“Show’s over, time to play cards,” Vince said. But Vince seemed much more interested in continuing his monologue than in getting to his favorite pastime. As he talked he worked his eyebrows nonstop; they arched and flattened calisthenically. He seemed to be signaling wildly from somewhere inside himself while he confided in a casual tone.
Suddenly I said, “She shaves her pussy.”
His cigarette stopped just short of his lips. He looked at me, squinting past the smoke. “Yeah, a lot of them do that.”
“She shaves her cunt bare,” I said.
Vomiting up these cruel vulgarities forced the blood into my head. Please remember, I wasn’t drunk, hadn’t had a sip of anything stronger than club soda. I felt happy, there’s no other way of putting it.
I said, “I know her. I’ll probably fuck her one of these days.”
Vince stayed quite still for a couple seconds more. “I doubt that,” he said.
Vince got louder as he drank another round, and then another. I didn’t know what he was saying. I listened while peering mainly at his eyebrows. Every now and then I answered. It was the kind of barroom conversation in which two people talk at cross-purposes until, sometimes anyway, one punches the other one.
My habit when I’ve been humiliated is to go out and buy a book. When I wiped out a small IRA by trading like a crazy roulette addict, I bought a book on stocks. When I played golf in the Virginia suburbs and everybody laughed, I found a book by Gary Player; after some practice I got pretty good, good enough to like these outings with lobbyists. After this incident in a bar I found a book in a small, exotic store: 101 Defenses Against Attack. I see I’m stalling. My friend slugged me. His fist snaked out like the knotted end of a whip and struck my forehead and the bridge of my nose. A polar whiteness exploded in my face. And although I wasn’t out, didn’t sleep, my thoughts all turned to questions, and I tipped over onto the floor. Sat there trying to push myself upright. I’m sure everybody thought I was drunk.
Under my hands the floor felt gritty with what I thought might be sawdust. It took me a little more time to remember what I was doing down there — I was trying to get up. I looked up to see Flower Cannon beside the stage. She’d taken off her black wig. She had her drink tipped up high and she was looking at me sideways. But out of a sort of libertarian barroom tact, I think, neither she nor anybody else seemed to be making very much of this incident. A couple of guys from a neighboring table helped me back onto my chair while I said, “I’m all right, I’m all right.”
Vince himself had disappeared, and a good thing — a person with his criminal history couldn’t afford any more trouble.
As soon as I could stand up straight, I left. On my way out I suddenly felt dizzy and sat down at the bar and asked for some orange juice. I sipped at it no more than a couple of minutes and then made my way out to the bright parking lot, where I realized I hadn’t even stopped off at the men’s room to see to my condition. My hands were filthy where I’d pushed myself up from the floor. Along with the grit of sawdust I found the stains of spilt drinks on my knees where I’d crawled around looking for my senses. I began to realize I had no idea where in the world I was going.
A man approached me, a young man frowning intelligently. Apparently he’d followed me out of the casino. “I saw that in there,” he said.
I leaned against a car.
“You okay?”
I nodded and tried to smile. “Excellent.”
In retrospect, there’s the humiliation: I forgot to be outraged, tried to play the cowboy.
“If you want to press charges, I’ll show up in court.”
“It was just one of those ridiculous — aah,” I assured him incoherently, “you know how it goes.”
“That was a completely unprovoked attack.”
I recognized him. He was a grad student with an office in our building, the Humanities Building. I didn’t know what subject he taught, but whenever I went down the stairs I passed his office, and it seemed he was always there, always talking in a self-assured nonstop voice to one of his students while others waited outside his door or sat on the stairs nearby. In a way, he was a junior colleague of mine. My embarrassment was now complete.
“If there’s anything I can do—”
“I’d really feel worse if you troubled yourself about it at all.”
“Yeah, I get you,” he said. “Okay.”
“Thanks.”
“Just tell me you’re navigating on your own power, and I’m outa here.”
“I just needed air. I’m all right.”
After he’d left me I moved myself a few paces and sat on the bumper of a truck while I tried to make a plan for the rest of the day, which looked completely unappealing now. I determined I’d check on bus schedules. If I didn’t learn of a bus leaving very soon, I’d get a motel room and watch TV or nap while I waited.
But now I found myself signaling across the parking lot to Flower Cannon as she came out of the casino. She headed right over, whether to greet me or because her car was parked close by I didn’t know.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a man’s wrinkled linen sports coat. Her makeup was gone.
“We’re actually acquainted,” I said.
“Yes. Hi,” she said.
“Do you remember me?”
“Sure. You just got knocked out in there. You’re quite memorable.”
“I was just going to ask you for a ride back to the University, if you remember me.”
“Michael Reed, right?”
“Yes. Michael Reed. I need a ride.”
“Did he steal your car, too?”
“I’m glad one of us sees the humor in it.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just laughing because I’m drunk.”
“Drunk? And you’re driving?”
“All over the road like a goddamn maniac. We’ve got plenty of room,” she said. “Hop right in.”
Actually her grad-student Japanese hatchback was crowded with boxes, books, clothing, trash. I cleared a space on the passenger side by shoveling junk over the back of the seat.
“I’m sorry it smells funny,” she said. “It needs to go through the car wash sometime with the windows open.”
She started the car after a couple of tries. “Wasn’t there somebody else?” I asked.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Who’s we?”
“We?”
“You said we. Who’s we?”
“I don’t know. You and me.”
“Okay. I just didn’t want to forget someone.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fuck ’em,” she said, “whoever they are,” and we swooped out of the lot.
I’d stayed in Riverside no more than two hours, probably less, been conveyed there swiftly and stayed briefly to be assaulted and now was conveyed back again over the flat landscape where the fields lay in perfect sterile rows of dust. I felt wonderful in a way. But my head ached.
“I missed your act,” I told her. “What was the alias you performed under?”
“‘O. O. O’Malley,’” she said.
“And you won.”
“I sure did.”
“Very good.”
“You take it all off, you get the prize. Gynecology triumphs.”
“I missed that.”
“‘Skin to win.’”
“Excellent.” I couldn’t really converse. I worried about Flower’s driving. She didn’t give it her full attention. She took her eyes off the road whenever she addressed me and had a trick of jamming the gas suddenly and accelerating up into the seventies for no good reason. In a sports car she’d be a demon. I could feel the cogs and guys of the steering about to snap. I worried about the tires, certainly they were the cheapest. Yes, sometimes part of me wanted my life to end like this, in a bad wreck, as a way of sharing the horror of Anne and Elsie’s last moments. But the rest of me was just inordinately afraid in a car.