Anthony Burgess - Enderby's Dark Lady

She sighed out cigarette smoke. "Brother," she then said, "you sure are one large pain in the ass."

"Unfair. Disinterested. Ask nothing. If you wish, I apologize for that ah declaration. We're coming into Chicago now, my kind of town, sorry, that's back in Tangiers. Then back on the job, forget what I said. Partners in crime only. It is a bloody crime too. The things we're doing to Shakespeare. Then I pack your divine image among my dirty shirts and go. Love poems."

"Pain," she varied, as they prepared to get out, "in the divine fundament."

"What God showed to Moses," Enderby said, following her down the aisle. "I've often wondered why. God with a bottom. Some very profound significance."

When they had marched a mile or so, to the accompaniment of ubiquitous Vivaldi, nice change from pop, pop of its day when you came to think of it, to the area whence the aircraft for Indianapolis took off, Enderby at once sat down and chewed a couple of Pepts. Silversmith was there, with two other men. "Hi," he offered. He effected laconic introductions. "Len Bodiman, orchestrator. Pip Wesel, MD. " Bodiman carried a heavy canvas bag which presumably contained what would be called the score. His glasses, in heavy black mourning frames, were too big for him, and he kept them on by variously grimacing. He was a big soft man in a kind of Churchillian sirensuit. Enderby said:

"What kind of orchestra? Shawms, recorders, viols da gamba, sackbuts? Authentic, I mean?" It was this Pip Wesel who replied. Enderby assumed that Silversmith's rude terming of him as Mentally Deficient was either a joke or a tribute to his creative madness in whatever field he wandered, scenic artistry perhaps, but the young man, who was chihuahua-hairless, was full of uncoordinated gestures and he now bleated several times. He said:

"We've been hearing about you. Mike here said that's what you'd say. You want madrigals too? Hey nonny nonny and all that shit?"

Enderby felt his neck getting thicker. "Don't," he threatened, "use that word in the presence of this lady here." April Elgar was standing somewhat apart, and Enderby saw himself, with bitter regret, as physically not very disjunct from these three ugly leerers. White and unbalanced, paunchy and full of tics. He pulled in his own belly since he could not push in theirs. He had a vision of April Elgar writhing on a bed with a black man of comparable beauty. He nodded with desperate regret and satisfaction. April Elgar said:

"Save your breath, kid. He's crammed with that er commodity." She had learned something from him, Enderby, then. Wesel said:

"Okay okay, colleagues, right? Working together, right? Peace and love and all that shit, right?"

"There you go again," Enderby said. "And what precisely is your ah role in this enterprise?"

"MD," Wesel said.

"That's frank, or perhaps facetious, but what is it precisely that you do?"

"He wags the stick," Bodiman said. "He's the stickwagger." And then, to April Elgar, "You got rhythm yet, Ape?"

"Don't," Enderby began, "call -"

"One of the big black fallacies," Bodiman continued. "Rhythm as the inborn inheritance of the jungle."

"I got more rhythm in my ass," April Elgar said unwisely, "than you got in your whole fat sluggy ofay corpse, brother. I can see we going to get along just fine."

"Shakespeare at work," Enderby pronounced. "Sowing dissension. It's the curse he prophesied. Moving his bones." But nobody listened. They had been told through a loudspeaker to get on the aircraft, but Bodiman found the opportunity to say:

"In your ass, right," and she:

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"He's not referring," Wesel said, "to your singing, if that's what it's called." And then he skipped ahead, bleating. If Enderby had had the money, he would have limped back through the crowds and Vivaldi to the international segment of O'Hare, there to purchase a homeward ticket and get, as they said here, the hell out. But he was chained. On the aircraft, next to an April Elgar who brooded and drank whisky sours in excess, by some dispensation, of the number allowed by the paternalistic airline, he gloomily regarded his new digital watch, faintly fascinated by the onward march of the square figures which turned one into the other with insolent ease, a kind of numerical paranomasia. Then he switched the instrument to a calculator and added up large sums.

He was adding up even larger sums on his bed later that day, having eaten hamburger steak with fried eggs, drunk lager that tasted of onions and water, taken Pepts and Windkill, then sadly onanized. He should rightly have done so to the stimulus of April Elgar's present, but it was not aromatic of her as a shoe or stocking would have been. The present was really an unwilled invitation to accept a very dull future in which one second was the same as another, as symbolized by the minimal metamorphosis from number to number, in which the achievement of a minute and later an hour was, so muted was the change, nothing for the instrument to crow over. The sums he added were, though large, small enough for him to check by simple arithmetic. The instrument told, it seemed, no lies and might be trusted with huge multiplications and even square roots. Then there was a knocking at his door. It was April Elgar in plastic rainhood and raincoat. It was hard to tell whether her face had been irrigated by rain or was being irrigated by tears. She said:

"I've moved in here. I can't stand the bastards."

"You mean," Enderby asked, "in here?"

"Not in here, stoopid. In the hotel. Just down the corridor." And then she sat on the nearer bed, that on which Enderby, in shirt, trousers and socks, had been lying calculating, and wept. Enderby sat next to her. He said:

"Take those things off. The outer ones, I mean. Then tell me why. Crying, that is. Not that there's any reason why you should. Explain, I mean. We all ought to be crying all the bloody time." She needed, Enderby could see, comfort, so he put his arms about her. So, in his arms and in plastic rainwear, she sobbed. He patted the plastic rainwear, going "There, there." And then: "Insulted you, did they, those white bastards? And then there's coming away from home and leaving your mother and your kids, a known loving ambience, and meeting sneering swine making uncalled-for references to your private life I took them to be, believe me, I don't believe any of it, I know you, it's the snarl the jealous world delivers to talent and beauty, there, there." He nearly added, unthinking, his stepmother's cantrip: Cry more and you'll pee less. She stopped crying very suddenly, wiped her eyes and face vigorously on Enderby's shirt, then said, as all women were supposed to say, according to Enderby's reading, in such circumstances:

"I must look terrible."

"Not at all. Young, defenceless, and, of course, very beautiful. Now take that stupid rain thing off. Have you eaten anything?"

"Yeah, I ate dinner, and those bastards were in the dining room kind of jeering, and then I went back up and was taking a shower, and I said the hell with it, I'm going to where my friend is, so I got my bags taken down and I put on my raincoat and. If I take it off," she suddenly began to giggle, "you'll see the real me, kid. Divine fundament and all."

"You mean," Enderby gulped, "straight out of the bath, shower I mean, ridiculous unclean American custom, and and." His body stiffened except for one member, which couched morbidly flaccid. "I see." He added, obscurely: "The casting of the die." He superadded: "You mean you would?"

"You talked about loving me till you die, kid."

"It's not the same," Enderby said, much perturbed. "Perhaps I've been too dualistic, too Platonic. I mean, there are too many difficulties involved. Aesthetic, for instance. Beauty and the beast. Not that I'm ungrateful. But love, love, that's something different from taking that thing off. Please understand."