He said: “Hello, mister.”
Seven
I’ve never been to Brazil before,” said the moppet.
“Golly,” I said.
“Harvey, I’m sorry,” said Jodi, of the furrowed brow.
“My name’s Everett,” said the urchin.
“Who asked you?” I asked him.
“Now, Harv,” said Jodi. “It isn’t his fault.”
“Everett Whittington,” said the talking albatross.
“Hail and farewell, Everett Whittington.” I told him and, to Jodi: “Remember me to the gang.”
“Harvey, please!”
My hand on the doorknob, I made the biggest mistake of my entire life. I turned about, and I looked at them. I looked into the trusting innocent saucer eyes of the five-year-old kiddie kargo, and I looked into the pleading promising deep-well eyes of Jodi, and I was lost. Lost lost losterooneyed.
I undid my fingers from around the doorknob, and I sighed an all-is-lost-anyway sigh, and I went over to the nearest chair and I sat down. “All right,” I said. “All right.”
“You aren’t going to run out on me, Harvey, are you?”
“No, Jodi, I suppose I’m not.”
“You’re a funny man, mister.”
“Contraband,” I told him, “should be seen and not heard.”
That broke him up. He thought that was the funniest thing since the Three Stooges. He slapped his little knee and whooped in his little falsetto and generally overacted all over the room.
“You know,” I said into the racket, “if I’d had a child five years ago, he’d be just about your age now. And that’s the strongest argument for celibacy I’ve ever heard of.”
But I was lying. There was an even stronger argument, had he but known it. And the argument’s name was Helen.
Helen. I married her, if you recall. I recall, worse luck.
Bermuda bound we were, on one of those Technicolor cruise ships, with a crew entirely composed of gigolos, and passengers from Central Casting. The Captain was a humdrum middle-aged fag, than which there is nothing sadder, and the third night out I saw Charon pass us, smirking up his sleeve.
But I wanted to tell you about the first night out, though I hardly know why. Some masochistic desire within me for public humiliation, I suppose. Herewith, therefore, the tale of my virgin bride and I upon our wedding night, heading southward through the glistening seas o’er the turning orb toward the beauteous pearl of the Atlantic, Bermuda, tourist trap of the British Commonwealth, where wealth is common and so are the British. Very common. In more ways than one.
But I digress. Perhaps I don’t really want to tell you about my wedding night. Nevertheless, I’ve promised, and so I’ll do it. I really will.
That day, our wedding day, had been hectic from dawn to dusk, with split-second timing being the rule throughout. The wedding had started at precisely such-and-such — attended primarily by office friends from her office and my office — and had finished at exactly thus-and-so, in order for the reception to commence here and end there, so that the two of us could whisk away to the pier and board our vessel of delight specifically at then, milliseconds before the gangplank was taken away and the vessel of delight drifted away from Manhattan Island, southbound for a warmer but not really much different island, seven hundred miles away.
Honeymooners, of course, made up a large part of the passenger complement aboard the ship, intermixed with intermixers of various kinds and sexes, divorcees anxious for another try, kept boys and kept girls and kept tweeners looking for somebody to keep them, single girls and boys looking for romance (which is the ladies’ word for sex), and even a couple of fussy British retirees who’d apparently been playing tourist in New York and were now homeward bound to Bermuda. Greener pastures and all that, and their presence did make everybody else look a little silly. At least, I thought so. No one else seemed to notice the irony at all. But, after the first night, I must admit that I had an eye for irony.
After all the timetable rushing around of the wedding day, it was good at first to simply sit and relax awhile aboard the ship. Manhattan Island, that crowded three-dimensional Monopoly board fell away to the stern, and the rolling ocean rose up before us to the horizon. We wandered around on deck, hand in hand, watching the sun go down, looking at our fellow passengers, and generally breathing deeply and getting ourselves unjangled.
You could pick out the newlyweds with absolutely no trouble at all. The grooms all looked gently lustful, as though mentally practicing the line, “I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you.” And the brides all looked apprehensively lustful, as though they didn’t believe it.
I don’t know for sure whether Helen and I could have been spotted as newlyweds or not. It depends, I suppose, on how much showed on my face. Nothing at all showed on hers, that much I’m sure of. At the time, I thought it was simply unusual control. I didn’t realize that it was a perfectly accurate portrayal of what was on the inside. Nothing, in other words.
As to me, my feelings weren’t precisely those reflected on the faces around me. I was lustful, certainly, but there was nothing gentle about my feelings at all. I didn’t much care at that point whether I hurt her or not. I had been biding my time for far too long, had been respecting her maidenhood and maidenhead till a few mumbled and overpriced words had been said over us, and now I was anxious to get to it, get at it, and get with it. I wouldn’t say that I was lustful; I would say I was rapacious.
At the same time, a kind of contented lethargy — you’ve seen that on the faces of the cows on the Carnation milk cans — had come over her. After all this waiting and all this preparation and all this buildup, at last it was mine, it was legitimately and completely and exclusively mine, and there wasn’t any particular hurry in demonstrating my proprietary control. We could relax a while from the exertions of the day, we could stroll the deck, we could take our time and take it slow, knowing that soon or late what I had come here for would be mine, all mine, mine, mine, mine.
I have the feeling, then, that the expression on my face was that of a sex maniac with a low metabolic rate. I looked, I imagine, insatiable but calm. And since Helen had no expression at all on her lovely physiogoomy. Gods knows what our combination looked like. Trilby and Svengali, maybe.
Yeah, well let me tell you something. I was Trilby.
At any rate, we roamed the deck anon and anon, and around us the ranks of newlyweds diminished. A gently lustful groom would all at once grab the hand of his apprehensively lustful bride, and the two would scuttle away toward their cabin, hips already awag. This couple so departed, and that couple, and that couple over there, and gradually the decks emptied of their panting cargo, leaving only the singletons — none of whom would be making out that well this first night out — and the returning Britishers, who wanted nothing more than to sit morosely on deck chairs and think about how they’d been taken in New York.
Until finally there wasn’t a newlywed to be seen. Except for Svengali and me, I mean. And I at last suggested that we make the retreat complete. “What do you say?” I murmured in my true love’s ear. “Shall we, ah, go below?”
“Oh, but look at the ocean,” she said, turning away from me and pointing out away from the ship. “Look at it in the moonlight.”
“Let’s look at it through our cabin porthole,” I suggested.
“I think I’m hungry,” she said.
“I know I’m hungry,” I told her. “Let’s go to our cabin.”