Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

“Sleeping out.”

“Want some fudge?”

I shook my head and walked on.

“You got a hole in your fence,” she said.

She was twisting and screwing up her face at me when I looked back.

At home I took the tent into the back yard, unrolled it, and pitched it as far as I could from the house, banging in the stakes and tightening the guy ropes. I crawled inside and lay down with my hands under my head and thought, Paradise!

That night while I sat at the dinner table my father seemed surprised and annoyed. He was not eating; he was shaving. He shaved twice a day, morning and evening. He kept his razor and strop by a mirror in the kitchen, where he shaved — no one asked why — every evening before his bath. He held one soapy cheek tight with a finger and jerked the blade of his straight razor at the window. He said, “The hell’s that all about?”

“Pup tent.”

He scraped at his face. “Thinks money grows on trees.”

“I saved up for it.”

“A fool and his money are soon parted.”

“I got it cheap on Atlantic Ave.”

“Get what you pay for. Bet you dollars to donuts it falls apart.”

My mother said, “Andy, your dinner’s getting cold.”

I clawed at my mashed potatoes with the turned-over tines of my fork while my father wiped the suds from his ears and sat down.

“Can I sleep out?”

“Pup tent is a peck of trouble,” my father said. He snatched at my fingers. “You could grow vegetables under those nails.”

The next day I put down a ground cloth, a rubber sheet from Louie’s cot, and stocked my tent with a flashlight and a canteen of water and Trap Lines North, Campcraft, and the horror comics.

The horror comics I hid from my parents; they said they were violent and disgusting. I liked the comics because they were violent and disgusting. The women shown in them wore tight blouses and short skirts and had big red lips and were terrorized. Now and then they were dismembered, chopped into pieces and put into bloodstained bags, but only if they were cruel. Horror stories always had a moral. Good people were never killed in them, but guilty ones were always beheaded or devoured by ghouls or choked — blue tongues out, bloodshot eyes popping, neck squeezed small.

One hot afternoon in the summer of my pup tent I was reading Tales of Terror, two separate stories intertwined. In one a shapely blonde in a skimpy bathing suit was always lying in the sun, trying to darken her tan; in the other a pale-skinned brunette spent the day applying cosmetics, trying to devise ways to stay youthful. Their husbands were tormented by their vanity, one wife wasting time in the sun, the other wasting money on skin creams. By coincidence, in the middle of the story, both men met on the beach, just bumped into each other. “Sorry!” “Excuse me!” They did not realize how their lives were similar: henpecked by vain, demanding wives. One man was an electrician, the other man a chemist. This meeting was brief, a chance encounter before the stories diverged again, a detail of storytelling that impressed me.

Not long after, unable to stand the nagging, the men snapped. The electrician tied his wife to a table and burned her black, toasting her to death under the glare of a hundred sunlamps. She lay naked and scorched, her skin peeling.

You got your wish! Now you’re nice and brown!

In another part of the same city, the crazed chemist had prepared a huge vat of clear molten plastic. He shoved his wife into it, drowning her and sealing her in the goop as it solidified. She was fixed in the posture of thrashing, her legs apart, her mouth choked open.

You said you never wanted to grow old. Now you’ll be young forever!

The justice of it, the morality of it, the desperate husbands pushed over the edge; but I stared at the women’s bodies, their tortured corpses, still beautiful in tight bathing suits.

“Andy?”

Evelyn’s voice on top of the pictures made me flustered. I shut the comic book.

“Brought you some fudge.”

She stuck her arm through the tent flap, with a small brown paper bag, three squares of flat crumbly fudge.

“How did you get over here?”

“Through the hole in your fence.”

After she went away I heard her talking to herself, something she wanted me to hear, but it was only a meaningless murmur to me. Later I saw the missing pickets.

The next day just before dark she came again, saying, ‘Anybody home?”

“I don't want any fudge.”

“Didn't bring you any.” She put her face through the parted flap of the pup tent. “Can I come in?”

She was on her hands and knees in the grass, her face forward, her hair damp, and dampness on her face.

“I guess so.”

She duck-walked into the tent, knelt for a moment, then sat down on the ground sheet, her pleated skirt riding up her thighs. She smelled of soap and bubble gum. She wore her hair in braids, a ribbon at each end, and twirled one braid with a stubby finger. With her other hand she gave me a wrapped piece of Dubble Bubble.

Chewing the gum and unfolding and smoothing the small wax-paper rectangle of jokes that was wrapped with the gum, I pretended to read it. But all the while I was glancing at her skirt and her legs, her pretty lips, her smooth cheeks, her small shoes and white socks.

She was daintily dressed and so clean, with a slight film of sweat on her face from the summer heat. Her blouse and the socks were pure white, and there were a few crumbs of dirt on her knees.

I was lying on my side and was both eager and fearful of her lying next to me.

“What's that supposed to be for?”

She meant the army flashlight. “So I can read after dark.”

“My mother hates comic books,” she said, seeing the Tales of Terror I had tried to hide.

I liked looking at her legs when she was turned aside, the way her little skirt was creeping up her thighs as she squirmed, interested in something else. Every time she shifted I saw her pink panties, the edge of them, trimmed with white lace, tight against her skin.

“Other books, too.” I showed her Trap Lines North and watched her fingers as she turned some pages. Her small nails were painted with pink polish.

“No pictures in this one.”

I took the book from her and showed her a one-page photograph of a stack of muskrat pelts, and another of a cabin in the snow.

“It’s about fur trappers. And Mounties.”

She had picked up the horror comic and was leafing through it, looking disgusted. “That’s wicked.”

A woman was being strangled by a crazy-eyed man. The woman’s arms were flailing, her mouth wide open, her tongue sticking out, her eyes bulging, her legs apart, her blouse torn.

“She kills him with a hatchet on the next page.”

“You can even see her bra,” Evelyn said. The word, and the casual way she dropped it, excited me. She smiled at me and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

I stared at her tongue lolling between her lips.

“Just tinkle.”

She got onto her hands and knees and turned away from me. I watched her bottom twitch as she wriggled out of the pup tent. She hurried away through the space in the fence with the missing pickets.

I was glad she was gone, so that I could think hard in the darkness about what she had boldly said. I wanted to remember and repeat her exact words, and see her face, her lips, the way she had smiled saying them. Then I switched on my flashlight and tried to read Campcraft, but I kept hearing Evelyn, Just tinkle, and seeing her face.

That night at dinner I said, “Can I sleep out?”

“Something wrong with this hotel?” my father said, still eating. “You got a nice bedroom. Your mother works hard to keep it clean. Now pass the mouseturd. And get a haircut — you look like a girl.”