Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

WITH MY BEST FRIEND-AND I'LL MISS HIM!

Errol greeted us with enthusiasm, running his eyes over Jill's body, and saying, "Women are good for two things, and one thing is for lying to."

The place was packed, the drumming so loud that the talk had to be louder. I couldn't hear Jill very well, which was just as well, for the drive over had been rough, emotionally. Ever since my "weirdness" at her party, Jill had been more wary of me. My impotence had continued.

"Know what really bothers me?" Jill had said in the car. I asked what. "You seem so sure of yourself. You always have an answer for everything."

"I don't feel sure of myself at all."

"You know, Roy, most people aren't like you; they're like me-unsure of themselves, feeling, deep down, that they

deserve better than they're getting in life, feeling that their life is a failure."

"Your life's not a failure, mine is."

"Look, I kind of love you, but I keep getting myself into these jams with guys, these incredible love nests that empty out in the most bizarre ways."

"Have you thought of antidepressants?"

"Yeah."

"If you want, I'll write you a prescrip-"

"But instead I'm going to the Galapagos. I leave tomorrow."

"What?" Even with my Prozac on board, said to block the brain receptors for Rejection Sensitivity, some receptors must have still been working. "With that guy?"

"Eduardo, yeah. It's a great place to see them."

"The aliens?"

"Just a bunch of rocks in the sea, and sky all around. Everywhere you look! And no one yet has been 'up' from there!"

"Don't go! I can't stand it, everybody going!"

"How sweet!" She took my hand and slipped it up her thighs smooth as a baby's bottom up and up to her panties but there were no panties and the tangle of welcome stuff was like an oasis and I flashed on how once in Morocco, south of the Atlas in the high Sahara, Berry and I had chanced upon an oasis called Source Bleu du Meski, all palms and shade and blue water that tasted of copper.

The drumming was coming from the living room. There, at least ten men, big and small, were crouched over drums, big and small, beating the shit out of them. Some men were bare-chested, some wore feathers. A few I recognized as the muscular mental health workers of the West. Against the panorama of an ocean leading all the way to Casablanca, these men seemed savage, their beating these long things between their legs a savage masturbation ritual. Coming of Age in Heidelberg? Why not?

"Robert?" shouted someone in my ear. I smelled perfume. Gloria, the head nurse of the West.

"No, Roy!" I shouted back over the drums.

"No, Robert Bly! He says men have gotten too 'soft'! They need to become 'warriors.'" Her hand was on my chest. "Robert says men need to get hard."

"By drumming?"

"That's one way. Want to take a look around the house?"

"Yeah." I searched for Jill, but she was lost in the crush of bodies. I was pulled along by Gloria room to room, a lot of body contact between us.

The house was incredible, looking out on and being looked in at by sea horizon and reddish rock. The party was not incredible at all, more frat bash than anything else. There were a lot of men in uniform-what seemed a whole destroyer full of sailors who were ripping at the women as it they hadn't been ashore for a year. The drug company reps were out in force, not only the lackeys passing out pills and pens and even condoms with the Gliicksspiel Apotheke logo-a rose and two pointy-nosed dogs biting a crest-but also the corporate bosses, sacks of flesh with those fatty jowls and ears and blub-bery necks and slits for eyes. Arnie Bozer was there with Blair Heiler, the latter with his new flame, a red-haired young social worker. The pitiful Nash and the cute Jennifer were there too, sticking close together.

I followed Gloria upstairs and then upstairs again, the old steep stairs and her short steep skirt giving me full view of exactly what she wanted me to see. We stopped a few times to get drinks and eat things, then we stopped in the attic to catch our breath. A few others were there-several men and women were on the padded floor, embracing. The drumming, fun-neled up and bouncing around the sharply canted walls, was deafening.

"Want some chocolate cake?" Gloria shouted.

"Whose?"

"Union Carbide. It's good!"

I did, and it was good, and we shouted at each other for a while and then wandered out onto the widow's walk, where only a few other couples were. The drumming was insistent but lower down, as if in the pit of my stomach, and the view of nothing but half-moon and half-moon reflection in dark water seemed to freshen me, lighten me, and then overlighten me, for suddenly I felt light-headed and the banister seemed to become balsa wood in my hands, friable as dead skin, and the drop down to the rocks and water scary and I backed away and Gloria backed with me and I found myself, head spinning, entwined with her in a corner under the sharp elbow of a

gable, her mouth an ocean her tongue a half-moon and her hands all over me and me all over her and I felt funny not funny ha-ha but funny high from the cake.

"WHAT'S THAT RACCOON doing out in the daylight?" I asked, finding myself in an overbright chilly morning, walking arm in arm with Glo along the main road of Misery. She was pressed tightly against me, and where she pressed, her body felt hot, like a feverish baby. The raccoon was stumbling along, stopping now and then to snap at something imaginary.

"He's an insomniac," she said.

"Or rabid," I said. "Or psychotic."

Like a hallucination, Lloyal von Nott, Erroll Cabot, and Win-with Beef Telly of Security protecting their rears-ran toward us, stared, ran past.

What had happened? I had only sensual memories, of Gloria stripping quickly her breasts seemingly pumped up like muscles with 'roids the nipples hard as if her spare job were as a wet nurse to a day care center and then before I could make a move she was rolling her leg over mine so that I was in her almost before I knew it was her-I had the sense that she had learned this as a preemptive strike against an impotent male since you'd have to deflate quick to avoid being in there-and the rest being bliss but for its lightness, as if it never made it to the engram stage of my biochemical memory. Where this lovemaking had taken place or how we had wound up in Misery I had no idea. I must have been slipped a drug, probably in the chocolate cake. Now my brain biochemistry was having trouble clicking back in, and I tried hard to remember who had just passed us and then said out loud, "Von Nott and Errol and Win and Mr. Telly?" and turned and saw I was right.

And where was Jill?

We came to the Heidelbergs. Glo, now demure, said, "Gotta go, Roy."

"I'm going home to bed,"

"Sleep tight. Can't wait till you come in."

Suddenly there floated into my mind a bumper sticker I'd seen just a little while before when Glo and I had been driving up to Misery:

A TISKET, A TASKET, A CONDOM OR A CASKET

Floating away from Glo, I realized that I had taken no precautions with her. Then with horror I realized I wasn't at all horrified about contracting AIDS and being dead.

Sixteen

ONE EARLY MAY evening, the kind of misty evening whose soft twilight and scent of moist earth and easing sky makes you feel that despite everything life is worth living, I was on call. Spring brought back memories of spring the year before, with Berry in Lago del Orta in northern Italy, and the memory challenged any notion that in a year I had made progress in my life. At this very moment lovers were rowing out to the island-the tiny island with its fairy-tale castle and cobbled lanes and no cars-but I was alone, and let's face it, when I felt anything through my drug cocktail, I was feeling so lonely and isolated that I wondered whether death could be any worse than this washed-out version of life.