All through this, at every beat when a laugh was possible, Seinfeld paused ever so slightly, the stand-up’s subtle elbow in the ribs of his audience. But the room has remained absolutely silent, save for the coughing and an occasional hawking of a phlegmy throat. This time, though, Seinfeld draws out the pause. He looks around, blinking in the light, and he waits and waits. Anne, meanwhile, has been peering into the darkness, looking for Henry. Hatcher thinks the act is over, and he has to decide whether to stay or to go when these two reunite, which will be torture either way.
But Seinfeld resumes, in the same monologist’s bright tone, “See, what I’m thinking is, we always misunderstood religion. All the religions of the world were, in fact, just these great big objects of performance art. Like going to Lincoln Center or the Met. So whatever religions knew about the universe, it was all metaphor. But how we all ended up here is that we’ve got this irresistible urge to turn metaphor into dogma. Like we read Huckleberry Finn and we become Twainists and we go, Every year you’ve got to lash some logs together and float down a river or you’ll end up in Hell. And if you don’t do the river thing, if, for instance, you’ve read Moby Dick and you’re a Melvillean and you think to save your soul you’ve got to go fishing every Sunday instead of floating on a raft, then I’m going to hate your infidel ass. And you’re going to hate mine. And if I don’t have a religion? Well, I’ve got the antidogma dogma going and I’ll hate your ass anyway. That’s why we’re all in Hell. And speaking of asses, I’m working mine off here with second-rate material while you just work the loogies out of your fucking throats.”
Instantly, someone from the darkness shouts, in a thick British upper-class accent, “You can’t say ‘fuck’.” And a heavy glass ashtray flies into the spotlight and catches Seinfeld on the left temple. He staggers back and another ashtray hits him bloodily in the nose. A dozen more ashtrays fly at him and he covers his head with his arms and he turns and staggers off the stage and disappears into the darkness.
The lights come up. The crowd stirs and rises — all men in morning dress — and they flow around Hatcher and Anne muttering “Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.” Anne studies the faces going by, and Hatcher is watching her watching them when the crowd thins and she shifts her gaze and her eyes widen and she stiffens. Hatcher looks. Two men are dawdling up from the front table, talking to each other. They are both dressed in iron-gray, single-breasted cutaways with pearl-gray vests and silk top hats, which they are patting into place. They are moving this way. One of the men is slender and narrow-faced and is wearing a black patch on his right eye. The other man, hobbling painfully, is vast and thick-necked and red-faced, and in spite of the fact that his specially tailored vest and coat could hold at least three of the eye-patched man, the fat man still threatens to burst from them. And though he is clean-shaven except for a small mustache with waxed twists at the end, and though the reddish-gold hair that has just disappeared under his hat is parted in the middle and lacquered with Wildroot, it is clearly Henry.
This is not the slender, strapping young Henry of Anne’s girlhood. Or even the notably expanding Henry of their marriage. This is the bloated and syphilitic end-of-his-life Henry that Anne, wide-eyed, is seeing now. Satan is not exactly known for never closing a door without opening a window, but Hatcher understands the primary torture here will be for Anne and Henry, and this will be a benefit for him. Let them both suffer a voice somewhere in him says. Hisses, really. And Hatcher feels light. He feels he can just bound out the door and go sit on the veranda and cross his legs and sip a gin sling and stare contentedly into the desert. And the drink will taste very good, while these two rancorously finish with each other, for all eternity.
Henry and the other man are upon them. As soon as the king sees Anne, his face bloats in a smile that is instantly lost in the folds of chin and cheek. He cries, “My once mistress, once friend, my once wife, once betrayer — or was it I who betrayed you? — my once joy, once torment, have you found me in Hell to torment me truly now so as to have your righteous revenge? For yes, I betrayed you, and to understand that betrayal is hell heaped upon Hell, my once wife. How’s that pretty throat? I’m sorry to allude thus now to your final wound, a wound I ordered, it is true, a wound I later conjured before my mind’s eye many a time as if it was our first fuck, and I am sorry to allude to that as well, but I find in this place that I cannot choose my own words and I cannot leave from speaking, except when I am listening to comedy that is not comedy at all and that leads me to yearn anew for my axman so that I might silence these solitary jesters who come before me, but I cannot find an ax when I need it, I can only find, as I listen to them, rotten pustulous things in the back of my throat, which surely rise from these poxed and cankered legs of mine, the legs that ruined me. O my legs, my once queen, my later queens had to deal with them, but at least you were spared the burden of my pus.” And all these words rush from Henry as if in a single breath, and he still does not pause but turns his face to his companion and moves seamlessly from pus to command. “Sir Francis, my dear Vicar of Hell, take this man to the veranda and provide him with drink, I must have a word now with this once inadequate womb before me, this slut, this girl-yielding cunt, though the girl she yielded had quite a reign, as I’ve heard, a greater reign than mine, they say.” And Henry begins to quake even as he talks on and the man called Francis has Hatcher by the elbow and Hatcher is happy to go, for the rancor soars now on strongly beating wings.
And so Hatcher crosses the lobby of the Raffles Hotel with Sir Francis Bryan, Henry VIII’s longtime drinking buddy and master of the henchmen, poet and roving diplomat, sent to the Pope when Henry first sought a Catholic divorce for the sake of Anne, and a master of jousting as well, which is how he lost his eye. The eye is unrestored in the afterlife, though Bryan has come to see that as an ironic benefit — one less body part to hurt when it is time for everything to hurt. “Sir Francis Bryan, at your service,” he says.
“Hatcher McCord, presently at your disposal.”
Bryan chuckles. “He will do that.”
“You’re his vicar?”
“Lay vicar, I must stress.”
They step out onto the veranda. A table at the front is being vacated by an elderly couple in hunting jodhpurs who stagger off the veranda and out into the desert, clutching at their stomachs.
“Some people shouldn’t drink,” Bryan says.
The two men move toward the vacated table, and on the way, Hatcher is surprised to find Bill and Hillary Clinton sitting together. She’s staring vacantly out to the mountains. Bill’s mouth is drawn down sadly and he’s stirring his gin with the tip of a forefinger. Hatcher stops beside them. Hillary ignores him, but Bill looks up from the slow swirling of his drink. “Hello, Hatcher,” he says.