She said, “I thought it was an obscene display.”
Arcadius didn’t contradict her.
Later, after they had circled round the base of the larger hill, the path sloped upward and grew dryer. The trees fell away on their left and permitted a view eastward across Alexa’s melon fields. Hundreds of bodies were scattered over the trampled scenery. Merriam hid her eyes but it was not so easy to escape the scent of decay, which mingled, almost pleasantly, with the odor of smashed, fermenting melons.
“Oh dear,” said Arcadius, realizing that their path would lead them straight through the midst of the carnage.
“Well, we’ll have to do it—that’s all,” Merriam said, lifting her chin with a show of defiance. She took his hand and they walked through the field of defeated barbarians as quickly as they could.
Later, Lottie came up looking for her. “I was wondering if you were all right.”
“Thank you. I just needed a breath of air.”
“The plane crashed, you know.”
“No, I hadn’t heard any more than you told me.”
“Yes—it crashed into a MODICUM project at the end of Christopher Street. One-seventy-six.”
“Oh, that’s awful.”
“But the building was just going up. No one was killed but a couple of electricians.”
“That’s a miracle.”
“I thought you might like to come down and watch the teevee with us. Mom is making Koffee.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“Good.” Lottie held open the door. The stairwell had achieved evening a couple hours in advance of the day.
On the way downstairs Alexa mentioned that she thought she could arrange for Amparo to get a scholarship at the Lowen School.
“Would that be good?” Lottie asked, and then, embarrassed by her question, “I mean—I’ve never heard of it till just now.”
“Yes, I think it’s pretty good. My son Tancred will be going there next year.”
Lottie seemed unpersuaded.
Mrs. Hanson stood outside the door of the apartment gesturing frantically. “Hurry up, hurry up! They’ve found the boy’s mother, and they’re going to interview her.”
“We can talk about it more later,” Alexa said.
Inside, on the teevee, the boy’s mother was explaining to the camera, to the millions of viewers, what she couldn’t understand.
Emancipation:
A Romance of the Times to Come
1
Summer mornings the balcony would fill up with bona-fide sunshine and Boz would spread open the recliner and lie there languid as something tropical in their own little basin of private air and ultraviolet fifteen floors above entrance level. Just watching, half-awake, the vague geometries of jet trails that formed and disappeared, formed and disappeared in the pale cerulean haze. Sometimes you could hear the dinky preschoolers on the roof piping their nursery rhymes in thin, drugged voices.
A Boeing buzzing from the west brings the boy that I love best. But a Boeing from the east…
Just nonsense, but it taught directions, like north and south. Boz, who had no patience with Science, always confused north and south. One was uptown, one was downtown—why not just call them that? Of the two, uptown was preferable. Who wants to be MOD, after all? Though it was no disgrace: his own mother, for instance. Human dignity is more than a zipcode number, or so they say.
Tabbycat, who was just as fond of sunshine and out-of-doors as Boz, would stalk along the prestressed ledge as far as the rubber plant and then back to the geraniums, very sinister, just back and forth all morning long, and every so often Boz would reach up to stroke the soft sexy down of her throat and sometimes when he did that he would think of Milly. Boz liked the mornings best of all.
But in the afternoons the balcony fell into the shadow of the next building and though it remained almost as warm it didn’t do anything for his tan, so in the afternoon Boz had to find something else to do.
Once he had studied cooking on television but it had nearly doubled the grocery bills, and Milly didn’t seem to care whether Boz or Betty Crocker made her omelette fine herbes, and he had to admit himself that really there wasn’t that much difference. Still, the spice shelf and the two copper-bottom pans he had given himself for Christmas made an unusual decorator contribution. The nice names spices have—rosemary, thyme, ginger, cinnamon—like fairies in a ballet, all gauze wings and toeshoes. He could see her now, his own little niecelette Amparo Martinez as Oregano Queen of the Willies. And he’d be Basil, a doomed lover. So much for the spice shelf.
Of course he could always read a book, he liked books. His favorite author was Norman Mailer and then Gene Stratton Porter. He’d read everything they’d ever written. But lately when he’d read for more than a few minutes he would develop really epic headaches and then be a complete tyrant to Milly when she came home from work. What she called work.
At four o’clock art movies on Channel 5. Sometimes he used the electromassage and sometimes just his hands to jerk off with. He’d read in the Sunday facs that if all the semen from the Metropolitan Area viewers of Channel 5 were put all together in one single place it would fill a medium-sized swimming pool. Fantastic? Then imagine swimming in it!
Afterwards he would lie spread out on the sofa that looked like a giant Baggie, his own little contribution to the municipal swimming pool drooling down the clear plastic and he would think glumly: There’s something wrong. Something is missing.
There was no romance in their marriage anymore, that’s what was wrong. It had been leaking out slowly, like air from a punctured Baggie chair, and one of these days she would mean it when she started talking about a divorce, or he would kill her with his own bare hands or with the electromassage, when she was ribbing him in bed, or something dreadful would happen, he knew it.
Something really dreadful.
At dusk, in bed, her breasts hung above him, swaying. Just the smell of her is enough, sometimes, to drive him up the walls. He brought his thighs up against the sweaty backside of her legs. Knees pressed against buttocks. One breast, then the other, brushed his forehead; he arched his neck to kiss one breast, then the other.
“Mm,” she said. “Continue.”
Obediently Boz slid his arms between her legs and pulled her forward. As he wriggled down on the damp sheets his own legs went over the edge of the mattress, and his toes touched her Antron slip, a puddle of coolness on the desert-beige rug.
The smell of her, the rotting sweetness, like a suet pudding gone bad in a warm refrigerator, the warm jungle of it turned him on more than anything else, and way down there at the edge of the bed, a continent away from these events, his prick swelled and arched. Just wait your turn, he told it, and rubbed his stubbly cheek against her thigh while she mumbled and cooed. If only pricks were noses. Or if noses …
The smell of her now with the damp furze of her veldt pressed into his nostrils, grazing his lips, and then the first taste of her, and then the second. But most of all the smell—he floated on it into her ripest darknesses, the soft and endless corridor of pure pollened cunt, Milly, or Africa, or Tristan and Isolde on the tape recorder, rolling in rose-bushes.
His teeth scraped against hair, snagged, his tongue pressed farther in and Milly tried to pull away just from the pleasure of it, and she said, “Oh, Birdie! Don’t!”
And he said, “Oh shit.”
The erection receded quickly as the image sinks back into the screen when the set is switched off. He slid out from under her and stood in the puddle, looking at her uplifted sweating ass.