“Yes.”
CHAPTER 130,031
NOT FRENCH
Jiselle and Susan are on opposite sides of the tiny balcony. A half-tempo electronic rendering of Mozart’s The Magic Flute is coming through the speakers of the box on the railing. At the end of the overture, Susan says, “Hey, Jiselle, can I borrow a cigarette?”
“Borrow a cigarette? What, are you gonna give it back to me when you’re done?”
Jiselle thinks this is awfully funny when, really, it’s just stupid fucking banter. On the other hand, Susan knows that one asks not to “borrow” a cigarette but rather to “bum” a cigarette for precisely the reason Jiselle has made salient.
Jiselle says, “When’d you start smoking fags, anyway?”
“This afternoon.”
“How’d you like the eggs?” Jiselle says.
“They were ungodly,” Susan says.
“They were not.”
“I didn’t actually get to eat them, but Jiselle, let me ask you. In terms of cousinhood, exactly how distant are we?”
Jiselle extends her arms as far as they’ll extend. “No blood,” she says.
“Wow, your armpits are shaved.”
“I’m British, Susan. I’m not French.”
“Neither am I. Fuck.” Susan puffs at her cigarette.
“Are you gonna inhale on the bloody thing or what?”
“What?”
Jiselle demonstrates.
Susan mimics, coughs, considers.
Her mind twirls at the thought of getting high on opium that never entered her system; at the thought of Adam distinguishing between himself and the world and its future and his own; the thought of a man, not yet slated to die, thinking to give seventy years away; of how to understand the difference between giving and having while alone and immortal in Eden. How you could mourn the end of something you never had a chance to take for granted.
Susan starts to shiver, and she shivers till she shakes, and it doesn’t let up when she flops out of her chair. It doesn’t let up when her ass hits the floor of the balcony, nor when the impact shocks her spine. Even after the back of her head strikes a corner of her wheelchair’s footrest, and even after the back of her head strikes the corner again, and her skull pushes in her brain, she doesn’t stop shaking, not for a full seven seconds.
The breathy honking that comes from Jiselle might sound like weeping, but because she keeps sticking her tongue out and saying things like “Good one,” and “Joke’s up, bloke,” and finally, mysteriously, “Bung-o,” her dying cousin concludes it’s not weeping. And then her dying cousin is dead.
CHAPTER SUSAN
SUSAN
Free-floating three feet over the balcony, disembodied Susan is at once alarmed and relieved that Pedro is not there to greet her. The alarm soon dissipates, however, because disembodied Susan is looking at her disemSusaned body, at her head turned left-cheek-up, the cigarette she dropped at the start of the shaking burning her hair away, and it is gleefully a shame. Susan knows everything now. She knows, for instance, that while Jiselle, who has run inside to call for help, starts to cry, she is silently repeating, “She asked for the fag, I didn’t push it on her,” and, though she can’t seem to express it, or anything else, Susan knows for sure that nothing is inexpressible.
The hair on the head of the body burns away quickly to reveal a red mark Carla kissed atop a freckle just below Susan’s left ear.
“How I was pretty, isn’t it pretty to think so, how I was pretty to think so, says Susan, thinks Susan,” Susans Susan, Susaning.
THE EXTRA MILE
This wheezing heckle, this spluttering raspberry, this vile string of punchlines life. Funny? Sure. But also cruel. “Cruel,” you might retort, if you ever said anything, whoever you are, “but funny, too.” And I’d tell you the half-full/half-empty line doesn’t change the fact of the binary — that you either laugh a lot and feel a little bad, or laugh a little and feel a lot bad. What I ask is, where’s the solace? All I’ve got left is this pool and its sundeck and that gaggle of knucklehead schmendricks over there to hone my timing to a sharper brutality against the shrinking, alter-cocker bones of. Our wives are all dead and we sit around warping. We can’t remember what made them laugh. As know-nothing boys, we wooed them like naturals; as men, we killed them with… what? Not killed them. Failed to save them. They died of neglect and the world was destroyed and we stayed in Florida to learn irreverence. That’s the whole story, a long dirty joke.
It was time to play cards, so I went to our usual table by the deep end. Everyone appeared to be suffering from mouth pains. After we’d exchanged all our how’s your digestions, my friend Heimie Schwartz asked my friend Bill the Goy, “How often did you go the extra mile for your wife?””
“All the time,” Bill the Goy said. “Every single time.”
I pulled the deck from the box by the ashtray and dealt out a hand of rummy four ways. I neglected to shuffle first. I was in no mood to shuffle.
Our fourth, Clyde the Schlub, who, truth be known, is more of an acquaintance than he is a friend, was stirring Splenda into his mug of iced tea when Heimie put the question to him.
“Clyde,” Heimie said, “how often would you say you went the extra mile for your Christina?”
“Always,” said the Schlub. “Whenever I got the chance.”
We all knew I was next and that I would answer the same way as the Schlub and the Goy. We all knew Heimie had a different answer to the question than the rest of us and that he would offer up his different answer as soon as I gave mine. That is Heimie’s rhetorical method. That is how he stirs up a controversy under the umbrella by the pool on an otherwise uneventful afternoon of rummy or canasta, even sometimes cribbage: he creates the promise of consensus, then undermines all hope of consensus with his wild assertions. I do not resent Heimie’s thirst for controversy, and in fact think the day tends to get better when it’s quenched. However, to my taste, his method lasts a few beats too long. I think: Why redundancy? Why first ask all of us a question we have the same answer to when all you and we really want is for you to get to your wild and controversial assertion already?
I’d had enough of this method, so before he had the chance to ask me his question, I said, “What about you, Heimie? How often did you go the extra mile for Esther?”
At my interruption of the routine, the Goy placed his startled hand on the shoulder of the Schlub and the Schlub spilled a little tea on his cards and his shirt, but Heimie didn’t even flinch. He said, “That’s just what I wanted to ask you, Arthur.”
“I asked you first, though, Heimie,” I said. “So you answer first.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m afraid that before I can answer your question, I’d have to ask you to clarify. I’d have to ask you not to take for granted that I take for granted that both you and I know what it is that the other one of us is talking about when that one of us inquires of the other about this extra mile and how often we went it for our wives. That is to say that I would have to ask you to first define the term extra mile.”
“You know what it means,” said the Goy. “Come on.”
“We all know what it means,” said the Schlub, licking some tea-drops off an ace of spades.