“It isn’t that kind of tiger,” said Richard Abneg. His tone was dismissive. These two, Thatcher and Abneg, were going to be at it all night long, I saw. They’d find materials over which to dispute through the dessert, and through the round of Cuban cigars Thatcher always loved to personally distribute, and the seemingly spontaneous offerings of brandy and Armagnac Thatcher would haul out after the cigars, to distend the evening into a contented, blithering haze, meanwhile instructing the staff to do the final clearing in the morning, to Maud’s disgust. (This was Thatcher’s real enmity, anyway. Maud’s conversational prerogatives ruled while conversation was possible, so Thatcher worked steadily to numb our tongues with stimulants, until we were reduced to the humming and grunting and Morse-code glances he preferred.)
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked not Thatcher but Naomi Kandel.
“Just that it isn’t that kind of tiger, where you can, you know, kill it with a well-placed shot between the eyes or something.”
“I have heard it is quite… sizable,” murmured Georgina, allying herself with Abneg.
“Yeah, it’s big. A big problem is what it is. You have no idea.” Was Richard Abneg implying that as a mayor’s aide he was privy to facts about the tiger not printed in the Times? His heavy glances seemed to say Yes I am. He adjusted the collar of his shirt, grimacing sweatily, as if adding and I’ve got claw marks on my back, they itch like hell. Thatcher Woodrow seemed to take this as a signal to depart, without explanation, for a visit to the bathroom, or possibly to his humidor, to poison Abneg’s cigar in advance.
Of course, there was no poison in Thatcher’s cigars. Or, only a kind of poison we craved. An hour later, with all of us sprung from the vise of Maud’s table, sprawled on her white couches, snifters hovering at the level of our heads, hostilities were forgotten. Or drowned. Thatcher, in his absurd maroon dinner jacket with its college emblem, was our champion, keeping those snifters full of colored fluids with magical properties. He always had another exotic bottle that cried to be sampled, always with a name I instantly forgot, thinking instead: Funky Monkey, Blueberry Kush, Chronic.
Now we all loved one another to death. Which is to say, until the end of the evening. There was no other place to be, it was unimaginable not to float on our backs in this ocean of luxury, an archipelago of personalities lobbing witticisms across one another’s beaches. Only I’d lately become irresolute in my dissolution. Gazing up at blue from my island, I’d begun to wonder how near that sky was. Whether it was some ceiling, perhaps a tissue I could rend with my fingertips if I only reached up to try.
Georgina Hawkmanaji and Richard Abneg sat side by side in the center of the largest and whitest of the couches, a kind of centerpiece around which we’d deferentially arrayed: Maud and Sharon Spencer and I bunched at one end of a facing couch, with Reggie Spencer asleep, face propped, curled knuckles indenting his sallow cheek, at the other; Thatcher coming and going from his terrific caramel-leather throne of a chaise longue, and Harriet Welk in another, smaller chaise, with Naomi Kandel camped out on the carpet at her feet-I spotted Naomi reaching casually to caress Harriet’s sheer-stockinged calf for emphasis at some point she was making, but this gesture was going absolutely nowhere, only being blithely tolerated by Harriet. (To be honest I was being similarly molested by Sharon Spencer, and it mattered as little.)
It was Georgina’s and Abneg’s coming together that formed the main action here, a show we all consented to see slowed to a crawl by Georgina’s elegant jitters and Abneg’s distractibility. The show’s progress was slowed, too, even if sponsored, by the flow of Thatcher’s brandies. Our delight in the exhibition wasn’t unkind. It was simply a real pleasure to witness Georgina uncorked by Richard Abneg’s coarse, crazy appetite for her. In glimpses, between harangues on one subject or another, when he didn’t seem to notice Georgina at all, Abneg appeared not to believe his fortune. You’d have thought their sweet collision was Maud’s engineering-I envisioned her taking credit, with relish-only it became clear Maud couldn’t have known whom her new friend Harriet Welk would bring along to dinner.
Abneg, somehow, had gotten onto the subject of a visit he’d made, some time ago, to Stonehenge. “You park in this little area, it’s across the road, and then you buy a ticket, just to be allowed to cross the street. There’s this underground tunnel, you mill through like sheep. And there’s nothing to do except trudge like that, all the way around the thing. They’ve got you in a kind of track, restrained from Stonehenge itself. You can’t go near the rocks. And that’s it. You trudge around single file in a circle, the thing looks a little smaller and less mysterious than you’d hoped, and you go back through the tunnel and maybe stop at the gift shop or the restroom, then back to your car.”
“Unimpressive,” grunted Thatcher.
“Well, sure,” said Abneg. “Totally unimpressive. I wanted to be like one of those apes in whatchamacallit, 2001, by whatsisname, Kubrick, you know, kneeling in fear before those slabs, getting brain-zapped.”
“I never saw 2001,” said Harriet. “It’s about apes?”
“Ape-men,” said Thatcher helpfully.
“They should change the name of that movie,” said Sharon Spencer beside me. “Since the real 2001 turned out so different.”
“Listen,” said Abneg, with exasperation that we hadn’t caught his real drift. “I’m trying to tell you about the Stonehenge restroom. I had to piss, so I went in there, it was a completely modern men’s room, with all these floor-length ceramic urinals. They didn’t have the wit to arrange them in a circle, but the resemblance was obvious. And whereas everyone was jabbering when they walked around Stonehenge, all the moms bargaining with the whining children, in here the men were all silent, avoiding one another’s eyes. Each of us standing at a urinal or waiting our turn, and this profound truth comes over you, a feeling much bigger than anything available outside and across the road, which is that everyone in that restroom just did the exact same thing you did.”
“Which is what?” said Naomi Kandel.
“Looked at Stonehenge,” said Abneg. “And now you were taking a piss, and then you were going to get back in your car.”
I tried to understand, and almost did, and then found myself wondering if Abneg was emphasizing the word piss so strongly in order to force Georgina to visualize the existence of his penis. It was forcing me to visualize it, anyway.
“That… is… not… deep,” said Naomi Kandel conclusively.
Thatcher, Abneg’s biggest fan, seemed to get it. “Got a place like that in Australia,” he said. “Ayres Rock, only you’re supposed to call it something else. Biggest rock in the world, takes a coupla hours to walk around it. Same thing, though. You go around in a track. Center of the country, nothing around for a thousand miles, no other reason you’d ever stop there. Rock has its own damn airport.”
Abneg was thrilled, though it seemed to me his point, if he had one, had been hijacked for Thatcher’s imperial scorn. “Fantastic! So, basically, that airport’s just the world’s foremost example of a Stonehenge restroom.”
Thatcher toasted this, a little uneasily, with a hoist of his snifter.
“In a thousand years,” continued Richard Abneg, “they’ll probably lead walking tours around the perimeter of the ruined airport.” “Huh,” said Thatcher, less and less sure.