Exquisite Corpse - Issue 4
HomeSearchSubmitCorpse CafeArchivesCorpse MallOur Gang
issue 4 home | ec chair | broken news | critical urgencies | burning bush
ficciones | secret agents | stage & screen | letters | gallery
C L E V E R
by Andrew L. Wilson

He walked back into the room where they were all sitting around. He sat and smirked at them. He was holding a drink. He jiggled the ice in the drink and took a sip of it. Then he smirked again. He heard someone say something clever.
     He said something clever about what had just been said.
     There was a pause, a few gargled laughs.
     More ice clinking.
     Then he added a clever saying to the saying he had just said, and this addition drew more gently appreciative laughter and some fond looks from the ladies with bare arms--one in a black pullover with dangly earrings, the other a spit-shine buffed-to-the-shins blonde with shining hair in a red knit dress that moved pleasantly whenever/wherever she did.
     Ha ha, someone said.
     Then someone else spoke up to add something clever.
     Smirks of appreciation and self-congratulation went all around.
     He got up and walked to the fireplace and stared at a print framed over the mantle and, with his back turned to the bare armed ladies and the throaty-voiced gentlemen, said something else, this apercu only mildly clever, but there were more laughs and the excitement soared. He was commanding the room like a drill sergeant with his clever sayings.
     Then the hostess came in and sat down, crossing her long legs, and touched the pearls at her brown neck with idle fingertips and said something meant to be clever which wasn't quite, but appreciative laughs swelled up just because, well, she was giving the party, and since she was rich and good looking, she didn't have to be clever, just capable. And she was all that and more.
     Henry, Iris, Mike, George, Daphne, and Perdilla.
     Perdilla lives with Mike in a quiet little house in the dunes. Actually the house is on stilts so the sea when it storm surges can rush under it without sweeping the whole shingled pile away. Perdilla owns a chain of beauty salons. Mike is a well-groomed alcoholic with glossy hair that looks like he parts it with the same razor he uses for shaving. He's drunk but never sloppy. He has blue eyes and a way of looking at your mouth when you say something clever the way a cat stares at the hole a mouse has just popped its head out of.
     George is the one who keeps saying the clever things. His mouth barely moves as he does. He touches his own eyelids quite often. It's a tick he might have picked up from Alec Guinness movies. He's got a quiet way of speaking. Is that a hint of an English accent I hear? Did he have his buttocks whipped at Eaton? No. He's as American as you or me, but he's unusual in being clever, and because people treat him with such deference for his huge wit he's assumed the silky shades of Englishness. It's a verbal mask that gives him some added dimension at these events. He's more of a projection than a man, a kind of moving shadow. He flickers rather than talks. You get his meaning before his words are finished being said. That's because he slows it down. He doesn't speed it up as inferior showmen do. He gets you excited and he slows it down. Then you're the one straining for release and he's just the man to give it to you.
     Shut up, Iris suddenly said to Henry. She touched his arm and smiled to show she'd been kidding, but no one there was taken in. She'd meant it. Henry's face turned a whiter shade of pale. He moved his lips but no sounds came out. Then a stream of inarticulate protest noises. Hush, Iris, said, patting his wrist. It's all right, baby. The others turned back to their drinks. George sat down again and gazed at the hostess' pearls. She went on tracing them with the tip of a forefinger. George was imagining her tracing the engorged vein in his rampant cock like that.
     George was thinking that he'd like to be clever with Daphne in some different venue than this, maybe in a candlelight-splashed restaurant. Rain, he thought. It would have to be raining. Why rain? Because it's erotic. At least in the old movies it is.
     He shivered and for a moment was at a complete loss to think of anything clever when she spoke to him across the space of the sitting room to ask if he had read the nauseating new book that was on all the bestseller lists and was making a fortune for her good friend Robert Jones, the publisher.
     George had read the book and found it ridiculous and he said so. It wasn't clever but it was something. The others were attentive to him, drinks poised so the ice didn't drown him out by clinking, possibly because they assumed he would reply in his clever mode, and when he didn't there was a general feeling of let-down that manifested itself only in a twitch of Mike's left wrist and a light spasm that went through Iris, contorting her cherry-red lips.
     Henry said, What?
     Oh, Iris said. Shut up, Henry.
     She patted him.
     Just shut up.

_________

      Henry stared at his shoes. Iris laughed a bright fulsome laugh. George smiled, his thin lips stretching almost ear to ear.
     Iris's only clever moment at these things, always, was when she told Henry to shut up. But the line got laughs so she kept on using it.
__________

      Perdilla doesn't talk much. She's harsh on the subject of other people but she adores her alcoholic beau. That's what she likes to call him. They have fun together, drinking and whatnot, in their house on stilts perched like a stork in the dunes of Montauk. Mist comes in and then the sun burns it away and they go down to the beach to swim and to loll around on the sand. So that's their story. Then she goes back to the city and makes herself crazy trying to focus totally on work while Mike sits at home drinking during the days and working on his unfinished novel, Drunk, then going to the bars at night to pick up the big-haired, loudmouth types he adores but Perdilla can't stand. He always has a roll of cash. He holds the bills in place with a gold clip. He gets a fresh-looking town girl into his car and drives her down to the sea. Feel the wind, it's grand. I love how it just slaps your face down here. They're walking along the cliffs. She's in the arm-clinging mode, almost as drunk as him. He wants to talk about anything but what they've come down here for. Finally she grabs him around the hips and, standing on tiptoe, tries to thrust her tongue into his mouth.. Hey! he says, laughing.

__________
     

      George is staring at Daphne's finger. He's hypnotized. Daphne, teeth flashing, is laughing loudly at something Henry has just said.
     Shut up, Henry, Iris cries, practically strangling on her merriment.
     
________

      Exterior. Day, almost. George is striding, windbreakered and Nike-shod, along the beach, and then he breaks into a run that scatters seagulls. He's running swift as a god across the hard slanting planes of gray sand on which surf is spreading as the waves break with hollow thumps. Rosy fingered dawn is spreading her legs and showing the pink inside.
     As George dashes, whuffing, along the beach, he shuts his eyes and thinks about churning inside Iris, and the shush and thump and roar of surf is his accompaniment to these lewd rememberings in which Iris is pumping against him with all her might and clutching him like a teddy bear to her breast as the orgasm rakes her up in its talons.
     He stops, bends over, and grabs his knees. He's sweating through his tracksuit. His face is dripping. He's out of wind; his side aches. His eyes squeezed tightly shut, he visualizes his heart, suddenly, as a writhing paper-machª dragon with a tail of exploding firecrackers.
     Is this it? he wonders. His mind flounders in search of a barbed witticism. Why not go out with a punch line, like Voltaire or Oscar Wilde?
     Abbe: Come, now, Monsieur Voltaire. Won't you, even on your deathbed, consent to renounce Satan and all his works?
     Voltaire: I ask you, Father--is this really the time to be making enemies?
     Oscar Wilde: Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.

_________

      First sentence of Drunk: a novel, by Mike Desmond: This is just the book to give to your sister--if your sister is a loud, dirty, boozy girl.

_________

      Exterior, brilliant day.  Mike and George are seated in fluttering grape-arbor shade on the terrace outside Ristorante Caligula.  Mike is raving about his new girlfriend, June, with wide gestures that slop his martini over the sides of the glass.
     What can I say, Mike asks, his blue eyes fixed on George's. When I first saw this girl she was holding a book in front of her face: Crazy Cock, by Henry Miller! I knew right then I had to get into those tight-fitting riding breeches.
     George laughs, listening to this discourse. Why not? Mike's fun.
     But he's also bored enough to begin thinking, almost idly, about the rain-soaked afternoon he picked up  a tense Perdilla at the train station in Connecticut. He drove her to his house in silence. He remembers how bastingly hot her skin felt as they slid together into the cold, stiff sheets of his master bed. She grabbed him right away--it was like she'd been waiting for it all her life.
     He can't help but think about Perdilla--gawky, yet somehow angelic--performing on Mike in exactly the same manner.
     He gets prickly from arousal. Then, listening to Mike action-paint her portrait with crazy, slurred words, he finds he's thinking schemingly about this June. Maybe he could find some excuse to--

______

      George waved a hand for the waiter. The waiter, a white-haired, staggering Italian vecchio, lurched  to tableside.
     George, slouching like a king in his seat, asked in clipped Italian for a bottle of acqua minerale, frizzante.
     Si, Signore, rasped the waiter.
     Grazie, George said, lingering on the last syllable as is done in the bright Tuscan hills. (Gratz-YEH.) (Ah, the bright Tuscan hills in springtime. Primavera. Dust settling on the roads, and dim trifoil fountains burbling streams of water over the stomachs of naked cherubs.)
     Prego, murmured the waiter, shaking with Parkinson's or palsy as he staggered off into the restaurant to retrieve another of the green, moisture-flecked bottles.
     George swung his smiling head, like a drowsily attentive lizard, back to Mike, who immediately started extolling the virtues of this interesting June person.
     Did you read that one? George asked Mike suddenly.
     What? Mike asked, nonplussed.
     That novel you say she was reading. Crazy Cock.
     Uh, Mike said, blinking. No.
     George smiled from ear to ear.
     It's fabulous.
     Is it?
     Well, it's not anything close to the quality of Drunk.
     Mike's eyes grew wet.  He loved having his art praised. He took any praise as a confirmation of the importance of his person in the great scheme of things.

_____

      Interior. Night. George settles down in his leather club chair with the manuscript box containing the laser-printed pages of Drunk on his lap, and begins picking out pages. He balls up each page as he reads it, throwing the balls, with devastating accuracy, across the room at the snout of his mild-mannered Irish terrier, Jack. The reddish dog, his paws extended Sphinx-like and his damp eyes blinking, merely winces each time a ball of paper bounces off of his muzzle.
     At the end of each page, George says, Delightful.
     Crumple.
     Toss.
     Soon, the dog is surrounded by wads of crushed paper.
     George stops at one particular page, and his eyes widen. He reads it several times, then, crumpling it in his fist, shakes his head. He places a hand over his eyes. He shakes with laugher.
     Jacko, old boy, George finally says, in a silken murmur. Come here.
     The dog whines and comes.
     George holds out a ball of paper. Jack takes the ball in his mouth and, whining again, lies down and begins to chew on the ball.
     George picks up his snifter of Oban scotch in one hand as he pats the dog's silky head with the other.
     Wonderful dog, wonderful, he says. If only you could write novels. Huh?

_____

      Mike's mouth is wet. He's ordered another martini, which the trembling waiter places before him after scooping up the empty glass of the last. Mike laughs and  sticks his thick fingers into the drink to pick out the shining olive, which he tosses in the air and catches in his open jaws on the descending arc.
     George claps;  Mike  takes a hearty, blushing bow.
     You're as good as Jacko at that, George says.
     Mike has worked himself up into a bit of a frenzy about June. George shifts listlessly on the metal chair as he feigns amusement at Mike's descriptions of what his hard-riding girlfriend is like in bed.
     George's mind is on a number of other things besides Mike and his pulchritudinous book. Drunk is not only objectionable from various established moral points of view--you can excuse that in a Joyce or a Fitzgerald--it's not even really that clever.  But the worst thing about this lunch isn't Mike. It's sitting in the wincing-hot sunlight, and getting served one's lunch with excruciating slowness by the crippled Italian.
     When the waiter brings the bread and a beaker of luridly green olive oil--at last!--George tries to engage him in some conversation by asking him what part of the country he's from.
     Roma, the old man says with chest-booming pride.
     Ah, George cries in mock-ecstasy. Rome!  It's exquisite. You know, I remember the artichokes the most.
     The old man's eyes fill with tears. He spreads his arms operatically and, clenching his fists, draws them in so they are jammed against his skinny chest.
     Mike is watching, fascinated.
     Slowly, the old man brings his fists up to chin height and, extending the fingers rigidly, turns his face to the blazingly blue vault of sky.
     Ah! he cries. The artichokes!
     After he's left the table, Mike, giggling, says to George:
     You sly dog. You always know how to get people going.
     Ah, George says.
     Shrug.
     
_____

      George isn't recalling the Roman artichokes, as succulent as they taste when drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice and served with a pinch of coarse salt, but other things. Such as the pale nudity of the girl who climbed onto his cock as he stood with his back pressed to a damp, crumbling wall inside the Colosseum. As the girl bucked on him, he was excited almost to slavering by the gasps and groans of many couples hidden in niches or screwing brazenly against the fallen columns. The smells of vaginal mucous and sperm thickened the warm night air.
     She moaned into his mouth little delicate Italian phrases; he had never been so charmed.
     
_____

      Mike pushes away the half-finished plate of risotto and pats his belly. George licks his fingers for the last juices of the clams he has picked out of his linguine con vongole.
     What do you think of this place? George asks.
     Mike, as he pours himself more Corvo bianco:
     Amazing!
     George lifts a finger to the waiter, who hobbles over and stands panting above them in sunlight.
     A sorbetto di limone? George asks.
     Si, huffs the waiter.
     George extends two long fingers.
     Due sorbetti per favore. E anchedue esspressi.
     Si, Signore.
_____
     
      George lifts the demitasse to his lips and, blowing on its foamy contents,  delicately sips.
     Delicious, he murmurs. Your better Italian establishment will give you an espresso ringed with crema. Such is the case here.
     Mike ignores his caffe espresso. He's slopping the last of the wine into his glass.
     George puts down his cup on its saucer and suddenly says, with dark enthusiasm pitched to sound brightly false:
     So! --this girl who's saddled you up.  This June.
     Yes?
     When do I get to behold her fine young figure in the flesh?
     Mike laughs.
     Well, I don't know. Soon. Hey--you don't plan on taking her away from me, do you?
     George smiles. Shrugs.
     Only if she consents.

To be continued...

Links:

L I N N A E A N S T R E E T, edited by Andrew Wilson
http://www.linnaeanstreet.com

Current Web publications:
http://www.etext.org/Fiction/Paumanok
http://www.thewag.net

Email: wilsonbrosa@mediaone.net

issue 4 home | ec chair | broken news | critical urgencies | burning bush
ficciones | secret agents | stage & screen | letters | gallery

corpse home | search | submit | corpse cafe | archives | corpse mall | our gang
Exquisite Corpse Mailing List Subscribe Unsubscribe

©1999-2002 Exquisite Corpse - If you experience difficulties with this site, please contact the webmistress.