Everywhere they went, they sued all the neighbors first thing, but in this one instance his mother had a point. They had not yet sued any. Behind them was the mother of a hoodlum who lived in juvenile detention centers, to the side of them the people who’d sold them their house and held the mortgage and had a severely retarded child, across the street a millionaire who lived abroad, next to him ever-changing renters, next to them a man who had sired thirteen children out of his one, lame, eighty-pound wife. There was no one to sue. But they would talk. To whom, he could not guess.
The young Mr. Nefarious stood there that day following his pool tryst, still marginally priapic and limping slightly from his afternoon of unrelieved water ballet, ready to assent to this absurd prohibition because he did not know if his seminiferous system could take another four-hour throttling, when his mother pulled out another stop on the organ of her rectitude. “I want you to write me,” she intoned, smoking a cigarette and having her first cocktail, “an essay on integrity.”
“On what?”
“On IN TEG RIT TEE. Do you know what integrity is?”
“Think so,” the young Mr. Nefarious managed. “If not, I’ll look it up.”
“Good.”
“Do you think it’s in the World Book?”
He cannot remember if he actually made the last crack, only hope, and he does not remember looking up the word in the dictionary, but thinks he did, aiming to kill twenty-five words by copying the definition into his “essay,” which he did not — this much is for sure — ever write. Nor did his mother ask for it. It was clear to Mr. Nefarious, if not to her, that the matter of integrity between them was extinct.
When he thought of the girl whom the woodsman recommended they all avoid, smiling and looking like his mother, he suffered a wicked thrill and then shuddered and hung up the phone before she could possibly answer it. This was a dangerous moment for Mr. Nefarious. The next thought was invariably this: everyone looks something like his, Mr. Nefarious’s, mother, if you get right down to it, including himself. How could you go about life avoiding everyone on earth, and yourself, because humans resemble each other? The long-term answer to this question had worked itself out over time without his knowing it: dogs were safe, as were all people who demonstrated a total want of, or an aggressive dislike for, integrity. Those were your playmates in this tough world: dogs and people with shit on their upper lip. Mr. Nefarious had developed his nearly incessant smile by attempting to look at his lip.
At trees no smiling unless there was axing, and then the smiling was worked quickly into a determined slit-of-purpose mouth. But spiritually still a smile.
He smiled writing letters to people, overintimate, unsolicited revelations of himself, and smiled retrieving from the mailbox mail-order catalogues mostly from fancy gardening-tool concerns, in each of which was an outdoor bench costing not less than $500. To X, a woman who certainly had never been in any sense his girlfriend but who had been for damned sure somebody’s girlfriend, namely Charles’s, to whom she had been securely married for fifteen years or more, he wrote, “I do not customarily”—here he smiled—“write love letters,” and then he saved the day, which made his smile dim, or curl, ever so rancidly, by of course not declaring his love for her, which did not really exist anyway (he smiled: where, with whom, on whom, did it exist?), saved the day by just letting the letter drift off into a rather lame and nonspecific lament about his … not depression, just downness, all of which was designed — he smiled — to suggest he did love her, about 23 percent. That was enough love and at the correct angle to come at a married woman with better sense than to listen to garbage — she could certainly not entertain 25 percent, a full one-quarter throttle — and Mr. Nefarious smiled, sealed it up, stamped it with two stamps (one was extra so he could lick twice), packed it off in his country mailbox, raising the red flag, and wondered on the way back from the mailbox what it would be like to have — it bordered on not smiling to think of it — a $598.95 teak bench sitting out in the rain, the rain, and then the sun.
Mr. Desultory
MR. DESULTORY CANNOT, FOR the life of him, or of anyone else, or of any thing, do this after that, or that after this, if either sequence might logically look sequential from a distance of, say, 2 cm or more. Mr. Desultory, as a somewhat colorful British roofer he once knew put it, referring not to Mr. Desultory but to the roofing concern in whose employ they at the moment were, Mr. Desultory an ordinary interloper and the colorful Brit somewhat more wayward in that he had accepted a proposal of marriage from an unnubile American woman to stay his imminent deportation only to find himself praying for deportation immediately after the honeymoon and thereafter referring to his immigration bride as the Dragon — anyway the colorful British roofer subject to a harridaning beyond the wildest torments of immigration authorities or coal mining or whatever he had to do back home, it must have been something unpleasant for the Dragon Knot, as the wedding was called, to have been tied in the first place, though even Mr. Desultory can remember the colorful British roofer’s having said she, the Dragon, was “sweet,” he used that word, and straight, without a glint of irony or sarcasm in his glinty little eyes, all colorful British roofers have glinty little eyes to match their glinty little Cockney mouths, where are we? The Cockney married to the sweet, fat (he said she was huge, a matter that all the boys on the roof found impossible to verify, though try they did — running to the edge of the roof when the Dragon came to retrieve her husband, and looking down from their roof at the roof of the tiny car from which she never stepped and speculating just how large she might be to be in so small a car, what is that a Comet or what? She can’t be that big, and look at old Bob stepping right on in, he step in there without a shoehorn, don’t he? Don’t see him squoze out the window either — look, he smilin!) American girl, the Cockney married to the American girl told her that the company for whom he and Mr. Desultory and those who speculated upon her size worked could not have organized a piss-up in a brewery or a shaggin session in a brothel, and it is arguable that both colorful expressions, which had to be translated somewhat to American idiom, both expressions could be said to apply, and to have applied, though not so much then as now, for he is worse now, to Mr. Desultory himself.
Mr. Desultory cannot rub two quarters — not quarters, ideas, he can’t get two … things, he can’t do two related, sequential, yes it is in sequencing that … this goes before that, so he’ll get that squared away and then go to do this, but it is already backwards, he must do this then that, so forget that, let’s do this now, but this could arguably precede this which is already that because here’s this new this here — two quarters refers to wealth, or lack of it, a tired little phrase that must have come from the Depression, a time which sometimes Mr. Desultory feels sounds like his kind of time. He could have handled the Great Depression, you either jumped out of a skyscraper window, no sequencing problem there: one open her up, two review at the last minute your collapsed financial state, weep and moil your hands shedding tears, ink running on your last financial statement — maybe not ink but pencil, would a last financial statement, even one coming to zeros zeros zeros, be in ink or pencil?