Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“Is Ellen Rose out of it?”

“Oh sure,” Ruth says. “With her fella already come? That’ll be the day, won’t it, Louise?”

“You should have seen it, George. She’s all lathered up. What a pair of tits on that Bernadette.”

“Charlie!”

“Well it’s true.”

“Nicer than mine?”

“No, not nicer than yours. Not nicer than yours at all. Just bigger,” Charles tells his wife.

“Only because she’s four months’ pregnant. It’s all milk.”

“You’re pregnant too. She doesn’t even show yet.”

“She shows in her titties.”

“Are we really having a control contest?” Ray shouts from the bathroom.

“Is it all right, George?”

“Why not? There’s no TV, I’m out of cocoa, I haven’t got a phonograph, and only one station on the radio works.”

“Sure,” Charles shouts back, laughing. “Come, I say come, as you are.” He turns to George. “Count ten to yourself and start moaning.”

“Charlie, that’s cheating.”

“No it’s not, it’s a joke. We’ll make monkeys out of them.” He moans, he purls. “ Everybody, ” he hisses.

“The water’s running. They can’t even hear us.”

“No fair you guys,” Charles calls. “Either turn off the shower or open the door. Hey,” he calls. “you guys in this or not? — Okay,” he whispers, “go.” In seconds he begins to moan again. He growls, he coos. He’s the very troubadour of sexual melody.

“How come you never sound this way in real life?” Ruth Oliver asks.

“Come on, come on, ” Charles tells his wife. “Oh. Oh yeah, ” he says less quietly. “I lose,” he cries. “I lose. ”

“I guess we ought to humor him,” Ruth says. “Mnn,” she purrs, “mnn.”

Mary looked at him wide-eyed. “Is this true? Did this happen?”

“I’m in a state of grace,” George Mills said. “I don’t have to lie.”

Now Louise is chirping. Grace notes, diapasons, the aroused tropes of all dilate rapture.

“Louise?” the child said.

“All of them,” George Mills said. “Doting love solos, Miss. Arias of concupiscence. Choirs of asyncopatic, amatory, affricative, low-woodwind drone.”

“What a racket!” Mary said.

“Yelps, cries, askew pitch. All the strobic gutturals of heat.”

It’s quiet for a moment. Then, “This one’s finished,” Bernadette calls from the bathroom.

“Oh God,” Ellen Rose shrieks in George Mills’s bed, “ me, me tooooo! ”

“Go for it,” Charles urges.

And, in the dark, George Mills can just make out his leer, his wife Ruth’s. Louise is actually touching him now. His flies are in her fist. George’s left hand is under her dress, his fingers snagged in her garter belt, his palm hefting flesh, the hard little button at the top of the strap. “Don’t, you’ll tear it,” she says in his ear wetly. He introduces his fingers beneath the tough edges of her girdle. Where they are baffled by other textures. Elastic, the metal of fasteners, silk, hair, damp, curled as pica c ’s. She squirms from his hand.

“Easy,” she says, “take it easy. Don’t hurt me.”

“It’s all this stuff, ” he says, and tries to raise her dress, to pull it out from under her behind.

“No,” she says, “don’t,” and moves away from him. This is when he tries to pull her down, when his head falls into Ruth Oliver’s lap, thighs closed prim as pie. He feels a man’s hand at his ear. It’s Charles’. Mr. and Mrs. Oliver are holding hands across his face.

“Aw, he’s suffering,” Louise’s friend Ruth says. “Put him out of his misery, Lu.” And when Ruth’s friend Louise moves her body against him. When his nerves shiver, spasm, when he whimpers his release. Not trumpets, not brazen blares. No boomy bray of barking majesty, but whimper, whine, fret. An orgasm like a small complaint.

The door to Mills’s bathroom opens and Ray and Bernadette come into the living room. They are dressed. When Ray turns the light on in the hall George Mills can see that their hair isn’t even wet.

“Maybe we ought to go,” Charles says.

“What about the lovebirds?” Ray asks, indicating the closed door to Mills’s bedroom.

“Knock on it. Tell them maybe we ought to go.”

“Hey, break it up you guys,” Ray says into the woodwork. “Give it a rest.”

“How about that?” Herb says as he leads Ellen Rose into the living room. “It’s not even midnight. Want to play some strip poker? Where’s your cards, George?”

“Weren’t you mad?” Mary asked.

“What for? To be proved right? She was a virgin. She was only protecting herself. She was a virgin. She wasn’t in nature yet. None of them were.”

“Two of those girls were married. They were pregnant.”

“Yes,” George Mills said, “they were protecting the unborn. It was hygiene is all. Marriage like a sleepover, like a pajama party. If it helped the husbands for the wives to talk dirty, if it helped to be together, to make crank calls, if it helped to excite each other until they didn’t need excitement or protection either anymore, what harm did it do?”

“Ellen Rose wasn’t married. Ellen Rose was whoosis’s, Herb’s, fiancee.”

“His pants were stained.”

“What?”

“Herb. His pants were stained too.”

“You tell me the darndest things.”

“Intimacy.”

“Pardon?”

“Intimacy. Because that’s the real eye-opener. The knockabout slapstick of the heart. Open secret, public knowledge. Those thighs on the sofa, those folks in the bed. Intimacy. Even friendship. Even association. Jesus, Miss, I’d thought my ass was a secret, my pecker hush-hush.”

“I’m going to tell my mother how you talk.”

“Your mother is dying. She’s gorging herself on all the shrimp she can eat.”

“Don’t you say that.”

“You can’t evangelize grace. You can only talk about it. Ballpark figures.”

“You’re crazy. You’re a crazy man.”

“Because I was right. In a way I was right. You can’t seduce virgins. Louise and I were practically engaged from the moment she found out I didn’t have cocoa.”

“You shut up,” Mary said. “Take it back about my mother.”

“Your mother is dying,” Mills said calmly.

“Stop that,” Mary said. “I’m just a little girl.”

“Then behave like one. Practice the piano, be nice to your sister, bring up your math.”

“Leave me alone,” Mary cried. “Mind your business. Leave me alone.” She was crying uncontrollably now, her sobs like hiccups, her nose and chin smeared with thin icicles of snot.

“Wipe your eyes,” George Mills said. “Blow your nose. Use your beach towel.”

Later George Mills would tell Messenger that he had known, that he’d been certain, that either his experience in Cassadaga as a child or the state of grace, which he’d be the first to admit he’d had no hand in, which he’d caught like a cold, or maybe something in each of us but compounded in Mills, who had a thousand years of history at his command, or anyway disposal, a millennium of what Messenger would call racial memory, hunch all the while increasingly fine-tuned in his stock until by the time it came down to George it was no longer hunch or even conviction so much as pure biological adaptation, real as the equipment of birds or bears.

“You’re a fucking mutation? That it, Mills?” Messenger would ask. “The new man?”

“No no,” Mills would say, “your people are the new men. With your kids and clans, your distaff and branches, all your in-laws and country cousins and poor relations. In me boiled down, don’t you know? What do you call it? Distilled. Spit and polished back to immaculate, what do you call it, mass.”