William Gass - Eyes - Novellas and Stories

Not that key, please.

You’re pounding me. When you surprise me I don’t sound. Otherwise I am so — teal…What do you mean I’m a mockup like the plane? Sure, they treated me like a toy. I can complain of their treatment, but — hey — I rise sweet in the morning…I do so have all the necessary keys. Maybe I don’t treble up as far as some do, but you’ve just been hitting the wrong ones is all. The ones that have received maltreatment…That woman who plays the tango — hell — she sways there strumming the handle of her guitar. Might as well be a broomstick. And nobody minds…You can’t play either, honey. Scatman Crothers — I bet he could make a plank plink.

The Ending? You want an ending?…The whiny creep — a joker on every set, I hear — used to put out the cigarette that Boots and Britches was eternally burning with an eye-drop of his urine applied to its glowing tip. How’s that for going out with a snizzle?

Yes. Yes. Vichy Water filled me in about the ENDING. It — the bottle’s label with the bottle on it — was taken to the hangar for the dénouement — don’t be surprised, I have a range if not every key — music does not acknowledge the barriers of tongues — okay, the climax — anyway did they blow that! Blow! Blow! Blow! Captain Frog has been ordering Champagne cocktails the entire film — did you notice that nobody finishes their drink but Rick? — you can tell he cares about something — and Captain Frog brings his war ribbons and a bottle of Vichy to the send-off. He celebrates the moment with dead fizzy water? Nobody opens it for him, it is just at hand like the U.S. marines. And we know why. So he can drop the Vichy bottle into the wastebasket at a summational moment. Vichy told me itself how the camera followed it into its hole like a rat after cheese.

There were so many changes they had to use colored pages to keep the actors’ heads straight about them: blue, pink, salmon, green. Now this you’re going to like. This guy’s name I’m going to remember like I remembered Scheid because it’s part of the joke. Stucke. His name was Stucke. Like some of my keys. He brought the pages to the set. That’s why everybody knew the entire movie was—. Right. And in that way, too — from stuck to stuck so to speak — the production stumbled toward the truth of what they were trying to do — achieve a perfect mix of chauvinism and schmaltz.

Enduring qualities, you’ll agree.

You want me to explain? Pianos don’t explain. We riff, we run, we trill, we even thunder, but we don’t explain. The inexplicable is the order of the day here. Chauvinism is reflected in the war of songs, ONE; in issues of duty, TWO; in Strasser’s devotion to the Nazi party, THREE; in Ilsa’s husband’s selfless nobility, FOUR; in the Frog’s subservience, FIVE; and schmaltz…schmaltz in the character of the conflict between duty and indulgence…where?…when they’re at odds in the same official like the Frog, by the tug of war between duty and love in Ilsa, and betweeeeeeen love and indulgence in Rick.

Vichy said the scene was shot in a homemade fog. Rick and Ilsa are trying to enjoy a farewell clinch, and Rick says — Vichy swears he says — Rick is trying to be persuasive — he’s been a real prick about Paris — so she loves him all the more — what a dumb doll — anyway — he says something like our troubles are but bubbles in this messed-up world, we don’t even amount to a hill of beans — something like that — I say how high is the hill? how big are the beans? — anyway — then he says — Vichy swears he says — someday you’ll understand that. That’s what the condescending bastard says to a dame who’s married to a freedom fighter on the run from an army of Fascist thugs. She’ll understand that! I remember one night Rick sits in the set and drinks a fifth of 100-proof self-pity because his honey didn’t leave her hero for…what did Rick have to offer?…his hill of beans. It’s not a sad note. To end on. It’s a sour note.

But Vichy says the movie ends happily with the two self-indulgent party pals, Rick and Frog, disappearing slowly in the mist, Frog rid of duty, Rick rid of love, both looking forward to a life of boffery and bourbon, or, if you prefer, complaisance and Champagne.

Don’t run off, dear.

I’ve got an idea for a horror movie. Objects — see — in this movie — come alive. How or why remains to be worked out. They come alive and take over. I am this monstrous alien life form with a mile-wide mouth of teeth. When some ham hand lays a finger on me I bite it off. I just nip the tip. Neat as though it were all nail. Walk on me, will ya? And I scowl.

Whattya think?

Hey, I made a plink.

Try that one again.

—

With thanks to

Aljean Harmetz. Round Up the Usual Suspects . New York: Hyperion, 1992.

Jeff Siegel. The Casablanca Companion . Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1992.

When we were born you wouldn’t believe the fuss that was made over us: so many, so fit, so simultaneous. People drove by our mother’s house and dropped off gifts and small change. We were tiny, especially when we were folded up. Crowds waited — patiently, I must say — to see us, maybe through a window when we were carried across the parlor, or during the few hours every day that people were permitted to walk through the kitchen to look at us lined up on the linoleum pretty much as we are here, only with not so much gray hair. Ha ha! I’m the only one of us with a sense of humor.

We’re still together as you can see, even after all these years: that’s Deadly Reckoning on your left, the one of us who received so much press; and Barry Buttock is next — we got around to calling him that on account of his constant complaining about the burdens he bore every day of his life, well, we were all weighed down from time to time (I always told him he hadn’t a leg to stand on — ha ha! — he’d say he had four); then Overly Neighborly is on Butt’s left, neighbor to me, always wedged in as we customarily were, but he seemed to enjoy it; then I’m in the middle — I was always in the middle — positioned below the paper pinned to a coat hook, the one that has curled like a burnt worm for being so long in a room moist with razor washings and shampoos; now we come to Commander Prince Paul who looks to me pretty much like the rest of us but one who fancied himself some sort of exiled African royalty, compelled for political reasons (that he pretended threatened his safety) to endure our life of required labor and enforced comradeship by parking against the wall of Walter’s barbershop in Natchez, Mississippi, waiting, the guys say, like the taxi girls down the street, to be of use, but fearing (as the Commander insisted) to be found out and snapped into shackles on the spot.

We were all born together despite Prince Paul’s preposterous mytherations, and healthy as bean sprouts, but Perce was without the entirety of his equipment — a front strut — though it never seemed to interfere with his duties which he carried out with as much enthusiasm as the rest of us…not much — ha ha! — yet an infirmity that sharp-eyed customers were bound to notice.

They’d pick up a comical magazine from Walt’s rack to stay busy-headed while they were waiting their turn; then often leave it in Perce’s lap when a barber became available, since some folks didn’t want to settle down on a chair with no front strut. Perce wants me to say that all of us were fitted with those safety braces once but that Perce lost his in a terrible accident, and because of this unfortunate omission nobody would make use of him, just politely shy away and put their reading on his lap instead of lowering their anatomy. If it suits him in his heart to say it went that way, why not say it that way, say I.