Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

“Seen what?”

He stopped laughing and said gravely, “Back home they call them skin flicks.”

The room was stifling with all the shades drawn, and the screen was a bedsheet, which struck me as uniquely repellent. We sat, six of us, wordlessly fixed on the blue squares jumping and flickering on the screen while the rattling projector whirred: the countdown — a few numbers were missing; the title — something about a brush salesman; the opening shot — a man knocking at a door. We fidgeted when the man knocked; no knock was heard. It was a silent film.

The absence of a soundtrack necessitated many close-ups of facial expressions; and a story was attempted, for both characters — salesman and housewife — were clothed, implying a seduction, the classic plot of conquest with a natural climax — an older concept of pornography. The salesman wore a tweed double-breasted suit and his hair was slick and wavy. I guessed it was late forties, but what country? The housewife wore a long bathrobe trimmed with white fur, and when she sat down the front flapped open. She laughed and tucked it back together. The salesman sat beside her and rolled his eyes. He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one, a Camel. So it was America.

He opened his case of samples and pulled out a limp contraceptive and made a face (“Oh gosh!”) and shoved it back. Then there was an elaborate business with the brushes, various shapes and sizes. He demonstrated each one by tickling the housewife in different places, starting on the sole of her foot. Soon he was pushing a feather duster under her loosening bathrobe. The housewife was laughing and trying to hold her robe shut, but the horseplay went on, the robe slipped off her shoulders.

I recognized the sofa, a large prewar claw-foot model with thick velvet cushions, and just above it on the wall a picture of a stag feeding at a mountain pool. The man took off his shoes. This was interesting: he wore a suit but these were workman’s shoes, heavy-soled ones with high counters and large bulbs for toes — the steel-toed shoes a man who does heavy work might wear. His argyle socks had holes in them and he had a chain around his neck with a religious medal on it. His muscled arms and broad shoulders confirmed he was a laborer; he also wore a wedding ring. I guessed he had lost his job; as a Catholic he would not have acted in a blue movie on a Sunday, and if it was a weekday and he had a job he would not have acted in the movie at all. Out the apartment window the sun shone on rooftops, but I noticed he did not take his socks off. Perhaps it was cold in the apartment. Afterward he walked back to his wife through some wintry American city and said, “Hey honey, look what I won — twenty clams!”

The housewife was more complicated. Judging from her breasts she had had more than one child. I wondered where they were. There was a detailed shot of her moving her hand — long perfect fingernails: she didn’t do housework. Who looked after her kids? From the way she sat on the sofa, on the edge, not using the pillows, I knew it was not her apartment. She took off the fancy bathrobe with great care — either it was not hers (it was rather big) or she was poor enough to value it. She had a very bad bruise on the top of her thigh; someone had recently thumped her; and now I could see the man’s appendix scar, a vivid one.

Two details hinted that the housewife wasn’t American: her legs and armpits were not shaved, and she was not speaking. The man talked, but her replies were exaggerated faces: awe, interest, lust, hilarity, pleasure, surprise. She kissed the man’s lips and then her head slid down his chest, past the appendix scar — it was fresh, the reason he was out of a job: he had to wait until it healed before he could go back to any heavy work. The housewife opened her mouth; she had excellent teeth and pierced ears — a war bride, maybe Italian, deserted by her GI husband (he thumped her and took the children). The camera stayed on her face for a long time, her profile moved back and forth, and even though it was impossible now for her mouth to show any expression, as soon as she closed her eyes abstraction was on her face — she was tense, her eyes were shut tight, a moment of dramatic meditation on unwilling surrender: she wasn’t acting.

Mercifully, the camera moved to a full view of the room. On the left there was a wing chair with a torn seat, a coffee table holding a glass ashtray with cigarette butts in it (they had talked it over— Are you sure you don’t mind? — perhaps rehearsed it), and on the right, the face of a waterstain on the wall, a fake fireplace with a half-filled bottle on the mantlepiece — the Catholic laborer had needed a drink to go through with it. There had been a scene. If you’re not interested we’ll find someone else. And: Okay, let’s get it over with. It was breaking my heart.

There was a shot of the front door. It flew open and a large naked woman stood grinning at the pair on the floor — this certainly was the owner of the fancy bathrobe (the cameraman’s girl friend?). She joined them, vigorously, but I was so engrossed in the tragic suggestions I saw in their nakedness I had not questioned the door. It was a silent movie, but the door had opened with a bang and a clatter. The feller beside me had turned around and was saying, “What do we do now?”

WITH SOME kidding fictor’s touches, by changing the time of day and my tone of voice to make the story truer, by intensifying it to the point of comedy where it was a bearable memory, my escape from the blue movie raid became part of my repertoire, and within a year I was telling it at the bar of my own place, Dunroamin: “—Then the Chief Inspector, a Scotty, says to me, ‘Have I not seen you somewhere before?’ and I says, ‘Not the club, by any chance?’ and he says, ‘Jack, I’ll be jiggered — fancy finding you in a place like this!’ ‘I can explain everything,’ I says. ‘Confidentially, I thought they were showing Gone with the Wind ,’ and he laughs like hell. ‘Look,’ he says in a whisper, ‘I’m a bit short-staffed. Give me a hand rounding up some of this kit and we’ll say no more about it.’ So I unplugged the projector and carried it out to the police van and later we all joked about it over a beer. And to top it off I still haven’t found out which club he had in mind!”

I walked through the bar at Dunroamin all night, chatting fellers up, introducing the girls, and settling arguments.

“If you’ve got a certain attitude toward cats, you’re queer they say. Ain’t that right, Jack?”

“Sure. If you want to bugger a male cat, that means you’re queer, prih-hih!”

As always, my clowning went over well, but like my new version of the blue movie story it was the clowning that worried me — the comedy struck unexpected notes of despair. I turned my worst pains into jokes to make myself small and to obscure my sick aches; it was my fear of being known well and pitied — my humor was motivated by humility. I sang songs like “What Did Robinson Crusoe Do with Friday on a Saturday Night?” and saying, “I wouldn’t have anyone here that I wouldn’t invite into my own home,” I treated Dunroamin — where I had moved in with my amah and pets — as another joke. But it was no laughing matter. I had plowed my whole savings into it. My refusal to admit I took it seriously was my way of guarding against anyone feeling sorry for me if it failed.

It didn’t fail; and the feature of it that I had conceived as a joke of last desperation was what saved the house from collapse. The house itself was not large, but it was walled in and set back from the road. I picked it for its high wall and rented it cheap from a superstitious towkay: it was on Kampong Java Road and the rear opened on to the Lower Bukit Timah Road cemetery. Those several acres of tombstones and the fact of the house being associated with some Japanese atrocities accounted for the low rent, but gave me headaches when it came to getting girls to live in. The joke was the Palm Court orchestra: fellers often came and paid my slightly higher bar prices to sit and listen.