William Kennedy - Very Old Bones

“I couldn’t say.”

“I think I’ll take my suit off.”

“I prefer it that way. It makes me feel fucksome.”

“You mean fuckish.”

“I prefer fucksome.”

“Language isn’t a matter of preference.”

“Mine is.”

Silence prevailed again.

“Is this better?”

“Much better. And a better view.”

“How would you describe the view?”

“Classic in shape.”

“Classic. Now that’s something.”

“And larger than most.”

“Larger than most. That’s really something, coming from you.”

“It also looks extremely useful.”

“You are a very fucksome woman, Giselle.”

“Fucksome is as fucksome does,” Giselle said.

Giselle and I walked along 57th Street and down Broadway, a change of scenery, a move into the murderous light of eschatological love and sudden death. I had convinced her after five hours of lovemaking that the walking was necessary to rejuvenate our bodies for the next encounter. Master the hiatus, I said, and you will regain the season. I did not tell her where I was taking her. I told her the story of Meriwether Macbeth, protagonist of the memoir I was putting together from a chaotic lifetime of journals, notes, stories, poetry, letters, my task being to create the quotient of one man’s verbal life.

“He lived with a woman who called herself Jezebel Jones, a name she adopted after meeting Meriwether,” I said. “She was a slut of major calibration, but quite bright and extremely willful; and together she and Meriwether cut a minor public swath through Greenwich Village for the better part of a decade. She was known for bringing home strangers and creating yet another ménage for Meriwether, who had grown bored with Jezebel’s solitary charms. She turned up one night with a hunchback who called himself Lon because his hump was said to look very like the hump Lon Chaney wore in The Hunchback of Notre Dame , and Jezebel found the deformed Lon enormously appealing. But it turned out Lon was a virgin, a neuter, who had never craved the sexual life, was content to move through his days without expending sperm on other citizens. Jezebel tried to change this by teaching the game to Lon and his lollipop. She enlisted Meriwether’s aid when Lon visited their apartment, and Meriwether, through deviousness, bound Lon’s hands with twine, then tied Lon’s legs to the bedposts as Jezebel, having unsuited the hunchback, aroused him to spire-like loftiness, and mounted him. Released from bondage, Lon fled into the night, returned the next day with his Doberman, and sicked the dog on Jezebel and Meriwether. As the dog bit repeatedly into various parts of Jezebel, Meriwether took refuge behind the sofa, his face buried in his arms. Lon moved the sofa and, with the hammer he had brought with him, crushed Meriwether’s head with a dozen blows. Jezebel survived and provided enough detail of the attack to put Lon into the asylum for life, and Meriwether moved on to a posthumous realm that had eluded him all his life: fame.”

“This is where I spend a bit of my social life when the world is too much with me,” I said, pulling out bar stools for Giselle and myself.

We were in The Candy Box, a 52nd Street club that featured striptease dancers from 6:00 p.m. till 3:00 a.m. It was eight o’clock and the low-ceilinged room was already full of smoke that floated miasmically in the club’s bluish light. Four young women in low-cut street dresses sat at the bar, two of them head-to-head with portly cigar smokers. The other two, on the alert for comparable attention, turned their eyes to us, recognized me, gave me greetings.

I called them by name and sat beside Giselle. On the dance floor, Consuela, a busty platinum blonde, awkwardly unhooked her skirt to the music of a four-piece band, while three other club girls cozied a table full of men, and another dozen solitary males watched the blonde with perfect attention.

“This is so depressing,” Giselle said. “Do you come here to be depressed?”

“I know the bartender,” I said.

“You know more than the bartender.”

“He’s a friend. He lost his leg at Iwo Jima. A colleague in war, so to speak.”

“And your stripper, she works here?”

“Five nights a week.”

“Are we in luck? Will we get to see her?”

“It turns out we will.”

“Is that her trying to make herself naked up there?”

“No, that’s Consuela, one of the new ones, still a bit of an amateur. My Brenda is a talented stripper.”

“Your Brenda,” said Giselle. “Your behavior is ridiculous, Orson. It’s the way you were back in Germany. You seem to like living in the sewer.”

“Orson the underground man.”

“What’ll you have, Orse old buddy?” the bartender asked. He was tall and muscular, with a space where his left canine tooth used to be, a casualty of a bar fight. But you should see the other guy’s dental spaces.

“Port wine, Eddie,” I said. “The best you have. Two.”

“Port wine. Don’t get too many calls for that.”

“It’s a romantic drink, Eddie. My wife and I are celebrating our reunion. I brought her in to meet Brenda.”

“Yeah? Now that’s a switch, bringin’ the wife in here. You don’t see much of that either.”

“Wives have a right to know their husbands’ friends,” Giselle said.

“Not a whole lot of husbands buy that idea,” Eddie said.

“It’s trust, Eddie,” I said. “There has to be more trust in this world. Shake hands with Giselle.”

“A pleasure,” Eddie said, taking Giselle’s hand.

“When is Brenda on?” I asked.

“She’s next.”

“We are in luck,” Giselle said.

“Eddie, would you ask her to come out and say hello before her act?”

“Right away, old buddy.”

“Eddie is certainly a friendly bartender for a place like this,” Giselle said.

“You should avoid categorical thinking, Giselle. There are no places like this.”

“They’re all over Europe.”

“The Candy Box is different. Trust me.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Because basically I’m a good person,” I said.

“That’s another reason I married you, but I’ve decided that doesn’t mean I should trust you.”

“In God we trust. All others should be bullwhipped.”

I saw Brenda walking toward us from the back of the club, wrapped in a black dressing gown that covered less than half of her upper significance. On the stage Consuela was removing, as a final gesture, her minimal loin string, revealing a shaded blur that vanished in the all-but-black light that went with that ultimate moment.

I stood to greet Brenda, her eyes heavily mascaraed, her red lipstick outlined in black, her shining black hair loose to her shoulders. I bussed her cheek, offered her my bar stool, then introduced her to Giselle as “my good friend Brenda, who has done everything a woman of her profession is ever asked to do by men.”

“And what is your profession, Brenda?” Giselle asked.

“She’s a dancer,” I said.

“I didn’t ask you, I asked Brenda.”

“Is this really your wife, Orson?”

“She really is,” I said. “Isn’t she lovely?”

“I’m a dancer,” Brenda said to Giselle. “What’s your profession, honey?”

“Giselle is a photographer,” I said.

“You take my picture,” Brenda said, “I’ll take yours,” and she parted the skirt of her gown and spread her legs.

“Is that what you’d like me to photograph?” Giselle asked.

“No,” said Brenda. “That’s my camera.”

“She has a sense of humor, your Brenda,” Giselle said.

“She’s had dinner with Juan Perón, she’s stripped for the Prince of Wales. Is there anything you haven’t experienced, Brenda?” I asked.