historians?"

"Why," she said gaily, "were we planning to get in a bit of sketching this morning?"

"No more black bread," he ignored her cleverly renovated face.

"In the four hundred and twenty-seven boulan-geries in this quarter you couldn't find black bread?"

"No," he said simply, "apparently I couldn't."

"I don't want any bread," she said, casting a poisonous spell on the crisp, amber baguette he placed on the table. "Just cheese."

"I couldn't get cheese either," he shook his large satisfied head, "it's Monday, your Italians are in church." He reached into his pocket, "Instead I bought two jars of confiture."

"I hate confiture," she sat up, tears exaggerating her eyes. "It's disgusting to eat sweet things when you're hungry. Couldn't you buy me a yogurt? Couldn't you find one small edible civilized piece of nourishment in all of Paris. It's an attack, I know your method, you've done this out of spite and sadism. You're a cunt, a mediocre lazy smelling repelling emit," she crept lethally out of the bed, "persecuting me, torturing and destroying me, eating at my self-confidence. But I won't let it happen, Macdonald. Starve me and I'll still fight you with nerves. With my last choked energy I will not be tyrannized," and circling the table in demonic fury she clenched the divining rod and wrenched it into jagged halves. "Wall plaster, not one vitamin, protein or mineral salt," she spat on the pieces and before Macdonald could interrupt the ceremony, offered the bread through the slit in the wall that functioned as a window. "There," she consoled her belligerent belly, "there, there." Her quivering form steadied, her breathing regulated. She listened for the hushed encounter of bread and pavement five flights below, and hearing the faint plop, turned to the bed.

Actually there had never been any chance of her reaching it. Macdonald had been distorted into a man of furious action. Clenching her naked shoulders he pulled her passionately back into his arms and in a completely unrehearsed imitation of Rudolf V whispered, "Precious one, you have a choice. Either I break open the wall with your head, and push you through that hole down after the bread, taking the vague chance that your bloody skull doesn't contaminate the bread, or you move into the hall fully clothed in nudity and climb down those five flights of public stairway, enter that public courtyard, find that bread, both halves, lick it clean with your pink little python tongue and carry that bread back to dad. You have practically no time at all to make your decision."

"I ... "

"Don't talk," he said savagely, "or I'll surely lose mine and bash in yours. Just nod. Once means the wall and twice the hall." He caught her by the ankles and twirled her like the figure-skating champion of Canada which he wasn't.

"Macdonald ... "

"Nod," he commanded, whirling her body in a circumference that lazily included the four corners of the room, sailing her over the bed and under the sink and past the armoire. "Too bad," he panted philosophically, "I can't see your head. It's hardly fair."

"Macdonald, I'll never ... " her words drifted away from them.

"I know my love, you'll never make it, and you'll never forgive me, and you'll never smile again, and you'll never eat or fuck again, and every day I'll bury my cock in a barrel of wheat germ and commune with your cunt of a spirit." Her head, which she had been holding high during the sporting event brushed the tile floor, lightly but with a conclusive bounce, then the neck collapsed limply and Macdonald knew she was out. He carried the noxious burden past the bed through the door, and there deposited it. He walked rapidly to the sink, filled a cracked martini pitcher, her American contribution to their household, with plain water, quenched his thirst, walked back to his stiff puppet, drenched its face, and soon as its eyelids quivered against the infliction of light, forced the door closed against her bare bodkin.

He pulled the foil off the small jar of pineapple preserves and curved his finger Indian style into the jam, scooping out sweet mouthfuls. He ate seriously, thinking all the time of the body stretched out in the hall, and sucking his fingers. He consoled himself with another mouthful of sweet mucous. She had the magic American body, long, straight limbed, thin, nice around the stomach and hips, flat yet round to caress, the small tight breasts with the slightly exaggerated nipples. And the legs, the legs that sometimes happened to American girls, legs that traveled half the distance of their bodies, right up into tight high buttocks and wide enough hips; her thighs full and white that pressed her cunt into a thick triangle of vigorous hair. Macdonald squinted his imagination until he could paint the harmony of her white curves, decorated only by the riotously red shield of her cunt hairs. A remarkably restrained canvas. "Only America produces such women," he lamented, "with their hideous minds. Well," he breathed with Scots sagacity, "the left bank's as good a place as any not to find eternal love." He pulled his suitcase from under the bed and disappeared Merlin-like in a billow of dust and ashes. When the particles settled he was still there to hear some whimpers pouring through the patches in the door.

"Macdonald," her voice called faintly from the enemy's side of the partition, "have you killed me?"

"Yes," he reassured, "you've been dead about twelve minutes."

"Is that all?" her doubts pursued him from the other world. "I can't remember ever having lived."

"How ungrateful," he lit a Gauloise, "when you consider it was I who first brought you to life."

"You," she snorted, "I'm sorry I ever told you that."

"You couldn't avoid it my dove, all that cursing and fainting and rolling of eyes."

"It was just such a surprise."

"I bet."

"That you, the ugliest reptile I'd ever condescended to sleep with should be the first to make me come."

"The same old story of beauty and the beast."

"Of course, I only came because of your complete insensitivity. I just figured, he's not a man, I'll use him."

"Like a raw carrot."

"You've always taken advantage of me because of it," her voice contorted into an attack.

"Unfortunately untrue, it's trapped me these three years. Every time I fuck you I behold the virgin Mary defiled."

"I was not a virgin," he could hear her struggling to her feet. "I counted for you once, I had twenty-three men before you. Twenty-three beautiful, virile well-educated, rich, talented men."

"And never that consummating spasm of joy."

"And then comes you," she continued, "a thing of such ridiculous physique that mean mothers hold their children up to get a good punishing look at you. Entire villages are disrupted when you enter, bets taken as to your species."

"It was charity and pity that made you surrender your virginity to me," he suggested.

"I was not a virgin." The concierge five floors below moved her huge bulk to escape the sound.

"Old story Martha, old American Tragicomedy. All you poor pretty bright things sitting in black stockings and tennis shoes confessing: I lost my virginity at seventeen and didn't regain it until I was twenty-five, at which time it was too late to do anything so I came to Europe."

"It wasn't you," she tore off his insignia of the Most Distinguished Order of st. Michael and St. George. "It was the change in my diet. Wheat germ and yeast, it was that. A healthy body builds a healthy mind. I'd become less neurotic. Any man," she insulted, "could have given me an orgasm when you did."

"You cried for three days," he girdled a cord around the suitcase. "You had a raging fever for five, you kept kissing my toes and licking my armpits and telling me I was greater than Frank Sinatra. Not many men could have pulled through that."

"I was insane."

"I thought you were less neurotic."

"Neurosis has nothing to do with insanity."

Macdonald sighed. "Imagine if you had read two books instead of one?"

"Macdonald," the sound tore out of her like the blues blasting out of New Orleans, "Macdonald, I don't have any clothes on!"

"What cad went and told you?"

"Macdonald, have you gone mad, let me in. Macdonald," she shrieked, "Let me in. Let me in my room," her voice was a travesty of control, "the room my mother's occasional checks pay for."

"Bread," he reminded her, "as always, the conflict is about bread."

"I'll have you arrested, Macdonald."

"Scab."

"I'll go to the Scots Embassy, I'll tell them all about the two abortions you gave me after your passport expired eighteen months ago, I'll tell them everything, everything. You'll be guillotined for this, I swear to you. Macdonald, the little father's coming up the stairs, Macdonald, answer me," she pounded the door frantically, "miserable jealous flunky sadist, what are you doing in there? Answer me," she sobbed against the relentless silence of the wooden door, "answer me, what are you doing?"

"I'm packing, I've opened my valise and I'm folding my property into it. Any more questions?"

"Monster," she spat at him, "vulgar perverted ugly monster." Macdonald pulled a chair to the door and sat down tiredly, opening the fresh pack of Gauloises.

"Macdonald," she slipped into the pose of rational social worker, "we know we're finished, must we end it with this humiliation, must we finish despising each other, can't we salvage a speck of dignity?"

"From what, Martha?"

"We have meant something to each other."

She paused. "I've never loved anyone the way I've loved you."

"How revolting," snarled Macdonald and moved away from the door to the window. "I can still smell the bread," he shouted, "the concierges must all be buggering their cats, hurry wee one." He knew with shrinking heart and belly that it'she didn't relent, he would.

All the exercise and running back and forth to windows and tossing of dead weights was a decided departure from Macdonald's usual sedentary life, and his appetite responded. Would-be writers, he rediscovered, do not incline towards athletics, which was why so few of them had made memorable records at the Olympics. He opened the door and found the hall gloomy and empty in the diminishing afternoon. No Martha, only the faint rustlings of paper emanating from the room that the French, out of respect and affection for the English language, identify as the water closet. "Martha," he called, forced into the offensive, "are you going?"

"Is the hall empty?"

"I am in it."

"You don't count. I mean people, not baboons."

"Three baboons are standing next to me." Macdonald counted with slow authority, "I am the only recognizable human. But you may say that including me there are four baboons in the corridor."

"Pig," she grunted, and he heard the latch of the bathroom door lift. Martha emerged clothed in patches of France-Soir, Le Monde, ll Observatoire, and upon her breasts, Ullumanite".

"I'm not going back there," Martha pointed. "I'm going to stand here and ask the first person who passes to help me."

"If you were English," Macdonald cheered her, "every policeman would be required by law to give you two shillings," and he brushed past her accidentally touching a lighted match to the kiosk.

Getting to the courtyard was not for Macdonald the automatic process of walking down familiar steps and through familiar doors while the creative plains of his brain were left free to transport him to reckless adventure. All of his stealth, all of his cunning had to be invoked for his encounter with the enormous owneress of the hotel. All day, huddled and hidden in the folds of her flesh, her fury waited for him. On alternate Fridays of August at four o'clock when Madame bathed, then and only then could Macdonald and Martha pop in and out of the building, which they did from six to eight times with the wild abandon of the fluctuating franc. Today she guarded her post, and most terrible circumstance, someone was paying his bill. That always cheered her, and cheered she leered in a savage exposure of ivory. He tried to confuse her with slow dragging steps, disguising himself as an unfamiliar cripple, but she was on to him with an immobile leap.

"M. Macdonald," she shouted, "M. Macdonald, we must speak of your note."

"We must, Madame," he said in correct breathless eighteenth-century French, the language for concierges and locataires and dogs, "we must, Madame, but I regret now I must rush or miss rehearsals."

The plot was to give her pause. In that snatched second of marvelous hesitation the total destruction of Paris could occur.

"Then I will be brief," she promised, not removing her bulk from the bill payer. "Today, you pay, or tomorrow we pack all your disgusting property and protect them in the cave." She turned to the Swede who was obscenely displaying ten thousand francs. "They are so rich, Americans, and never they pay their bill."

"I am not an American," announced Macdonald in his precise French, "I'm a Swedish subject."

It was the persistent incredulity of the Swede that he had not conquered the simpering language of his host, and he drank to still his surprise. "American?" he asked of Macdonald in Garbo accents, smiling a little drunkenly.

"I am one of the two hundred thousand unemployed Hungarian freedom fighters," Macdonald nodded.

"Demain," snapped the patron, who knew that she was being insulted, "demain you take your filthy rags and wife with you."

"What is she saying please," the Swede arranged the English words like heavy slabs of marble, "her voice is so high I can not hear her."

"She is asking you to leave her hotel because yesterday you fucked four little boys in the afternoon, one of them her husband's sister's youngest son."

"Madame," roared the Swede, "Madame," clutching the ten thousand francs, "Madame, I demand privacy. In Sweden," he turned to the Hungarian, "we would burn her instantly. First we would tie her lacerated bleeding form to a ladder and then we would push the ladder into the cool flames."

"How curious," Macdonald said, his head waving in serpentine hypnosis to the rhythm of the large swaying franc note. "You must come to my room, number twenty-two, the fifth floor, and tell me many of your country's customs."

"Of course," agreed the Swede, "Paris is still the center of the world for the exchange of ideas."

"And the comparison of cultures."

"Exactly," the Swede ecstatically raced his mind down the phrase book. "In my city of Bofors there is not much culture."

"But is everyone as tall as you?"

"In our schools," smiled the tall man, "we are required to learn English. It is necessary for commerce. We are a commercial people."

"And why not," said Macdonald to his brother.

"Commerce and drink," lilted the Swede poetically.

"And skiing and suicide and pederasts," grinned Macdonald helpfully.

"Yes, yes, you must visit to me one day, I give you my address. It will cost nothing, you will be an honored guest. In my cold and distant land guests are honored as they were to the ancient Greeks."

"Not to speak of ass-holes," understood Macdonald heartily.

"All is honored in Bofors. We are manufacturers of steel," and he placed two thousand francs into Macdonald's dry palm.

"Of course," said Macdonald, folding the money into his pocket. "Skol," he congratulated the laughing Swede, eager to escape the locataire's insidious glare.

"Wait," called the disastrous drop in the French birthrate, "I have a letter for the Madame." She handed him the envelope. "It is thick and from America." Everybody knew what that meant.

Macdonald fingered the envelope. The envelope looked possible. Two thousand francs in his pocket and an envelope with possibilities in his hand. Had he been too harsh with Martha? She was, after all, an American. Strange and unpredictable prosperities came from America that were unknown to a Scotsman. And it was rather charming the way she pounded on the bed and screamed obscenities when she came. He hoped that she was back in the room unpacking his bag.

Macdonald hardly noticed the first four flights. It was only from fourth to fifth that his breathing apparatus deteriorated and he took the cigarette out of his mouth grabbing the banister and dragging himself to their door. He'd left the door open on his hasty exit, and so it waited. Martha was on the bed sitting Buddha-like in great but pretended dignity. His valise had been kicked empty to the floor, and surrounded by Macdonald's clothes, she was busily sorting those garments she had razored into shreds from those she had not yet achieved.

She looked up distractedly and said, "Oh, hello Macdonald, I'll be finished in a minute."

"You bitch. What we do to each other is one thing, but property is sacred!"

"I wanted you to know what it felt like to wander naked in this world, it's really been a liberation for me. I thought," she razored a stubborn sleeve with quick clever fingers, "that it would be a good idea for you to become an Adamite. It would make a great picture story for Life magazine, and if you weren't too lazy and kept a journal," she tugged with straining arms at the lining of his revoltingly moss green tweed jacket, "they might use it to caption the photographs." The jacket surrendered with a wounded shriek that came out of Macdonald.

"You'll break something, Macdonald," she cried, and snaked away from his raised fist. Her body slipped over the mattress edge and her fingers encircled an empty wine bottle. It flew for his head, and landed on his shoulder. Macdonald shook himself as if a nerve long dead had died. "Let's not fight, really you'll thank me one day. A man like you should travel light and fast and far."

"Where did I put it," he asked dizzily.

"What, Macdonald?" Martha asked conversationally.

He concentrated on the pile of lint that had been his wardrobe, kicking bits aside with his toe, fastidious as a practiced clochard. He bent swiftly and picked up a slice of leather which looked as if it had once been part of a belt, though it was small enough to have been part of a wrist band, small enough indeed to have been part of a Chinese dinner. He held the leather in his palm.

"Oh, Macdonald," Martha implored, "don't hit me again. Why don't we fuck instead? It's practically the same thing."

"None of your Freudianisms," Macdonald warned. He pulled her cruelly by the long red hair, dragging her off the bed and bouncing her carelessly on the floor. "Don't give me any of your American shit." He kicked her ribs. Martha rolled away from him, and then rolled recklessly back grabbing his ankle and biting viciously for the bone. Her teeth reddened with his Celtic blood. "Except if you're impotent," she called up. "If you can't fuck, then beat, but you won't be fooling me, old man," she licked her teeth clean. "I don't think it's so grand and virile of you to kick me. Pricks tell me more than feet." She kneeled in front of him and dared him: "Just let me look, darling, I want to see if it's still there. If it's not there anymore you can kick me again. Just let me look," and she pleadingly unbuttoned his vile trousers. "There it is, all folded away and shrunken like a great shy schoolboy, come on," she cooed, and pulled the inactive member into prominence. She nipped it with her tongue, and suctioned the staff into her mouth the way Macdonald had taught her. In the most revolutionary tradition, the student was conquering the master with his own techniques. Macdonald let the battle be lost, he let the new generation ascend, he let the pupil lesson the teacher, he let her suck. She clung to his thighs, hiding her head bashfully in the shadows of his pubic hairs, rubbing her cheeks timidly against his thin-skinned sacs. His malevolent maleness swelled angrily in her tight mouth, rocking his loins into alertness, teasing the erect rod away from her, and then remembering that she hadn't eaten all day and magnanimously feeding it back into her wide open mouth. She curved her fingers around his hips, serpenting for his anus and pinioning his anger deep in her throat. The brazen gulping gasps quickened, and she fell away from him when he least wanted freedom. He hadn't taught her that timing; no man had ever taught a woman such mutinous timing. His throbbing cock led him slavishly to her hole, and she was on the floor wide open and wet for the assault. "Well," sighed Macdonald, "what the hell," and plunging into her gave her unconditional victory. There were other ways to die. His body pounded hers under the bed, and they rolled crazily to the window. They grunted in concentration, secluded and separate in their own pleasure. "It's up to you, Martha," warned Macdonald, rotating his hips so that the lever inside of her could touch off every battery in her hole. "Keep going," she gasped. "Keep in me, stay in me, roll in me, that's right, don't stop, don't get lazy, think of other things, think of your mother, Macdonald, think of New Year's in Glasgow, darling, think of all the Americans you've fucked, yes," she crooned, "don't think of me, just fuck, Macdonald, fuck me faster, darling," she urged him, "suck a lovely little Scots fucker you are, yes, my angel," she moaned, "don't stop, Macdonald, don't stop, don't stop," and he could feel her sex throbbing surrender. He came with her, invited by the inhalations of her sex and long after they were both good for nothing, Martha was still screaming, "Don't stop."

"Enough, darling," said Macdonald, "the neighbors will think I'm beating you."

CHAPTER 3

Martha was propped up on the pillows eating black bread and cheese. Macdonald beside her emptied the wine bottle into the glass.

"Really, don't you want any, Mac?" asked Martha. "I'll make a sandwich for you."

"No sweet, I'm not hungry, just thirsty."

"You should eat something."

"Later."

"You mean," she tore out a mammoth mouthful, "I should leave some bread and cheese for you?"

"No, wee one," he said, "it's all for you. I'll get something in a cafe later."

"Did we inherit money, Mac?" Martha turned to him and ran her finger over his bare chest, he trembled his approval.

"Do that again, can you manage to eat and do that at the same time?"

"Wait till I finish my sandwich."

Macdonald sighed. "You're so clever, such fine coordination, why don't you work up a juggling routine."

"I don't see you drinking wine and sucking my cunt at the same time. Why should I be expected to be the clever one?" she wandered off and bent down to kiss his thigh. "There's something delicious about you, Macdonald," she admitted bewilderedly, "I hate to admit it," she caressed his belly, "but your flesh is gorgeous."

Macdonald patted her shoulder. "Be a slave to lust," he recommended, "every woman should be trapped in her sexual appetite."

"You really think so? You're not just saying it out of greed? You think women are more interesting when they're all cunt?"

"I think women are fascinating when they have nothing but cocks on their wee minds."

"I could be that way, Macdonald," she traced his breast bone down onto the end of his swelling rod, "if I didn't have so many other things on my mind."

"Empty that empty vessel," he advised with laconic authority. "Don't think of anything. Remember," he scratched his irritated groin, "all a female has to worry about is getting a cock inside of her twenty times a day."

"That's an awful lot of times, Mac."

"Then nineteen," he conceded. "The less she has, the more she should worry about it. The idea is to stay worried."

"When I finish my sandwich," she promised, "I'll worry."

"Here, have some wine."

"The bottle's empty. You pig, couldn't you save some for me?"

"Woman is created for sacrifice."

"They always gave plenty of wine to sacrifices," Martha complained, "that's the one joy of being a sacrifice, wine and drugs."

"You'd rather eat than drink anyway," Macdonald reminded her.

"Must everything be a choice? Must every preference exclude?"

"Here, drink," he shoved the half-filled glass at her, "but don't finish it." She lifted the glass gracefully to her lips and gurgled it to depletion.

"After Victoria nobody wants to drink," the empty glass rolled on the treacherous incline of the cement floor.

Moodily, Macdonald watched its journey. "This room looks like we shit and piss in it, couldn't you occasionally clean?"

"I'm too busy."

"I never see you move out of bed."

"But I'm thinking all the time, lying here and thinking. How can I be more seductive, yesterday I had seventeen pricks in me, the day before twelve, before that eighteen. Why can't I be a complete female? Why can't I hit twenty. Just thinking of it exhausts me, Macdonald," she sat up and stared into his face, "I think I'll wash."

"Don't think about it, just perform. Be capable of a spontaneous act."

"Nothing as sophisticated as washing could be spontaneous." Martha carried tepid potfuls of water to the tin bidet and squatted.

"Don't use the face cloth," warned Macdonald.

"Would you rather I used your face," she massaged soap into her tender membranes.

"You're the dirtiest woman I've ever known."

"I was brought up in a country with plumbing. I can't learn to bathe in sections, it's necessary for me to totally submerge."

"Americans," he grunted, "barbarians."

"That's why we're winning," said Martha. "While you're all communing with your precious dead souls we're making like Eskimos."

"Is that a private joke?"

"One you may share," Martha offered magnanimously. "What I mean is ... "

"Oh Christ, I forgot, your illiterate mother wrote to you," and he leaned over the life-giving bed for his battle green trousers.

"What does she say?" Martha stood up from the bidet and began the fruitless search for a towel.

"Don't use the face towel," Macdonald repeated.

"Is that what she says," Martha nodded, picking up the towel and patting her thighs. "She has eyes in the back of her nose."

Macdonald reached her in one leap. "I live here too."

"You and your medical training," snorted his drenched concubine. "These vestiges of sanitation. You're like an unfrocked priest who refuses to fuck choirboys."

He wrenched free the towel and returned to the bed. Martha, legs spread, surrendered to drying at room temperature. "Read it out loud," she demanded, squeezing her pubic hairs. "It is from my mother to me."

"First we must determine if I can read it at all. She writes like you wash. I begin," Macdonald looked up for attention, wiping his nose with the towel, Dear Marty, "that explains a lot," enclosed is five dollars, he pulled the sheets of paper apart, and taped to one corner of the third sheet of the manuscript was a brown green square of money which he detached and laid tenderly on the table. It should go a long way in Europe, the letter advised, since we read here that Europeans will do anything for American dollars. "Even fuck Americans," agreed Macdonald agreeably. I'm sorry I can't send more, but in America Americans will do anything for dollars, too, and most of them are doing more than your father. "She has a mind like Bertrand Russell," he looked up. "Shall I repeat that line?"

"Just read the letter once," Martha sat at the edge of the bed. "Does she say when she can send more?"

"Next line, J wish I could promise you more, but I'm afraid this is it for a long time. Aren't you writing anymore? I should think you could make some money that way. I don't expect you to be a great serious genius like Edna Ferber and Fannie Hurst, Macdonald's face tinged yellow and the words thickened, but at least you could get something in "Ladies Home Journal' or Saturday Evening Post." Don't they pay anything for stories? You used to write such nice stories. I always said, and I still say, why not a happy ending? You know what I mean dear, it's the same thing as it's as easy to love a rich man as a poor man. I never could understand why you had to kill off all your characters, unless your stories were detective thrillers and it's just to deep for me. "Did you explain to her that you couldn't have orgasms at that stage of your literary development," demanded Macdonald seriously. Martha stared at the wallpaper opposite the bed.

"Mac, were those blue flowers peonies or bluebells?"

"I think they were bachelor buttons."

"Let's get dressed," Martha said suddenly. "Let's get dressed and get the hell out of this room."

"I have two more pages."

"Read the last line."

Poor soul, Macdonald read, I guess it all happens for the best. Love Mama. "I see where you derived your style," he sympathetically sucked her teats and then finding her sex as soft as his staff was bony and burning, sank into her.

"There's a P.S., Martha. Do you want to hear it?"

"More than anything in the world," admitted Martha, holding a lighted match to the comer of the airmail stationery, "but I'm a terrible masochist."

Speeding down Boulevard St. Germain in a rush not to be late for the early quitters, Martha, trotting beside Macdonald, relented.

"What did she say in the P.S., when was I coming home?"

"Something like that."

"I'm never going home," he saw the serpent fear in her eyes. "Rather, I am home. I mean, must home be where you were born? Can't someone decide that he's home because he finds a place where he feels comfortable?"

"I do think home is a feeling," Macdonald agreed, "I'm not so sure it's a comfortable feeling."

"What do you mean," she snapped nervously, "don't quote lines at me. You know I'm a ignorant American."

"I just made that up as we were going along," he assured her, "but it's so good it's a pity to waste it on you. If we don't get in too late tonight I'll start on a book or play about someone who stands still so that home can run away from him."

"Another forty-seven minutes marathon of genius."

"Why the hell should I write that play," he reconsidered, "I can only accomplish two things with it, make people feel better or worse. Let them find their own diversions."

"You can help them to understand what's happening," Martha found God.

"Dear child, why would anyone bother watching a play it'something was happening."

"Well, most great writers write because they must, they have no choice, or paint or compose for the same reason."

"I'm not discussing psychopathic behavior, forgive me but I'm talking about myself."

"Actually, Mac," she complimented, "you do have excellent ideas. You're an idea man. You belong on Madison Avenue."

"And you belong in a home for the incurables," he offered her an equally attractive retreat. "What can't I cure?"

"Sex, mama, home, money, food, success, men, you, all the diseases of your beloved homeland."

"Every homeland has the same story, the same problems. It's just that in America we're articulate, we're eager for self-improvement. We've read Freud. Between Europe and America there is only a difference of vocabulary."

"Like the difference between Shakespeare and Faith Baldwin."

"Yes, that's what I mean. You know, Macdonald, before I met you I'd bad some pretty dark days."

"Better to have dark nights and no days at all isn't it?"

"And sometimes I'd think of going back to America, just for money, you know, money and comfort and all those things that don't matter."

"Only an American," Macdonald intervened, "giving his life for those things that don't matter could make that statement. It's the heroic part of your nature."

"And then I'd remember my mother."

"Enough said. After reading her letters, I'm afraid of going there on the one hundred and ninety-one million chances to one that I might meet her."

"Then I think, Macdonald, if my mother had been normal, even semi-normal, how ordinary I'd be. I'm sure it's ignorant mothers that produce extraordinary geniuses."

"Like you?"

"Apparently you had an intelligent mother."

"Yes, but her mother was moronic, and I have reached back a generation for my dominant genetic characteristics."

"I read somewhere that all Scotch women were intelligent and the men frightening dullards."

"Scots, my dear," he corrected her, "Scotch is a spirit, not a nationality."

"You're so sensitive," she admired him.

They passed St. Julien le Pauvre. "Is today Saturday?" she demanded.

"I forgot to check with my secretary."

"If it's Saturday I'd like to go to church tomorrow. Let's come tomorrow and hear an orthodox mass. They have glorious services."

"You go and then tell me all about it," recommended Macdonald. "It would make our relationship more dynamic."

CHAPTER 4

Posted on pillars high above the head tops in constant and severe judgment leer the two wooden mandarins. They regard not each other, their unfriendly shoulders at forty-five degree angles, nor at the pilgrims beneath their thrones. The smoke from chainless ends of cigarettes rise to their feet and so they preside in a heavenly shifting of clouds over the swarming magenta velvet benches. So deeply afflicted are the penitents of the Deux Magots with their own guilt that were the overseering deities to relent and forgive they would cling to the damnation of cigarettes and talk. In more than one tragedy, the punishment has absorbed all of life.

Into this undescribed circle of Dante's hell, or anybody's circle or anybody's hell drifted two. Their eyes wandered from table to table gliding flatly over the unfamiliar dead bodies lying cold on the left bank of the Seine. They looked into all the faces with the terrified persistency of parents requested to identify and claim their young. The disaster had been enormous, all the chips had gone down. In panic their eyes would flicker recognition into locked eyes, recognition but not intimacy, and with the reluctant hope that their own were not amongst the victims, they continued the dreadful search.

These two who entered were creatures of another time. Two of the many who had not packed their doctrines in time when the existentialists had been ordered out of Paris. As women will fling themselves into philosophies without reservation, saving reservation for their men in the calamity of their men not being their philosophies, so the girl appeared the more indoctrinated of the two. She was clothed in her beliefs and her face had not happened until granted full membership. Viewed from the floor, the practiced perspective of the cafe, she revealed in orthodox restraint no inch of her flesh. Between flat black Italian slippers and tight black cuffless corduroy slacks was a bridge of black stocking. The stocking moved up under the tight pants that moved up beneath the curtain of a wide black coat into a black high necked long sleeved sweater. Her shoulders were bent in vague imitation of the man, squared and stooped as it'she were apologizing for having been born the Prince of Wales. Above the black habit glared her violently white face, white and expressionless as a white and expressionless stone. Not the ovens of summer or the abrasive currents of winter could stimulate color onto her bleached cheeks, so inviolate to the elements was her water-repellent mask of white powder. She could have dived into the waveless depths of the Mediterranean and struggled to the surface, her epidermis an unchanged white. Everything the cosmetic manufacturers promised, it was, and the simple addition of prickly heat powder to the mixture, rendered the powder an even whiter white than educated biologists and chemists had achieved. Often, out of desperation, the layman will exceed and add to the knowledge of the scientist. Only Macdonald suspected her black secret, that beneath the white powder there lay vanquished the rosy unscrubbed American cheek.

Martha's talents did not stop with her whiter than white on white canvas, for on the colorless cloth she outlined black and enormous eyes that transformed the abstraction of glacial prelife into a surreal portrait, vital as a statue, grave as an insect. Her face stood away from an electrical red frame, a work of dedication and love, a combination of concepts preserved from antiquity that could only have been assembled in the twentieth century.

Macdonald's face, being less ancient was less restricted to the modern and its surface bore the markings and creases of many centuries.

His was not the actor's stock expression of hero or victim, but the confusion of one who had been cast as both, played both and been found ill-suited for both. Where Martha's face was smooth, Macdonald's was corrugated, where she was a monochrome, he was a kaleidoscope, where she was ancient he was old. Where her garments were as inflexible black, his resembled an unscraped pallette.

"That girl," Martha asided to him, laboring not to move her mouth or nod her head in that direction, "she's looking at us and writing in a notebook."

"Don't smile," Macdonald warned, "she might have a camera."

"Shut up," Martha snapped, and then quietly, "she might have a tape recorder. There's Fioren-zaio," she cheered quickly, "he's sitting at a table alone with fourteen other Gurgeffians. I think he's trying to telepathize a greeting to us. And there's Gregoriansky, he's sitting with someone who looks like the Finnish ambassador's daughter, anyway she's got clean hair, all shiny and yella, I think he's reading from one of his notebooks, yes, yes, I can tell from how his mouth is moving. Now Macdonald, don't you think that is a very strange neurosis for a white Russian to have, even if his mother and father were deposed Princesses, to write down everything that he says to everybody, and nothing that anyone says to him? And then to insist on reading his words to everyone? And since the only time he speaks is when he reads what's written down, he keeps writing down and reading the same things."

"Very strange," agreed Macdonald.

"There's that English cunt who says you have eyes like Aly Khan. God, she has ugly straight white teeth."

"I found her a sweet child."

"Child! Maybe you're referring to her youngest aged daughter. I mean that old haggard smiling British Commonwealth cunt sitting at that table alone waiting for someone of her class or an exotic, like a man for instance, to fuck her, that's who I mean. There's Conrad, he's waving at us, don't wave back. Who is sitting with him?" her voice elevated wildly. "It's so unattractive. It's got a head exactly as wide as its neck, which is narrow even for a turtle. I mean really, Conrad is so public domain, oh god more waving, say something Macdonald, pretend to be talking, I'll pretend to be listening."

"If you will help me," his words trembled in her ear, "just a few moments longer," his heavy hand landed on her shoulder, "and guide me to a quiet table on the terrace of the Cafe Flore, I would be so grateful, my child. Though I am old and blind, and appear to your young and clear and blessedly healthy eyes to be a pauper, in truth I am the richest prince of saudi Arabi who plucked out his eyes, but not his fortune, when I viewed the West for the first time after a sheltered life spent on an oasis, wherein my father had built artificially cooled skiing slopes and ponds of frozen champagne so authentic that it was there that Eisenstein chose to film the finale of Alexander Nevsky, reshooting in his scandalous perfectionism the drowning sequence so often that our entire slave population was drowned in ecstasy and genius, and all alone I was forced to Europe in search of seventy-eight new concubines in order to replenish our tribe. No sooner had I landed in Paris when the Formosans as a test of their strength and as a propaganda stunt for Life magazine, later commented on in Time magazine under the curious heading of Personalities, invaded my oasis with fire throwers and melted my cherished father's slope, thereby washing away the last landmark of my ancient civilization. Indeed, where my empire stood, high, white and cold, now lies the desert, low white and hot. Even with a map, anthropologists have been unable to relocate it, and so I am without people or land. Fortunately, my money, invested in Swiss banks ... "

"I'm going to sit with Conrad," Martha scratched at his claw grip.

"Come back," cried Macdonald, "come back my angel, my sight, my heaven, I am old and blind and you young and blessed with twenty-twenty vision, let me drape you with rich furs that I may feel them, let me put diamonds big as cow bells around your ankles that I may hear them, let me douse you with rare perfumes ... "

"Let go of me, Macdonald, you're dangerous when you get like this. If you don't take your filthy bones off my shoulder, I'll scream." , "Just your voice ... "

"Stop it now. Anyway that girl left, it's all down on tape, you can stop now."

"Do you think she believed any of it?"

"All of it, especially about me being young and blessed."

"Well quick, get her empty table. Harvest the comforts I laboriously plant for us."

"You're sure you don't want to sit with Conrad?"

"The reward of long union is familiarity. I am sure, as you are so sure, that I don't want to sit with Conrad."

"I'm a little tired of just hearing your voice."

"How strange, conversely I've only just noticed yours."

"I think we should make an effort to be more social," Martha hinted. "I wasn't born into this Siamese state."

"Our attachment is your illusion, my dear. Do go sit with Conrad. I assure you that the operation will cause no loss of blood and little or no pain. None of the miracle drugs need be employed."

"Why don't you stop protecting yourself? You know how it would devastate you, absolutely devastate," she emphasized in expanding doubt, "if I got up and left."

"If you don't stop beating yourself," Macdonald pushed her onto the bench, "I'll cry."

"I'm going to sleep with that man," Martha threatened Macdonald.

"What man, darling? Not Conrad, I hope? Conrad's already been tested and disproved, hasn't he? I thought he was one of the Neanderthals who preceded me in your exhilarating climb to my sophisticated pinnacle."

"No not Conrad, the other one."

"Other one," Macdonald sat across from her, "ah, I follow now. You refer to turtle head."

"There," she triumphed, "you're insulting my future lovers. You hate him. You're ravished by jealousy."

"Consumed is the accepted expression. Consumed by jealousy."

"I don't speak in cliches."

"Just think in them."

"It's time, Macdonald, that I made a concerted effort ... "

"That's better."

"What's better?"

"Now you're thinking and speaking in them. That's the unchanged untouched girl I took home with me three eventless years ago."

"Cleverness is just defense."

"I wouldn't be surprised."

"If you'd let yourself feel something as frequently as once, you'd probably find out that you're made of marshmallows."

"Not a toasted nut in me."

"Conrad is looking at me," she whispered, "so is the turtle."

"Martha, you confound me. How, with your back to them can you see what I can't see with my front to them?"

"Mirrors."

"A secret passed down from father to daughter?"

"Mirrors, mirrors," she said impatiently, "you're so dense about decor, Macdonald. The mirrors all around the room. This is a good table," she stared at nothing and combed her hair. "From the mirror up there," she pointed, "I can see everything to the left and behind me. From that mirror over there," she forced him to turn around, "I can see everything to the right and behind me and also the revolving door."

"That's the best mirror of all, isn't it?" he innocently tried to five in her cosmology.

"They're all important," she said shortly.

"You never can tell where fate enters and sits."

"And then from that mirror there, I can see everything in front of me."

"It is declasse to look directly at anything? It does seem an excess to use mirrors where a direct glance would serve."

"Mirrors are better," she talmudically shook her head. "It's always better to appear not to be looking at anything."

"But you do take the chance of getting an extremely narcissistic reputation, never taking your eyes off mirrors. People might get the revolting impression that you're looking in the mirror to find your own reflection."

"Only Italians do that."

"A simple race."

"Prenatal."

"What, beside death, could be simpler."

"Conrad is coming over," she whispered dramatically.

"Explain further, Martha, seeing the world through mirrors as you do, do people appear to be walking away from you, when indeed they're approaching? Or do you turn to the right when they're coming from the left, or do you think they're still stuck in the mirror when in fact they're standing on your toes burning your nipples with their real hot, red hot cigarettes?"

"Don't be so precious, Macdonald. Soon you'll be sending orgies of pneumatiques to yourself."

"What will I say," he asked entranced.

"You'll say that you'll kill you if you don't leave me alone."

"I'm going to send it tomorrow. Could you jot that down for me?"

"He only went downstairs to the men's room. Now he's coming back up again."

"I'll never again spend days wondering what gifts to buy for you, Martha, thank god that dilemma is resolved. For our golden affair anniversary you will have a golden mirror, for our silver a silver, for our wooden a wooden, but for our glass, which is I believe the third brittle year of connubial bliss, I will purchase a hand wrought comb and brush set."

"Why," she turned away momentarily from the mirror.

"Just as a surprise."

"I can't see anything, if I'm looking at you. What's Conrad doing now?"

"He's sitting on the floor playing with that damn kangaroo of his. A typical American affectation."

"Cunt," she returned to the mirror. "Turtle head just spotted me. Move your shoulder a bit, you're cutting his head off."

"How symbolic."

"Can you see him."

"Yes," Macdonald granted, "but if you'd move your shoulder a bit you'd save me that mishap. He doesn't know about mirrors-he hasn't taken his eyes off the back of your head."

"Jealous cat," she exulted, "what do you think of him?"

"The turtle analogy is an adequate one, but I find that he has more a thick neck than a thin head, which gives that comparison such weighty inaccuracy. However, the overall effect is of an inquisitive darting look which I find rather sympathetic."

"A coffee," she said to the long neglected garcon loitering near them.

"Be wicked," suggested Macdonald, "get it with milk."

"If you will."

"A coffee and a cognac," Macdonald dismissed the garcon.

"You find him revolting," Martha asked directly.

"Physiologists of the nineteenth century tell us that a man's body changes every seven years. In time I might come to be delighted with him."

"You're pushing me into his arms," she resented.

"On only one condition will I push," Macdonald asserted, "that's if his wealth made him one of the more sought after undergraduates at Oxford."

"You think he's English."

"I meant it metaphorically."

"I want facts," she poured the cold black coffee, "facts and opinions, not philosophy. Anyway I'm not interested in him for his money."

"What then, his gorgeous shell? I never could understand infidelities among the poor," Macdonald admitted.

"I have a heart, too," she crushed the rock-like cubes of sugar with her spoon, "and soul and desire and ambition."

"In turtle head," he wondered, "you hope to find the same."

"Why not? Don't be spiteful, you're afraid that you're seeing your successor."

"That's the tragic flaw in every great man."

"It's not that I don't admire you, Macdonald," Martha rehearsed her farewell address, "it's just that I must be independent of you."

"Can independence for a woman be found only through the agency of a new man?" Macdonald spoke directly to his empty cognac glass. "Are you an infectious microbe which can survive only the short flight from one diseased and exhausted organism to another presumably healthier."

"I am infectious, aren't I?"

"That's what I was trying to say."

"You're trying now at the last minute to tell me that you love me."

"How did you guess."

"But it's too late, Conrad is coming now."

"If the boy is rich, marry him," said Macdonald ominously, "then nothing can separate us."

"Yes," Martha clapped her hands in childish anticipation, "then we can all live grandly meaningless lives and sit at the Ritz and drink martinis."

"Don't wait for Hemingway," he ordered, "or I'll never get rid of you."

Conrad leaned low over their table and said in the confidential voice which coxswains project into megaphones, "I have an old friend from Texas sitting at my table worth about forty million dollars in transferable stock. He'd like to meet Martha. Would she like to meet him?"

"Martha was just saying," Macdonald chuckled, lifted his fiancee by the elbow, "how bored I was with her."

"Go on," laughed the soft-spoken Conrad so that heads beyond the heads in the mirrors turned in alarm, "Paris wouldn't be Paris without you two together."

"If you were convinced of that," Macdonald held her up, "I should think you'd all pull for the short straw to see who destroys Martha."

"Why me!" she roared.

"I'm older than you."

"You coming," said Conrad abruptly, looking back at his table. "I don't want to leave him alone too long. Any of the cunts in this room might get their hands on his money."

"We'll be over as soon as I finish my cognac, old boy."

"Don't finish nothing," Conrad advised, "my friend will buy you a new one, with those little bags of salted almonds."

"Let him finish his drink, Conrad," Martha intervened irritably.

"All right," Conrad began to fade, "excuse my gaucheness. I don't know what he sees in you anyway, Madame spook face, he must have been brought up in a country where they never had no snow."

"That's your beloved Conrad," said Macdonald drinking slowly. "America's reason for Europe."

"I'm leaving. I don't want to sit with them." Martha stood up nervously, hastily gathering her bag that wasn't here.

"Sit down, you've accomplished this whole situation by pounding your powerful brain waves against turtle head's banks. Now you must act the gentleman."

"I was only kidding," she whimpered, "it's become so serious, must I go over there and fuck him?"

"Now child," Macdonald held her, hand, "you don't have to fuck anybody. Just be nice to him, he seems an intelligent chap and a devoted sensitive friend to cultivate."

"I'm not good at that, I'm better at not being nice and fucking."

"So many ways to skin a cat," he said sadly. "You skin him."

"My dear Martha, if he has the slightest insight into his homosexuality, which is latent in all of us and overtly latent in the rich, I will personally ask turtle head to ask you to leave the table."

"Is that a promise?"

"It's a prayer."

"All right then, we'll go. But just for one drink."

"Come little one," Macdonald lifted her to her flat Italian shoddings, "Let's not be late for school. Now, which expression will you cast on our splendid tortoise, the furtive glance, or the aggressive? I think neither will do, possibly the contemptuous, the rich adore being hated, they're much too valuable to hate themselves. Or, the inviting glance, threaten him with his own attractiveness."

"No expression," they neared Conrad and their prey, "no expression at all."

"That might be best," Macdonald gravely concurred, "it's best to relax and be natural in these demanding situations."

CHAPTER 5

Conrad said, glowering up at Martha from his chair, "I only stand up for ladies, not for their ghosts." But James Dykes was not so secular. He looked at Martha with indescribable admiration. "Sit down," he jumped up and offered his velours throne, "please sit down." Martha condescended in rigamortal nonchalance, concentrating all of her female intensity on a rim of dirt that had wedged itself into her thumbnail. "Introductions," called James Dykes, pronouncing his words with an inherited authority that hinted the hardness of his pink and gold tortoise shell. It had more than hardened, it had petrified under the intense pressure of all of his fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, great uncles, maiden aunts, blood cousins, kissing kin's money. Hardened almost at the moment of his conception, leaving the petulant, squeezing, fetal expression smeared all over his face. They all waited his displeasure.

"The lady," James enthused, "present the lady."

"Martha Heck," Conrad called her to the stand, "the pantomine queen of st. Germain."

"Splendid conception."

"Whose," demanded Martha, bristling suspicion, "his or mine?" speaking smack into Macdonald's reproachful stare.

"You're perfect, Miss," James Dykes accorded, "you're perfect," and turning to Conrad repeated with small alteration, "she's perfect," and then for Macdonald the same construct, "she's perfect."

"For what?"

"For my purposes, of course," James responded to Macdonald's piquant humor.

"Exactly what purposes," pressed Macdonald, eager to talk prices.

Martha lifted her heavy eyes. "Purposes," she echoed, "must I have purposes?"

"Tell them your purposes, James," Conrad urged with an interested and modest enthusiasm that people tongue the rich.

"You tell them my purposes," James grandly relegated in that interested and modest enthusiasm with which the rich get tongued.

"James is a painter," Conrad began, "all the while he was organizing his wills, trusts, investments, inheritances, property, lands, houses, peons, stocks, bonds, accounts, coupons, oil wells, tennis courts, orange groves, rubber plantations, steel mills, atomic plants, stables, kennels, and aviary, he was thinking of being a painter. Am I correct so far, James my boy?"

"For ten years I've thought of little else," James confessed.

"I can see it's a heartbreaking story."

"I can hardly tell it," Conrad admitted, "help me, promise you'll help me," he turned to James, "if I choke up."

"We'll all help," said Martha.

"No, no," James rapped her mental knuckles, "give the man a chance. Let's not condemn him until he slips up."

"Stout fellow," Macdonald's enthusiasm unburdened itself from between the crevices of his teeth.

"You're a healthy man," James knighted Macdonald, "quick healthy reactions."

"If it's reactions you're after, offer him a drink," Martha recommended.

"I'm not after anything," James said quietly. "I'm just like everybody else."

"Can I continue?"

"Continue," and Conrad continued.

"Now James didn't want to be another ordinary painter like Cezanne or Michelangelo or Breughel, or any of them guys."

"I should say not."

"He didn't want to make the mistake they all made."

"What do they serve if they don't make our mistakes for us?"

"Because James is no ordinary artist. It's not his forty million smackers that separates him from the lesser men..."

"If anything that brings them closer to him," Martha plunged on.

"You've got real understanding," James assured Martha.

"She understands everything," Macdonald tore away the first of her many veils. " ... but his theory."

"Delicious, I just adore theories, don't you," Martha turned boldly to Macdonald and held him sparrow-like in her fluttering eyes.

"Fiercely."

"His theory being ... "

"Could I have a drink with the theory?" Martha would interrupt.

"Excellent," said Macdonald, "Let's be a still life having a drink." He motioned to an ambitious garcon overhead. "Four cognacs?" he gave the statement to the waiter and the question to them, allowing the words to hang for approval

James did not drink cognacs. He didn't drink cognacs as actively as most do drink, who do drink, cognacs. "I'm drinking juices, pure juices," he explained. "I do not wish to make sewage of my glandular system, but please," he insisted magnanimously, "do so with your own."

"James Dykes Theory," calmly continued Conrad to give a Socratic atmosphere to the group poisoning, "is that it's better ... "

"Healthier."

"Forgive, healthier to copy than to originate, since you never know what's going to come when you paint a painting for the first time, unless it's being done on commission or the subject is the Royal Family of Great Britain, so that painting the Royal Family is the next healthiest thing to do but you've got to be English to do that. James has had the original theory of copying rather than, I've lost it," said Conrad dazed. "It's gone, I held it too close and it choked to death. Gone."

"You'll hear from my lawyer in the morning," joked old James Dykes with an expression so cheerful that none of them dared to laugh, or chuckle or even smile or grin or cry.

"At the moment I'm copying Picassos," he picked up his own crudgeon, "not only because it's healthy, and he's healthy, healthy old spic," he produced another infectious interlude of mirth.

"The heart of the matter is," said James, coining a phrase, "that imitation should be the highest achievement of mankind. After all, just look around us." They all did as they were told. Martha didn't see one attractive man in the salon. Not one. She noticed that they were all looking around too, over heads, through hairs, past nostrils, darting, piercing, searching, inquiring looks. As James Dykes explained, they were all looking for something to imitate. "What's originality," he pounced, "what's creativity? Man deciding that he's God, man creating in his own image. And what chaos," he launched enthusiastically into his concept, oblivious to the cognac content between Macdonald and Conrad. "Now is man God?" he asked good-naturedly.

"More a horse's neck," supplied Macdonald.

"Correct," James was falling in love. "A sage remark from a sage. And the wage scale," added James mysteriously, "and the demands for leisure time, and all this nonsense about God resting every seventh day. My grandfather," his voice trembled noticeably, "would stop rolling in his grave if he knew what salaries I paid. It would just kill him. But did he have the problem of hiring Gods? He did not. Did he hire men? He did not. He hired parts of men, and that's what we've got to go back to. He lived in a world that worked. Try it with Gods," James dared them.

"God forbid," said Conrad piously. "Thank God I don't have your problems."

"Imitation is the answer," James leaned forward with a cunning expression in his glacial eyes, "instead of letting artists create, I create artists. Do you get me?" He shoved his question into Martha's ribs. "Once an artist arrives, I copy him. Once an originator crawls out of his cave, I glut the market with him. If it's Picasso, let it be Picasso. But it's going to stop at Picasso. Follow me?"

"All the way," Macdonald was becoming God without lifting brush or pencil, just lifting those cognac tumblers that got lighter and lighter.

"And though collectors fill basements with Picasso, hiding him away, trying to destroy him so that they can push a new God, I protect his sacred name. For every Picasso they turn to the wall, I paint thirty of the same period. Ha," laughed James Dykes, "how I loathe the man. Every idea he has thrown immediately on a canvas."

"Do you sign them all Picasso?" Martha drank in the pause.

"I sign them Dykes," he blushed blue, "but my signature is remarkably like his. Only an expert can distinguish a Dykes from a Picasso."

"Think of the confusion in eight thousand years," Macdonald exclaimed, "when there are only three Picassos and eight Dykes existent. Picasso will be hailed as the copyist."

"Let's hope so," said Dykes, "greater Gods have been lost in civilization's shuffle."

"But then," emerged Martha, "the ersatz will be the real and the real the ... "

"Use that word again, Martha," her fastidious lover threatened, "and I've fucked you for the last time."

"So particular."

"Now I'm on his vile Harlequin period," James pursued, "and this, young lady, is where you come in."

Martha looked around wildly for any entrance that could be used as an exit.

"Me?" she said like Chicken Little.

"I want you to model for me."

"But if the paintings are there, already."

"Oh come now, do you think the models Picasso used looked any less like his paintings than you do?"

"But I hate paintings," she admitted feebly, feeling like one of the underpaid pinboys in a bowling alley, "and painters," she developed, "and gouaches, watercolors, line drawings, woodcuts, sculptures, collage, mobiles, photographs, old tapestries, old maps, lithographs, pen and inks, fragments of ancient statuary, samovars, ceramics, colored crayons, pencils and St. Germain jewelry."

He brushed her dislikes aside like so many autumnal droppings. "It's just that you feel your creativity is hampered by your ability to have children, dear woman, a common disorder of your species."

"That's it," Martha lost, "why did I have you," she raved fiercely at Macdonald, "I've lost three years to art having you."

"Stop shouting," Macdonald stood up so that he could lean closer to James Dykes. "You won't find another model like Martha, James, she's just reached the same period. A fortuitous historical calamity. The only remaining problem is, what will you pay?"

"Pay," said James in alarm, weakened by Macdonald's fetid breath, "pay?"

"Of course," Macdonald explained, "you've got to give her a reason, an excuse for being great. You understand, she wasn't born to greatness, or she could do it for nothing."

"Ahh," said James, "I see what you're getting at."

"It'she were born you, she wouldn't have to vulgarize everything by talking prices."

"I'm not talking prices," Martha bit into the dirty nail, "you're the vulgar one."

"I'm protecting James," Macdonald's eyes were like thick thumbs on her white mouth. "James doesn't know how expensive you are when you give something away for nothing."

"I can imagine," James despised her with his baby blues. "I want to be fair," he pleaded with his advocate, "how much are models getting?"

"Three thousand francs an hour," Macdonald could neither dream, speak or think higher.

"What's that in dollars," he included Conrad in the enormity.

"About the same," Conrad broke his silence over all the heads that twisted around to him.

"Well, that's not too bad," James agreed, "three thousand it shall be. Can you begin tomorrow?"

"Wait," she said, getting up from the table and clutching her long coat around her narrow body, "I've got to go telephone my solicitor." She pushed three people through the revolving door before Macdonald caught her.

"Don't be a fool," he grabbed at any extremity, landing her elbow, "don't throw our opportunities away."

"Our, our," she shouted for all the gratified tourists clustered around the kiosks, "when did we form this combine?"

"All right, yours, I didn't want to give you selfish reasons. Do you realize what James Dykes can do for you, not for us, for you? Do you know how many Socony secretaries are saving their salaries and virginity for a crack at James Dykes?"

"They have my blessing," she pulled wildly out of his grip, "I despise them, I despise him."

"How can you despise the man who could buy you a wheat mill, a yogurt factory, a juice still? Together you and James can be a degenerate symbol of American health for all the gum-bleeding Europeans."

"Don't compare us, don't couple us," Martha's voice softened. "The thing is, Macdonald, he scares me. Really, I mean he's more than a nut, he's insane."

"Therein lies his charm," Macdonald patted her auburn disorder, "imagine him sane. Just imagine James Dykes sane and moderate," he shuddered, "there would be danger."

"If you find him so charming," Martha snapped, "why don't you fuck him? Do you hate wheat mills?"

"Darling, I promise you, if he didn't maintain this admittedly insane pose of heterosexuality, if he had even a clue to his obvious preferences, I'd be tickling his ass-hole. If he had a sister who liked degenerates or a mother who preferred innocence, if by any peregrination I could endear myself to the Dykes, I would not be standing here endearing myself to you." He walked Martha slowly back to the Deux Magots. His head lowered over her luxurious head, he spoke with the tenderness and intensity of a student selling vacuum cleaners. "Martha," he said quietly, "it's not just the white of your face, you are getting older, and worse, you are looking older. You need nourishment, you need more than I can give to you at this moment; later with James Dykes' assistance I may be able to give you everything I dream of." He lost the tissue thin thread of concern, "and if he can make you come," he finished haphazardly, "you'll be free to spit in my face."

"You feel pretty safe saying that, don't you, old scout?"

"Imagine if he can make you come," Macdonald pounced on his victory. "That means you're free, no longer in a neurotic trap, after him anyone can make you come. Except possibly me. Make him your litmus test."

"If I turn blue it means it didn't work, that's the only danger."

"Did you ever see anyone laugh at a millionairess just because she was blue? You'll set a whole new fashion, every girl will be crazy to be blue with pale green lips."

"My lips aren't green," he had her inside the grand ballroom.

"They're not exactly roses."

"To sleep with him," she trembled, "to get into bed and fuck him. Fuck him!"

"Don't think about it," Macdonald shuddered in real sympathy, "thinking kept you frigid for twenty-five years. Don't think of anything except wheat, cheese, olives, grated carrots, unsalted nuts, hearts of palm, brown sugar and yeast ... help yourself. Every woman who comes has to give her mind a little push in that direction."

"If I agree," she spoke mesmerically, "will you disengage my elbow so that I can unburthen myself in the ladies' room?"

"Dear Madame," he smiled his release, "do you call me such a tyrant?"

At the table Conrad asked, "Will she do it?"

"She's agreed," Macdonald settled back into his chair, and for his battle and for his deceit ordered another cognac. "She'll model for you, James, and I'll tell you something, lad," Macdonald spoke in the soft Scots burr that broke through the boundaries of sex or age, "the lass is willing because of you. I don't think she's changed a whit her ideas on art. It's you she wants to work for, not the world and not Picasso. It's the way of women," Macdonald chuckled, "to appreciate the wee things."

"When will she be ready to begin," demanded the eager Mr. Dykes.

"Oh she's ready now and I'd start her immediately," advised Macdonald in his confidential old baron of a roue pose, "you know women and their changing ways."

"No," James admitted eagerly, "do they change more than men? Maybe that's the difference people keep talking about."

"Well" said Macdonald cheerfully, "people really aren't talking about it anymore, are they?"

"You've got real understanding," persisted James Dykes, "you're the most healthy person, mentally and spiritually," he amended, accounting Macdonald's display of sparse black teeth, "that I've met outside of banks."

"You should meet him in a bank," said Martha on her return, "he's radiant."

"You, on the other hand," James Dykes playfully pinched Martha's cheeks, and then brushed his white thumbs on his dark greys, "need help."

"Your help!" Macdonald grandly developed.

"What she needs is a good lay," ad-libbed Conrad.

"That's a good one," roared James, laughing till he wept like Niobe, "you sure do come up with some wows, Conrad, I've got to remember that one. What she needs is some good hay," the catastrophic laugh happened again until the terrace as one human crawling organism turned toward him, the

Americans nervously lighting Gauloises and demanding more Pernod in their Pernods.

"Lay," corrected Conrad, "I said, lay."

"Hay is better," Macdonald silenced him.

"Whore," she whispered.

"Of, of course," said James mysteriously, and ordered another round of cognacs for them. "I always thought I'd be sitting here one day drinking cognacs," he expanded pleasantly. "Instead I'm here drinking sun-kissed tomatoes."

"Sure you are," Macdonald let the eager garcon confiscate his empty glass.

"Harlof s heart," breathed Martha. "I'm not finished yet," she attacked the over-zealous waiter, "don't rush me."

"After this one," James decided, "you all come around and see my studio. It's got a wonderful exposure, probably the best in Western civilization."

"I think it would be better," accepted Macdonald, "if I came around and looked at it during the day. Understand, first impressions are the only lasting ones to me and I might never come to appreciate it if I saw it now. But Martha's enormously imaginative, she never gets impressions," he disclosed grandly. "Why don't you and Martha go there and straighten it up a bit, and if tomorrow's a clear day, I'll look in at you."

"Only a really healthy man," James reiterated, "is so careful of his sensitivities."

Macdonald lifted Martha out of her chair and snapped the joints of her mechanical knees into locked upright. "Tomorrow little one," he promised, "be a good model and daddy will give you a big red all-day sucker."

"I want a green one," and there the game ended. She moved hesitantly away with James, looking reproachfully at Macdonald who was graciously accepting another libation from Conrad.

"Goodbye Macdonald," she called grievously, and inside of her a child's voice long dead echoed, "goodbye for ever."

CHAPTER 6

There was an elevator to lift them to James' atelier and as it carried them silently to the top floor, it separated her from Paris and Macdonald as surely as a planet fired to remote planets.

"It's quite comfortable," James was assuring her, "not as comfortable as something we'd be accustomed to in the States, but one can lead quite a healthy life there. Particularly," he said with relief, "since I put in a refrigerator. I don't see how the French live without refrigerators."

"That's because they have no heat," she pedantically supplied, an early earthman describing dead customs to an anthropologist. "The rooms were so cold," she detailed, "butter could stay fresh for weeks. That is," she particularized, "if one had butter."

"What fatty substitute could one employ," he inquired more deeply, "in place of butter?"

"Wine," she said seriously. "Everyone just substituted wine."

"Then the cuisine centered around pot-au-feu, bouillabaise, bourgogne, and casseroles. Am I right?"

She shook her head meaning no fight.

"Abominable," he brought her sharply to her senses, "every mouthful jeopardizing survival of the civilization. And did they perform abominations on eggs?"

"Abominable," she confirmed, "they boiled them for years, right in the shell, and then left them to solidify a few more years on cafe counters."

"The Chinese bury them in the ground."

"The French were much too proud for that."

"We're here," he welcomed them, opening the iron drape that guarded the elevator shaft, and leading her into a warm carpeted hall. "I've got my key handy," and he showed her how he managed that, pulling a stretch chain from under his lapel at the end of which dangled the key. "I worked in one of our department stores," he admitted, and she knew that "our" meant not his and hers, which etymologically it might have, but his, which it still meant. The door opened onto an enormous studio which had: gold walls, a black ceiling, Louis seize, Queen Anne, and Knoll furnishings, two silver and crystal chandeliers, one orange French men-at-work lamp, a Persian rug over which was thrown Japanese mats, upon which were scattered rectangular black patent leather pillows. He walked quickly across the room and pulled open a heavy black curtain with the huge letter D embossed in its center. "This is my pride and joy," he confessed, revealing a jeweled stain-glass window. "Some Egyptologists claim it's older and finer than the windows at Chartres. I don't care," he struck a blow for freedom and democracy, "I think comparisons are onerous."

"Aren't they!"

"Could I get you something to drink? I'm afraid I've only got fruit juices and vegetable essences in the house, that's all I generally imbibe," he made light pleasantry.

"That would be just fine, I find them especially good with solids, like ham sandwiches for instance," she recommended.

"Of all the meats I do not eat," James roared, "dirty pork is the one I don't eat most. But by all means, sandwiches," he softened. "I'm afraid I've only got black bread, rye bread and fresh ground com bread with wheat germ added."

"I'll take the latter," she said dreamily.

"And for fillers," he advised, "there's watercress, cucumber, sliced white solidified yogurt, unbleached Holland cheese, unbaked freshly-ground cashews and caviar which turns out to be surprisingly rich in iodine."

"I'll take the latter," she repeated ecstatically. "Two times latter," he checked. "I'd like more than two."

"But not too much, Martha," he crooked a naughty finger at her, "we've got to stay thin for the Harlequin period. If our arrangement works out," he promised, "there'll be all the walnuts you can crack when we get to the Classical Interlude."

"Oh, it will work out," she prophesied.

"Now," he wrung his soft hands, "to begin. Would you like to browse around my books while I fix us some strength and energy, or would you prefer to listen to one of my five thousand long-playing records?"

"I would actually like to take a bath," Martha hinted faintly.

"A bath it will be," he promptly agreed, and not unlike a bearing Greek threw open a paneled oak Twelfth-century monastery carved portal to reveal a cushioned and carpeted bathroom. He drew open a black curtain with a large embossed B centering it and revealed the Paris skyline. "I think that the most important room, from the view point of view, is the bathroom. I do prefer looking to reading or thinking, at those moments," he explained, "and I do believe that the organism relaxes and performs most efficiently in that circumstance. One is hardly aware of the process of elimination," he laughed, "while sitting before this enchanting vista. Good body habits and reflexes to vistas," he chuckled joyfully, "have caused me no small embarrassment in the Eiffel Tower and at the top of Notre-Dame."

"No kidding," she laughed, quite willing to appear ignorant.

"I'll just turn the hot water tap for you," he began almost immediately to disappear in a billow of vapor, "and here are the towels," he handed her two huge black thick squares with the initial D thereon embossed. "Don't put your clothes back on," he said as efficiently as a concentration camp attendant. "I've got a costume that we'll be using for work."

"Of course."

With that James Dykes left, and Martha stripped to the slightly rosier than her face skin, lowered herself into the pouring crypt and leaned back luxuriously, indifferent to its coffined contours, allowing the weeks of coupling and filth to soak deeper into her pores. The pleasure and heat of the bath were hypnotic and she closed her eyes in a surrender more complete than anything Macdonald had known. Macdonald! Her eyelids flung open. Macdonald was probably, at this moment, finishing a hot bath in a well organized American girl's apartment. In the fog of the room she stared out at the crystalline fragility of Paris-and felt herself stranded as a London streetwalker peeping into prosperous windows. On the blackened window stretched before her she projected the familiar seduction scene. The heat, the pleasure, the surrender, the jealousy flooded the arteries of her heart as she heard him faintly promising the young secretary at the embassy:

"Of course you're normal my dear child, a European has just to look at your adorable figure and sweet pensive face to know that you're normal, possibly a little more sensitive than you should be, but if we make that sensitivity work for you, well lass, it will be all the more pleasure for you and that I promise."

"You do understand me," an ignorant blonde voice echoed.

"Let's say I understand beauty," Macdonald particularized. "And I understand that the boys you've known in the States," (carefully he called boys, boys) "couldn't understand you, and my little angel let's be fair, maybe you couldn't understand them."

"Oh, but I did."

"Did you now," he praised, "and were you noting how much like your mother they were? Now how can a sensitive beauty like you be gratified," the word rolled spaciously about the cavern of his lying mouth, "by boys like your mother? You've been asking too much of yourself, lass, you've been asking to do alone, what must be accomplished by a minority of two, and no wonder you're tired, and no wonder your body's tired, yes, move a little faster, like that, and no wonder you've come here to France for a rest. And as exercise is the best tonic for the body, and movement the greatest ease, I'll ease you, my bonny one, I'll ease you good and proper."

The pig. She studied the Eiffel Tower in the hazy darkness, hating it as she always hated it. The pig, and the tower seemed to be swaying ponderously close to her tub. She picked up a black washcloth and scrubbed her private parts. She was hot with revulsion, eager to be out of the bath, to rush to Macdonald, to pull him out of her doubledecker's arms, to tell him clearly that they were finished in case he'd missed the heavy nuances of her goodbye.

Mighty as Athena, she loomed out of the bailing water. Soap had not touched her body and the dirt would dry back into the pores, protecting her skin from the vagaries of the Paris winter. James opened the bathroom door and she could faintly make out his outline through the heavy steam. "Are you still there?" he called.

"Just getting out." She wrapped herself in the hygienic absorbance of the towel.

"Here," he shouted as if the fog created great nautical distances, "I'll just put these things on the dressing table. The food's ready when you are," he added jovially.

"Can't I dress after I eat?' Martha revealed her tendency to get to the best parts first, to search out the dirty passages in dirty books, to eat cheese before salad. She revealed herself as a gross sensualist, and James Dykes responded as a formalist. "You will dress first, please," he admonished, "then we'll see how much you're allowed to eat."

Martha dried herself carelessly, and stumbled to the black mirrored dressing table. She groped for the promised garment, and her hands encountered nothing but two sticks, each one foot long, tapering into dangerous points. She opened the door, letting some steam out and some outline in. "I can't find it, James," she called him by name for the first time, "all I see here, and I can't see very much, are two sticks."

"That's right," he shouted back, "tonight because of lack of light we're just doing the black and white, pen and ink Dance With Banderillas, circa 1954. I am often forced to adjust the circus to the time of day," he resented. "If you'll just hold one banderilla in each hand, I'd greatly appreciate it."

"Sure," she said, "why not," she elaborated, and following counsel danced into the studio where James, in a traditional High Lama's robe, was reclining cross-legged on the smallest and highest of the patent leather pillows.

"Oh," he rose hastily as she entered, and she thought how well mannered the rich were, clinging so wisely to grandfather's money and customs, "oh," and this time she detected dismay in the monosyllable, "this will never do. Why you're all pink," he accused her, "I will not be forced into the Rose Period now," he stamped his foot, "and you're pink pink pink."

"If you just have a little prickly heat powder in the house," she assured him.

"It's not the same thing," he insisted, "if I wanted to work that way I could use mirrors."

She stabbed a thick caviar sandwich with her banderilla.

"You're too pink to eat," he said shrilly, grabbing for the floating dark bread.

"If you touch my sandwich," Martha said quietly, "I shall have to kill you."

"By all means, eat," he deflated, "be fat and pink. What difference does it make?"

"That's what I say," said Martha, poising her weapon for another.

"Only don't use my costume," he thundered, "use your fingers the way all fat pink women do."

"Gladly," she consented, "I'm too warmly dressed anyway," and she put the darts in each reach at her side, refilling each hand with a sandwich.

"Don't be so Oliver Twist," he insulted her. "Eat one at a time, I promise I won't take them away."

She shuddered. "I don't even like to hear you joke about the possibility in the negative. Do you mind if I move the tray a little closer to me?"

"Well I might want one."

"Just ask me," she suggested generously. "Service will be prompt and cheerful," and she laughed with her mouth full, knowing instinctively that that would get him. James Dykes reacted as if he'd been shot, stretching out on the Japanese mat and fitting his neck into the curve of the patent leather pillow. He closed his eyes and pretended to meditate.

"It's all so boring," he was medium to his own dead spirit, "it's all so boring the sameness, oh God," he said wearily, addressing himself, "health turns out to be the same as disease, the exotic the ordinary, the unexpected the expected." He turned in inner agony on the wooden leather-covered pillow, "I think I'll eat a steak tomorrow. It's all the same, it's all so boring."

Martha knew certain things, she knew these certain things axiomatically, absolutely, unquestioningly, and it was from these certain things that she derived her woman wisdom. One of these certain things that was axiomatic was that any man who propounded at length on boredom was impotent, and any rich man who so propounded was certainly impotent and possibly completely lacking in a genital appendage. There was something cockless about James Dykes. That had been her first impression, and now the intensified impression returned as fact, releasing a gush of almost love in her. The woman in her responded fragrantly, like a sun-ripened, room-rotting fruit, to his impotence. She moved closer to him and calculated his thin silk robe lying flat on his flat body. Surely no staff hid beneath the folds. Magically she became woman, releasing the long-latent goddess within her. She relished the vigor and splendor of her physicality, and abhorred mind.

"Of course, darling," she breathed. "Of course it's all so boring."

He turned bored eyes on her. "Do you know how boring it is?"

"I'm only a woman," she swelled with mammalian power and containment. "I know nothing, but I can feel a male's boredom. I can feel how boring it must be for him. The closest I can come to knowing," she stiffened her empty fingers, "is through feeling what the man is knowing, because" she entwined her body with his, letting her luxury of scarlet tresses cascade his weary face, "I'm only a woman."

He looked with deepest contempt into her eyes. "Woman, he intoned, "do you know the boredom of boredom?"

"It is not my province to know," she smiled knowingly. "I am essentially a creature of feeling, therein my strength of weakness, but," she comforted him, "though you may despise me, you need me, therein lies your boredom."

"You do understand," he said wondrously.

"That is for you to judge," her body sheltered his, "Leave me only my intuitions and instincts."

"Martha," he nestled, fetus-like, closer to her warm dark body, "everything turns to shit."

"What difference my darling," she dismissed his male dilemma, "why question the rhythms of life? Do the rhythms of life question us?"

"That is easy for you to say," he complained.

"Yes," she hastily interposed, "being a creature of rhythms, it is in me to feel and accept rhythms, as deeply as I feel and accept cycles. To question rhythms, would be for me to question life," she kneaded his taut shoulders.

"But it is just that which I question," his eyes, crazed for comfort, searched hers. "I question life."

"Hero," she chided him, "hero and fool, smaller in your greatness than am I, WOMAN, greater in my smallness. Foolish God," she caressed his brow, "silly creator, how you push into the future, how you rush on into progress. Eternally bored giant," she chastised the trembling figure, "bored with today in anticipation of tomorrow. If only you could intuit that tomorrow is yesterday you could attain the mockery of freedom which, with my rhythms, my never-ending monthly cycles, I try to impart to you. But of course I can not," she exulted, "for then you would be woman and I would be shit. So struggle, my beloved," she urged him. "Suffer, push, create, fail, fly and fall again and again to earth, and I as woman will wait always on earth and brush you off."

"Martha, I was not always a copyist," he confessed.

"I accept you," she covered his lips with her lessoning fingers.

"There was a time when I kneeled to originality."

"As god is your absolute," she prayed, "man is my absolute."

"And I realized that to originate is ultimately to copy, and I decided that it was greater to begin at the end of the process, to sacrifice the agonies of originating for the ease of copying."

"Tyrant," she attacked him, "banging your mortal head against the walls of the world, as you punished the walls of my womb. Resenting your emergence into a world I made and never leave."

"If I were a woman ... "

"Hush," she hastened, "hush, the gods are surely listening."

" ... I would never bring more miserable bored sons on the earth."

"Occupation, housewife," she changed.

"Of course, one must do something," he comprehended, "Let's you and I do something, Martha."

"We are doing something my beloved," she compassioned, "even more, we are being something. Together, we may achieve nothing."

"Suck my cock, Martha."

"Pardon?"

"My cock," he repeated, "suck it, Martha."

"But why?" she shrilled.

"That's one question I've never asked," he admitted, "and now that I hear it, I know why. The answer doesn't particularly interest me. I doubt if there even is an answer," he untied the silken cord of his silken robe, "I doubt if it's even a rhetorical question. Who knows," he removed the robe and lay on the Japanese mat in emaciated thick-necked nudity, "maybe it's a truism."

"I hardly know you," Martha stuttered.

"I'm not asking you to know me," he conceded agreeably, "just my cock."

"But it looks so much like you," Martha quibbled. "It looks enough like you to be your twin." And it did. His staff was an enlarged miniature of the rest of him. It was very white, very long, the exact thickness of his neck, small and quizzical at the head.

"It's fantastic," she touched it hesitantly. "It's repulsive." His balls seemed inconveniently, uncomfortably forward, pushing the entire massive machine within easy reach of a mouth. The rod was colorless, erect, strong, healthy and somehow bored. A fond mother couldn't have distinguished between James Dykes and his privates.

"It doesn't seem possible," Martha meditated. "Can it talk?"

"Maybe to you," James conceded. "It never says a damn thing to me."

"Does it have your tastes in music and literature and such trifles," she pressed.

"Mouths," he enunciated. "Mouths, ass-holes and cunts, that's all I know about its tastes. For the rest, we leave each other alone."

"Do you ever compete for the same women?" she indiscreetly pressed. "Or do you ever have disagreements? Does sometimes it hate one of your women, or force you into a degrading relationship?"

"I always choose our women," Dykes pronounced heavily.

"Doesn't it resent that?" She stared at it and it stared back with James Dykes' witless expression.

"It works," he said belligerently, "and that's all we care about. We work well together. I don't ask it questions, and the converse is respected."

"Does it eat what you eat?" she researched further.

"It seems to prefer being eaten," he hinted in an apparent sarcasm of boredom, "and frankly, I prefer it to be eaten too. So if you'll just remember your eternal function of acceptance and stop asking questions the answers to which would include intellect and exclude you, we'd both be happier."

"You promise it won't eat me, James," she lowered her head in fear and trepidation. "It looks so stupid and mean."

"Suck," he commanded, pressing her head into action and luxuriously spreading his thighs, "suck, suck, suck, suck."

Fuck you, Macdonald, were her last thoughts as her head sank, fuck you, Macdonald and your inscrutable plans.

"Noises," James Dykes insisted.

"How dare you," she lifted her wet face indignantly. "I'm perfect at this, I never make noises!"

"I want you to make noises," he thundered. "Loud ugly sucking sloppy drowning gushing noises, noises infantile slobbering unquenchable and despicable. like this," he sloshed an enormous fountain of spittle down his thick throat. His rod finally had its mute say, jumping up right in absolute accord. Perversely her mouth dried in stage fright, there was nothing but the silent perfection of her sucking. "Noises," he bellowed. "Water," she gasped.

"Good, good," he rotated his hips, "pretend you're burning up on a log in the middle of the sea. I am the sea," he transcendentalized, "my prick is the log, cling to it, suck it, suck it for moisture, taste its poisonous salts that will relieve your thirst into agonizing thirst. Ahh." he threw himself into the piece, "how hot it is, ahh I'm burning, suck, suck," and she choked obediently on the gross raft that whipped her into a whirlpool of shooting sperm. "Now drink," he panted, "don't let a drop escape. Quench your thirst, it will make you thirstier, drink," he ordered, "suck it all out."

"So you're one of the talkers," she fell away from him on the mat. "Nothing like fucking a cheerleader, my team always loses."

"That wasn't too bad," he tied the silk cord of his silk dressing gown around his waist and stood over her inert form, "I'll brush my teeth and then we'll try another version, maybe we'll even switch roles," he tempted.

Martha crouched beneath his high looming figure. "Deceived," she wept, "deceived; why," she attacked him, "do you pretend not to have a cock if you have one? Why the cruel game?"

"So many questions, my dear," he reprimanded her, and disappeared into the bathroom. "There's a white ring around my black ebony tub," he called out to her. "Do you know how it got there?"

"Some say he floated, others say he just walked over the waters," she answered darkly and groped her way to the long table and poured unsweetened lemon juice into an emerald and ruby-encrusted chalice. She drank until she couldn't hear his voice anymore. Her next conscious recollection was his pulling the cup from between her clenched teeth.

"Let's adjoin to the bedroom," he suavely suggested, "beds are old-fashioned but sometimes they're fun."

"Yes," Martha intuitively understood, "one shouldn't throw the baby out with the water."

"Shouldn't one," he wondered, "I've often wondered about the wisdom of that conundrum. Babies are such a bore," he reminded her, "always crying about property settlements and inheritance taxes. I shouldn't wonder if a baby didn't originate that little parable."

CHAPTER 7

The bedroom was not a disappointment. The walls were bare except for floor to ceiling murals of the twelve apostles and their concubines. The bed itself was a surprise: narrow as a Vestal Virgin's, it had thrown casually over its spine a black spread with the letter D embossed upon its center. The slender cot was canopied by a black drapery that divided in two and had on each of its halves the letter D contained within a triangle of the same color. The rug was a deep smoky black, bare except for a few dozen white roses that appeared to have been accidentally dropped there and forgotten, supplying the only decorative release. But their freshness revealed the deft, decorator's touch. It was a serious room, almost formal, and Martha felt that she had trespassed into James' tomb.

"Do many people enter this room," she asked quietly.

"As many as I can make enter," he modestly admitted, "I believe a man's room is his inviolable right. And as many enter, leave," he continued, and left it for her to interpret, as assurance or reassurance.

Fuck the rich and their lousy money, Martha thought. I hate them, her mind labored, they think it's such a privilege to hate them. Well fuck them, she meditated, they're not so special, I hate everybody.

"I'd hate you just as much if you were poor, James," she didn't realize her thoughts had become words.

He led her as his bride to his black narrow bed and pulled the black cover back to reveal the black silk sheets. But hiding under the blackness, obscene and groomed as any hospital bed, were taut white sheets.

"White sheets," she flung her head back and laughed freely, "how clever."

"Much more healthy," he interjected, "and sanitary, easier to detect dirt, no dyes to damage the skin tissues."

"Of course," she brushed his esotericism aside, "I've always slept in white sheets, and my mother before me."

"Some traditions," he repeated, it was revealing itself as his theme, "are best guarded."

"No point," she agreed, "to throw out the diamonds with the broken chain."

He lifted her high in the air and playfully dropped her onto the middle of the bed. She realized that the mattress was even narrower than it had appeared when draped with the black drape. It was, in fact, no wider than an ordinary kitchen chair.

"Why so narrow, James?" she queried.

"You'll find out," he promised in his best cavalier manner, and left her to the cruel game of inquiry without answers. "Excuse me a moment," he begged, and disappeared as discreetly as a head-waiter, but certainly not a French headwaiter, who never appears, or his Italian brother, who never disappears.

"And now my test, beware, MacDonald, you may lose me," she intoned, and she started to masturbate as a head start and stopped only when she realized that that could be considered cheating. Though she should have felt joy at the prospect of severing her humiliating ties with Macdonald, at the thought of meeting him one day in the streets, possibly when she and James returned from the Hague, pushing the mink collar of her mink coat away from her face and saying, "Oh, by the way I came, I came all over the place," she felt instead a sadness, the deep disturbing sadness of loss. It was magnanimous to suffer Macdonald's losing her and it indicated to her a spiritual bond, no other word volunteered, that neither of them suspected. Leaving Macdonald was not just this cold business of switching cocks, of substituting luxury for penury, there was the deep hidden tragedy of two lovers who had touched and not known that they had touched. Macdonald might even destroy himself, she began to cheer herself. He wouldn't do it in a vulgar ostentatious Seine-plunging way, but privately by drinking wood alcohol and slowly going blind or not treating a carefully acquired syphilitic infection and slowly going blind. Again and again the image of Macdonald as a blind Oedipus formed. Or was he a blind Homer? The brow was Homeric, but the tragedy Oedipal. There would be those who would not understand that she was the cause of Macdonald McBlane's disease and decay, but slowly through the years, stories of a discreet trust made out in Macdonald's name would be credited to her, until it was inadvertently revealed to all of it. Germain that it was for Martha, the beautiful rich but remote Martha that Macdonald had destroyed himself. And who would not sympathize with him? And who, seeing her seated alone and small in the back of the chauffeured limousine, would cast the first stone? "James," she called fiercely, "James, come consummate."

The lights in the room lowered as he entered, and he stood a moment at the doorway, and then moved quickly toward her, balancing a small Japanese bowl in the outstretched palm of each hand. Carefully he placed the bowls on the low tables that stood at either side of the bed. "Pick the two most perfect roses from the rug," he invited her, "and float one in each of the bowls."

Martha crawled along the rug, lifting and studying the remarkable buds. It was revelatory how the apparently perfect revealed its imperfections on close examination. Here was one rose with a white petal missing, another with the inner tips tinged faintly brown. Here a rose seed fallen fallow on the black rug, a pistil bent, a piston missing, a leaf torn, a stalk rough, a thorn blunted. "None of them is perfect," she confessed, "tulips might have been better. Roses are so complex," she kicked one aside, "I doubt if there exists a perfect rose. One could probably dedicate a life to the development of a perfect rose, and then not approach its realization."

James checked the time. "Any two will do."

"Will they, yes," she realized, "we can love them for their imperfections. Is beauty not exaggeration? Shall I choose the two most imperfect, James?" her voice thrilled with adventure. "The most imperfect which shall reveal themselves as the most beautiful."

"Is it going to take you as long as the first search?" he said suspiciously. "Is there going to arise the issue of which is more essential in the rose, the piston or the pistil? I smell a rat," he finished.

"It might take as long," she gaily conceded from the rug.

He rushed to her and pulled her upright. She was captured with three roses in her hand and he wrested them from her, throwing one to the floor. "These two will do fine."

"In the end one is arbitrary, isn't one," she dragged the lesson homeward.

"In the end one is bored," he corrected, "but not stiff. Watch me," he suggested, "so you can teach your grandchildren, God forbid. I put a rose in each bowl, and as we mate I shall play with the buds and in that way, by mental distraction, sustain physical prowess. It is now two o'clock in the Sunday morning; with distraction I can assault you until two-thirty o'clock in the morning. It is a method naturally learned from the Orientals."

"Naturally darling, but how can you assault me when there's no room for me in the bed. It does seem a bed made for one person."

"You will lie under me, he explained. "In that way there is room for even a third person, either over me or beneath you. The bed is limited to verticality, but it is within limitations that the greatest freedoms occur."

"For sure," Martha slipped under his lean form, "good luck." She closed her eyes and prayed. "God, if you make me come I'll never steal another pair of gloves from the Bon Marche."

James was breathing and snorting like a pedigreed cat. "It's so exciting," he gasped, "you're such an exciting woman lying there, motionless. What style, what aristocracy, not a spark of passion on your face or in your body, passive, perfect. If you don't move, I think I'll come," he warned her. "It's not fair to excite me this way. Wait! Help me to prolong our union. Don't just lie there like a gorgeous, veined marble statue, oh," he groaned, "oh," and dived for the roses. His staff was bruising her thigh, as massive and stony as the steeples of Chartres. "Put my cock in you," he urged, his hands obviously occupied, "Lead me into your filthy womb, direct contact always stops my passion. Quick," he commanded, "shove it in or I'll come."

"I'm trying," she squirmed under his weight.

"Ahh, that's better," he sighed suddenly, "that's better."

"You're not in yet," she wrestled with the large insensitive hook. "I can't get it in."

He lifted a hand out of the rose bowl and dipped it into her sex. "Why are you so dry," he demanded.

"Just excitement, I guess," Martha conjectured, feeling a chill, surely death, spreading up from her toes.

"Make me come," the voice inside of her was howling. "God make him make me come."

"So many women have that," he muttered. "Dry as glass. I guess we're both a little too excited," he admitted.

"Something like that. If it would be too profane," she hinted, "maybe a little water from the bowl would cool my cunt."

"One up for you," conceded James, massaging a rose petal against her rose petals until entry was achieved. "That feels good," he gasped just like anybody else. like her mother always said, "They can't take their money to bed with them." He pointed in and out of her in callisthenic rhapsody. "Beautiful motionless cunt," he changed, "I love to have a woman under me paralyzed with excitement, too passionate to breathe my pink beauty, my Classical Interlude."

Martha suspected that she wasn't there, that it was all happening to the couple upstairs. "Macdonald," her heart wept, "Macdonald, I'm all alone."

"How does that feel," he rammed it into her hard, "and that," he pinioned her against the mattress, "and that," he riveted them together with his prick high and deep inside of her.

"Very good."

"Say suck," he commanded, "say suck."

"Again with the suck," she moaned.

"Say it," he punished her body, "say it."

"Suck."

"Again."

"Suck."

"Again."

"Suck, suck, suck, suck, suck," the word became a disembodied sound, an inarticulation, a moment before language. "Suck," she played, trying to find the contours and sense of the word again, "suck, suck, suck."

"Ahh," he groaned, "tell me when to come, tell me when I can come, are you almost ready?"

"Suck."

"Bite my ear cold, dry, passionate savage, bite my ear I despise to be bitten. Bite my ear in your passion wretched possessed woman."

He thumped her mightily, perverse possessor of a steel erection that tempered and strengthened and hardened in her bruised loins. Obediently she caught his lobe between her teeth, never recapturing the lost suck.

"Harder," he groaned. "Harder, don't come yet," subtly implanting the idea, "don't come yet. No hurry, don't come."

"Don't worry," she sank into his ear, and twisted her hips against his pelvis in sudden participation, promptly collapsing under his arresting weight.

"You came," he misinterpreted her moment's activity, "bad girl came," he blabbered in nursery prattle, "bad girl came before James, now James," he mumbled jealousy, "this time James, now James," and crooning his name he emptied his hot burning machine. He fell off her body onto the black rug, his arms and legs spread chaotically like a tripod. His eyes remained closed and his breathing painful and staccato. Then slowly the lids sank open and he stared up fixedly at the gothic vaulted ceiling and temporized, "So much work, and in the end, all so boring."

She experienced her first genuine flow of emotion for James, a deep and tumultuous loathing.

"What you need is a pen pal, James, someone with whom you can exchange false photographs. I'll even give you one of mine," his sperm oozed amoeba-like down her thigh, "if you want to correspond with a woman."

"Don't tell me what I need," he attacked brutally, "all my life women have been telling me what I need. First my governess, then my teachers, then my nurses, then my aunts, then my sisters, older and younger, then my grandmother."

"You love it," she accused. "If only I had had a mother," James wept, "then I could have been homosexual like all the other boys at school. But no," he jumped up in his despair, "she had to run off to work in Schweitzer's leper colony, she couldn't learn the Bunny Hug or shingle her plaits. I admire her," he said bitterly. "That's what she's bequeathed to me, admiration. Nothing," he stood fixed before the twelve foot portrayal of the apostle Andrew, "is more boring than admiration." His hands wandered over Simon's mute flat face, "you had a mother too, Simon." He pressed the fishing hook with which Simon tormented his concubine's teat and one of her bulbous breasts sprung open to reveal a safe of neatly arranged bottles drugs needles alcohol stove burnt spoons and sterilized absorbent cotton. "Sex," his powerful teeth ground out a most hideous sound, "enemy of health, sapper of energy. Now you have my strength," he turned on her, "I hope you find better uses for it than I," laughter followed. James diluted the white powder, heating the solution in the blackest spoon. Needle attached, he skillfully plunged the filled hypodermic into his jugular vein and before Martha could find any employ for her new strength he returned smiling and starry-eyed to the bed. "Stay if you like my dear," he gallantly invited, "there's a matinee at the Cinematheque. They're doing Potemkin three times tomorrow, we can come in at the end of one show and see the beginning of the next. I do find Eisenstein's sense of color superb. It's too bad everybody's copied him or I would."

"I should be going," Martha regretted.

"By all means go," he seemed to prefer that agenda. "You'll find the elevator in the hall. It doesn't go down, only up, but if you use it as a guide and follow it down the steps you'll reach the street. I'd really love to take you home but I've got a great many esoteric thoughts to kick around. I'm also thinking of starting an hilariously funny book, called Then Buddhism, I think the title will go in England." He said clearly "an hilariously" so she knew it was time to go.

"There's a question of my salary," Martha reminded him. "I hate to mention it," she blushed, "but the union will double my dues if I don't insist on payment."

"That's one of the esotericisms I intended pondering," he found the bandelleros and hid them. "Could you come back next Friday for the results?"

"No, I couldn't."

"It's ambitious people like you, with adding machine brains who force me to retreat from reality. It's vulgar pedestrian bourgeois mentalities that crush me into my cocoon of brilliance, fame, creativity, beauty and wealth. Here," he said brutally, pressing a thorn in Christ's crown and flinging open the wall safe, "will this get you home? Will this rid me of our fleeting illusion of reality?"

In blushing humility she gathered the bills off the rug. At last used all his stolen strength not to fling the money back into his impudent leering face. Her knuckles whitened around the enslaving symbols of freedom. A phrase that cut into his ambiguous soul rescued her dignity. "Apropos to something," she flung at him in vicious understatement.

CHAPTER 8

"Oh Macdonald," she switched the glaring forty watts of overhead into his eyes and woke him instantly. "I thought I had left you."

"Did you," he sat up in the disordered bed studying her vacantly in a concentrated and rapid effort at identification.

"Oh darling, don't be so cool and sure of me."

"I'll try."

"Then I reached the hotel and there's a new man on night duty and he didn't know me and started accusing, you know how bored he must get sitting there all night making out fiches. You can't come into the hotel at this hour without a man, and I said very haughtily, I live here, as if he was the room-clerk at the Ritz style, and he said: What's your number, like we're all prisoners or something, so instead of giving him our number I said, Jesuis Madame McBlane, as if I was opening a charge account at Dior's and he was a reptile who just happened to be there, and then I marched up the stairs and left him tearing behind me. And darling it was so exciting to say Madame McBlane. I never dreamed anything could be so exciting."

"You always do get a kick out of lying in French, Martha," he had no more confusion about the intruder's identity.

"If it weren't for my mother, Macdonald," she realized, "I would marry you and be Madame Macdonald McBlaine. It is an improvement over Martha Heck."

"But don't rush into anything precious, almost any name would be. But tell me, protecting my battered ego if possible, would your mother so hate the cadence of Madame McBlane."

"Oh no darling, it would justify her entire life if I could write and say Dear mother, of all things I'm marrying a doctor."

"I'm not a doctor."

"You're not a practicing doctor. I wouldn't write, I'm marrying a practicing doctor, anyway. She'd never understand that."

"Of course not."

"But if I just said I'm marrying a doctor, what a surprise. She has the idea I live in filthy rooms with starving old bums."

"What an imagination. Is it possible that your mother had a kind of repressed Lewis Carroll genius?"

"No."

"But she'd like a son in the professions."

"More than money."

"Don't get hysterical. And then darling what would she do with her valuable acquisition?"

"Why she'd make you a partner in one of my father's haberdashery shops where you could really be doing something that made sense and tell the customers that you used to be a doctor. A doctor with a head on his shoulders, that's what she'd call you."

"The image excites me," Macdonald confessed, "I think I'll marry you."

"I wouldn't marry you."

"Nothing impersonal I hope."

"Of course not, I simply wouldn't marry anyone. I think marriage is obscene."

"We agree," he exuded his surprise. "I wonder though," he hesitated, "if we have the same reasons?"

"To get married," she promptly volunteered, "is like two people hiring an army to stand on either side of them to keep them together. And then all those filthy public confessions and trials and executions."

"Our reasons differ," he smiled sadly, "but darling, I thought you were pushing commitments."

"Private ones, of course," she insisted, "but it's vulgar to call out the militia."

"A detail," he corrected, "but then, I'm not really against marriage."

"Oh aren't you, Macdonald," she clutched him passionately about the knees.

"Not so long as one of the parties of the first part has a lot of vulgar money. Marriage is dandy sport for the rich, like polo and incest"

"You're loathsome, a loathsome calculating machine. One should marry only out of passionate attachment."

"Exactly my sentiments."

"You have no sentiments, only arithmetic," she attacked. "Marriage is for children, for reassurance, for two people to say to each other, I'm here today and I'll be here tomorrow and we have all the time and space we need to play in."

"I think your convictions are becoming confused, Martha," he suggested.

"They won't be at the end of the book," she smugly announced.

"And will you then rewrite it, from the beginning?"

"Certainly not," she expostulated. "What's so objectionable about confusion."

"Order."

"James Dykes," she dug deeply into the reservoir of her memory, extracting that almost forgotten name, "has more sense than you."

"Forty million times more," sighed Macdonald, "tell me all about his other problems," he urged.

"I'll tell you all about it tomorrow," she promised, "I just want to get into bed now and sleep, sleep, sleep. I'm dead. O how dreary to be so loved," her trousers crumbled limply around her trim ankle?.

"It feels like tomorrow now, what time is it?"

"It was four o'clock when I left James."

"Then tell me everything now," he trapped her. "Then you can sleep through tomorrow."

"All right, just let me get into that gorgeous bed.

You didn't make the bed, did you? You were so sure I was coming back tonight, weren't you?"

"Well I prayed," Macdonald admitted, "I couldn't do any more than wait and pray like all the other girls."

"What did you do after I left?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

"And Conrad?"

"We had a few drinks together."

"What did he say about me and James?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Well you can ask him tomorrow, maybe he said something, I can't remember."

"Did you miss me darling, did you feel ghastly?"

"I still miss you, I still feel nasty."

"Ghastly."

"I'm not a member of the House of Lords, I don't even try to pronounce that word."

"You're such a snob," she said blissfully crawling between burlap sacking and stretching her body against his. He kissed her judiciously between the breasts and she trembled.

"Have you come home all hot and frustrated," he pushed her away in undisguised irritation.

"Say that again, Macdonald."

"The entire sentence?"

"No, just the one delicious word, home."

"Martha, James hasn't destroyed your senses, has he?"

"I think so," she began to weep quietly at first and then huddled against him sobbing splendidly, "all of them. Oh Macdonald, it was so terrible. Why did you let it happen to me? Why didn't you warn me?"

"I'm sorry, little one," he held her close, "I thought you wanted to experiment, you seemed so fretful this morning."

"Don't ever think that again," she whimpered, quieting her mouth against his broad narrow shoulder, "I have no scientific instincts. Better," she moaned, "to experiment with other people. Are you sure it wasn't that?" she tortured herself out of his arms, "are you sure it wasn't you experimenting with me? Or me experimenting with you? Macdonald, tell me the truth, what did you do tonight?"

"Nothing," he elaborated.

"Does nothing mean another woman?" she moved away from him and prepared herself to accept any answer.

"No other woman, wee thing," the one answer she was least prepared to accept. He pulled her heroically back into the warmth of his body. "Conrad and I had a few drinks and then I came back here." He carefully avoided the word home which she caught neatly between the ego.

"Macdonald, are you still attractive to women?"

"Haven't you been keeping your survey up to date?" he abused her. "You used to ask every woman with hair it'she was trying to fuck me."

"Wouldn't it be hideous if we discovered that we were together because nobody else wanted us, and all the time we thought we were together kind of as a mutual protection league because everybody wanted us?"

"There could be worse discoveries," he terrified the confused girl. "For example discovering that we were together."

"I thought of that tonight," she admitted wistfully, "but only in terms of tragedy. I'm quite sure we'll never discover that while we're together."

"Small comfort," he relaxed. "But didn't James want you, my adorable little puss?"

"Say that word again," she begged.

"Which of the fifteen have you selected this time, Madame?"

"Puss, say puss. Why does it excite me? Puss, puss, oh God it's so exciting I think I'll go mad. Puss, puss, pussy cat, no that's not so exciting, pussy, yes, puss, pussy, maybe pussy is better than puss. Pussy."

"Does this recitation come out of the San Francisco poets, or are you claiming insanity as a defense? Just answer my question."

"I've figured it out," she gloried. "If you were an American you'd have figured it out. That's why men and women of the same cultural, religious, and economical background are so compatible. Pussy makes me think of ... "

"Of your cunt, my beloved."

"Well certainly not of yours! Can't tell you anything," she turned on her stomach. "First James and now the Answer King. No wonder I'm frigid," she elevated her fury into unctuous remorse, "no wonder I'm dead," and she shook the bed with her agony.

"He couldn't make you come?" Macdonald rolled over to her side of the sloping mattress and pressed his mouth against her exposed back of neck.

"Not exactly," she mumbled into the tearsoaked roll of metal filings.

"You mean, he came," Macdonald compas-sioned.

"Profusely."

"And now you hate me because you're lusting for me?"

"I don't need any excuses to hate you," her hysterical voice circled the circular pillow to reach him.

"Turn over, darling," Macdonald pleaded, "I can hardly hear your pretty little insults. Come my sweet, I was so frightened you wouldn't come back to me, I tried to forget you. You dearest of the best Americans should be sympathetic. Isn't it written in your constitution as conceived by Freud at the battle of Gettysburg that hostility is fear? Be contemptuous of me, but be patient and turn over." He tossed her on her back, stretching his hand to cover the mossy mound of her cunt. His fingers dexterously found the concealed cave of neglect and he gently massaged the dampening walls.

She said expressionlessly: "Don't bother, I have no feelings left."

"Let me bother little pussy," her insides jumped against his fingertips, "forget about your feelings. Just you relax and tell Macdonald."

"Don't," she stopped him.

His ringers obeyed. "No, that's all right I meant don't call yourself Macdonald. He does that. He calls himself James."

The fingers in her sex smoothed her brow. "Your taste improves, my love. Living with me has not been a complete waste, as I so often despair. I shall forget my name, I promise you. He's listening," he began.

"And you won't stop what you're doing?"

"Have my promise."

"Well," Martha sighed and moved her hips to bury his hands more deeply in her abused womb. "It was terrible. When we left the Deux Magots he said to me. You have your choice my beautiful witch, that's what he called me all night, his beautiful witch, either we can tarry at my modest studio which is ancient reconstructed Gothic cathedral the Flemish embassy of the sixteenth century and now completely remodeled with steam heat and an automatic kitchen, or we can take my private plane and reach Zaragosa in time for the first bull.

" 'Let's just tarry at your place,' I said, because I knew that would please him, and it did, so he hailed three taxis to show his pleasure and we walked around the corner to rue Jacob. A man dressed exactly like the Red Dean of Canterbury let us in and we went right past his private theatre upstairs to his private apartment."

"Not all the details, Martha," Macdonald pinched her juicy berry for emphasis. "I'm more interested in psychology and action than decor."

"I was getting to that," she spoke slowly. "So I won't describe his private apartment."

"Good girl."

"As soon as we arrived in his private quarters he locked the door behind me and whispered in a maniacal distemper, I'll never let you go now, I've been watching you for months. You've dominated my every awake moment and poisoned my dreams. I saw that was just a pose, because I've been around a bit so I said: Now James what is it you want, and that deflated him fast. He fell on his knees and cried, Just love me a little. Try to love me a little. I know it's preposterous to even hope for it but if you would just come and sit here with me when my need for you becomes most desperate, and let me touch your beautiful witch's hair and look into your beautiful witch's eyes and think on your beautiful witch's mouth ...

"So I said: Doesn't my beautiful witch's body interest you?"

"Good girl."

"Faster, Macdonald."

"Spoken for and done."

"Darling, can't we fuck a little, just a little and then I'll continue the story."

"Isn't that part of the story."

"No, I'm asking you."

"Don't be impatient, we have our senility ahead of us."

"Macdonald, you won't ever leave me."

"Not unless something better comes along."

"Oh," she relaxed, "what security you give me."

"Nothing compared to the security your analyst gave you."

"Do you think I'm conceited."

"To the point of insanity."

"Macdonald, you are insane for me, aren't you? Just like James."

"Ah yes, James," his clever fingers waited for her to continue.

"Where was I?"

"At the witch's body."

"You make it sound so exciting. Doesn't my witch's body excite you. 'It is not your body but your soul, your mind, and your beautiful cold witch's heart that I want,' he told me. 'To have your body and not the rest would be empty mockery.' "

"His life has been a series of full mockeries."

"What?"

"Go on."

"So I said: 'Do you have something to eat?'. "

"That sounds authentic."

"It's all authentic!"

"Of course, of course," Macdonald kissed her shocked lips. "Only some parts are easier to follow for an avid moviegoer like me."

"You're wrecking your sensibilities," Martha warned him, reaching haughtily for his staff.

"Good girl."

"So he gave me something to eat and I ate. I can feel that you want to fuck, too."

"And we're going to, but not at the best part."

"You pervert. It excites your morbid sexuality to hear of my adventures with other men."

"I knew you'd discover me."

"If I'm telling you all this just to excite you, then I'll continue."

" 'No man,' I said to James, 'has had my body and my mind.' 'I felt that,' he answered.' It was that that attracted me when I first saw you with that hulking Macdonald McBlane. Which does he have? Neither, I assured him, but since he is wise enough to realize this, he offends me less than other suitors."

"Did you really say suitors, precious? I didn't know that was in your vocabulary."

"There are a lot of things you don't ... "

"Forgive the intrusion. You have my tension."

"How whimsical. Let me be your protector, James insisted. I appreciate your unattainability more than an oaf like McBlane. Allow me not to attain you. If you like, I replied moodily, but I would indeed prefer to be attained. How lonely I become in my exquisite exclusion. And aren't we brothers in loneliness, James pleaded. How lonely am I in my incredible opulence? You're all women, he said to me, just like that, you're the illusion and the reality, the promise and the fulfillment, the realization and the denial ... you appear in the vestments of your incomparable body to seduce poor mortals, your white forearms alone are a drama that petrify me ... "

"So you figured he was impotent and he fucked you," Macdonald jumped ahead.

"What would you have thought," Martha wept. "Does anyone with balls so reason or speak, thought I to myself? Have I not wandered into the bosom of the cockless cult where woman is untouched in her white supremacy?"

"And after he fucked you?"

"He wept, Macdonald, I swear to you he wept. Another material vision, he wept, the woods are full of them. Another apparition that gazed in at me through the window of my feverish fixation and found fleshly form. Another ... "

"How much did he give you?"

"I haven't counted," she replied frigidly except for her sex which boiled in independent alarm.

"How much did he give you?"

"Ten thousand."

"Not bad, you might have gotten more if you hadn't fucked him."

"Not a franc."

"Like that."

"He pays for his pleasure because he hates it so much."

"Doesn't he soften when he's stoned."

"Into granite."

"Inclined not to give anything away when he's not there."

"Exactly."

"Well, ten thousand is ten thousand," spake the philosopher.

"James Dykes got a bargain," Martha wept. "Another loathsome woman thing destroyed for ten thousand francs."

"You're not destroyed, darling."

"I'm frigid again, Macdonald. You know I am. Stop protecting me: admit that I am."

"But sweetness, you've come twice in the just passed. Here, you're coming again."

"How can you tell? How can you be sure?"

"The tops of the fingers of my right hand have been snapped off."

"I'm not sure. I'll never be sure."

"Sure, you'll be sure," he assured her spreading her legs and fitting his staff in where it belonged. "This time we'll both be sure."

CHAPTER 9

As soon as Macdonald realized that his eyes were open, he realized that he was alone. He closed them quickly in an effort to hold on to reality. A Sunday morning to himself, a Sunday morning of forgotten Sunday Times and cups of boiling tea. No, those were the Sundays in Scotland where mothers and sisters were born into servitude and men clung gallantly to their beds. This was a Paris Sunday, no discussion about that. The suspended airlessness of Sunday clogged his pores. He listened to the morning and lit a boiling Gauloise. The chambermaids, who lived in the halls, were playing with their electric drill outside his door. Another futile plot of the hotel proprietor to castrate his dead sensibilities. It was not the monotonous roar of the machine as much as its contemporanity that sent him wavering back to sleep. How integrate the decor of a room that had known no alteration except rapid decay in the past one hundred and seventy-two years with a noise that was undeniably modern? And if, lying in his eighteenth century bed on eighteenth century linens that had been disgrazziano when new, surrounded by the cracked and patched, yellowed and streaked smattered papered walls, he lost the twentieth century, the vacuum cleaner's roar could break his half nelson on sanity. Did the roar precurse the long feared judgment day? Or was it the end without judgment? During those panic-filled awakenings he welcomed dear Martha's screwability. This was not one of those severe mornings. Wresting Martha from her fears of frigidity had left him paralytically fatigued. But where was Martha! Perhaps, Macdonald leaned nervously over the side of the bed where the slope was most treacherous, he was being too soon tranquil. He searched the floor and she was not. Her uniform of black sweater and matching trousers also were not. Serenely he lit the second cigarette and heard the cleaning apparatus creep vermin-like through the vermin-made cracks in the door. When Martha was in the room she was in the bed, that being a genuine syllogism, because when she was in the bed, there being no other area in the room, she was in the room. He pounded on the suspicious mounds of blanket sheets and mattress, convinced for a dreadful moment that she was unsmothered in the dishevelment. "Martha," he called in his elaborately casual voice, "Martha," not wanting to sound the fool in case she wasn't there; wouldn't want anyone to think he was reading poetry aloud. Macdonald, man of taste, shuddered. Then, with a flush of intuition he knew that she wasn't there, knew it with the certainty that Columbus knew he'd found India. Macdonald dragged his long bony legs from under the cover and reached for his natty chartreuse Daks. From its pocket he drew forth one thousand francs, gift from the man of Bofors. In three minutes he had the bill unfolded, and chose coffee. In this most humane of all possible economies, it entitled him to coffee, no questions asked. Being rich enough to buy, he decided to charge, and pressed the button that echoed five flights below in the wicked woman's ears his intentions to add coffee to their unpaid bill. "Without coffee," he had explained to the monument with a human shape, "I cannot get to my bank."

Macdonald selected his insouciant smile for the catastrophe and carefully arranged it on his face, waiting. There was the blast of a short angry endocrine in the corridor, which meant that the owner, hunched over the leftover croissants was informing the femme de chambre that someone on the fifth floor wanted something. Their code not yet being perfected, they were required to scream back and forth up the perilous leap of five flights, one hundred and six steps, until they determined by a process of elimination and telepathy that that despised someone was despised number twenty-two. Once established, the maid thumped violently on the fragile door.

"Caid," Macdonald called forth, urbanely exhaling a nimbus of smoke, "je voudrais un petit dejeuner."

"Complet Monsieur?" she inquired, her ironic

French voice berlesqued into meaningless syllables by the ponderous addition of irony.

"Oui," he agreed, guarding his insouciant expression and emptying his shrinking heart. It was not to be. "Avec de pain et du beurre ou des croissants?" she sadistically investigated.

"Du pain, du beurre, de la confiture et un cafe au lait," he let the elaborate fantasy spew out. The hell with them.

"Tout de suite, monsieur," she crackled and he could hear her sarcastic feet descend the five flights. The energy spent was a detail considering the good joke she would have had with the loathed locataire. The French will spend anything, so long as it's not money, for anything, so long as it's not food, for which they will spend anything, incredible sums of it. Motionless on the mattress, he measured her light foot up the stairs, and the thunder of her fist on the door.

She mumbled something that sounded like the last line of a hilarious joke that was convulsing the narrator.

"What?" He determined not only not to laugh, but not to understand.

She repeated and so did he. In desperation the maid turned off the interminable roar of wasted electricity and repeated with slow relish: "The Madame says the banks are closed today."

He didn't answer. Let her stand there thinking he was dead. Screw the French and their coffee and no Sunday papers. Screw them right up their oral ass-holes. At the apex of detestation, Martha invaded his despair. It was as easy as rolling on a log to fire all his hatred into her revolting bright white face.

"Where the hell have you been, and why aren't you still here?"

Metaphorically she removed her hat, tossed it on the bed and ran her fingers through her short blonde tight curls.

"Out."

"Have you had coffee."

"Hours ago."

"Hours ago, oh hours ago, John, simply hours ago. Good morning Myrna Loy, or are we being Googie Withers?"

"I'm being myself. I'm not so depraved by my association with you that I can't occasionally be myself."

"This quite early morning," he brutally pulled at his pistachio overalls, "that seemed to be someone you'd found in Havelock Ellis. May I ask if this late morning you have found a more congenial self in Modern Screen Romances?"

"This morning I was something pathetic and possessed that you had created out of your deep loathing and fear for women. This late morning I am again in control of myself, aware of the blessedness of being a woman."

"Congratulations, my good woman, would you be so womanly as to take that filthy empty glass over the sink and render it a clean empty glass through the application of soap and water and bring your tired man a cup of hot coffee from the cafe en face to the Hotel de St. Claude."

"Do you," she responded to his speech, "intend lying like a grunting smelling pig in that bed the entire day?"

"Why, my dear," he leaped, "has the fox hunt gone off without me?" And Macdonald separated himself nervously from the shroud that after long association he had come to resemble and rushed to the wash basin. "And have you," he inquired over his hairless shoulder, "been drinking coffee these hours that you've been 'up' or occupied in other endeavors?"

"I've been to church," she quietly lit the longest butt.

"To church."

"And why not."

"Why?"

"In search of a morsel of compassion and tranquility."

"But you're a Jew." His body twisted away from the sink, his piss spraying the concrete floor.

"And are Jews," she blasted, "not entitled to compassion? Too bad you didn't know where to find me, you could have rushed in and stopped the services, screaming out your anti-Semitic rage. My mother always told me," she emphatically quoted, "Martha, remember they all hate Jews. They may pretend to like us but that's because they're afraid of our great brains. Take what you can get from them, she always told me, but never trust them."

"So that's who you're being," nodded Macdonald, returning his generous stream of urine to the sink, "your mother. Why didn't you say so, my dear? I would have gladly been your father. You did tell me they never spoke."

"Never," snapped Martha, "isolated in their fleshly bodies outside the body of the church, they discovered that they had nothing to say to each other, even in matters of money."

"And in which house of our Lord did you tarry, my adorable?" Macdonald finished his daily ablution and rejecting the miserable invitation of his nuptial couch, buttoned his forest greens.

"I can tell you," she agreed, "because I don't intend returning there next week. Each Sunday I shall visit another cathedral until I come down to all churches and end up at chapels. I was at Notre-Dame."

"Notre-Dame!" amazement discolored his nostrils.

"And why not? I consider it sinful to have been three years in Paris and never once in Notre-Dame."

"And have you been to the Lido."

"Of course not."

"And do you consider that sinful."

"That's different. I'm not on an expense account."

"Then have you been to the Louvre."

"I'm getting there."

"Or Tour d'Argent, or Baudelaire's tomb, or the Folies-Bergere. Sins of omission heaped on sins of your father."

"I intend."

"Intentions, Madame, are discussed in heaven."

"If you will please leave this room," she struggled for outer as well as inner composure, "I should like to bring some order into this disgusting rat hole."

"Noble," he enthused, "make believe I'm not here. I'll curl up in a comer like a catatonic."

"I'll see you, that will be sufficiently nauseatingly distracting."

"One more question and I'm gone," he promised. "Did you attend the social and tea after services, exchanging recipes with our neighbors and friends, or did you walk moody and lonely along the Seine? You do know the Seine?"

"We went and had coffee."

"We? Is that you and our omnipresent maker or you and not so repressed mama."

"We is a gentleman I encountered and myself."

"Again this self, how the ego expanded and multiplied in the splendor of Our Ladies' parlor."

Martha got down on her knees and gathered the handfuls of cigarette butts that had accumulated during days and nights outside of the Lord's compassion. She swept them into separate triangular stacks.

"I conclude by your industry that you have invited this Viennese gentleman to tea."

"How did you know, you've been spying on me?" she tripped angrily over a growing mound.

"I promise to make my departure long before he makes his arrival. Is he perhaps watching across the street for my retreating figure?"

"He's not coming."

"Then I know nothing," Macdonald modestly withdrew to the door.

"Stop, Macdonald, how did you know he was Viennese?" Hysteria deepened the implications of an otherwise simple question.

"My dear child," Macdonald calmed her, "your gentlemen are always Viennese, the way chaps are English and guys are American. Allow me that much intelligence. I also read in that scandal sheet the New York European Edition of the Paris Herald Tribune that you can't meet anything but Viennese in cathedrals these days. They're making a regular religion of it. My methodology is logical, not mysterious. But most telling evidence of all, I must reveal to you, is the analyst's accent you have carried home from church."

"He was right," Martha whispered vindictively, drawing her hair away from the ashes in a grim gesture.

"In what was he right?" Macdonald to show his concern kicked a butt closer to her ash heap.

"He told me I was bewitched. He said someone was tampering with my soul, you are the black prince, Macdonald."

"Only an agent, a poor underpaid agent I assure you, or I'd be your fairy godmother. What is the informer's name?"

"Adolf."

"Quite right, inevitable indeed. Adolf brings echoes of sir James Dykes. James too found witchery in your wild ways. Is this not perhaps James Dykes disguised with a beard?"

"How did you know?"

"It is James Dykes," Macdonald triumphed.

She looked up distractedly and said, "Oh, hello Macdonald, I'll be finished in a minute."

"You bitch. What we do to each other is one thing, but property is sacred!"

"I wanted you to know what it felt like to wander naked in this world, it's really been a liberation for me. I thought," she razored a stubborn sleeve with quick clever fingers, "that it would be a good idea for you to become an Adamite. It would make a great picture story for Life magazine, and if you weren't too lazy and kept a journal," she tugged with straining arms at the lining of his revoltingly moss green tweed jacket, "they might use it to caption the photographs." The jacket surrendered with a wounded shriek that came out of Macdonald.

"You'll break something, Macdonald," she cried, and snaked away from his raised fist. Her body slipped over the mattress edge and her ringers encircled an empty wine bottle. It flew for his head, and landed on his shoulder. Macdonald shook himself as if a nerve long dead had died. "Let's not fight, really you'll thank roe one day. A man like you should travel light and fast and far."

"Where did I put it," he asked dizzily.

"What, Macdonald?" Martha asked conversationally.

He concentrated on the pile of lint that had been his wardrobe, kicking bits aside with his toe, fastidious as a practiced dochard. He bent swiftly and picked up a slice of leather which looked as if it had once been part of a belt, though it was small enough to have been part of a wrist band, small enough indeed to have been part of a Chinese dinner. He held the leather in his palm.

"Oh, Macdonald," Martha implored, "don't hit me again. Why don't we fuck instead? It's practically the same thing."

"None of your Freudianisms," Macdonald warned. He pulled her cruelly by the long red hair, dragging her off the bed and bouncing her carelessly on the floor. "Don't give me any of your American shit." He kicked her ribs. Martha rolled away from him, and then rolled recklessly back grabbing his ankle and biting viciously for the bone. Her teeth reddened with his Celtic blood. "Except if you're impotent," she called up. "If you can't fuck, then beat, but you won't be fooling me, old man," she licked her teeth clean. "I don't think it's so grand and virile of you to kick me. Pricks tell me more than feet." She kneeled in front of him and dared him: "Just let me look, darling, I want to see if it's still there. If it's not there anymore you can kick me again. Just let me look," and she pleadingly unbuttoned his vile trousers. "There it is, all folded away and shrunken like a great shy schoolboy, come on," she cooed, and pulled the inactive member into prominence. She nipped it with her tongue, and suctioned the staff into her mouth the way Macdonald had taught her. In the most revolutionary tradition, the student was conquering the master with his own techniques. Macdonald let the battle be lost, he let the new generation ascend, he let the pupil lesson the teacher, he let her suck. She clung to his thighs, hiding her head bashfully in the shadows of his pubic hairs, rubbing her cheeks timidly against his thin-skinned sacs. His malevolent maleness swelled angrily in her fight mouth, rocking his loins into alertness, teasing the erect rod away from her, and then remembering that she hadn't eaten all day and magnanimously feeding it back into her wide open mouth. She curved her fingers around his hips, serpenting for his anus and pinioning his anger deep in her throat. The brazen gulping gasps quickened, and she fell away from him when he least wanted freedom. He hadn't taught her that timing; no man had ever taught a woman such mutinous timing. His throbbing cock led him slavishly to her hole, and she was on the floor wide open and wet for the assault. "Well," sighed Macdonald, "what the hell," and plunging into her gave her unconditional victory. There were other ways to die. His body pounded hers under the bed, and they rolled crazily to the window. They grunted in concentration, secluded and separate in their own pleasure. "It's up to you, Martha," warned Macdonald, rotating his hips so that the lever inside of her could touch off every battery in her hole. "Keep going," she gasped. "Keep in me, stay in me, roll in me, that's right, don't stone, don't get lazy, think of other things, think of your mother, Macdonald, think of New Year's in Glasgow, darling, think of all the Americans you've fucked, yes," she crooned, "don't think of me, just fuck, Macdonald, fuck me faster, darling," she urged him, "suck a lovely little Scots fucker you are, yes, my angel," she moaned, "don't stop, Macdonald, don't stop, don't stop," and he could feel her sex throbbing surrender. He came with her, invited by the inhalations of her sex and long after they were both good for nothing, Martha was still screaming, "Don't stop."

"Enough, darling," said Macdonald, "the neighbors will think I'm beating you."

CHAPTER 10

Martha was propped up on the pillows eating black bread and cheese. Macdonald beside her emptied the wine bottle into the glass.

"Really, don't you want any, Mac?" asked Martha. "I'll make a sandwich for you."

"No sweet, I'm not hungry, just thirsty."

"You should eat something."

"Later."

"You mean," she tore out a mammoth mouthful, "I should leave some bread and cheese for you?"

"No, wee one," he said, "it's all for you. I'll get something in a cafe" later."

"Did we inherit money, Mac?" Martha turned to him and ran her finger over his bare chest, he trembled his approval.

"Do that again, can you manage to eat and do that at the same time?"

"Wait till I finish my sandwich."

Macdonald sighed. "You're so clever, such fine coordination, why don't you work up a juggling routine."

"I don't see you drinking wine and sucking my cunt at the same time. Why should I be expected to be the clever one?" she wandered off and bent down to kiss his thigh. "There's something delicious about you, Macdonald," she admitted bewilderedly, "I hate to admit it," she caressed his belly, "but your flesh is gorgeous."

Macdonald patted her shoulder. "Be a slave to lust," he recommended, "every woman should be trapped in her sexual appetite."

"You really think so? You're not just saying it out of greed? You think women are more interesting when they're all cunt?"

"I think women are fascinating when they have nothing but cocks on their wee minds."

"I could be that way, Macdonald," she traced his breast bone down onto the end of his swelling rod, "if I didn't have so many other things on my mind."

"Empty that empty vessel," he advised with laconic authority. "Don't think of anything. Remember," he scratched his irritated groin, "all a female has to worry about is getting a cock inside of her twenty times a day."

"That's an awful lot of times, Mac."

"Then nineteen," he conceded. "The less she has, the more she should worry about it. The idea is to stay worried."

"When I finish my sandwich," she promised, "I'll worry."

"Here, have some wine."

"The bottle's empty. You pig, couldn't you save some for me?"

"Woman is created for sacrifice."

"They always gave plenty of wine to sacrifices," Martha complained, "that's the one joy of being a sacrifice, wine and drugs."

"You'd rather eat than drink anyway," Macdonald reminded her.

"Must everything be a choice? Must every preference exclude?"

"Here, drink," he shoved the half-filled glass at her, "but don't finish it." She lifted the glass gracefully to her lips and gurgled it to depletion.

"After Victoria nobody wants to drink," the empty glass rolled on the treacherous incline of the cement floor.

Moodily, Macdonald watched its journey. "This room looks like we shit and piss in it, couldn't you occasionally clean?"

"I'm too busy."

"I never see you move out of bed."

"But I'm thinking all the time, lying here and thinking. How can I be more seductive, yesterday I had seventeen pricks in me, the day before twelve, before that eighteen. Why can't I be a complete female? Why can't I hit twenty. Just thinking of it exhausts me, Macdonald," she sat up and stared into his face, "I think I'll wash."

"Don't think about it, just perform. Be capable of a spontaneous act."

"Nothing as sophisticated as washing could be spontaneous." Martha carried tepid potfuls of water to the tin bidet and squatted.

"Don't use the face cloth," warned Macdonald.

"Would you rather I used your face," she massaged soap into her tender membranes.

"You're the dirtiest woman I've ever known."

"I was brought up in a country with plumbing. I can't learn to bathe in sections, it's necessary for me to totally submerge."

"Americans," he grunted, "barbarians."

"That's why we're winning," said Martha. "While you're all communing with your precious dead souls we're making like Eskimos."

"Is that a private joke?"

"One you may share," Martha offered magnanimously. "What I mean is ... "

"Oh Christ, I forgot, your illiterate mother wrote to you," and he leaned over the life-giving bed for his battle green trousers.

"What does she say?" Martha stood up from the bidet and began the fruitless search for a towel.

"Don't use the face towel," Macdonald repeated.

"Is that what she says," Martha nodded, picking up the towel and patting her thighs. "She has eyes in the back of her nose."

Macdonald reached her in one leap. "I live here too."

"You and your medical training," snorted his drenched concubine. "These vestiges of sanitation. You're like an unfrocked priest who refuses to fuck choirboys."

He wrenched free the towel and returned to the bed. Martha, legs spread, surrendered to drying at room temperature. "Read it out loud," she demanded, squeezing her pubic hairs. "It is from my mother to me."

"First we must determine if I can read it at all. She writes like you wash. I begin," Macdonald looked up for attention, wiping his nose with the towel, Dear Marty, "that explains a lot," enclosed is five dollars, he pulled the sheets of paper apart, and taped to one corner of the third sheet of the manuscript was a brown green square of money which he detached and laid tenderly on the table. It should go a long way in Europe, the letter advised, since we read here that Europeans will do anything for American dollars. "Even fuck Americans," agreed Macdonald agreeably. I'm sorry I can't send more, but in America Americans will do anything for dollars, too, and most of them are doing more than your father. "She has a mind like Bertrand Russell," he looked up. "Shall I repeat that line?"

"Just read the letter once," Martha sat at the edge of the bed. "Does she say when she can send more?"

"Next line, I wish I could promise you more, but I'm afraid this is it for a long time. Aren't you writing anymore? I should think you could make some money that way. I don't expect you to be a great serious genius like Edna Ferber and Fannie Hurst, Macdonald's face tinged yellow and the words thickened, but at least you could get something in "Ladies Home Journal" or Saturday Evening Post." Don't they pay anything for stories? You used to write such nice stories. I always said, and I still say, why not a happy ending? You know what I mean dear, it's the same thing as it's as easy to love a rich man as a poor man. I never could understand why you had to kill off all your characters, unless your stories were detective thrillers and it's just to deep for me. "Did you explain to her that you couldn't have orgasms at that stage of your literary development," demanded Macdonald seriously. Martha stared at the wallpaper opposite the bed.

"Mac, were those blue flowers peonies or bluebells?"

"I think they were bachelor buttons."

"Let's get dressed," Martha said suddenly. "Let's get dressed and get the hell out of this room."

"I have two more pages."

"Read the last line."

Poor soul, Macdonald read, I guess it all happens for the best. Love Mama. "I see where you derived your style," he sympathetically sucked her teats and then finding her sex as soft as his staff was bony and burning, sank into her.

"There's a P.S., Martha. Do you want to hear it?"

"More than anything in the world," admitted Martha, holding a lighted match to the corner of the airmail stationery, "but I'm a terrible masochist."

Speeding down Boulevard St. Germain in a rush not to be late for the early quitters, Martha, trotting beside Macdonald, relented.

"What did she say in the P.S., when was I coming home?"

"Something like that."

"I'm never going home," he saw the serpent fear in her eyes. "Rather, I am home. I mean, must home be where you were born? Can't someone decide that he's home because he finds a place where he feels comfortable?"

"I do think home is a feeling," Macdonald agreed, "I'm not so sure it's a comfortable feeling."

"What do you mean," she snapped nervously, "don't quote lines at me. You know I'm a ignorant American."

"I just made that up as we were going along," he assured her, "but it's so good it's a pity to waste it on you. If we don't get in too late tonight I'll start on a book or play about someone who stands still so that home can run away from him."

"Another forty-seven minutes marathon of genius."

"Why the hell should I write that play," he reconsidered, "I can only accomplish two things with it, make people feel better or worse. Let them find their own diversions."

"You can help them to understand what's happening," Martha found God.

"Dear child, why would anyone bother watching a play if something was happening."

"Well, most great writers write because they must, they have no choice, or paint or compose for the same reason."

"I'm not discussing psychopathic behavior, forgive me but I'm talking about myself."

"Actually, Mac," she complimented, "you do have excellent ideas. You're an idea man. You belong on Madison Avenue."

"And you belong in a home for the incurables," he offered her an equally attractive retreat. "What can't I cure?"

"Sex, mama, home, money, food, success, men, you, all the diseases of your beloved homeland."

"Every homeland has the same story, the same problems. It's just that in America we're articulate, we're eager for self-improvement. We've read Freud. Between Europe and America there is only a difference of vocabulary."

"Like the difference between Shakespeare and Faith Baldwin."

"Yes, that's what I mean. You know, Macdonald, before I met you I'd had some pretty dark days."

"Better to have dark nights and no days at all isn't it?"

"And sometimes I'd think of going back to America, just for money, you know, money and comfort and all those things that don't matter."

"Only an American," Macdonald intervened, "giving his life for those things that don't matter could make that statement. It's the heroic part of your nature."

"And then I'd remember my mother."

"Enough said. After reading her letters, I'm afraid of going there on the one hundred and ninety-one million chances to one that I might meet her."

"Then I think, Macdonald, if my mother had been normal, even semi-normal, how ordinary I'd be. I'm sure it's ignorant mothers that produce extraordinary geniuses."

"Like you?"

"Apparently you had an intelligent mother."

"Yes, but her mother was moronic, and I have reached back a generation for my dominant genetic characteristics."

"I read somewhere that all Scotch women were intelligent and the men frightening dullards."

"Scots, my dear," he corrected her, "Scotch is a spirit, not a nationality."

"You're so sensitive," she admired him.

They passed St. Julien le Pauvre. "Is today Saturday?" she demanded.

"I forgot to check with my secretary."

"If it's Saturday I'd like to go to church tomorrow. Let's come tomorrow and hear an orthodox mass. They have glorious services."

"You go and then tell me all about it," recommended Macdonald. "It would make our relationship more dynamic."

CHAPTER 11

Posted on pillars high above the head tops in constant and severe judgment leer the two wooden mandarins. They regard not each other, their unfriendly shoulders at forty-five degree angles, nor at the pilgrims beneath their thrones. The smoke from chainless ends of cigarettes rise to their feet and so they preside in a heavenly shifting of clouds over the swarming magenta velvet benches. So deeply afflicted are the penitents of the Deux Magots with their own guilt that were the overseering deities to relent and forgive they would cling to the damnation of cigarettes and talk. In more than one tragedy, the punishment has absorbed all of life.

Into this undescribed circle of Dante's hell, or anybody's circle or anybody's hell drifted two. Their eyes wandered from table to table gliding flatly over the unfamiliar dead bodies lying cold on the left bank of the Seine. They looked into all the faces with the terrified persistency of parents requested to identify and claim their young. The disaster had been enormous, all the chips had gone down. In panic their eyes would flicker recognition into locked eyes, recognition but not intimacy, and with the reluctant hope that their own were not amongst the victims, they continued the dreadful search.

These two who entered were creatures of another time. Two of the many who had not packed their doctrines in time when the existentialists had been ordered out of Paris. As women will fling themselves into philosophies without reservation, saving reservation for their men in the calamity of their men not being their philosophies, so the girl appeared the more indoctrinated of the two. She was clothed in her beliefs and her face had not happened until granted full membership. Viewed from the floor, the practiced perspective of the cafe, she revealed in orthodox restraint no inch of her flesh. Between flat black Italian slippers and tight black cuffless corduroy slacks was a bridge of black stocking. The stocking moved up under the tight pants that moved up beneath the curtain of a wide black coat into a black high necked long sleeved sweater. Her shoulders were bent in vague imitation of the man, squared and stooped as if she were apologizing for having been born the Prince of Wales. Above the black habit glared her violently white face, white and expressionless as a white and expressionless stone. Not the ovens of summer or the abrasive currents of winter could stimulate color onto her bleached cheeks, so inviolate to the elements was her water-repellent mask of white powder. She could have dived into the wave-less depths of the Mediterranean and struggled to the surface, her epidermis an unchanged white. Everything the cosmetic manufacturers promised, it was, and the simple addition of prickly heat powder to the mixture, rendered the powder an even whiter white than educated biologists and chemists had achieved. Often, out of desperation, the layman will exceed and add to the knowledge of the scientist. Only Macdonald suspected her black secret, that beneath the white powder there lay vanquished the rosy unscrubbed American cheek.

Martha's talents did not stop with her whiter than white on white canvas, for on the colorless cloth she outlined black and enormous eyes that transformed the abstraction of glacial prelife into a surreal portrait, vital as a statue, grave as an insect. Her face stood away from an electrical red frame, a work of dedication and love, a combination of concepts preserved from antiquity that could only have been assembled in the twentieth century.

Macdonald's face, being less ancient was less restricted to the modern and its surface bore the markings and creases of many centuries.

His was not the actor's stock expression of hero or victim, but the confusion of one who had been cast as both, played both and been found ill-suited for both. Where Martha's face was smooth, Macdonald's was corrugated, where she was a monochrome, he was a kaleidoscope, where she was ancient he was old. Where her garments were as inflexible black, his resembled an unscraped pallette.

"That' girl," Martha asided to him, laboring not to move her mouth or nod her head in that direction, "she's looking at us and writing in a notebook."

"Don't smile," Macdonald warned, "she might have a camera."

"Shut up," Martha snapped, and then quietly, "she might have a tape recorder. There's Fioren-zaio," she cheered quickly, "he's sitting at a table alone with fourteen other Gurgeffians. I think he's trying to telepathize a greeting to us. And there's Gregoriansky, he's sitting with someone who looks like the Finnish ambassador's daughter, anyway she's got clean hair, all shiny and yella, I think he's reading from one of his notebooks, yes, yes, I can tell from how his mouth is moving. Now Macdonald, don't you think that is a very strange neurosis for a white Russian to have, even if his mother and father were deposed Princesses, to write down everything that he says to everybody, and nothing that anyone says to him? And then to insist on reading his words to everyone? And since the only time he speaks is when he reads what's written down, he keeps writing down and reading the same things."

"Very strange," agreed Macdonald.

"There's that English cunt who says you have eyes like Aly Khan. God, she has ugly straight white teeth."

"I found her a sweet child."

"Child! Maybe you're referring to her youngest aged daughter. I mean that old haggard smiling British Commonwealth cunt sitting at that table alone waiting for someone of her class or an exotic, like a man for instance, to fuck her, that's who I mean. There's Conrad, he's waving at us, don't wave back. Who is sitting with him?" her voice elevated wildly. "It's so unattractive. It's got a head exactly as wide as its neck, which is narrow even for a turtle. I mean really, Conrad is so public domain, oh god more waving, say something Macdonald, pretend to be talking, I'll pretend to be listening."

"If you will help me," his words trembled in her ear, "just a few moments longer," his heavy hand landed on her shoulder, "and guide me to a quiet table on the terrace of the Cafe" Flore, I would be so grateful, my child. Though I am old and blind, and appear to your young and clear and blessedly healthy eyes to be a pauper, in truth I am the richest prince of Saudi Arabi who plucked out his eyes, but not his fortune, when I viewed the West for the first time after a sheltered life spent on an oasis, wherein my father had built artificially cooled skiing slopes and ponds of frozen champagne so authentic that it was there that Eisenstein chose to film the finale of Alexander Nevsky, reshooting in his scandalous perfectionism the drowning sequence so often that our entire slave population was drowned in ecstasy and genius, and all alone I was forced to Europe in search of seventy-eight new concubines in order to replenish our tribe. No sooner had I landed in Paris when the Formosans as a test of their strength and as a propaganda stunt for Life magazine, later commented on in Time magazine under the curious heading of Personalities, invaded my oasis with fire throwers and melted my cherished father's slope, thereby washing away the last landmark of my ancient civilization. Indeed, where my empire stood, high, white and cold, now lies the desert, low white and hot. Even with a map, anthropologists have been unable to relocate it, and so I am without people or land. Fortunately, my money, invested in Swiss banks ... "

"I'm going to sit with Conrad," Martha scratched at his claw grip.

"Come back," cried Macdonald, "come back my angel, my sight, my heaven, I am old and blind and you young and blessed with twenty-twenty vision, let me drape you with rich furs that I may feel them, let me put diamonds big as cow bells around your ankles that I may hear them, let me douse you with rare perfumes ... "

"Let go of me, Macdonald, you're dangerous when you get like this. If you don't take your filthy bones off my shoulder, I'll scream."

"Just your voice ... "

"Stop it now. Anyway that girl left, it's all down on tape, you can stop now."

"Do you think he believed any of it?"

"All of it, especially about me being young and blessed."

"Well quick, get her empty table. Harvest the comforts I laboriously plant for us."

"You're sure you don't want to sit with Conrad?"

"The reward of long union is familiarity. I am sure, as you are so sure, that I don't want to sit with Conrad."

"I'm a little tired of just hearing your voice."

"How strange, conversely I've only just noticed yours."

"I think we should make an effort to be more that would not touch the floor. It is dire to let a witch touch the floor."

"What makes you so sure I'm a witch?" Martha challenged The Challenger. "Just because this lunatic-"

"Are you a lunatic?" Adolf's eyes filled with tears of profoundest compassion. "Blighted witness, has she so enchanted you that the heavenly location of the moon cheats you of your sense?"

"Is this basket big enough?"

"Not for our purposes." Adolf smote his brow in what appeared to be a nervous habit that sent him to the floor. "I have neglected The Tortures and The Devices and Signs by which the Judge can Recognize a Witch."

"Fool," accused Macdonald.

"Help me," Adolf humbled himself, and with ecclesiastic strength pushed Martha into the wooden chair that with the disintegrated bed filled their household. "If you'll take the other end of the chair," which Macdonald did, "thus we will begin questioning. Forgive me for having endangered both of us by leaving her unbaptized limbs free. Now if you can help me to lift this vile burthen to the mattress, we will strip the victim and proceed with the test of needles. Hurry," he strained with Macdonald, "Lest she confess before we commence tortures. In spite of your screams and blasphemies, vile harlot, I know this will not hurt, unless the devil makes you sensible to pain in one of his vile jokes, whereby he terrifies unrepentant witches into greater unrepentance."

Martha closed her eyes in a pose of absolute self-possession. When they opened, she smiled a soft woman's smile of greeting, devoid of sarcasm or humor, a simple smile of recognition, and Macdonald paused in his jubilation. "They always get like this," the Inquisitor sagely discharged, "as soon as you get them in chains with no part of their body touching the floor."

"Do they?"

"Disrobe her," enjoined the Prosecuting Inquisitor, "we will needle plunge for the devil's mark. Where she feels no pain are his revolting exits and entrances, whereby he possesses her soul."

Macdonald approached the relaxed figure. "I think she's dead."

"No, good man," laughed Adolf, "I know what a horrific sight to a simple and honest Christian is a Canonical purgation. Her taciturnity is a measure of her heresy, and one that the red-hot irons, we implore Almighty God for her Eternal Salvation, may purge."

Adolf stood before her and made the sign of the cross. Fixed in a perpetual silence, Martha followed the two paths of his hand and laughed.

"Truly a vile sorceress," shuddered Adolf. "They laugh hideously four times, at birth, at marriage with Satan, at the sign of the cross and at their glorious and deserved death on the burning stake."

"Do they?" Macdonald moved closer to Martha. "You have a great sense of humor, Martha," he touched her hair and found it soft and burning hot beneath his palm.

"Don't touch her," Adolf thrust him aside, "she will bewitch you into the most unnatural state. And look not directly in her eyes, lest she contort your features and curse all your progeny."

He said: "Why don't you go home, Adolph, your mother's all nerves."

"My mother was a foul witch," Adolf set the laden chair down on the mattress, "who I did ass in the town of Briesack in the diocese of Basil." He twisted rapidly to confront the motionless chained figure. He placed his hand flat on the head of the accused and recited, his eye sockets a glaring, rolling white: "I conjure you by the bitter tears shed for the salvation of the world, and by the burning tears poured in the evening hour and by all the tears which have been shed here in this world by the Saints and the Elect, that, IF YOU BE INNOCENT YOU DO NOW SHED TEARS." The room filled and flickered with her profound quiet "She cries not," Adolf gloated, pressing his thumbs against her dry cheeks, "she knows not the grace of tears."

"That's her most bearable quality," Macdonald agreed.

Adolf turned away from the fearless Madonna and walked to the opposite side of the dark chamber, then staggered backwards, struggling with his flowing beard and skirts, until his back confronted her, pivoting on his heels and ripping her shirt away.

"Leave her alone," Macdonald shouted, "don't abuse her."

"You have touched her unprotected," Adolph accused, "and she has seduced you from torturer to slave. Stand away from me slave, I will proceed alone. You shall be cast into the flames with her if exorcism purifies not your addiction."

"The needle will reveal to us what we already perceive and prejudge, damned, obstinate, stubborn impenitent."

"Give me that," Macdonald wrestled with the judge, "can't you see she's in a coma," he rattled his words to disturb her pitiless silence, "you've drugged her, or something, you've planned this whole business with her."

"Here," lunged Adolf, "our first visitation." The needle swifter than Macdonald's anger sank into Martha's breast, deep enough to touch her heart.

"Madman," screamed Macdonald, and flung Adolf aside. Martha sat in triumphant unperturbed calm.

"Lustful seduced fool, wicked in your foolishness, you see that she feels not and cries not and bleeds not. She is completely possessed of the devil. She is the bride of the Prince of Death, the wife of the Prince of Liars, the concubine of the Serpent, the Adversary, the harlot of the devil of fornication, Asmodeus, filled with the swollen pride of Leviathan and the avarice of Mammon."

"Get the fuck out of here." Macdonald searched for the wound that the pin had punctured her flesh, caressing the white firm breasts.

Adolf limped to his feet, "I will shave her hair and her spell over you will be broken."

"Martha," Macdonald grabbed her shoulders with chaotic urgency, "Martha please, he was your idea. I didn't invent him." But his words were intense as tinsel in the volcanic grandeur of her silence. Then she opened wide her lips, but the sounds could not come. She contorted in the chains, and Macdonald swiftly unhooked them. Again she tried to speak.

"The devil of wind, the Prince of Gales blows in her body," cried Adolf with fear, "for when he sees a Vicar of the Most High and Holy Apostolic Church flung to the ground, he grows powerful and willful."

Macdonald chafed Martha's hand between his palms. "Soon as he gets up, old girl, we'll send him away with his mechanical circus."

"I speak from Toledo," a voice masculine, resonant and furiously amused sent Macdonald twisting to his knees. "I speak," the voice broke through Martha, "from Toledo. Toledo is the first word."

"What is she saying?"

"It is not she who speaks, lunatic," Adolf shuddered, "Toledo is the capital of the devil's most horrible empire, and the seat of their most vilified University."

"I speak through my detested agent," the voice brought with it an echo of tumbling streams and the faint cadence of a lost piped tune, "who has always been my agent.

"Women are my agents, all women have received from me the three sacraments of Baptism, Priesthood and Marriage. My poor emissaries," the sounds collected slowly and awkwardly within her mouth, "they have forgotten their contract, and know not why they are feared or unconquerable.

"My gifts of prophesy, healing, sacrifice, fertility, fidelity, fleshly beauty, lust, strangle them. They suffer for me and know not why they suffer." The voice became old, aged with compassion and Martha's tearless eyes glinted. "From Toledo I watch them waste and decay, pulling down with them the empires of men. They cannot break their contracts with me," he roared out with young delight, "for all their piety, their patience, their purity, their purgings, their profanity, their protests, their penances, their priests and their pretense. They are mine," Martha's hands caressed an invisible head, "and the more you abuse them, the more they are mine. Despise them and they forget their secrets. Worship them, and they worship me," she transmitted jealousy. "Keep them chaste, and they are ovens of lust; or as whores, and I freeze their hearts.

"Marry them, and choke on the ashes of their divine fire. Oh so, so divine," the vulgar disembodied voice pursued them "Mother to you and wife to me. Lucky devil, he never had a mother. And let me tell you," he forced them into chilling intimacy, "that in a confusion and fury of unappeased appetite the women eat their children and hunger for me. What can I do?" demanded the antagonist, in a exaggeration of sympathy, "if there's only one me?"

"I say the woods are full of you," burst from Macdonald.

"Oh no," came with fading regret, "the woods are nearly empty."

"How lonely for you," the rage, the impotent rage sucked Macdonald down a cone of insanity.

"It's lonelier for the women," the syllables formed in the drafty corners of the room. "Bad season, bad contract. I signed up the ladies but the men won't play. Be careful my boys, be careful, the game will go on without you ... "

"Burn her," screamed Adolf, "burn all of them."

"Macdonald," Martha exhaled the woman's voice, stretched exhausted on the collapsed mattress. "Could I have a cigarette?"

"Sure," he groveled in his torn pocket, "Let me light it for you. Here." His shaking hand extinguished the unused flame. He tried another match. Martha held his wrist to steady the flickering fire.

"God it tastes funny, so cool, like a mentholated cigarette. Don't you have a Gauloise?"

"Don't serve her lusts," Adolf struggled between them. "She is a self-confessed romancer."

Adolf extracted two ordinary pipes from the debris that had preceded him to the floor. "There are facilities for a wood conflagration?"

"Have you got a real cigarette, Macdonald?" Martha drawled.

"Would you like a cigar," he blasted, spiraling between their demands.

"Why? Have you had a baby?"

"Yes," he said, "and it's colic, it won't stop laughing."

"Is that him over there," Martha turned lazy eyes on Adolf, "why don't you go away, Adolf? You'll miss the matinee of the Ten Commandments."

"Jewish folklore," said Adolf with contempt.

"That's right," Macdonald rose enthusiastically, "she can't be a heretic, she's a Jew."

"Who?" demanded Adolf, shrinking behind the density of his beard, "who dares pronounce Jew to me?"

"I'm a Jew," Martha groaned, "my real name is Martha Sheck, the immigration officer ran out of ink and shortened it to Heck."

"Then the trial, the admissions, the witnesses, the tortures, all for nothing," Adolf roared, "for doesn't the last Canon Law concerning Jews say: His goods are to be confiscated and he is to be condemned to death, because with perverse doctrine he opposed the Faith."

"I'm sure that refers only to converts who convert," Macdonald mediated.

"This is not a valid objection," thundered Adolf Moses Hexenhammer, "be they apostates or abjurers of the faith, the essential principle is they are witches ... "

"The other twelve were Jews too," baited Macdonald, "twelve succulent Semetic succubi."

"Where are they," Adolf whirled in his flounces, "I want them all. All to burn as my mother burned, all to confess as she confessed, to confiscate all their possessions as hers were confiscated." He smiled. It was worse than either of them had anticipated, and they feebly intertwined. His delight was a precise sheltering of stunted teeth, the lips pursing together, creating an undisturbed garment of the beard that grew from his toes up and until his nostrils. "If the witch could turn ecclesiastic evidence, she might be granted a year in case. We might leave her in this foul dungeon," he scanned the room with buyer's eyes. "There are ear chewing famished rats, I presume?"

"I'm here," offered Macdonald.

"Who are the other twelve, Martha Shock."

"Never," she swore.

"The notary will record," glared Adolf. "One Never."

"Never," Martha repeated.

"Sisters," comprehended Adolf, "a family of witches."

"Never," pursued Martha.

"And the foul mother, of course."

"That never was the father, I think."

"Ten thousand women witches for every man," recited Adolf, "but with Jews we find equal dedication to the filthy practices."

"A family that burns together, yearns together," said Miss Sheck.

"Do you really find that?" Macdonald pursued.

"I go to hunt the Nevers, sisters, daughters and obscene parents. You will guard the prisoner until my return, Goodman Macdonald?"

"She won't leave this room."

"You will feed her on bread and water, taking care not to eat her fetid feces."

"I'll try."

"Preventing her from forming lead idols in your urine."

"If I can."

"Permitting her to bury no objects, such as single threads from the shrouds of recently deceased nuns,"

"With all my might."

"Avoid her turds," intoned Adolf, "they are assuredly lethal."

"When will you be back, Adolf?" Martha remembered her manners.

"That depends on the Nevers."

"You'll give them my regards."

"What witch," he roared, "dares hire me as messenger. Suck on your devil's mark, and they will feel their blood flow. Whisper to your familiar, and will not their familiar whisper to them. Warn them," he said ominously, "warn them that Adolf approaches."

"Don't you want to surprise them?"

"When," said Adolf, gathering his tools as Macdonald showed him to the door, "have I ever surprised a witch. When," he sobbed, "where, how?"

They heard the over-laden Inquisitor charging and vibrating down the stairs, "He's gone," Macdonald sighed down on the mattress and took a puff from her neglected cigarette. "That wasn't so amusing."

"Oh he's not so bad," Martha decided she wanted the cigarette back, immediately, "he has a few eccentricities, but he means well."

"He doesn't mean anything."

"So nothing means anything."

"You read that on a ruined Mimoan temple."

"We were fucking," Martha reminded her lover.

"Let's sleep, Martha," Macdonald studied her impassive pale face, "if you don't mind I'd like to sleep."

"I don't mind anything."

"Let's have the conversation again, substituting mind for means."

"Will it work," she rubbed her silky teat. "Does it hurt."

"Of course not. Is pain the only sensation?"

"I don't know," he admitted, "it's the one I remember best."

"What are you so solemn about. Has the franc dropped again?"

"Martha you said some very strange things."

"What did you expect, you two madmen chaining me to a chair and shrieking accusations, grace and tranquility?"

"In a very strange voice."

"Look, good man Macdonald, forget it."

"How did you know about Toledo?"

"My brother was an avid baseball fan."

"What are you talking about?"

"Don't ask me, I'm just answering questions. Who is Toledo?"

"You brought Toledo into this, not me," Macdonald insisted. "And you said a lot of shit about women healing and fertility and fleshly beauty, and other maternal absurdium about women and mothers. I loathe theories about women," he sat upright on the mattress. "I hate all this phony mystery about cunts."

"Is there an invisible idiot in this room disagreeing with you?" Martha offered him her back.

"The only thing mysterious about women is how they occupy themselves."

"Theatres, darling, cocktail parties, polo, flower shows, charge accounts, I've explained it all to you."

"If they'd go to work like men," Macdonald pressed absently against her separated buttocks, "if they'd put on derbies and school ties and push into the metro at nine in the morning and try to fuck their secretaries, there wouldn't be any of this I hear strange voices crap."

"Macdonald, if you're going to put it in, put it in, I'm getting all nervous and girlish."

"Even mines," he shoved his angry cock into the pink and black dilation. "If they'd work as miners or truck drivers or short order cooks. If they'd just stop fucking around with lipstick brushes and babies."

"Please my cunt, I come in my cunt," she reminded him.

He reached for her sex obediently, rubbing it thoughtfully.

"Tomorrow," she promised ecstatically, pulling at her erect nipples, "we'll buy me a new tie pin and suspenders, faster Macdonald, the fingers faster. Oh go deep," she shuddered, "go deep."

CHAPTER l2

"Macdonald." She repeated her call for the tenth time, in her hospital, quiet please voice. "Macdonald." The body beside her was too motionless to be asleep. The breathing regular, but at that he was practiced. He did not credit her description of him asleep, twisting and farting in an agony of self-doubt that afflicted him only in unconscious states. Lying now in a pantomime of quiet repose, she knew that he was entirely awake, clinging to immobility with the belligerence of an hysterical child. "Macdonald, Macdonald, answer me."

"I am answering you," the words roared out of his invaded tomb. "The upper classes answer with silence."

"Macdonald, please."

"Who is this Macdonald you keep blabbering about."

"Macdonald ... "

"Stop making that awful sound," he shouted, "that meaningless gurgle first thing out of your mouth every morning,"

"But Macdonald."

"I'm not Macdonald yet Macdonald doesn't exist yet Unfortunately he's getting born now. He's suffering his way into the world, but don't push too hard mama, you may give birth to a monster."

"Macdonald, I must talk to you."

"Must I be here for that diversion. Must I, I, I, I, always happen when you make that sound, when anyone makes that sound Macdonald. Must you plug me into your switchboard before I even decide if I want to be Macdonald today."

"Stop it" she cauterized her wound, "stop playing with me. I'll call you anything you want."

"I'd get to hate another designation just as much," he sat up in the bed and lit a Gauloise. "I guess the whole idea is not to be called."

"When did you decide this?"

"I decide it every morning, but I forget it the way one always forgets pleasant dreams."

"Would you like me not to be here in the morning?" she asked quietly.

"You decide that," the smoke curled from the nose and mouth of his rigid head like escaping incense, "once I know for sure that I'm here, everything else becomes a detail."

The tears came easily. "That's the crudest thing you've ever said to me."

"Call me a detail," he suggested, "get even."

"I don't want you to be a detail," she sobbed.

"The white man's burden."

"What?"

"I said I know. In the end well both be fighting for the privilege."

"What privilege?"

"Of being details."

"You've gone insane this morning."

"Unfortunately I haven't gone anywhere, I'm still here. Still in the same old Macdonald. And there's Macdonald's pants on the floor, and his girl in the bed. And I wouldn't be surprised if Macdonald's Paris isn't outside Macdonald's window."

"That's what I must talk about," Martha pulled her knees against her chest and the bed groaned its ready disapproval.

"Macdonald's window?"

"Paris."

"Ahh, Macdonald's Paris. He apologizes."

"We must leave Paris."

"Shall I send for the car now."

"There's nothing for us in Paris, let's leave," she persisted.

"Don't you like all the pretty bridges and buildings?"

"I can't spend my life standing here and admiring them, bridges, I'll build my own."

"Oh let's stay," he fought with the blankets until they shrouded him to the chin, and covered her head, "you know how I hate this business of packing and calling agencies and making hotel reservations and changing francs into dollars and dollars into drachma and pesetas into yen and yen into lire and all that."

"I'm getting out," she announced calmly.

"Call for me when you've got the servants trained."

"We can starve in Greece, can't we," her voice pursued him, "or somewhere where the sun happens. Did we have to pick the most miserable climate in the world to die in."

"Well we didn't know, they lied to us. None of us knew what Paris was really like before we got here, or the place would be filled with nothing but French laughing at each other's accents."

"I hate the French."

"Of course you do. That's why you've never spoken to one in the three years you've been here."

"There aren't any interesting people in Paris, I expected it to be swarming with important arguments and revolutions and vicious women and literary experiments and wild painters at wild parties, and instead it's this, this hideous stuffed room with filthy yellow wallpaper and that miserable Deux Magots crowd who want to break into French television or Italian movies or English publishing or Irish theatre or Greek dances, it's like living in a railroad depot. Why did we come here, Macdonald?"

"Don't decide it's Paris," he said, "eventually you have to ask that question anywhere unless you stay where you were born and how you were born, in which case you're entitled to a life of important silence."

"It is Paris and the French with their disgusting arrogance. They never learn another language, they never move to another country. And what's so hot about French. It's less masculine than Russian, less difficult than Chinese, less refined than Spanish, less euphonious than Italian, less concentrated than Greek ... "

"Yankee go home."

"Is that the answer?"

"You must know by now," Macdonald was strangely more depressed than she, "that answers aren't my specialty, but they hate us for trying to crowd into their world. No, hate is too strong, they're just contemptuous."

"It's not that I'm trying to live in their world," Martha pounced.

"I know," Macdonald interrupted her, "it's just that you're trying to live out of yours, that's why they're contemptuous. They know we're all weak, allergic to mother's formula. Maybe they're right to despise us for abandoning the impossible."

"Maybe they're wrong," Martha shouted, "what's so glorious about accepting a puny little destiny."

"It has more dignity," Macdonald said strangely, "it has fidelity and tradition. It's correct, that's all."

"I despise you for saying that," Martha wept, "you sound like an old beat ex-revolutionary. You make my liver crawl with defeat. You tired old failure. You've been here seven years, Macdonald, and what's happened to you?"

"Are you after my bank balance, love," he reached calmly with trembling hands for the mirror at the side of the bed and with his disbelieved reflection. "Would that be a happening? Or are your values more elevated? Do you incline to names in illuminated neon and winners of Nobel prizes?"

"I don't mean fame or money, those are accidents."

"Are they?"

"Well you can't expect them, you can't plan for them."

"How charming of you to be exactly wrong," Macdonald patted her neighboring thigh, "fame and fortune are the rewards for the planners, the workers, the true believers."

"If I thought that ... "

"You'd start making plans immediately, you healthy young American. Your discoveries are my disappointments."

"Macdonald, what are you after?"

"Must you ask me all the questions you shouldn't be asking yourself."

"All right, what do I want, what do we want."

"Which shall I answer? For you, me or us? Trick me."

"For you."

"I don't want anything except another six hours of sleep."

"Then you want nothing," she understood in dismayed innocence.

"I'm not that dynamic. It's not that I want nothing. It's just that I don't want something. I haven't been handed the right application blank to fill in."

"Have you?"

"Well haven't I," she cried, "or have I been fucking my shadow?"

"If you leave me," he advised, "you can note in your journal that you were with me for three years. But as long as you stay, as long as nothing changes, it's a bit eccentric to put heavy crosses on an invisible calendar. Go to sleep Martha dear. I'm tired."

She was silent for the first time, then: "I'm leaving you."

"Wise girl. I'm glad I'm here to help you out."

"How have you ever helped me!"

"Imagine if you had to leave yourself."

"You're a dead man, Macdonald."

"That's the secret of my great vivacity."

"Please," the appeal was more for him than for herself, "don't you want me at all, Macdonald?" She searched his impassive lined face.

"Immediately. My cock is throbbing with this enchanting dialogue."

"Pig," she dynamited his congealed icy composure, "animal, monster. So proud of your appetites. So in love with your miserable needs."

"I relish my appetites," Macdonald ignored her blazing eyes and concentrated on the pale quietude of her buttocks. "I love my appetites." His fingers violated her tight anus. "I like slobbering all over the earth and sucking on the great dried teats."

"But why?"

"I'm a masochist. I'm out to lose battles. I like losing control. I like it so much it makes me come. Turn over," he ordered. "Let me demonstrate."

"I won't turn over. I won't be your accomplice. I won't fuck a dead man."

Macdonald removed his fingers and lit a cigarette. "You're filled with prejudices and rules about deportment. New rule for the day. Never let a dead man fuck you in the ass. What is it about making rules and breaking rules that excites all you eager fivers so much? I think it's better to be one of the dead. So elect."

"So boring," she groaned into the pillow. "So boring, so boring, so boring. All I do is lie in this filthy bed and smoke and talk and sleep and put that thing that manages to get hard into my anatomical depressions."

"Wow," applauded Macdonald, "boredom really excites you and makes you so poetic."

"I hate it," she raged. "I loathe myself and you and Paris and everything that's stinking of decomposition." She pulled herself frantically out of the bed. "I'm going to buy a clock, Macdonald, an alarm clock, and set it for eight o'clock and find out what the world's doing in the morning and push into crowded cafeterias at one o'clock and read newspapers and see the latest films and hate the bad guys and like the good guys and live with life and die when I'm dead. I'm going to drink one cup of coffee in the morning and one cup of wine at night. I'm going to sleep when it's dark and wake when that bell calls me and I'm going to sleep alone, all alone, until I find a man who knows when I'm in the bed with him and wants me there and keeps me there."

"And you'll sleep for exactly eight hours and fuck for exactly twenty-two minutes every Saturday night. And be pregnant exactly eighteen months, and have exactly two children an exact boy and an equally exact girl and live exactly as long as you breathe and die exactly once," Macdonald roared, "being exactly exact all the time so that exactly nothing happens except exactly."

"And what's so marvelous about how you're living?" Martha fled to the wasteland of competition.

"Don't judge me, Madame Timekeeper, that's all," Macdonald lowered his bellow, "as you go rushing off to your well ordered, supremely scheduled, no opportunity for error life, because, you'll find out it's just as boring as the grand careless life of excess that's boring you now. In fact, my love, it's exactly the same thing spelled backwards which may improve your bowel movements and get you on television panels but it's just as rigid, just as stupid, just as empty, so get that noble, irritating, dedicated, righteous, idiotic expression off your face."

"Macdonald, stop it. Help me. What can I do?" the words exposed themselves in virginal disorder.

"Wait while I dig up my tabernacle," he directed, "which has seventy-two engraved commantiments that solve everything."

Martha lay stiffly in the bed and located herself in the absorbing cracks in the ceiling.

"Come on," Macdonald said, "Let's get a coffee."

"No."

"Infusion?"

"No, thank you."

"You feel like fucking?"

"Go away. I'm thinking."

"Can't you think and fuck at the same time?"

"No."

"Then stop thinking."

He swung viciously behind her passive hips and pressed his prick against the firm dome. He was as stiff and firm as a bowl of strawberries and cream.

"My hero," she said contemptuously. "My ravenous beast of a hero."

"You're irresistible," he returned the love chant. "Help me out of my grave, make it hard."

"I won't touch it."

"Then suck it, use your mouth intelligently."

"Suck yourself."

"I'm not that self-sufficient."

"I must think," she repeated in a dazed voice. "Excite me, what is your tiny mind for anyway?"

"Not to serve your make-believe lusts."

"Idiot!"

"It's not that I'm against making love, Macdonald. It's just that there's no balance to anything. No proportion. Making love could be a part of our life together."

"And you're going to diagram which part in your miniscule brain?"

"If we were doing something," she pulled his trousers out of his grasp and clung to them, "anything, Macdonald, pushing buttons or washing walls, anything, instead of being great fornicating toads."

He turned her head to the wall and said: "Ignore me," taking his penis and pressing the tip against her warm sex.

"Could I have a cigarette?" her voice cams muffled from behind her shoulder.

"Did you come already."

"No."

"You can't have a cigarette until you do."

"I won't come."

"Why not. Have you forgotten the only thing I ever taught you."

"I discovered that you're not my type."

"In that case I'll poison myself with some cafi cu lait."

"I'll be packed by the time you get back," she turned away from him. "I'm leaving you and your appetites," she grimaced. "What a comedy. My shoe has more appetites than you."

"Bon voyage little one."

"Just like that you'd let me go, like that, just like that."

"Let me for once be noble," he pulled on his trousers. "And impressed by your ability to make a decision."

"You don't care," she flushed, "if I'm here or not here, if you're here or not here, if you love or don't love, eat or don't eat, sleep or don't sleep. You don't care."

"I know," Macdonald whispered, "but don't tell the gang or they'll elect me Grand Prophet."

"I care, Macdonald."

"I had a faint suspicion."

"Darling," she grabbed his sweater from the floor and pressed it between her hands, "maybe you do care. Maybe you have gargantuan colossal desires that are consuming you and potentially you're an enormous talent ... "

"The only thing," he pushed her description away with the disdain of an undertipped waiter, "Less potential than a potential is a potential."

"You want me to go, Macdonald. You're forcing me, leaving me no alternative. You despise me."

"Run," he said, "run for your life."

"All right. Yes," she handed him his sweater. "I'm leaving you, I'm leaving Paris. I'm leaving France."

"Now don't start dragging that sturdy little personality all over the world, just take it home," Macdonald fought the tangled wool, "and let them see how big and strong it's grown."

"You want me off the continent if you can't have me. Stop sending me home," she screamed in the first outburst of real hysteria. "What's home? Where's home?"

"Home is where they mass produced all the unbecoming labels. That's why you've come here darling, to get a Paris fitting. The alteration is finished, now go home and show it off."

"You mean I'm finished."

"I promise you're not," he took her hand and studied the black nail crescents, "I promise you're just beginning, you're just coming through. That's what the restlessness is, and the boredom. Stay with it." He was very gentle with her and solemn.

"Please stop sending me home," Martha twisted away from his steady gaze. "You don't know what's waiting there for me."

"Your strength is there, Martha. Let me explain in another way," he rapped against her inattention. "I know home is a dirty word. I know home is where everybody knows everybody else except himself. I know the heavy labels called crosses that they hang on you, and how you come here and spit at all the wrong people just to learn how to spit. But your pipelines are sunk back over there, and they got twisted back over there, and you came here and got them untangled and a little bit of the essence is flowing through now, making you mad. Be mad, get madder, but go home and be mad. Get closer to the well and the energy will come gushing through you and give your dynamo power to balance those heavy crosses on the tip of one finger and go dancing up the hill."

"Or on the end of my nose, entertain the onlookers.

"Anyway, there are no hills in New York, except in the Bronx."

"I'm glad I'm not a people's poet," Macdonald almost reached the door.

"And I want to get into the sun." She compromised slowly. "First a few months in the sun, then I'll think about what you've said. If I don't decide to stay in the sun forever and live on ripe fruits and olive oil and home woven cloth and be a magnificent technicolor animal."

"You'll be detouring, you're not being contemporary," he stood at the door, "if you're determined to be part of this world, and to look at it is to be part of it like Cinerama, you've got to go to the biggest, grayest, grimiest city, peopled with machines. The twentieth century was born in cities."

"Come with me, Macdonald."

"To the twentieth century?"

"To the sun. Come, please come, Macdonald. It will be marvelous. We'll find a stone cottage in Malaga, you know you can get them for nothing, and we'll eat what the peasants eat, and they'll love us and carry barrels of wine and baskets of grapes and leave them at our door."

"In payment for which we'll fuck with their eldest male infant."

"Why not? And we'll have long walks and long swims, and long siestas and short conversations."

"It sounds good," he laughed, "when the waltz is over, can I have the next dance?"

"Of course we'll dance peasant dances and sing peasant songs. They can't trap us in Paris, Macdonald. We'll get so beautiful in the sun that people will worship us and we won't turn the pilgrims away, we'll build stone cottages twisting and turreting down to the sea and all our followers can live in them, and maybe I'll write a book about how we did it, how we rescued ourselves, and while I'm writing you'll keep building these villas down to the sea, sprawling down to the sea with cracked decadent walls and strange misshapen chimneys."

"Such symbolism."

"Symbolism?"

"You make me ashamed of my privates."

"Oh no Macdonald."

"I thought you admired its contours."

"I do darling, completely."

"Remember what it used to feel like inside of you? Remember fucking in Paris, day after day, hour after hour, disregarding weather, economy, psychology, it always performed."

"But we'll make lots of love in Spain, Macdonald, love is the most important part of it. I don't want to sound romantic, I know you hate romanticism and I know why but just talking about the sun makes me alive and happy. Yes happy. Please let's go, even if it's a stupid idea let's go. Don't let anything prevent us. I'll go to James Dykes, I'll borrow fifty thousand from him, when I feel like this I can make anything happen. Imagine tomorrow with no hotel owner and no filthy room to depress us. Macdonald," she paused and succumbed a moment to share his silence. "You are happy we're going, aren't you?"

"The only curfew on my joy is will Paris survive my absence."

"Wouldn't it be wonderful if it didn't. If there were never any Paris to come back to?"

"Don't be bitter. Look what Paris has given you after three years. An absolute appreciation of sunshine."

"You're talking like that because I'm being enthusiastic," she said knowingly. "Enthusiasm revolts you."

"It makes me nervous," Macdonald admitted, "to scare away the evil spirits with loud noises."

"Then I won't say another word, because I'm really sure we're going so there's no need for me to get desperate and excited. Is there?"

"No, Martha."

"Wonderful, wonderful," she went spinning to the door in three whirling umbrella steps and kissed him. "No, Martha."

"What no?" she shook his hanging arms, "what no."

"No thanks for the rescue. Go without me. Almost as bad as doing something is going somewhere."

"You mean you'd stay here in this stinking little dungeon."

"Stinking little dungeons, as you accurately describe our home, comfort me. I like dark dirty little things, they rest my world-weary eyes."

"You coward," she shook him furiously, "you're afraid to come," he pushed her back to the bed. "You're afraid," she sank into the pillow, "afraid to live, afraid of your own shadow."

"Of course I am," he admitted in that sudden sad voice, "and in little dark rooms my shadow disappears and it comes too sharp in the sun."

"I'm not afraid."

"Don't brag, just pack all the things you don't have and go find out."

"You've cheated me," she howled, "you've all cheated me. Dirty cheats."

"I can't figure out," Macdonald miraculously found a safety pin amongst the debris on the floor and attached his trousers, "if all those noises are delayed birth pains or retarded growing pains. But please don't let me interrupt you. Do get on with your screaming. I'll be across the street."

"I'll be gone."

"That's the third time you've left in half an hour."

"Really I'll be gone."

"If I miss the final exit don't write to me at the Plaza Athene. I despise that place." He managed to get one foot through the open door.

"I'm not quitting, am I?"

"What?'

"Paris hasn't beaten me, has it?"

"What do you mean, my love," he said tightly, "must you pillage the city before you can leave it? Must you rape all the men and decapitate all the women to entitle you to a borrowed railroad ticket?"

"It's just that it's no good if Paris has beaten me," she lamented, "my defeat will glare in Spain, in the sunshine. I'll be rushing back for the next round."

"Leave Paris alone," he demanded like a protective mother. "Paris never did anything to you. None of us did anything to you. Go fight with someone your own size."

"You did," she screamed back, "it did. You chilled me and I want to scream and be vulgar and loud and hate all of you for being dry and dreary."

"All right, hate us," Macdonald snapped impatiently, "who's stopping you. But remember, we gave you the courage to hate us."

"I want to love," Martha wept in the empty room. "I want to be loved," the banal words slipping out of her brain as if they'd been hiding back there, spying on her all these days. Her legs kicked the mattress in infantile fury, and she clawed at the hard round tree trunk of a pillow struggling to release the gracious tranquil loving woman thing crushed under the anger.

THE END
The Woman Thing ....(90k)    by Harriet Daimler




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