Mark Leyner - I Smell Esther Williams

Uh-huh Uh-huh!

I’m not going to talk about who should move where or stay where or anything like that — I just want to tell you that I hope in the coming weeks we can make some plans (be they present or future plans) to stay together and perhaps get married.

Uh-huh Uh-huh!

I just want to know for sure that our relationship is permanent — because knowing that will make whatever separation there is more than bearable. I’ll talk to you soon.

Ah … if only nuptials were Sally’s bag. Perhaps she’s too much of the whore.

The sheets smell like Sally, There’s snow on the mountain already. Is Sally alive? Has she been driven to resort to cannibalism? Has she simply been driven to a resort — perhaps Steamboat Springs?

I attended, uninvited, a soirée in Louella Menzies’ smoky trailer. Nothing had yet been served and during a lull I fairly burst out, “Did somebody say dinner was on? What is the conventional wisdom vis-a-vis dinner, because I need the sustenance to make way like a smitten red-man into each valley and canyon where I’ll cup my hands to my mouth and call, ‘Yoo-hoo … Sally … yooo-hooo!’ ”

CHARACTERS

THE DAUPHIN

VERNON, the Dauphin’s chamberlain

LUCAN

JUDY, who feasted on exotic bird’s nests for days at a time and dressed her Pekingese puppies in vests made of costly imported fabrics

VIC PIANO, owner of SIT-Siemens electronics plant and Pirelli rubber factory; Lucan’s ideal

DEBORAH

THE TIME: 1973

SCENE 1

A hubcap-shaped Connecticut gymnasium.

LUCAN: I appreciate it even more — the mildness is terrific. Is your telephone still hooked-up downstairs?

THE DAUPHIN: You know it’s not the same number as when you used to call all the time.

VIC PIANO: Why don’t we just make this easy for both of us?

THE DAUPHIN: This is strictly business then.

LUCAN (nibbling at roast guinea fowl in a veloute sauce): Strictly business.

VIC PIANO: Is there a tape running?

THE DAUPHIN: Yeah.

LUCAN: You better catch it. I’m not the only one to believe that a deaf-mute girl read the lips of a Las Vegas entertainer planning to bomb a famous UFO museum. How do you like my striped suit? If you do anything to jeopardize this program, I’m going to get you!

VIC PIANO: You want this excitement … this … this action — just as much as I do!

THE DAUPHIN: No one lives to violate my wife and talk about it!

LUCAN: I live to violate your wife and talk about it!

VIC PIANO: It sounds like a woman.

THE DAUPHIN: How did you know that?

LUCAN: Instinct, I guess.

SCENE 2

A conference room.

LUCAN heats a pan of quartered tomatoes and sautés shrimp. The color change in the shrimp can be seen. When they are done, they curl up.

LUCAN: The chimes ring, the dogs bark. Cheese sandwiches in a panel truck. And oh … the violins! The lady says “May I have this dance?” I would be most delighted …

THE DAUPHIN: You’re dreaming, Lucan. It’s never going to be that simple again, that … that safe.

VIC PIANO (chewing a piece of truffled sausage encased in piecrust): But for you and me, Dauphin?

THE DAUPHIN: Can’t you see? We’re dying … we’re dying in time to our own beautiful symphony of parting chariots.

(They impulsively embrace and kiss.)

LUCAN: …cherubs beneath an extinguished lamp.

THE DAUPHIN: I remember a baseball called a nickel rocket, men.

THE OTHERS: A baseball called a nickel rocket, sir!

VIC PIANO: How is Judy doing?

LUCAN: As a matter of fact, very well. She’s even beginning to think a little like the old man.

THE DAUPHIN: What do you mean?

SCENE 3

A congressional hearing room.

LUCAN: … she said she wished she could have spent an evening with the jailhouse rocker.

THE DAUPHIN: The action would include some inspired pussy humping and crotch rubs that would burn your eyes out.

VIC PIANO: Right off the bat, people will say “there’s good fucking and bad fucking.” Why let them go on and on and on and on and on and on, their penises sliding into their vaginas. Fucking.… there are so many ways of thinking about it. Here’s the worst fucking list of doctors I ever saw: Dr. Bernard Schulman, Dr. Irvington Solomon, Dr. Theodore Martens, Dr. Craig Bushel, Dr. Sally Bloom, Dr. Richard L. Lumis, Dr. Peter Sibel, Dr. Theoharis Ariola. It’s always, “Dispose of his body, Ginger, and for crisakes Let’s Fuck!” They always want media attention.

THE DAUPHIN: You put the carrot before the cart — my father used to promise them a girl-packed UFO show.

VIC PIANO: These orchids I discovered nearly thirty years ago in certain forests of Burma. They occur at extremely rare intervals — traditionally only once in a century. From these orchids I have at last obtained, after twenty-five years of study, an essential oil which completes a particular formula — the formula elixir vitae for which the old philosophers sought in vain.

THE DAUPHIN: What a story! A beautiful stranger warns the 100 that she intends to track them down single-handed! What a scoop it would be to discover who she is!

VIC PIANO (pouring the men hefty glasses of local cognac, giving them steaming bowls of homemade soup, and heaping their plates with meat): You’d only be writing her obituary! She hasn’t a chance against the 100! Those hoods have a finger in every racket in the area!

THE DAUPHIN: Simmer down! Johnny Adonis, the convicted murderer scheduled to die in the electric chair tonight, wants you to see him in the death house, immediately!

VIC PIANO: Can’t understand why!

THE DAUPHIN (covering the microphone with his hand): It’s those little things that nag you.

VIC PIANO: They nettle at you.

SCENE 4

The setting is the same as Scene 2, though the sound of mopeds is not quite so thunderous.

(When Wu Ch’i owned a restaurant, there was a cook who, before dinner, was unable to control his ardour. He advanced and fried a pair of dumplings and returned. Wu Ch’i ordered him to be beheaded. The maitre d’ admonished him, saying: “This is a talented cook; you should not behead him.”

Wu Ch’i replied: “I am confident he is a cook of talent, but he is disobedient.”

Thereupon he beheaded him.

The son of the son of this hapless cook was VERNON.)

It’s about four o’clock in the afternoon. Shadows begin to worm their way across the stage. A $600 stallion belt buckle holds up VERNON’s trousers.

LUCAN: I look older when I smoke. Don’t let my age fool you.

THE DAUPHIN: How old are you?

LUCAN: I was launched in ’51.

VERNON: You’re jerkin’ him off, toots.

THE DAUPHIN: No — how old are you?

LUCAN (heatedly): 22!!

SCENE 5

A hotel lobby.

DEBORAH sits across the couch from JUDY who is folding a section of newspaper. The couch is badly in need of reupholstering.

JUDY (reading from the paper): Octogenarians “Die” in Crash. Peter J. Reichwein, 82 years old, and his wife, Lois, 82 of Wayne, were “killed” yesterday when their car crashed into a slow-moving train at a crossing. Due, in large part, to the miraculous speed with which they were delivered into surgery, doctors were able to revive the New Jersey couple after two hours of confirmed forensic “death.” Interest heightened amid reports from attendant hospital personnel that a voluble and robust Reichwein later recalled the experience of participating in this exchange at the instant of “expiration”: “What do you mean bringing a platinum cutie into a respectable establishment like this?” “Platinum cutie!!! Men, surround this oaf! Make it so champagne bubbles will never tickle his nose again!! Fix him so another wax dame will never make him balmy!” “You will do no such thing, Captain!” “Draw your weapon from its scabbard!” “You are about to become extinct, Captain! Never again to strengthen alliances or encourage troops to succor the poor!” “You’re a shit, sir … a real shit!!” “I’m going to cleave your brains in two — I hope they don’t regenerate like worm-parts, Captain!!” “It is you sir, who will soon adorn my hook!!!” “Your fish-like countenance strikes me as familiar, Captain — have we sparred before?” “You too ring a visual bell, sir, but I too cannot locate the source.” “Let us agree then that the survivor of this skirmish trace the wellspring of this faint familiarity.” “If it is I, sir, I will employ in my investigation every possible means — electronic bloodpressure units, calculators that are as thin as credit cards, wrist microsplit stopwatches.” “Taste death, then, Captain!” “Taste death then to you sir.”