Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“A house phone?”

The clerk told him where to find one.

“Benny?”

“I have to use a house phone,” Benny Maxine explained.

“May I please have Miss Mary Cottle’s room number?” he asked the operator.

“Benny.”

“Just a minute,” he said, “she’s getting it for me.”

“Benny, look at the time. I was supposed to be back half an hour ago.”

“No, not six twenty-nine, the other one,” he said.

“I’m going back,” she said.

He covered the mouthpiece. “Wait, will you!” he almost hissed.

Because he was beginning to believe now. In the mystery, the adventure.

Rena Morgan was crying.

“Oh, Jesus,” Benny said. “All right! Oh, Je sus!” he said, and replaced the telephone.

And was still trying to calm her down when Lamar Kenny spotted them.

“Is something wrong?” he asked with a concern that was almost soothing and put his suitcase down before the open elevator door. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No,” Benny said, “my friend just has this truly disastrous allergy is all there’s to it. That’s why her eyes is all funny. She’ll be fine once she gets back to her room and can take her pill.”

“I’ll be fine,” Rena managed, sobbing and already pulling lengths of rolled handkerchief from her rigged magician’s person. She was all over herself, tapping and pulling and patting, conducting herself like an orchestra, playing herself like a shell game. If her left hand shot forward, a handkerchief might suddenly appear in her right. If her right hand moved, her left might already have disposed of the handkerchief Lamar Kenny had not yet even seen there. Her fingers, quick as a pickpocket’s, moved across her body like a loom. She made lightning passes across her face and seemed to dab, to pluck at the corners of her eyes, drawing the juices away from her nose as one might tap a tree. One couldn’t tell what she did with her hankies, whether they went into the big purse she carried or back up her sleeves.

And she’s working me close up, Lamar Kenny thought.

It was only because he was trained as an actor and accustomed to quick bursts of sudden but misleading dexterity that he could tell not how she did it (or even what she did) but that she was doing anything out of the ordinary at all. To someone else she might simply have seemed nervous, fidgety, even flighty. But he was in the business. (And understood he had a name like a lounge act. It was no news to him. Few people believed it, but Lamar Kenny was his real name. Even his agent had tried to get him to change it. “It’s my name,” Lamar told him, “I won’t change it. Maybe I’ll switch it around, call myself Kenny Lamar. Then you can get me gigs introducing strippers, make me an M.C. at industrial shows.” But he wouldn’t have done that either. It was the name, he felt, which pointed him toward show business in the first place, the glamorous name which had become his fate.)

“You’re pretty good,” he told the girl.

“That’s right,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“No, no. That stuff you do.”

“I get this way,” she told him. “I’m fluidal.”

“Fluidal. Christ, yes. Fluidal,” he said. “Like the burning Ganges, like old man river, like Victoria Falls. Christ, yes, fluidal.”

“Hey,” Benny Maxine said, stepping forward, almost tripping over the man’s suitcase. They did not understand each other.

Kenny was referring to her moves with the handkerchiefs and didn’t know about her fluids, could tell only that she was upset: her tears, her puffy red eyes.

“Please, Benny,” she said and started around Lamar Kenny toward the elevator.

“I’m coming,” he said.

The moves were from his old sheep-dog routine and, like the girl’s, were based upon principles of misdirection and distraction. Soon the wise-guy kid was stumbling all over himself as Lamar imperceptibly shifted the suitcase with the merest touch of his shoe or by seeming to brush against it with a trouser leg or by picking it up and, with the aid of his body’s exact compensatory movements, apparently replacing it again in its original and identical position — caviar for the general, thought the trained actor — although it was actually in an entirely new relation to the wise-guy kid or, conversely, though it seemed to have been set down inches or even feet from where he’d picked it up, was really in the same spot. (He didn’t even need the suitcase. It was an impediment, circus, athletics, mere footwork, and added nothing to the routine, maybe even detracted from it, necessary only as a sort of grace note or drum roll, as superfluous and minor, finally, as the inspection of an escape artist’s locks and chains. Even Lamar Kenny’s extended helping hand an exquisite mockery, as blind and stammered as a fall, a plunge to balance. Even his bitten, embittered “Sorry”s and “Excuse me”s.)

Lamar Kenny’s flexible face — all this would have been beyond any Kenny Lamar — mirrored Benny’s own. “Timing” was too simple a term; what Lamar did was a sort of reverse ventriloquy, carefully monitoring Benny Maxine’s face and body, picking up signals the boy was not even aware he was sending (almost literally putting himself in the other’s place). It demanded incredible concentration. It was high and subtle art, but go tell that to the yahoos who thought they were seeing only the familiar clumsy choreography of two people stuck in each other’s way, slapstick, ordinary doorway-and-sidewalk contretemps, when what it actually was was one man dueling for two, parrying all the wise-guy kid’s progressively embarrassed, astonished, and finally terrified smiles. Mimicry so high and subtle it was no longer mimicry but an actual act of possession.

They might have stayed there forever, feinting and lunging and parrying, in eternal stand-off and locked as stars in each other’s gravity and orbit. Because Lamar Kenny knew that the only way the victim/volunteer from his audiences could ever get away was actually to turn and flee. Indeed, it was that that he watched and waited for, not just for the moment when an adversary would do it but, looking in his eyes, watching and concentrating, thinking ahead — thinking ahead, that was the secret — examining him until the precise moment not when he would do it but when it first occurred to him that he would do it, when Lamar Kenny would break it off himself, when he would turn and flee, running the five or six steps to the side of the small stages where he used to work, to turn and bow to the stunned and generally silent audience.

“Come on, Robin,” Lamar Kenny said, “see can you get past Friar Tuck.”

Could Kenny Lamar do this stuff? Lamar Kenny wondered, and gave the suitcase a violent, peremptory kick, clearing the ground between them, himself and the wise-guy kid, as if defying him, upping the ante of his mockery now, as if to say, “There. That’s gone. You won’t have to worry about that anymore, about tripping or stumbling over it. Now all you’ve got to worry about is me.” And looked up at the wise-guy kid to resume their impositioned parity and stalemate, dead-heat dance. Only he was staring at the grip, the wise-guy kid, seeing it for the first time perhaps, noticing its smooth unscathed leather, its unused, untagged, oddly mileless condition.

“Come on,” Lamar Kenny said. “Come on, let’s go.”

But Kenny was distracted too. Something had broken his concentration. It wasn’t the banging of the elevator door, its timed attempts to close, its short mechanical temper as the grace periods when it retracted itself once its long rubber safety plate had been touched became shorter and shorter until it literally whined and ground itself against the resisting arm or thigh of whoever pressed the plate — he’d allowed for that, he’d picked the spot for his performance and allowed for that — nor even the strident, outright claims of the little girl, her insistent, importunate, and even terrified “Benny! Benny!” —he’d allowed for that too — but the sight he had of her out of the corner of his eye. She had stopped the business with the handkerchiefs and was staring at him, her face enormous, enlarged, magnified to him behind the clear mask of her mucus.