Robert Coover - Pricksongs & Descants

“Grundigy?” asked the policeman in disbelief. “What kind of a name is that?”

“No, no!” the old woman whined, her grand manner flung to the winds. “Grundy! Grundy! Without the ‘-ig,’ don’t you see? You take off your—”

“Oh, Grundy! Now I have it!” The policeman scrubbed the back end of his pencil in the notebook. “Darned eraser. About shot.” The paper tore. He looked up irritably. “Can’t we just make it Grundig?”

“Grundy,” said the woman coldly.

The policeman ripped the page out of his notebook, rumpled it up angrily, and hurled it to the street. “All right, gosh damn it all!” he cried in a rage, scribbling: “Grundy. I have it. Now get on with it, lady!”

“ Officer!” sniffed Mrs. Grundy, clasping a handkerchief to her throat “Remember your place, or I shall have to speak to your superior!”

The policeman shrank, blanched, nibbled his lip.

Paul knew what would come. He could read these two like a book. I’m the strange one, he thought He wanted to watch their faces, but his streetlevel view gave him at best a perspective on their underchins. It was their crotches that were prominent. Butts and bellies: the squashed bug’s-eye view. And that was strange, too: that he wanted to watch their faces.

The policeman was begging for mercy, wringing his pale hands. There were faint hissing sounds, wriggling out of the crowd like serpents. “Cut the shit, mac,” Charity Grundy said finally, “you’re overdoing it.” The officer chewed his moustache, stared down at his notebook, abashed. “You wanna know who this poor clown is, right?” The policeman nodded. “Okay, are you ready?” She clasped her bosom again and the crowd grew silent. The police officer held his notebook up, the pencil poised. Mrs. Grundy snuffled, looked down at Paul, winced, turned away and wept “Officer!” she gasped. “He was my lover!”

Halloos and cheers from the crowd, passing to laughter. The policeman started to smile, blinking down at Mrs. Grundy’s body, but with a twitch of his moustache, he suppressed it.

“We met…just one year ago today. O fateful hour!” She smiled bravely, brushing back a tear, her lower lip quivering. Once, her hands clenched woefully before her face, she winked down at Paul. The wink nearly convinced him. Maybe I’m him after all. Why not? “He was selling sea-chests, door to door. I can see him now as he was then—” She paused to look down at him as he was now, and wrinkles of revulsion swept over her face. Somehow this brought laughter. She looked away, puckered her mouth and bugged her eyes, shook one hand limply from the wrist. The crowd was really with her.

“Mrs. Grundy,” the officer whispered, “please…”

“Yes, there he was, chapfallen and misused, orphaned by the rapacious world, yet pure and undefiled, there: there at my door!” With her baggy arm, flung out, quavering, she indicated die door. “Bent nearly double under his impossible sea-chest, perspiration illuminating his manly brow, wounding his eyes, wrinkling his undershirt—”

“Careful,” cautioned die policeman nervously, glancing up from his notes. He must have filled twenty or thirty pages by now.

“In short, my heart went out to him!” Gesture of heart going out. “And though — alas I — my need for sea-chests was limited—”

The spectators somehow discovered something amusing in this and tittered knowingly. Mainly in the way she said it, he supposed. Her story in truth did not bother Paul so much as his own fascination with it. He knew where it would lead, but it didn’t matter. In fact, maybe that was what fascinated him.

“—I invited him in. Put down that horrid sea-chest, dear boy, and come in here, I cried, come in to your warm and obedient Charity, love, come in for a cup of tea, come in and rest, rest your pretty little shoulders, your pretty little back, your pretty little…” Mrs. Grundy paused, smiled with a faint arch of one eyebrow, and the crowd responded with another burst of laughter. “And it was pretty little, okay,” she grumbled, and again they whooped, while she sniggered throatily.

How was it now? he wondered. In fact, he’d been wondering all along.

“And, well, officer, that’s what he did, he did put down his sea-chest — alas! sad to tell, right on my unfortunate cat Rasputin, dozing there in the day’s brief sun, God rest his soul, his (again, alas!) somewhat homaloidal soul!”

She had a great audience. They never failed her, nor did they now.

The policeman, who had finally squatted down to write on his knee, now stood and shouted for order. “Quiet! Quiet!” His moustache twitched. “Can’t you see this is a serious matter?” He’s the funny one, thought Paul. The crowd thought so, too, for the laughter mounted, then finally died away. “And… and then what happened?” the policeman whispered. But they heard him anyway and screamed with delight, throwing up a new clamor in which could be distinguished several coarse paraphrases of the policeman’s question. The officer’s pale face flushed. He looked down at Paul with a brief commiserating smile, shrugged his shoulders, fluttering the epaulettes. Paul made a try at a never-mind kind of gesture, but, he supposed, without bringing it off.

“What happened next, you ask, you naughty boy?” Mrs. Grundy shook and wriggled. Cheers and whistles. She cupped her plump hands under her breasts and hitched her abundant hips heavily to one side. “You don’t understand,” she told the crowd. “I only wished to be a mother to the lad.” Hoohahs and catcalls. “But I had failed to realize, in that fleeting tragic moment when he un burdened himself upon poor Rasputin, how I was wrenching his young and unsullied heart asunder! Oh yes, I know, I know—”

“This is the dumbest story I ever heard,” interrupted the policeman finally, but Mrs. Grundy paid him no heed.

“I know I’m old and fat, that I’ve crossed the Grand Climacteric!” She winked at the crowd’s yowls of laughter. “I know the fragrant flush of first flower is gone forever!” she cried, not letting a good thing go, pressing her wrinkled palms down over the soft swoop of her blimp-sized hips, peeking coyly over one plump shoulder at the shrieking crowd. The policeman stamped his foot, but no one noticed except Paul. “I know, I know — yet: somehow, face to face with little Charity, a primitive unnameable urgency welled up in his untaught loins, his pretty little—”

“Stop it!” cried the policeman, right on cue. “This has gone far enough!”

“And you ask what happened next? I shall tell you, officer! For why conceal the truth… from you of all people?” Though uneasy, the policeman seemed frankly pleased that she had put it this way. “Yes, without further discourse, he buried his pretty little head in my bosom—” (Paul felt a distressing sense of suffocation, though perhaps it had been with him all the while) “—and he tumbled me there, yes he did, there on the front porch alongside his sea-chest and my dying Rasputin, there in the sunlight, before God, before the neighbors, before Mr. Dunlevy the mailman who is hard of hearing, before the children from down the block passing on their shiny little—”

“Crazy goddamn fool he just walk right out in fronta me no respect just burstin for a bustin!” said a familiar voice.

Mrs. Grundy’s broad face, now streaked with tears and mottled with a tense pink flush, glowered. There was a long and difficult silence. Then she narrowed her eyes, smiled faintly, squared her shoulders, touched a handkerchief to her eye, plunged the handkerchief back down her bosom, and resumed: “—Before, in short, the whole itchy eyes-agog world, a coupling unequaled in the history of Western concupiscence!” Some vigorous applause, which she acknowledged. “Assaulted, but — yes, I confess it — assaulted, but aglow , I reminded him of—”