“I’m not all that disappointed,” I said.
He laughed, a sound like a gate slipping its latch. “Is that so? Are you happy about where you are in your life?”
I wasn’t. “I can handle it.”
“Are you happy,” he asked, “about whom Eleanor is sleeping with tonight?”
I tossed the coffee over my shoulder and onto my clean floor. “Are you happy about whom Mommy is sleeping with tonight?”
I could hear the friction of lips over gums. “There’s no question that you’re bright,” he said. “You were always bright. Such a bright boy, such a golden boy.”
“I had two feet,” I said nastily. “And while we’re at it, come and get me.”
“Now you’re trying to insult me,” Wilton Hoxley said. “That makes me suspicious, even though we’re old friends. Old friends should be able to talk. You know, it amazes me that you didn’t realize that we were friends. After all, we had Eleanor in common.”
“Eleanor was never common enough for you,” I said, and closed my eyes.
“A little cheap,” he said. “But then you’re a nonentity, a footnote.” Schultz’s unwritten paper flashed before my eyes in its full unpublished glory. “You don’t understand, do you? They’re playing with you, just as I am. I can play with you until the cat comes home, and you won’t figure it out, and Eleanor will still land in my lap. If I want her. Of course, I don’t want her.”
“You wanted her before,” I said. “My, my, Wilton, the lies you told.” He didn’t say anything. “The lies you told to Mommy.”
He hung up.
I was wetter than I’d been after my shower, but I barely felt it. I took my copy of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and put it on the back of the couch, trained Billy’s semi at it, and blew it into satisfying smithereens. Feeling marginally more secure, I toted the gun into the kitchen and poured more coffee. Anything that could put commas into Dreiser could put a few well-placed full stops into Wilton Hoxley.
At five the phone rang again. I decided, for once, not to obey. It rang twenty-seven times before falling silent. I sat on the couch, hoping it wasn’t a wrong number. I still wanted him on the other end of the phone. When it stopped, I called Schultz and gave him a progress report.
“Get out of there,” he said.
“Skip it. He’s getting crazy.”
“Simeon,” Schultz said. It might have been the first time he ever called me by my first name. “Simeon, speaking from a purely professional standpoint and evaluating him within the peripheries of any generally agreed clinical criteria, he’s already crazy. He’s been as loose as a bucket of moths for years.”
“I think you should get off the line,” I said. “He might be calling.”
“He’ll call at six,” Schultz said. “Not before. You’re going to stay in touch, right?”
“As long as the promise holds. I talk to you, and it ends there.”
“You’re the one who’s crazy,” Schultz said, hanging up.
It rang again precisely at six, and this time I picked it up.
“Why should I want Eleanor?” Wilton Hoxley said as though there’d been no interruption. “Eleanor, as beautiful as she is, is just a woman.”
“Whoa, Wilton,” I said. “Good for you. How come you never graduated?”
“And what’s a woman?” he continued. “A vertical storage system, and a temporary storage system at that. Their insides gurgle like coal running downhill. Ever put your ear up against Eleanor’s stomach? Gurgle, gurgle. Peristalsis at work. Women eat innocence, nice, photosynthetic plants that make sugar out of sunshine, and they eat dumb animals who think that people love them until they get their jugular veins cut as the first long step toward the table. Pigs are treated well, Simeon. You’ve obviously never spent any time around pigs.”
“I’m rectifying that now.”
“You can’t insult me. You’re not important enough. Pigs, as I was saying, are very intelligent, they learn to love the carnivore who tosses them their slops, they follow him around from place to place. To them, we’re gods. To us, they’re pork. The most beautiful woman in the world is just a mechanism for turning innocence into shit. The prima ballerina, dancing around on those torturous little shoes the French invented, looking lighter than air, is gurgling inside, turning some light-footed pig-have you ever seen how a pig walks on those tiny little hooves? — into shit. Sleeping Beauty, Odette the swan, they get offstage, the tutu comes down, and some poor dumb animal or some inoffending head of lettuce comes out, headed for the sewer. Women are a self-procreating system for turning the world into shit.”
“Right,” I said, gripping the semi with my knees, “and what do men live on?”
“Men,” he said, with real scorn this time. “Skip it. We want women to be different, don’t we? Don’t you want Eleanor to be different? And they’re not. That’s the tragedy of the world, and the ancient gods knew it. Women are just like we are. Remember Pandora?”
“Vaguely.”
“You persist in disappointing me. Pandora, say the Greeks, was the first woman. Another of Hephaestus’ masterworks, created to torment mankind throughout eternity.”
“Why would Hephaestus want to torment mankind?”
“Well, I’m really taken aback. I thought you were many things, but I never thought you were ignorant.”
“So sue me,” I said.
“You got the fennel, I believe, on several occasions.”
“I can buy fennel in the supermarket. Not that I use a lot of it.”
“I’m sure, Simeon, that you understood the fennel. Please say you understood the fennel. One can take only so much disillusionment in one dose.”
“How do you know I’m not tracing this call?”
“Because you’re alone. Because you wouldn’t think it was fair. Because there’s been no one at your house except that cretinous teenager who checked your mail and brought you that useless gun.”
“It’ll punch holes in you,” I said, suddenly doubting that it would.
“You have to aim it at me first. And you won’t get a chance. Pandora,” he said.
“Listen, Wilton,” I said, sweating buckets. “Stick Pandora in your ear. If she’s too big, find someplace she’ll fit.” I hung up.
I wiped my forehead on the way to the refrigerator for a bottle of Singha. At the moment I reached for the phone to call Schultz, it rang.
“You’re making me break the rules again,” Wilton Hoxley said, and there was a nervous edge to his voice. “You already know how dangerous that is.”
“You’re scaring me to death,” I said, hoping it sounded like a lie.
“If I’m not,” he said, “something is seriously wrong with you. About Pandora.”
“Oh, stuff Pandora.”
“Please stop disappointing me. You said to my mother that you knew who I am, but not why I am. Is that more or less accurate?”
“More,” I said, wiping my forehead with my sleeve and pulling the bandage away. The blood started immediately, and I held the cold bottle of Singha against the cut.
“Well, then, sit tight and listen. Have you got the gun with you?”
“I’m using it to keep my back straight.”
“Get your shirts starched.” Wilton Hoxley barked a laugh. “Listen, insect. After Prometheus took fire to earth in a stalk of fennel-”
“The fennel was painfully obvious,” I said.
“Obvious? Please. Was that why you had to go see that old fart Blinkins?”
“Blinkins and I are old friends,” I said, warding off a sudden desire to cross myself.
“Of course you are. We all love Blinkins. Do you like the Greeks?”
“As Greeks go.” I was regretting the fact that I’d spurned Schultz’s offer of protection.
“Then you’ll like this,” he said. “Pandora was Zeus’ revenge against Prometheus’ treachery. She was the first woman, remember? After Prometheus gave fire back to human beings-who were all apparently men at that point-”
“Sounds like a world you would have liked.”
“You can’t goad me,” he said. “Listen. Prometheus had a stupid brother-”
“Epimetheus,” I said.
“Bully for you. And Epimetheus was living, with a lot of other males, on the corrupt earth. Zeus commanded Hephaestus, who could do anything over the fire in his forge, to create Pandora. Then, just to cover his bets, he told Hephaestus’ wife…” He faltered.