So Hatcher and Mary Ellen sit shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye, and they each easily recognize the other and they each wonder Who is this stranger before me? And then he thinks What was I trying to say? and she thinks What was it I was trying to think of? And then Hatcher says, “I have to go,” and he understands this is so only as he says it. And at that moment their bodies tremble and the couch trembles and the room trembles and the building trembles and the whole of the Great Metropolis trembles and all of Hell trembles as from the horizon comes the grand solar boom of sunset, and the room goes black.
On the slow trip back to Hatcher’s apartment, the rear seat of the Duesenberg is dark and the car shudders from the jostling of the night crowd. He struggles to learn something about himself from his visit to Mary Ellen. What. He was arrogant. He was arrogant and self-absorbed. So what was the deal with her marrying him? He must have changed along the way. Arrogant and self-absorbed and stupid. Stupid like a man. But taking these things out of their conversation doesn’t do jack shit for him. These are just abstractions. He lived his life with her — made his mistakes — in a body, in the moment, and he doesn’t know which moments were the telling ones, and there were so many of them that he can’t even recall, and they are all gone, anyway, and there are no more to be had with her. And no one is listening. He would be happy if he was alone in the world, she says. The street is stuffed with bodies, the windows all around him are filled with an ever-changing mosaic of faces. He doesn’t see them. He closes his eyes. Half a dozen moon-white geisha faces smear past and are gone, and a Chattanooga Baptist Youth bowling team, and a cornrowed Snoop Dogg trying to mark the Dizzle’s rear whizzle but howling from the sizzle of his pizzle. Fo shizzle.
At last Hatcher steps from the car, his camcorder in hand. He hurries into the dark of his alley and along beneath the tenements and he climbs the circular staircase and emerges into his corridor. He certainly does not want to be the only person in the world tonight. He certainly longs to absorb himself in Anne. He will try not to be stupid with her. He even has Henry’s address to offer. Can that possibly be self-absorbed? He passes the Hoppers’ apartment, and their door is closed. He’s happy about that. But that doesn’t mean it’s all about him or that he wants the doors to be closed on everyone so he can be alone. He puts his hand to his own door and turns the knob.
“Darling, I’m home,” he cries even before the door is fully open.
And now it is.
Anne sits, in jeans and halter top, at one side of the kitchen table. Lulu, in nothing but her skin and furry wings, sits at the other. Hatcher thinks there might be something quite appealing about this only-person-in-the-world stuff after all.
He’s ready to back out of the door, but he understands that’s not possible now. He pretty much knows what’s on Lulu’s mind, so he focuses on Anne to try to read what has transpired and what her attitude is about it.
All he would have to fear from Anne is that she thinks he is anything but forced to go with Lulu. But Anne has never shown a trace of jealousy. It has always been him, and his jealousy has always been of that strange retrospective variety.
He can’t read her eyes. But she has her hand upon her throat, thumb to one side, her fingers to the other side, and she’s stroking herself there, out and back, out and back, like a man thoughtfully stroking his beard. She probably has never seen a succubus. May not have known they exist.
And in spite of the strange circumstances before him, his free and private mind takes this moment to reflect: my retrospective jealousy, isn’t that somehow a desire to be the only person in the world, with the only exception being the woman by whom my cosmic exclusivity is measured?
Anne says, “This lady claims she has an appointment with you.”
Lulu giggles her deep-throat giggle. “Oh you dear. Calling me a lady. She’s so very sweet, Hatcher.”
He can only nod.
Lulu says, “And aren’t I très discreet? ‘Appointment,’ my titties.”
Anne turns to the faux-Frenchified succubus and says, “I’m not stupid, dear.”
Lulu does not giggle at this. She reaches across the table and takes Anne’s hand, and Hatcher fears what Lulu might do. The two women look at each other steadily, and Lulu says, “I had an ‘appointment’ with your King Henry, once upon a time.”
“Did he keep it?”
“They all must, you know.”
“You’re lucky he didn’t marry you.”
Again Lulu doesn’t giggle. To distract the succubus from doing harm to Anne because of her snarkiness and, indeed, to satisfy his own newsman’s curiosity, Hatcher puts on the playful voice of their first meeting and asks, “Who else have you done we’d be surprised to know about, you naughty Lulu you?”
“As rotten a fuck as Henry?” she says, still looking at Anne.
“Yes,” Hatcher says, calling on all his interview savvy to shift to the subject’s preferred tone. “You poor Lulu you.”
“Poor Lulu,” she says.
“What she has to go through for her work,” Hatcher says.
Lulu turns her face to him and she nods again and sighs a loud, booming sigh. She lets go of Anne’s hand. She says, “For about a hundred years I was the official harvester of your presidents. We like to use the seed of the big boys all around the world to make our little domestic demons. So you name the guy, from McKinley on through, and I did him, and it all went the way it should go, right through Bush the First. But after that, things started to get freaky.”
“Freaky for you?” Hatcher says, his incredulity involuntary and dangerous. But he gets away with it.
Lulu nods, pouting. “I have feelings too, mon cheri. With the live ones we’re supposed to come in the middle of the night and dope-whisper any companions into a temporary coma and do the boy while he’s still snoozing. With your President Bill Clinton, his wife’s alone in the master bed, and by the time I can get myself oriented, I’m face to face with a very wide-awake Mr. President.”
Lulu pauses for effect.
Hatcher prompts her. “Freaky, Lulu?”
“He took one look at me and dropped his pajama bottoms.”
Somehow this doesn’t surprise Hatcher, and that must show on his face.
“Only the dead and damned are supposed to go for it, my dear. And then, the next time, I went off to do Al Gore.”
“Wait. Al Gore wasn’t elected.”
“Hello. Poor Lulu had to figure out the fucking electoral college. And after I did, I had to go do a guy whose seed they took one look at and tossed. At that point, I’d had enough.”
Lulu digs a knuckle into the corner of a dry eye. A little trick she picked up from her boss. “Boohoo,” she says. And then abruptly she flares the hand at her eye and smiles brightly and says, “I am so glad you are dead and damned, Hatcher McCord. You will help make up for the shit work.”
And now, without Hatcher even registering her rise and approach, Lulu is in his face, and she gently takes the camcorder from him, and then there is a great flurry of her hands and in a seeming instant Hatcher McCord is standing naked at his front door, his clothes flung about the room, his camcorder, though, perched safely on the kitchen table, his blue minion tie folded neatly beside it, and beside the tie is Anne, her eyes wide and her mouth gaping.
And in the next instant his naked body is pressed against Lulu’s naked body, her two powerful arms clamping him there, and they are out the door and leaping into the air and her great bat wings open wide and beat fiercely and Lulu and Hatcher shoot straight up into the dark and he barely has a chance to turn his head and look behind him as the Great Metropolis spreads open beneath him like the time-lapse blooming of a vast black flower, and Lulu veers, and in the moment that they hurtle over the center of the city, Hatcher at last finds brief voice for all that is happening to him. He screams.