"AHA!" Simon says.
"Not too bad," says Veronica.
"Ill have another," Ralph says. He puts a ten on the bar.
"Me too," says Veronica.
"Ill go along," Simon says.
"You two getting it on, or what?" Ralph asks.
"Just acquaintances," Veronica says. "Mere ac?quaintances."
"Dont look like mere acquaintances to me," Ralph says. "I have a feel for that sort of thing. Theres a way people look. They kind of lean toward each other."
"This music is a little muddy," Simon says. The jukebox is playing a Madonna number, "Into the Groove".
"You mean conceptually?" Veronica asks.
"I mean the sound."
"I dont care," Ralph says. "If you two are getting it on. Im just an old friend. If you two are getting it on, Im happy for you. This kid is not my type, actually. I love her, but shes not my type. We spent the night to?gether once, and it was a damp, damp evening. Many, many tears. You remember?"
"Dont remind me. I remember."
"The Brown Palace," Ralph says. "Denvers finest."
"You were trying very hard," Veronica says.
"I always try very hard. One of the nicest things about me. But you just sat there and wept, all night long. First I said to myself, Ralph, what is this? Is this a tactic? Is this a maneuver? If its a tactic, whats the objective? I couldnt see an objective. So I decided it was grief, real grief."
"It was grief."
"So I said to myself, how am I to deal with this real, genuine grief? Room service? Booze? What?"
"Booze we already had."
"Stuff a cold, starve a fever," Ralph says. "I decided this was more in the cold area. We had their twenty-two dollar prime rib, if you remember."
"I had just busted up with Jack."
"So were sitting there tearing up this twenty-two-dollar prime rib in the Brown Palace at four oclock in the morning and she tells me I have a relentlessly pedestrian mind. Remember that?"
"I guess I was in a bad mood or something."
"I was not unaware of that," Ralph says. "Neverthe?less it hurt me, at the time. Now I can laugh about it."
"I was probably too drunk to be as sensitive as I am when Im not drunk," she says.
"You were pretty unhappy. You were probably thinking, what am I doing in this hotel room with this bozo?"
"I never thought of you that way. I always thought of you as kind of a friend."
"I just bought a new Mazda, gold in color," Ralph says. "People who are referred to as kind of a friend tend to buy cars that are gold in color."
"Now youre feeling sorry for yourself," Veronica says. "Stop it."
"Back to Denver," Ralph says. "Denver and my gold Mazda."
"This rounds on me," Simon says. "The same again? Everybody?"
IN the first dream he was grabbed by three or four cops for firing a chrome-plated .45 randomly in the street. He had no idea where he had gotten the .45 or why it was chrome-plated. In the second dream he awoke sitting on a lounge in a hotel lobby wearing pants and shoes but bare-chested. "Ive got to find a shirt," he thought. Then he was in an apartment, which he recognized, trying to find a shirt. People were sleeping in the apartment and he kept banging into cymbals on stands placed here and there. He couldnt find a shirt. His mother came out of a closet and asked him to be a little quieter.
A sober conversation with Anne. "Tim asked Dore to come to work for Medlapse," she says. "Hell make her a vice-president. To begin with, though, shell have to be the secretary."
"Its got crash-and-burn written all over it."
"Shell be a vice-president."
"Like being vice-president of a bag of popcorn."
"I know," Anne says, sighing. "God I hate being a secretary. I did it for three years in Denver. These ass?holes telling you what to do."
"If you could do whatever you wanted --"
"Id like to be an independent oil operator. There were a lot of those at home. Real party guys. Great hearts."
"Well," Simon says, "thats a skill too. You have to know how to con banks."
"I had one semester of geology."
"Maybe law school?"
"Terrible."
"You dont know that for a fact."
"Im a total failure."
"Begin."
When the women began to get angry, Simon had not known quite how to react. They surprised him. He had, after all, done little more than give them a place to stay, feed them, sleep with them and talk to them, extending good Christian fellowship. But they had to be mad at somebody, he understood that, and even if they were mad at themselves still that was only starting the en?gine, as it were, the vehicle still had to go somewhere, win a race, explode, even. Veronica had come in one day with a headline from the National Enquirer,
BOY PRODUCES
100 YARDS OF
THREAD FROM
HIS RIGHT EYE
and said, "What can you do, Simon?"
Some days they were angry with him, some days they were angry with each other. Four people, many possibili?ties. Each person could be angry at any given point with one, two, or three others, or angry at the self. Two people could be angry at a third, three people at a fourth. He reached forty-nine possibilities before his math expired.
Their movement through the world required young men, a class to which he did not belong. Simon liked young men, within reasonable limits, and approved, in general, of the idea of young men and young women sleeping together in joyous disregard of history, eco?nomics, building codes. Let them have their four hun?dred square feet. Veronica liked garage apartments. Perhaps the young men would do well in the world, at?tend the new branch of Harvard Business in Gainesville, market a black bean soup that would rage through Miami like rabies or a voice attenuator capable of turn?ing crackers into lisping Brits, and end up with seven thousand square feet in Paris on the Ile de la Cite. Young men had stiff pricks and smelled good, by and large, almost as good as babies. Young women bounced up and down on your chest and dazzled you with a thousand unexpected attacks. Simon counted the ways in which he was God-visited.
Sarah calls. "Do you know what shes done?" she asks. Shes referring to her mother.
"What?"
"Fallen in love."
Simon is astonished. "With whom?"
"The mayor. And hes married."
"Good God thats terrible."
"She was crying on my shoulder all last night."
"Oh Lord. Can I do anything?"
"Talk to her?"
"Would she want to talk to me about this?"
"I guess not. She said you were what she was trying to get away from."
"I understand that. I understood that a long time ago."
"Dont be bitter."
"Simple statement of fact. People get too much of each other. Civility goes away, finally."
"Yeah I think youd better butt out. Not that youve had so much to do with the affairs of your Philadelphia group lately."
"Well. Do you have enough money?"
"Daddy youve been asking me that since I was thir?teen."
"Its a reflex. Listen, Sarah, is there anything I can do for her, do you think? Or would it be better if I didnt know about it?"
"I think she wants you to know about it. Theres nothing you can do about it."
"Is he in love with her?"
"Hes a mayor. He needs a lot of love. More than other people. Oceans."
How does she know so much? "Keep me posted," he says.
"I dropped Ways of Being, the East."
"Why?"
"It was boring and the guy lectured into his tie, mostly."
Veronicas trampoline is leaning against the wall and Veronica is throwing books at it to see how far they will bounce. Buddenbrooks in a paper edi?tion bounces a good twelve feet. Dore is painting her legs red, with a two-inch brush and a big jar into which she has crumbled bright red Easter-egg glazes. Anne is threatening to cut off her long hair. She stands poised, a hank in one hand, scissors in the other, daring anyone to interfere. "Anybody messes with me gets the scissors in the medulla." Simon senses unrest.
A terrible night. Simon is in bed by ten, taking a Scotch for company. Anne and Dore are now watching television. Veronica is out somewhere. About ten-thirty Anne comes into the room, strips, and gets into bed with him.
"Im chilly," she says.
He turns her on her stomach and begins to stroke her back, gently. A very sculptural waist, narrowing sud?denly under the rib cage and then the hipbones flaring.
When Anne leaves to go back to her own bed, at two, Dore appears in the doorway.
"Are you all tired?" she asks.
"Probably." Dore climbs into the bed, clumsily, peels off her jeans and bikini pants, retaining the tank top which shes cut raggedly around the neck in the style of the moment. She takes his cock in hand and re?gards it thoughtfully.
"Im sad and depressed," she says. "I feel useless. All I do is sit around and watch MTV."
"What do you want to do?"
"Something. But I dont know what."
"Lot of people in the same position," Simon says.
"I dont want to be a lawyer and I dont want to be a wife. I dont want to be a musician. What does that leave?"
"Be bad. Imagine something bad."
"Like what?"
"I have to tell you what to imagine?"
She looks at him. "There was this guy once. He asked me, are you a swallower or a spitter?"
"Whatd you say?"
"He was a doctor. They tend to be crude."
He struggles around the bed and begins to kiss the insides of her thighs. "This is a terrible night."
"Why?"
"You guys arent solving your problems. I cant help you very much." His hands are splayed out over her back, moving up and down, over the shoulders and down to the splendid buttocks. Thinking of buttercups and butterflies and flying buttresses and butts of malm?sey.
"Veronica has a rash," she says, coming up for air.
"What kind of a rash?"
"Dark red. Looks like a wine stain."
"Where is it?"
"Youll see."
Saliva is running down his cock, token of enthusi?asm.
Veronica walks in. "What is taking place here?" she asks, in a voice like thunder.
AFTER the women had departed Simon set up a small office in a barely renovated building on West Broadway. He was on the fourth floor, there was no air conditioning, and the big open windows brought in the clamor of the street, sirens, rape, outrage. His partners in Philadelphia sent him small jobs, much as one might UPS a fruitcake or a brace of pheasant to one recov?ering from an illness, with the implication that they were to be enjoyed not now but later, when he was stronger. He sat at his draughting table, a hollow-core door resting on carpenters sawhorses, sketching on tracing paper with a felt pen. The problem was an of?fice for a small foundation which had leased space in a very good block in the East Seventies. The difficulty was that although there were floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street in the existing building, very little light reached the nether regions. He had designed a light scoop to be affixed to the rear of the building, but fig?ured that the cost would be pro hibitive. The fire escape was placed precisely where the tubing for the light scoop would have to go, and light scoops dont work very well anyhow, as both the tygers of wrath and the horses of instruction had taught him. Blake also had something to say about foundations:
Pity is become a trade, and generosity a science, That men get rich by ...
But thats a little hard, he thought, these people are doing the best they can, piloting worthy projects through the swamps of Inanition. To be working again felt very good.
SIMON thinks about Paradise. On the great throne, a naked young woman, her back to the viewer. Simon looks around for Onan, doesnt see him. Onan didnt make it to Paradise? Seems unfair. Great deal of marble about, he notices, shades of rose and terra-cotta; Paradise seems to have been designed by Edward Durell Stone. Science had worked out a way to cremate human remains, reduce the ashes to the size of a bouil?lon cube, and fire the product into space in a rocket, solving the Forest Lawn dilemma. Simon had once done a sketch problem on tomb sculpture, for his soph?omore Visual Awareness course. No more tomb sculp?ture.
Paradise unearned. It was, rather, a gift, in this way theologically unsound. It was a state or condition vis?ited upon him, like being in the Army. Simon had walked around in green fatigues for most of two years, doing the best he could from day to day, sometimes carrying drunken comrades back to the barracks at night, outside Stuttgart, in a firemans lift. His days were spent in meaningless maneuvers with giant weap?ons which the Army was afraid to fire for fear they wouldnt work. Mostly, when tested, they didnt. Simon read Stars & Stripes and very good mystery novels by John D. Macdonald. On leave in Berlin he tried to find buildings by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose work had not been lost on Mies. The women would soon be gone. The best thing he could do was to listen to them.
"Ive had twenty-six years practice in standing up. I can do it," Anne says.
Shes wearing sweat pants with a dark gray crewneck sweater and medium-gray Reeboks. Shes been drinking tequila and shes terribly drunk.
"I want to tell you something."
"What?"
"You think were dumb bunnies."
"What makes you think that?"
"Your attitude."
Simons been reading Audubon Action, "Arizona Dam Project Faces New Challenge."
"Whats my attitude?"
"I see fatigue and disgust."
"Sweetie, thats not true."
"Dont call me sweetie."
"Anne," he says, "you want to sit down?"
"You think were not bright enough for you."
"Youre as bright as anybody. I mean it."
"You have an attitude of disdain. Sticks out all over you."
"Just not so."
"Veronica thinks you want us out."
"No. Untrue."
"She thinks your mind is wandering."
"Thats what my mind does. Wander. Right now Im thinking about the furniture of Paradise."
"What is it?"
"Knoll, basically." He pushes a sketch pad toward her. "But you see they havent allowed for the angels who have only one wing, so Im trying to --"
"The angels have only one wing?" she says in aston?ishment.
"Some angels have only one wing." He shows her an old engraving in which a single-winged angel is pic?tured.
"How can they fly with only one wing?"
"What makes you think they fly? In the literal sense?"
"Ive always seen them with two wings."
"Artists like symmetry."
"He looks imperfect."
"You can get a lot accomplished with one wing. Fan the flames and lead the orchestra. I saw Buddy Rich, the drummer, play with a broken arm one night. Did more with one hand and his two feet than --"
"But itd be like having only one breast." He slips a hand inside her shirt. Her breasts are bare. "If Id spent the same amount of time worrying about my mind as I have worrying about my chest, Id be Hegel by now," she says. "I mean since thirteen."
"Old Hegel."
"Dont be so snotty. We have Hegel in Denver."
"Hegel is quite sexy. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis."
"You think thats where he got the idea?"
"Could be."
Simon positions the white plaster egg eight feet tall in the sitting room. The women are watching. He smashes it with an iron-headed maul. Inside are three naked young men. Their names are Harry.