The two men breasted the ridge and gazed across the river at the two women sitting, almost classical figures in the light mist. The Penelope III was concealed from them by the angle of the cliff.
“Look,” the Professor said, “their breasts are shaking.”
“Laughing at us, no doubt,” Father replied. “Women are more attuned to reality. That’s why they get hysterical.”
The Professor scowled. Topsy was gazing up at him, blinking nervously like her mistress. “Such beseeching!” he groaned.
“You must put up with this and more,” Father intoned. “We may be witnessing the poorest performance ever given by a dog. Everything depends upon the master’s glance.”
“But she’s so narcissistic.”
“No one can stand unconditional love for long, good friend. Bounce it back to her. Accept her damage. The suffering cannot end prematurely. Your only command to her is this: use your strength. Molto sentimento d’affeto. One must be tender even with the women one has lost.”
The Professor turned back from the river. The cord had tightened inadvertently.
“Pull on her that way, and the only thing you’d be able to predict is where she won’t be.”
“You contradict my every move!”
“Don’t you see, my friend? It’s like playing an instrument. Get the midrange right, and everything else will follow. Più tosto presto spiccato. We walk as between two rivers.”
“Very well, Topsy.” The Professor swallowed his gruffness. “Let us ply the bloody golden mean,” and she waddled through the grass approvingly.
“And stop seeing events as if they were always in a drama,” Felix barked.
The frigate was now directly beneath them, its oars tearing at the water like an uncoordinated centipede. Sailors scurried in the rigging and swore amongst the stacked scenery. But on the main hatch, strewn with pebbles and potted palms, a hodgepodge of a play was being rehearsed to no one’s apparent notice. The Astingi vowels floated up:
“Si spus-am ochiului meu trist: Imbrâtiseazâ!”
And then the translation, in perfect Oxbridge cadences:
“And then who knows whether it is better to be or not to be? But everyone knows that what does not exist feels no pain, while pains in life are many, pleasures few, to be?”
“Good Lord,” the Professor expostulated. “Even the dogs in Cannonia bark in a foreign tongue.” And from the kennel, only broken-winded yelps.
The Princess had lost herself in thought. Mother genuinely tried to deflect her from this course.
“What are they doing up there?” the Princess queried nervously.
The men were facing each other, apparently doing a kind of calisthenics, though upon closer inspection, it was rather a kind of grave conducting of a silent orchestra.
“My husband has devoted himself to the learning of grace, which he has no instinct for. First, conducting lessons from Gundel, the great closet maestro of Monstifita, then flamenco lessons, Greco-Roman wrestling, and ballet at forty-five. Can you imagine?”
But the Princess did not look up or react to this. She insisted, rather, in dwelling upon the history of each of her scars, from her Roman nose (a piano top had collapsed) to her petite cicatrized feet (the bones were growing in the wrong direction, she had been told.) She had also apparently been convinced by a certain Dr. Halban of Monstifita to move that peculiar female member of wondrous nerves, her sucre d’orange as she put it, closer to the urethral passage, a two-step procedure which would allow her to mount more easily ocean’s orgiastic wave.
Ainoha stared at Princess Zanäia for some time, watching as she traced her scars with her forefinger, adumbrating their causes and consequences. Then she threw herself into the river. Staying under for an anxiously long interval, she emerged some fifty yards away with a collar of water lilies, and shouted back to shore, “Surely there are worse things than monogamy!” Then she paddled aimlessly about, trying a number of different strokes, none of which relaxed her, until finally she realized she had no choice but to return to the tiny beach. But no sooner had she dried off than her royal confidant asked her if she could be of assistance in gaining entrance to the Silbürsmerze morgue, so that the Princess might make certain measurements of any female corpses there, as it was common knowledge that the Astingi women’s apparat was the least complicated in the world, and also rumored to run horizontally.
Mother replied that this was certainly a myth, though no doubt a useful one. But she was neither used to exercising self-control nor to asking someone to stop speaking in her presence. And she was also surprised to realize that indignity was as difficult to come by in this situation as compassion.
“Oh, I know you ardent women detest frigid women,” the Princess wailed.
Mother replied somewhat helplessly, “But I know no one at the morgue.”
The Princess was downcast. All her scars seemed to raise slightly. Tilting her head to one side, lips pursed, her nervous glance finally solidified, it was clear she was contemplating a measurement upon the most prominent live specimen of Astingi-related womanhood.
“You are quite the iconoclast,” Mother offered icily.
“Actually, no,” the Princess moaned, “just a misfit,” and burst into tears.
Ainoha had soiled her chemise.
Searching for the perfect non sequitur, Ainoha was mercifully interrupted by Catspaw, who had sensed his Mistress’s distress. He tottered down the steep path in a Russian blouse and white spats, precariously balancing a silver tray with several fruit spritzers and what appeared to be a skull from Father’s collections. He was extemporizing even before he stopped before the Princess.
“Here lies the water; good; here stands the man; good: if the man go to this water and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes — mark you that; but if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself: argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.”
“Bravi.” The Princess clapped her translucent hands.
“Goodness gracious,” the Naiad groaned. “Later, dear Catspaw, argal, not now.”
Pain crossed his face as he turned on his heel and began to trudge back up the path. At one point, he turned to recite the breathless messenger’s speech from Macbeth, but Ainoha, drawing her hand across her throat, cut him off.
Topsy was flagging and kept looking longingly across the river.
“In order to compensate for the mind’s imperfections,” Father was saying, “all the other senses must be put into compensatory concert. Now that we have run out of session, we must be quiet.”
They stood stock-still for some minutes.
“Do you feel it?” Father queried.
“Yes, indeed, a kind of energy. .”
“A displaceable energy, in itself neutral, but able to join forces with another impulse. An immanent movement?”
“Blast, now I’ve lost it!” The Professor snapped his fingers and groaned.
“No matter. The patient takes what she needs. You don’t know what it is, but she takes what she needs and leaves the rest. Semplice ma mysterioso.”
The Professor gesticulated sardonically to the heavens. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever be permitted to play my own cadenzas in this concert?”
“Sir, speak sequentially, without ungainly pauses. Where you choose to breathe is where her character is defined.”
The Professor sullenly took up the cord and dog, and with quick strides headed for the rope bridge, gradually lengthening the distance between the two men. Father followed, correcting the Professor’s various postures and gaits, a repertoire which, to his credit, was expanding: