Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“Uh-oh,” Matthew Gale said. “I’ve gone and put my foot in it, haven’t I?”

“Colin brought you here.” Because now she recognizes him. He’s the young man who had helped them that time at the Haunted Mansion and whose exchange of winks with Colin she’d intercepted back in those now-dead live-and-let-live days of their arrival. It hadn’t been he, of course, but the boiling circumstances of which he’d been a part that had turned her nerves into so many fuses waiting to be ignited and had caused her — who hated all arrangements in the first place — to — in the first place — take the room at all.

“Listen,” he said, who, being no dummy and having a feel for the strange displacements of the ordinary and sizing up the situation, its unspeakable ramifications, and wondering, for example, just what Mrs. Bible was herself doing on the night in question, sought to give comfort where comfort may or may not have been due, “who knows what goes on in another person’s marriage? In another person’s life? May I come in?”

“You may not.”

“I have no problem with that. I can say my piece right out here in the hall and let the neighbors think whatever they want to. I’m not going to tell you we’re two consenting adults and there’s the end of it. Because I’m beginning to suspect that in these particular circumstances two consenting adults wouldn’t even begin to get the job done. No, ma’am. I’m beginning to suspect that to be fair to all the parties we’re dealing with here would require a general goddamn election, a whole entire plebiscite. Well, there’s you, of course, and that other one, the master industrial spy, the London, England Colin, and Lord knows who else, the man, woman, or child with whom you yourself may have been disporting on the fateful evening.…Look, if I’m the least bit out of line, blow the whistle on me, please. Promise now.

“He’s really quite charming, your Colin. He even made me come up with the key to this place. I’m certain it was a test. Well, you know the sort of thing I mean. The little negotiations we do with the fates.…If such-and-so is meant to be, let a purple chicken come around that corner pulling a red wagon. Re li gion! — No, thank you, I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much; it’s not a bit drafty out here — But, well, frankly, though it’s not my business, it’s just I like your Colin so. He has his faults, of course. Who’s perfect? Certainly not me. Well, I’m sure you know that. Colin probably told you all about it. Well, why not? say I. What’s an open marriage for if the party of the first part ain’t free to lay it all out for the party of the second? However disgusting, degrading, and humiliating it may turn out to be for the poor hick son-bitch party of the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth! Am I getting warm?”

“I haven’t a clue regarding whatever it is you’re talking about,” Mary Cottle said.

“No,” Matthew Gale said, smiling prettily, “of course not.”

She started to close the door in his face. Gale resisted at first, then stepped suddenly back, drawing her off balance, sending her stumbling to the door, her left cheek awkwardly pressed against it.

“I don’t know,” Matthew Gale said loudly from the other side of the door, “just what it is, what nasty sting operation you people are up to, but under the circumstances I feel obliged to warn you that what we’ve been funning with here isn’t your standard, ordinary point-of-interest or your regular, everyday, five-star, not-to-be-missed, absolute Must, so much as the almighty God’s almighty own country itself! Can I get an Amen, somebody?”

“Amen,” said somebody.

“And why not,” Gale said (and she had the impression he was whispering now, that whatever he said he might have been saying into the grain of the wooden door), “why? This is Disney World! This is the basic universal G-for-good, G-for-goodness, main attraction and main event. You’re fucking with Disney World! Lady, lady, do you appreciate what that means? That means, if it came right down to it, they could do you legal as apple pie if they wanted. They not only got the guns, the Bomb, and the animatronics, but the Ten Commandments and the Onward Christian Soldiers too! They’re connected high up with important principles: with Safety First and Handicap Access. With double sinks and orthopedic mattresses. With convenience, clean accommodations, and fair value understood. With public temperance and a Lost and Found like the secret fucking service! With clever mice and friendly bears, with reluctant dragons and horticultural bulls. With Nature in sweet tooth and claw, as it were. With— Are you listening to me?” he demanded.

“Yes,” she said. Her hand was in her pants.

“With family, I mean! With grampas that fish and fathers that golf. With moms who drive car pools and look great in jeans. With brothers and sisses who’d be lost if they left each other’s corner for even a minute. With pets who’d lay down their lives for any of them. This is the picture. Are you getting the picture?”

“Yes,” she said. Was separating her pubic mat like a curtain and pushing a finger up into her cleft.

“I’m talking about a tone. Judgmental calls. Because it really is a small world after all. The high energy of high righteousness and fervency. All the us/them dichotomies. Not just capitalism, not just free enterprise. Not even just morality, finally, but something larger, grander, more important. Efficiency! That’s it. That’s all. Efficiency. More bang for the buck. It’s simple as that. Efficiency. Everything else is moral turpitude. Everything else. This is still the picture. This is still the picture. Who ain’t in it?”

“Who?”

“Colin ain’t in it.”

“Colin,” she said.

“And you,” he said. “ You ain’t in it.”

“Are you in it?”

“I’m a different story,” he said. “I’m behind the scenes.”

“I know who you are,” she said calmly. For she was herself again. Because she’d come now. Was restored to herself, in control, her nerves’ temperature normal, like fever broken in a crisis.

“What?”

“I know who you are.”

“Sure, sure,” he said. “Colin let on. That’s just the way of it with wise, experienced, double-dealing old fags.”

“I saw you at the Haunted Mansion.”

“Housekeeping,” a woman said. “I’ve brought you your towels.”

And when Mary opened the door he was gone.

Careful to let any guest, even a child, pass through first, he left the elevator and got off on the lobby floor. Gale high-signed his fellow cast members — we’re tight, he thought, we’re tight as skycaps passing in airports — and called out their names. He must have known almost everyone who worked at the Contemporary. Well, he hung out at the Spa so much. Which wasn’t, he thought, in the least suspicious. He was just using the facilities. As he’d seen bellboys and desk clerks at the Haunted Mansion during their lunch breaks. Only part of the perks.

What was suspicious, of course, was his use of the elevators. Being caught on the guest floors, coming down into the lobby at midnight, at one in the morning. What was suspicious was the flimsy cover story he put out that he was a gambler, that he went up to their rooms to take their money in poker and crap games. They thought they knew better, his bellboy and desk clerk cronies. So he grinned and aw-shucks’d them, and toed awkward circles in the pile carpets and marble floors, as if he were barefoot or wore straws in his mouth.

“Better give it a rest, Gale, or you’re going to lose it for certain.”