Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“You’ll be missing out.”

“So it’s all it’s cracked up to be, is it?”

“I’m afraid so,” Eddy Bale admitted.

“I thought it might be,” Benny Maxine said. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

“Five-alarm.”

“Fantastic,” Benny Maxine said.

When the child tried to draw him out about which parts of a woman’s anatomy Eddy preferred, the breasts, the behind, or the quim, Bale blushed and said he supposed it was a matter of individual taste.

Benny smiled and nudged Bale in the side with his elbow.

“You know what gets me?” he said.

“Perhaps I oughtn’t to be talking to you like this.”

“Their pelt.”

“Perhaps these things might more properly be discussed in the home environme—”

“Their pelt, their fleece, their fell, their fur,” Benny went on happily. “Their miniver, their feathers.”

“Yes, well,” Eddy said.

“Ask you a ques tion?”

Bale stared at the boy.

“It’s personal, but you’re the one brung it up.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Bale said ruefully.

“Well,” Benny Maxine said, “what it is then is…it’s just only it’s a bit awkward, me putting it, like.”

“Look,” Eddy said, “not on my account. I mean, if you’re at all uncomfortable about this, you don’t have to—”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” the child reminded him.

“Right,” said Eddy.

“I’m still pretty much virgo intacta and all,” Benny told him. “Well,” he said, “you must know that or we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?”

“Hey,” Eddy reassured him, “at your age I was pretty virgo intacta myself. You make too much of it.”

“Of virginity?”

He recalled Benny’s list. The miniver, the feathers. “Of birds,” Bale said.

“Well, it ain’t the birds exactly.”

“Maybe you should talk to Mister Moorhead,” Eddy said quickly. “He’s the physician on board. He could advise you on these things better than I. If this is anything at all to do with the effects of self-abuse on your condition, I’m sure he can fill you in on what’s what.”

“Nah, if I die, I die,” Benny said and glared at Bale, accusing him with the full force of his doom. “ Are you in for a pound?” he asked at last. “Are you even in for a penny even?”

“Sure,” Eddy said. “I told you.”

“Why won’t you let me get it out then?”

“What is it?” Eddy asked.

“You sure it’s okay?”

“Yes,” he said, “certainly.”

“All right,” Benny said, “so so far I’m this yid vestal, this kid monk. I’m this fifteen-year-old virgin with this fifteen-year- old virgin maidenhead. Fifteen years, and it ain’t any sure-thing, lead-pipe, dead-cert cinch I’ll ever make sweet sixteen. So what I need to know is how long.”

“How long?”

“It lasts. How long it lasts. That the chemicals work. That a chap can do it. That given the clean bill of health, the normal drives, and what the actuaries say, how long a party can keep his pecker up, Mister Bale.”

Eddy was confused. “Sustain an orgasm?”

“Sustain an orgasm?” Benny said. “No, of course not. I know how long a chap can come off. It’s the other I’m not sure of. How long the power’s there for, I mean. How long he has till his knackers go off on him.”

“How long? How old he is?”

“Yeah,” Benny said. “How old he is.”

“Oh, well,” Bale said, “that all depends, I should think. They say we’re sexual until the day we die.”

“Right,” Benny said.

“Oh, Benny,” Eddy said.

“What? Oh,” he said, “is that what you’re thinking? Forget it,” he said, “that ain’t in it. I mean I can subtract fifteen or sixteen from three score and ten and get the difference. I can take away the subtrahend from the whoosihend well enough. That’s not what bothers me. So I miss out on whatever it is, the fifty- four or fifty-five years of what you haul me in here to tell me the shouting’s all about. No big deal, no Commonwealth case. Nah,” Benny Maxine said, “that don’t bother Benny Maxine.”

“What does bother you?”

“That slyboots. That old son of a bitch,” Benny says, almost to himself.

“What?”

“The crafty old bastard.”

“I don’t—”

“Mudd-Gaddis. Here I schlepp him from room to room giving him gazes, giving him ganders, and at his age the little geezer has probably nineteen dozen times my own experience. Pushed his wheelchair, I did. Took him for a ride. Showed him the sights. And him under his shawls and lap robes with his hand in the heather. Ooh, he’s the sly one!”

“Benny,” Eddy Bale says quietly, “it’s not what the shouting’s all about. Benny, it isn’t.”

“Yeah, well,” Benny Maxine says, “thanks for the grand bloke-to-bloke chat.”

And, when Maxine has gone, Eddy Bale wondering aloud, and not for the first time, “Am I mad? Am I mad?”

(Because he was bursting with it: his discovery. Because, if his hunch was right, he figured he’d found the real Magic Kingdom. And, should they be caught, the ancient kid making such a good front and all. And because he thought the old boy was past it anyway. Wouldn’t remember. Certainly not where he’d taken him. Not where they’d been.

(And his hunch had been right.

(And Benny blessing his god-given, gambler’s gifts: his luck, his attention to detail, all his boon instincts.

(So the unlikely pair, the one, dying from some Old Testament curse which, since he wasn’t bar mitzvah, he couldn’t even begin to understand, pushing the chair down the hotel corridor, and the other, riding in it, dying of all his squeezed and heaped natural causes, nattering away from the depths of his old-age-pensioner’s, unpredictable, golden-aged, senior citizen’s cumulative heart. “Ahh,” Mudd-Gaddis had said from his congested chest, taking the air, “I do love a stroll about the decks of a morning. Thank you so very much for inviting me, Maxine.

(“What’s a shipmate for?” Benny had said.

(“The stabilizers these days, you’d hardly suspect there’s a sea under you.”

(“Steady as she goes.”

(Mudd-Gaddis had chuckled. “Quite good, that. ‘Steady as she goes.’ Not like the old days,” he added wistfully.

(“No,” Benny had said.

(“No. Not at all like the old days.”

(“No.”

(“Not like any HMS I ever sailed aboard.”

(“I’ll be bound,” Benny had said.

(“Not like the East India Company days. Not like the tubs H.M. sent us out in to encounter the Spanish Armada.”

(“Really.”

(“’Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves,‘” Charles Mudd- Gaddis had sung in his high, reedy voice.

(“You could probably have used stabilizers like these on the Titanic,” Benny had said, “or when you went off with Captain Cook to discover the Hawaiian Islands.”

(Mudd-Gaddis gave Benny Maxine a sharp look. “I never sailed with Jim Cook,” he told him quietly.

(“No, of course not. After your time,” Benny mumbled, wondering if the little petrified man was having him on.

(“Still,” Mudd-Gaddis said, “it’s not all progress. The sea air, for example. The sea air doesn’t seem quite as bracing as it used to.” Through his thick glasses Mudd-Gaddis stared at the corridor’s blue walls. “Indeed, it seems rather close out here. Even a little stuffy, in fact.”

(“Not like the old days.”

(“No. Not at all.”

(“It is stuffy,” Benny Maxine said suddenly. “Say, why don’t we duck into this lounge for a bit? It’s probably air-conditioned.” They had come to room 822. Benny knocked forcefully on the door and, hearing no answer, folded Mudd-Gaddis’s chair and hid it beyond the fire doors at the end of the corridor. Returning to 822 and working with one of the cunning tools on his Swiss Army knife, Benny had made short, clever work of jimmying the door.