Ultimately, it is not possible to say with any certainty whether or not lessons have been learned, since it is not possible to determine the moral objectivity of the spectators who gathered about like so many wretched flu sufferers, each vying for a moment of an exhausted physician’s time, each brandishing a crusted eyecup, or pitifully displaying badly soiled linen in a puerile bid for attention. It is one thing to deal with the orgiastic and the exhibitionistic in an area which is, let us admit, a dreary seadrome like La Bbec, but such activity, such shocking hedonism in a supposedly refined family setting, is, as a rude prospector, in quite another context, put it, “like a Bowie knife ’mid th’ aspic.” As to these noted activities, made depressingly public, they needed no Rosetta stone of the sensual in order for them to have been clearly — all too clearly! — understood. Granted, the balmy temperatures of these climes may have contributed to the general moral collapse, but the erotic pandemonium of gardyloos, shrieks, halloos, yodels, screams, and full-throated bellowings cannot be blamed on the weather, and must stand forever as a blot on this otherwise handsomely managed season. Some grumblers have suggested that morality and discretion were treated by the rentiers as mere trade-ins for the considerable monies provided by what this same disaffected group calls (worshipfully), with no reservations whatsoever, an ochlocracy. A small minority of older, successful tradesmen and professionals sneer at the younger and overtly “conspicuous” crowd as “rabid stearin,” but that is, surely, going a little too far. In any event, the stencils went up later that day, each bearing its remonstrative jussive in blazing red: DESIST! Yet the very next morning, the butterweed around the ransacked and noisome gazebo was crushed and broken, the machine for instant cupellation lay smashed at the bottom of the sea, and the shipment of New Testaments was but smoldering ashes. A noted conservative humanitarian of excellent family was found, sans trousers and underpants, bound and gagged in the ladies’ room, and time itself seemed to have retired — perhaps for good! Yet the antique chipper still had a fine edge to its blade, and the more obstreperous protesters were being, finally, brutally harassed. That afternoon, all the self-proclaimed prudes left, taking their health implements and “green things” with them, and the youthful contingent of regulars triumphantly flew the peter, thereby recalling those compatriots who, earlier in the summer, had unwillingly and unhappily vanished. All in all, the lesson learned, then, might be phrased, “a surfeit of emendation sometimes turns to delighted glee,” or, as an old proverb teaches, “else.”
A BEEHIVE ARRANGED ON HUMANE PRINCIPLES
So can you predict the exact date on which the “pearly” rain will fall? Are you a slave to such quirks of clairvoyance? Is there a testament, if you don’t think that’s too strong a word, for or against behavior of that sort? Would red flowers or white, or pink for that matter, be any the less useless to you? Or their motions, such as they are, in the wind? Speaking of wind, do you remember those long-ago parades, held in gales of lilacs, so it seemed, or were they actually merely lilac butterflies? And do you recall how the children and their mothers aped the yokels who marched in those Midwestern uniforms and plumes? Weren’t they always the dead white of sails, or snow, of, in short, winter as you once experienced it? Do you think of the usual creaking boughs and bitter frosts when you hear that “music”? Wasn’t it on one of those festive days that you butchered the peacocks? Those you claimed lived behind the house of the girl with the out-of-tune guitar? Didn’t you tell me her name was Regina, Regina Lake, or Regina Star? Now that I think of it, weren’t you and she the closest of friends when she was still a virgin? And isn’t she now the Regina Lake or Star whose sex life is the subject of the monographs on perversion that you collect? She and you flew pigeons off the roof, didn’t you? I remember, do I not, you telling me that she asked you the meaning of “gobbet,” or was it the derivation of “radish”? You say that was April Starre? Why would you think of April Starre when Regina looked, not like her, but exactly like Ursula? Speaking of whom, why did you insist on calling her really beautiful buttocks ugly? And why did you persuade the other women to give her a box of candles and bananas?
And why did Sheila Christian blush and crack her gum when you arrived? In the photograph you have of Sheila and Ursula, who is the blonde asleep or in a faint or perhaps even dead beneath the hydrangea? Why do women to whom you show this disconcerting photograph mysteriously call that position a “malady”? Why, for instance, do you say, “With a malady like that the only cure is Emperor Ointment”? And in the other photograph, isn’t that you doing the Tiger Hump? And why do all of you, you, Regina, April, Ursula, and Sheila, insist that Jesus was at the party? And then why do you agree that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he arrived wearing a sleeveless pink dress? Weren’t you wearing a sombrero like the sojourning Mexicans? Or were they really blackamoors whose curious taste for the fugue depressed all of you? And the turbans beneath their sombreros frightened you? But didn’t they kill the parakeets to assure you of their good intentions? Didn’t they appear the next morning in slippers and dressing gowns to tell you and anyone else who would listen of sunshine and cognac and the coconuts of Florida? Before we go on, would you like some chocolate? Or would you prefer to sit under a California umbrella and have a glass of orangeade and gin to chase the blues? Perhaps you’d like a free pass to the Bijou to see The Janitor’s Waltz? Seriously, as they say, why are you waiting this way, so hopelessly, really, for Ramón? Do you believe, despite all you’ve learned, that he’s different from other drummers? Didn’t he make you publicly “perform” on a bed covered with white carnations? Didn’t you have to eat cauliflower ice cream for him? Didn’t he make you sleep on bare porcelain tiles? Don’t you consider that being laced, day after day, into that tiny corset was an indication of his true feelings for you? And while you and the Mexicans acted those lewd roles for the camera, didn’t Ramón sit there blithely eating peas? You say that he sent you bouquets? But didn’t he give Ursula the pearl-and-ruby necklace he’d bought for you? Weren’t you bitterly hurt when he took April and Regina to Barbados on what he called a “double honeymoon”? Don’t you think that there’s a reason that he makes you live on Willow Way? Don’t you find it strange that a loathsome dwarf constantly spies on you? Didn’t your very blood sicken when you first realized that there wasn’t a crevice of your body that the little monstrosity hadn’t seen? Why do you pretend not to know that he’s always there, watching and masturbating? Why do you play those madrigals every night? Why do you threaten to call Connecticut, where you don’t know a soul, with the news? Why do you continue to believe that the cinnamon cantharides tablets and the sex toys that you get every month are from Ramón? Don’t you ever see the misshapen beast watching you in your bath? Why did you let Ursula hide in the family chapel? Didn’t you find it odd that Ramón asked Regina to pose for that “emperor” in nothing but pearls and high heels and carrying a tiny Japanese parasol? Didn’t she tell you that she was persuaded with hashish nougat? Were you the beautiful brunette rapt amid the flowering dogwood? Or were you naked in that copse of almonds? Why did Sheila name the sparrow that you gave her “Lesbia”? She was living then in the mauve-brick tenement you own, wasn’t she? Why did the milkman deliver free ice cream to you and to her every Saturday? Didn’t you say that his name was Bud or Billy Starr? Weren’t you, during your early days on Willow Way, playing the oboe with the Sapphic Apricot Romance Orchestra? Didn’t the leader affect a steel helmet and pretend an interest in antique gramophones in order to seduce you? Wasn’t she the woman who duped you with some absurd story about a lost canto of Don Juan? Why on earth did you buy her a football for Christmas? And didn’t you and Ursula buy her a blown-up color photograph of a plague of locusts? Do you still think that there was a certain “chemistry” between the two of you? Didn’t she give you a thousand dollars to “pose,” as she called it, in some expensive lingerie she’d bought for you? And didn’t you turn white as a ghost when a nude actor suddenly joined the two of you? Why did you, some few years later, regularly refer to the obscene exhibition that occurred that night as a “rendezvous”? And don’t you now term the photograph one of crickets, not locusts, as if it somehow mattered? And why do you maintain that the geraniums had a spicy smell? Why do you so dislike Sundays?