The Woman Thing
[aka 'Woman']
by Harriet Daimler 


CHAPTER I 

"Macdonald, can I turn on the light now." 

"Absolutely not." 

He hunted for her body and found it by following the descent of the mattress 
to the precipice where she had to be. 

"Then you turn it on, please," she let him pat her wet thighs and her dry 
belly and then graduate up to her breasts. 

"Sleep!" 

"I can't sleep. I must talk to you." 

"Does a tropical disease prevent you from hearing your voice in the dark?" 

"That's just it," she detached him from the nipple stuck between his 
irregular teeth. "I can feel me reabsorbing my voice. I want you to hear 
it." 

"Attention is a child of darkness." Macdonald mumbled into his yawn. 

"You'll go to sleep." Martha sat up on her side of the bed collapsing his in 
a landslide. "I know you'll go to sleep. You always do when I talk serious." 

"I go to sleep," her ingratitude woke him sharply, "after elevating my love 
to an ecstasy of pleasure for seventeen hours. Does that seem abrupt?" He 
labored to regain his own pinnacle. 

"But we're always either sleeping or fucking," she moaned. "I can never talk 
seriously." 

"Martha," he asked in fatalistic calm, "is this going to be the same as last 
week's conversation?" 

"With variations." 

"Then just rattle off the variation without the rest. I swear, I haven't 
managed to forget one consonant." 

"If you won't turn on the light, can I open the curtain? It might still be 
day," the girl bargained. 

"Keep your revolting facts of nature to yourself," he said, pinning her to 
the bed. "You Americans, no timing. Just this appalling accuracy. Clocks 
where your cocks should be." 

"Cunts," she beggared. 

"A detail that wouldn't give nerves to a poet." 

"You're not a poet, you're a doctor." 

"I've forbidden you to use that word in this bed," he snapped at her, 
shutting his eyes at the unforgivable trespass. 

"Why did you stop being a doctor?" 

"I couldn't stand the image of myself, tall, slender, humorous eyes, vital 
hair, nervous intensity, quick competent movements-and then that long white 
coat, so obscenely attractive women got sick at the sight of me." 

"Do you ever think of all those sick neglected patients?" 

"People have a right to be sack," he said darkly. 

"Also a right to be cured." 

"Absolutely not." 

"That's nonsense and you know it." 

"I know that you're trying to keep me awake," Macdonald lifted the arm from 
her flattened body and scratched his eyes open, "when you've got my complex 
glandular system alerted, you'll sneak into that monumentally meaningless 
conversation of yours, the whole serious thing, variations and theme." 

"Even if I had nothing else to say," Martha extracted her body from the 
tangle of damp, tobacco stained, wine stained, yogurt, coffee and come 
stained sheets, "I'd still say nonsense." 

"Congratulations." 

"Nonsense." 

He listened to her bare feet pressing cigarette butts on the tile floor. "If 
people are healthy, they're healthy," he delivered himself of a quotation no 
one would ever quote, "and if they're sick they're sick, disgusting 
egomaniacs, all their ingenious little diseases that it takes generations to 
cultivate. Fuck them." 

"What about being bit by cars," she fought for the masses. 

"Each man to his own bad habits," Macdonald reached above his head and 
squeezed forty watts of electricity into his eyes. "I frankly prefer livers 
decomposed by excessive drink and insanity caused by sleeping all night and 
struggling to stay awake all day. Martha, there's enough light in the room. 
If you touch that curtain and one sliver of day falls across my exhausted 
form I will consider your death a suicide." 

She took a chance and pulled back the curtain. Had the window been wide 
enough to frame an adult skull or the curtains full enough to form one fold, 
her gesture would have achieved significance. Squinting one eye she tried to 
focus it through the architect's esoteric joke. "It's a glorious day. I 
think there's sun somewhere, but of course not in Paris." 

"Of course not," Macdonald reached for the Gauloises, "you want to turn 
tourist agents into prophets." 

"It's that wall, Mac," Martha stayed sentinel at the rampart through which 
the enemy could not be spotted until he'd shot the pinks of her eye, "the 
whole world could be raging with peace and we'd just see the wall. Why," she 
turned her imploring naked search on him, "now why would the French build a 
hotel against a wall and then put a microscopic vaginal slit in all the 
rooms facing the wall when so many painters are screaming for commissions?" 

"When this hotel opened, little one, daylight was recognized as vulgar and 
ill flattering to fair complexions," he stared back at her, "and how wise 
were our ancestors is confirmed by your revolting appearance." 

"Then why did you become a doctor?" 

"Have I missed my cue," Macdonald apologized to his fellow players, "or did 
I just have a monotonous chat with myself about walls?" 

"Well, why? Did you love humanity?" 

"Never," his laugh turned into a nicotine addict's hackle, "humanity, those 
nauseous gases that solidified into you." 

"But why?" 

"Who can fathom nature." 

"No, the other why." 

"Come back to bed," he said, "I can see you too clearly at this distance." 

"I look like hell?" 

"The enamel is cracking a bit," he admitted. "You look like the Mona Lisa 
that didn't get returned to the Louvre." 

She rushed her face to the piece of mirror over the sink, "you're right," 
her fingers forcing the cracks to fuse and disappear. "I must put on all 
fresh powder." 

"Women," he marveled, "how with the mysterious and subtle changes of your 
delicate inner life and metabolism you create fife's only calendar." 

"Also I'll have to make some more black for my eyes." 

"Oh Christ," he moaned, "you're going to smoke all the concierges out of 
their electric eyes." 

"Well, I can't go around like this," she glared at him out of yesterday's 
ruined mask. 

"Get back into bed." 

"Why did you become a doctor?" 

"So I could study my body," he relented, "without everyone getting 
suspicious. I was always mad for my body." 

"Is that all?" She stood leaning over the bed looking for the opening, and 
then finding the corner where the blanket appeared to be in contact with 
mattress, crawled in. 

"Oh no, my precious Penelope, also to study female parts. I reasoned that if 
I could memorize all my vitals and then progress onto females', I'd make a 
fortune giving frigid American ladies, who sometimes came to our modest but 
picturesque village, orgasms. At the time I chose that livelihood," his 
words were aimless but his fingers on her sex sure, "Like most of my 
ignorant Scots neighbors, I thought that all frigid American ladies were 
rich. You, of course," he released a torrent of accusing smoke in her 
direction, "are only one of the examples confirming that youth should not be 
left to choose his own destiny." 

"Macdonald." 

"The voice I hear is not of my present love but speaks like a specter out of 
last week, and the week before that week." 

"Macdonald, are you the only man who can make me come?" 

"I wouldn't be surprised. I've always had rotten luck with my successes." 

"Then it must be because we have a profound relationship." 

"It must be." 

"See," she pulled the burning cigarette out of his mouth. "See, you're going 
to sleep with a cigarette and the light and window and everything. We must 
have this discussion." 

"Discussions," he groaned, "couldn't you write down your thoughts, leaving 
wide margins on either side of the paper for me to blue pencil in my 
corrections." 

"Why were you the only man to make me come?" 

"Because I'm clever. Because I have an iron and tireless prick." 

"Nonsense." 

"That phrase keeps recurring." 

She increased the agony of the bedsprings and turned to him. "I think I was 
ready. I used to believe it was your skill or my great love that made me 
come, but I've been reconsidering. I'd become less neurotic in Europe, any 
man could have done it." 

"Why my sweet," he reached gently for her hand, "and have I been the last to 
try? I never dared to ask or to hope." 

"Well practically." 

"Practically? You equivocate, have there been impractical results?" 

"No one else can," she said bluntly. 

"And the thing you wish to know is if this is a curse or a blessing? You are 
wondering if it will be necessary for you to throw your body on the burning 
pyre in the unfortunate calamity of my demise preceding yours." 

"Yes, that's what I'm wondering." 

"I can see your dilemma," he picked up another cracked mirror that fate had 
deposited on the bedside chair-table-crate and studied his ravished teeth, 
"and when you allow for the modern savagery of inhumation, I marvel at how 
you maintain a calm. Then you don't really maintain, do you." 

"Badly." 

"You would like me to assure that you will be the first of us to go? Is that 
what's haunting our idyllic relationship?" 

"Do we have a relationship, Macdonald?" 

"I knew it was a mistake to use that word." He spat on the insolent mirror, 
"I forgot about all the books you've been reading. Would you tweeze my 
eyebrows, Martha?" 

"Do we have anything, Macdonald?" 

"Sure, all kinds of things." He carefully replaced the gilt mirror on the 
marble top balustrade, and just as carefully separated her golden thighs. 
"Among which I sadly cannot include money." 

"Macdonald, speak seriously to me, are we together because we love each 
other?" 

"Is this famous discussion of yours an elaborate plot to make me impotent? 
Because that question would require a serious answer," he warmed his hands 
at the barricade, "if it made any sense at all." 

"It makes great sense," she held him out, "it's the only thing that does 
make sense. Why are we here together in this bed?" 

"Whereas the other answer would have to be too serious, this one is too 
obvious." 

"Just to fuck, Macdonald, is that all?" 

"You'll weep at that preposition when you hit sixty." 

"But why each other? Why for three years each other." 

"We pretend to enjoy it." 

"Is pretense everything?" 

"I'm not prepared to deal with everything, just fucking." 

"And will we want each other tomorrow, Macdonald?" 

"Don't be impatient, sweet. Let's wait and ignore that question tomorrow." 

"But it makes everything so tenuous," she wept, "it makes every day so 
arbitrary, and then so identical." 

"You want a reason bigger than either of us, my little one?" 

"I want an answer." 

"I can't give it to you." He wrestled with her hand that fell away like a 
sloppy drunk from the solid support of his offered pole. 

"Thank you," she said grimly, "you can continue sleeping now." 

"I have no reasons." 

"You made that clear." 

"I think reasons are so unreasonable." 

"Love would be a reason," she shrieked. 

"Is that a reason to love? Just to be neat and have a reason?" 

"It would be the other way round." 

"My suspicions are so strong as to be convictions." 

"Hate would be a reason." 

"So would geography, economy, chemistry, philosophy, or sodomy. So pick any 
one, or even two that satisfy you. I won't turn state's evidence." 

"I'm a woman," she insisted into his calm face. The man next door put down 
France-Soir. 

"If you're a woman," Macdonald surrendered on her desert-dry sex, "why don't 
you go to work like all the other women and give me some pocket-money and 
peace, then I'll be strong and beat you." 

"That wouldn't mean anything." 

"It might hurt. I'm bigger than I look." 

"If you'd beat me out of jealousy or lust ... " 

"Bring me my strap. I'll try." 

"Oh Macdonald, it's so weak our being together. It's as if once three years 
ago we got into bed and neither of us has had the energy to get out since." 

"You exaggerate, darling. We get out at least seven times a week. Ask any 
garcon at the Deux Magots." 

"What's that?" 

"It's a cathedral on St. Germain des Pres, across from the other Cathedral 
St. Germain des Pres, not far from that other Catherdral St. Sulpice." 

"I think," she jumped out of bed in a flair of intensity, "that people 
should be together because they can't be apart." 

"Like in prisons and mental institutions?" he suggested. 

"I mean there should be an urgency, an inevitability, a decision that makes 
them be together." 

"Tension is a good word." 

"Yes. Tension, attraction, love." 

"I hope my secretary is getting this all down." 

"It's so easy to be cynical," she said contemptuously, reaching for another 
cigarette and lighting it slowly and attentively, letting the sulphur fumes 
burn away and inhaling the clean heat. He watched her carefully and 
approved. 

"I want a man who needs me as a woman." 

"You read that somewhere," he accused. 

"A man who will accept being accepted as a man." 

"You've been sneaking copies of Readers Digest out of the library, naughty 
girl." 

"Shut up," she hammered at him, "I'm not a child anymore playing fuck. Let's 
play fuck. We're too old for running bases so let's play fuck." 

"Sure," he enthusiastically brought out his equipment, "get back into the 
bed." 

"Macdonald, I want to commit myself." 

He pulled his body back against the Greek pillar that the hotel outrageously 
disguised as a pillow. "It sounds very dangerous." 

"And I must commit myself to someone." 

"My toenails are a sight," he complained, "pedicure me." 

"I want to say to someone, I accept you and have him say back to me I accept 
you. Simple but difficult." 

"That one you overheard on a bus of sight-seeing goldfish." 

"What do you know about buses," she shrieked hopelessly, "when have you ever 
been on a bus?" 

"Is that what you've been getting at for all these weeks," he sighed, "you 
feel I'm not enough of an adventurer, an explorer, a hunter. You want to lie 
on this bed thinking all day of ways to comfort me while I transfer like a 
madman from buses to metres to taxis and stagger home to you bulging with 
brutal worldliness to grind my knee into your cunt. And then you want to say 
that's my troubled man grinding his knee into my healing cunt." 

"You're twisting it," her voice flew like a wild horse around the room 
looking for something unbroken. 

"You want the serenity of abuse," he pursued, "you're afraid I'm not 
sufficiently amused by you. You want to be beaten into my digestive system." 

"No, no, no." 

"Figuratively of course," Macdonald calmed her, "none of us have that much 
energy left." 

"We won't talk any more," her voice quivered. 

"Don't boss me around," Macdonald continued. "I'm no pervert. Just because 
you can't be dependent is no reason to become independent. I feel like 
talking." 

"Shut up, please shut your stupid mouth." She threaded the thick cord 
through the hole punched in the top of the tin sardine can and silently 
began to manufacture eye shadow. 

"All right, when I get my second breath in three years we can talk some 
more." 

"We shall never discuss anything again," she poured in the olive oil and lit 
the wick watching the black smoke rise. With priestly precision she erected 
a shed of tin over the smoke to catch the soot. 

"Good." 

"You're too disgustingly negative." 

"And not at all positive." 

"You leave so much out," she stood still but her rage trembled. "Don't I." 

"You leave responsibility and family and faith out." 

"Completely." 

"You leave the world out." 

"I knew I overlooked something." 

"And you and me out." 

"What carelessness." 

"Macdonald, why you and me?" she exploded. "It goes back to why you and me." 

"We happened in the same world that I left out." 

"So did everybody else." 

"But we're accident prone, we met." 

"Thanks," she bent her head over the small smoking furnace. 

"Your tears will excite me into surrendering myself," he warned, "I'll say 
that I'm your man and you my woman and apart we have no existence till death 
do us in and give us eternal life together." 

"I never knew beauty," her two tears dried in long slate exclamation points 
on her chalk cheeks, "until I heard your words." 

"Words," he said contemptuously, "incantations, you want to make a 
dedication out of fucking and use your body as a living altar." 

"What else does a girl dream of," she demanded, "during her painful Brooklyn 
adolescence." 

"You want me to prove that I'm better than you, so that you can really soar 
when you prove that I'm not." 

"What could be easier." 

"You have to be sure it's God's prick you stick on your pikestaff." 

"You and your miserable balls." 

"Get into this bed and shut your blasphemous mouth," he commanded. 

"Never!" 

He wrenched her on the bed in one graceless hurdle. "Put your woman's magic 
hand around my cock and make me feel good all over like that nauseous child 
in that nauseous book about that nauseous Uncle." 

"I wouldn't touch your filthy prick." 

"When are you going to stop listening to your own words. Haven't I taught 
you that. You're revolting when you're serious, your entire Jewish ancestry 
comes squatting all over your face." 

"You haven't taught me anything, except that a man and a woman can mean 
something together and we don't." 

"I'll worry about your education after I fuck you." 

"Don't come near me." 

"How authentic, I have to rape you." 

"You twist and vulgarize everything," she pounded his oncoming chest, 
"fucking should be a unity, where two people become one ... " 

"And you hate me so much you're unwilling to become me. Look darling, don't 
ever get confused about where I end and you begin," in infuriating calm he 
lit a cigarette. "I don't. That may be the clue to your reluctant orgasm. 
Good title. Maybe none of your former heroes made the distinction and you 
didn't want to be an old spoilsport and point it out to them just when they 
were having the best time." 

"Can I only be satisfied by someone I despise?" 

"I mean that you come with me because I leave you alone to enjoy yourself." 

"That's masturbation," the scandal thickened her alarm. 

"With an audience! Can you feel yourself turning indigo and going blind?" he 
squashed out the three hundred and twenty-fourth cigarette of the week. 
"Come, your great mind has stimulated my great cock." 

"I want to sleep," of all things. 

"Later," he pulled her against him, "I've had enough of being together, I'm 
sick of you. Let's fuck and be apart. Let me suck your cunt and forget 
you're here," he jammed a finger into her. "A few minutes' peace, then we 
can be lovers. Do you like when I suck your cunt?" he snarled. 

"You know," she relented, feeling the brush of his head between her thighs. 

"Then I'll begin neglecting you there." 

"You make me feel so alone." 

"Be a big girl, now," he sank his lips over the protecting pinkness of her 
pulsing womb, whispering an answer. 

"I don't want to be alone," she pressed against his skillful mouth, down to 
her deepest secret. "Don't leave me alone," her lips rotated in perverse 
obedience to Macdonald's insulting tongue. His fingers punctured her anus 
and hooked her sex higher and tighter into his sucking mouth. 

"I'd rather be a slave," she whispered, "than be so alone. And you're so 
alone, you don't even want slaves for company. Fuck me, Macdonald, fuck me 
with your prick." He moved up to her in the bed and she sucked her female 
juices from his lips. "Fuck me, Macdonald, be with me." 

"Don't eat me up," he warned. "Just be a bitch and fuck me till I'm dead." 

It turned into a very serious session, no memorable jokes or clever ideas. 
He just stayed on top of her, embracing her buttocks to get her pressed 
against him and opening her warmth with his broad stift'staff. He got the 
head of his rod into the center of her sex, and stayed on it, rubbed on it, 
without mercy. She pressed her insides against it, revealing all her girlish 
secrets. He just ignored her the first time she came, persisting in deep 
indifferent thrusts. Her spread legs pulled together and locked him to her, 
and her perspiring body got ready for the second time. It was all very 
serious, Macdonald had lost his sense of humor. 

He loved her until she was a hot river, until he could feel her not knowing 
or caring who or what that thing inside of her was, just plunging it up and 
down inside of her with lavish fascism. Then he forgot her and let his body 
turn into an enormous staff that went where it wanted to go as fast and as 
deep and as hard as it could. 

Her first words, when she could see that there was someone else in the world 
were, "I'm so hungry and there's nothing to eat." 

 CHAPTER 2 

"Well, if I were a woman," said Macdonald, removing his overused body from 
the waves of sea gray sheets, "I'd never have that problem." 

"And I wouldn't have it if I were a man," her face the white foam on the 
crests. "But I seem to be a woman and I seem never to have any money and I 
seem to get hungry every now and then." 

"Now and then," his laugh was a triumph of morbidity, "if you lost your 
appetite for two seconds you'd die of terror. But we'll have no panic," he 
promised, "as long as I'm decaying here in Paris I guarantee you daily, one 
revolting French phallic sandwich." 

"Could you go down and get something now, Macdonald?" Martha lifted her head 
from the round log of a cushion. "Just some bread and cheese, a hard 
cheese," she fell back ecstatically, "maybe a cantal or a gruyere. Imagine 
butter," her eyes dared him. "Imagine bread and butter and cheese?" 

"My imagination doesn't extend to that," in an attempt to poison hers he 
yawned in a treacherous display of surreal calcium formations. "Anyway it 
must be that large section of the afternoon when every shop is shut." 

"No," she insisted, unaffected by the cave of weird hanging stalagmites, 
"there's an Italian charcuterie on rue Monsieur-le-Prince that never closes. 
People are in there all day buying olives and hams and roast chickens and 
tongue and veal," she completed her catechism into the pillow, "and 
ca-memberts, and tomates farcies, and champignons a la grecque and pizza and 
spinach." 

"You're disgustingly carnal," Macdonald reminded her, "you'll never achieve 
spiritual anesthesia or my admiration." He pulled on his pea-green trousers 
and exerted his hand into its torn pockets. "I know I had five hundred 
francs yesterday." 

"We bought a pack of Gauloises," she reminisced, "and you had a rum," she 
pronounced resentfully. 

"You don't mention your Perrier. Why you dissolve money in water when even 
this hotel has taps full of it." 

"Perrier settles my stomach." 

He grunted. 

"And my nerves." 

"You have no nerves, my dear, I grant you the stomach. A bottomless 
insensitive vulcarion stomach." 

"I can't continuously make love on an empty stomach," she shouted. 

"Of course you can. Sociologists have discovered that starving nations 
reproduce at the greatest rate. That's the only solution to hunger, fuck." 

"I like eating." 

"There was a time," he wandered around the room picking up rags that turned 
out not to be his sweater, "when you'd lie in bed for three days and not 
move out for coffee. Just wanted to have me in you all the time, till you 
began to stink of decomposition." 

"It was different then," Martha said meaningfully. 

"Why different." 

"Because then I had money. I never get hungry when we have money. It's just 
when we have nothing that I get famished." 

"What a very cooperative unconscious you have," he patted her thigh. "Should 
make some masochist very happy." 

"Don't start talking intelligent," Martha warned, "whenever you get that 
wise look on your face I get so hungry I get sick." 

Macdonald sat down on the edge of the bed. "Rum," he figured, "forty francs, 
Perrier ninety francs, now that is ridiculous, Martha, ninety francs for 
water, cigarettes one hundred and five, that's one ninety-five and forty, 
two thirty-five." 

"Two forty-five," she corrected. "Shut up you idiot, you're as accurate as 
an induced miscarriage. My divine Circe, my noble 

Sibyl sacrificing your secrets for a piece of bread and cheese." 

"Look in your jacket pocket," she said, spread magnificently on the 
mattress, "maybe you put the change in there, and hand me a Gauloise too." 

"It's here. What did I say, two thirty-five, that leaves two sixty-five." He 
spread the round discs over his palm and held the assortment close under her 
nose. "Smell Dr. Weiner, two sixty-five." Then he pawed with his free hand 
for the cigarettes. He ripped away the top of the package and counted. 
"Seven cigarettes. Should I buy another pack and get food for one 
fifty-five, or should I blow it all on cheese?" 

"Of course buy cigarettes," she said primly. "We wouldn't want to break any 
of our habits." 

"What kind of bread." 

"Black." 

"White is cheaper." 

"Then why not eat the plaster of the walls?" Her voice trembled with the 
pain of the proselytizer. "Just as much food value, just as constipating. I 
want the unexpurgated wheat, only forty francs anyway. Then cantal. I guess 
cantal is cheap enough." 

"You're sure that's all, madam?" he pulled the pullover over his flat hairy 
chest, and his head reappeared still talking, "you sure you wouldn't like me 
to kiss your precious bowels." 

"Yes," she said petulantly from the nuptial folds, "kiss my ass, it's such a 
long time since you've kissed my ass, Macdonald." 

"Because you're such a bore," he apologized and unlocked his way out of the 
room. 

"Macdonald," she shouted after him, moving nothing but her wide unpainted 
mouth, "Macdonald," her voice trailed after him down the suicidal stairwell, 
"check if there's any mail." 

"No." 

Exhausted by the dramatic futility of her request Martha led her buttocks 
back into the cavern hex weight topped by Macdonald's weight had carved into 
the mattress and eroded into the springs. The joints of her knees had 
calcified into abrupt angles and she massaged them horizontal. Impoverished 
men, she upbraided destiny, why always poor men? They're certainly not more 
intelligent, they're not more amusing, they're not at all amusing. And so 
plentiful. They multiply, they destroy, they're like white cells in my blood 
stream. My parasites of poverty. And they have no style, so dedicated about 
having nothing. Treating everyone like wives-men, women, children, animals, 
birds, reptiles, fungus, concierges, their misery marries them to 
everything. Till finally he begrudges me a glass of water. I'll soon be 
drinking his piss, she thought lasciviously. Tomorrow, she fought fate, I'll 
put on a skirt and go sit in the Ritz bar. I'll take baths in Perrier. First 
rich man who comes up to me and says: What will you have? me sitting 
distracted behind a Scotch will say, I'll take a bath of Perrier. Create a 
fantastic reputation for myself. Become a myth, have poor girls from all 
over the world coming to drink my bathwater the way they do at Lourdes. 
Charge them for each sip, charge the 

Perrier people for the publicity, charge the rich man for the honor, charge 
general admittance, have virgins making wishes and throwing coins into my 
tub, just soak in that Perrier day after day swelling with wealth. Bottle 
what they don't slurp right out of the tub and call it Mother Martha's Money 
Maker. 

She picked up the mirror that Macdonald had abandoned and tried to be 
critical rather than familiar. She prepared herself for imperfections, but 
not for the pathos of her wrecked image. Instead of smashing the idol, with 
heathen intensity she lined up the paints and brushes and began the daily 
ritual of resurrection. Yesterday's mascara and black crayon smeared 
mushroom tan on the boned eye sockets. Her nose protruded in protest, and 
holding the mirror close to the repulsive tapestry, she doubted. The surface 
would have to be scraped. This was a structural disaster that could not be 
covered. Discarding the treacherous mirror, Martha smeared her face with a 
thick layer of cream. She vanquished her past, rubbing away the black 
experienced smears. Then she looked at the slightly ruddy and reddened skin, 
deftly layering it with a white powder. Her personality disappeared in the 
eyeless white mask so it was without recognition that she stabbed the razor 
sharp crayon into the dazzling blank field. She could landscape the suburban 
quietude of untrod lawn, or cultivate the dark secrets of the jungle. With 
one sure oval swing of the pencil, then another, she chose the pagan 
tropics. Now she could look directly at the familiar reflection. With a 
smile of recognition she blackened the curved brows and pressed the point of 
the weapon with cruel intensity into her immaculate temple. She was 
happening. A quiver of satisfaction adjusted her metabolism. The pale 
powdered mouth greeted her, and holding her neck taut, the throat poised for 
any social phenomenon, she was almost ready. Twisting and piling the vibrant 
red hair into a snake pit of poised insanity, she joined the forces of the 
furies, prepared for action, eager for admiration, desperate for coffee. 

"Are you still in bed," Macdonald shouldered open the never closed door. 
"Aren't you afraid you'll be neglected by art historians?" 

"Why," she said gaily, "were we planning to get in a bit of sketching this 
morning?" 

"No more black bread," he ignored her cleverly renovated face. 

"In the four hundred and twenty-seven boulan-geries in this quarter you 
couldn't find black bread?" 

"No," he said simply, "apparently I couldn't." 

"I don't want any bread," she said, casting a poisonous spell on the crisp, 
amber baguette he placed on the table. "Just cheese." 

"I couldn't get cheese either," he shook his large satisfied head, "it's 
Monday, your Italians are in church." He reached into his pocket, "Instead I 
bought two jars of confiture." 

"I hate confiture," she sat up, tears exaggerating her eyes. "It's 
disgusting to eat sweet things when you're hungry. Couldn't you buy me a 
yogurt? Couldn't you find one small edible civilized piece of nourishment in 
all of Paris. It's an attack, I know your method, you've done this out of 
spite and sadism. You're a cunt, a mediocre lazy smelling repelling emit," 
she crept lethally out of the bed, "persecuting me, torturing and destroying 
me, eating at my self-confidence. But I won't let it happen, Macdonald. 
Starve me and I'll still fight you with nerves. With my last choked energy I 
will not be tyrannized," and circling the table in demonic fury she clenched 
the divining rod and wrenched it into jagged halves. "Wall plaster, not one 
vitamin, protein or mineral salt," she spat on the pieces and before 
Macdonald could interrupt the ceremony, offered the bread through the slit 
in the wall that functioned as a window. "There," she consoled her 
belligerent belly, "there, there." Her quivering form steadied, her 
breathing regulated. She listened for the hushed encounter of bread and 
pavement five flights below, and hearing the faint plop, turned to the bed. 

Actually there had never been any chance of her reaching it. Macdonald had 
been distorted into a man of furious action. Clenching her naked shoulders 
he pulled her passionately back into his arms and in a completely 
unrehearsed imitation of Rudolf V whispered, "Precious one, you have a 
choice. Either I break open the wall with your head, and push you through 
that hole down after the bread, taking the vague chance that your bloody 
skull doesn't contaminate the bread, or you move into the hall fully clothed 
in nudity and climb down those five flights of public stairway, enter that 
public courtyard, find that bread, both halves, lick it clean with your pink 
little python tongue and carry that bread back to dad. You have practically 
no time at all to make your decision." 

"I ... " 

"Don't talk," he said savagely, "or I'll surely lose mine and bash in yours. 
Just nod. Once means the wall and twice the hall." He caught her by the 
ankles and twirled her like the figure-skating champion of Canada which he 
wasn't. 

"Macdonald ... " 

"Nod," he commanded, whirling her body in a circumference that lazily 
included the four corners of the room, sailing her over the bed and under 
the sink and past the armoire. "Too bad," he panted philosophically, "I 
can't see your head. It's hardly fair." 

"Macdonald, I'll never ... " her words drifted away from them. 

"I know my love, you'll never make it, and you'll never forgive me, and 
you'll never smile again, and you'll never eat or fuck again, and every day 
I'll bury my cock in a barrel of wheat germ and commune with your cunt of a 
spirit." Her head, which she had been holding high during the sporting event 
brushed the tile floor, lightly but with a conclusive bounce, then the neck 
collapsed limply and Macdonald knew she was out. He carried the noxious 
burden past the bed through the door, and there deposited it. He walked 
rapidly to the sink, filled a cracked martini pitcher, her American 
contribution to their household, with plain water, quenched his thirst, 
walked back to his stiff puppet, drenched its face, and soon as its eyelids 
quivered against the infliction of light, forced the door closed against her 
bare bodkin. 

He pulled the foil off the small jar of pineapple preserves and curved his 
finger Indian style into the jam, scooping out sweet mouthfuls. He ate 
seriously, thinking all the time of the body stretched out in the hall, and 
sucking his fingers. He consoled himself with another mouthful of sweet 
mucous. She had the magic American body, long, straight limbed, thin, nice 
around the stomach and hips, flat yet round to caress, the small tight 
breasts with the slightly exaggerated nipples. And the legs, the legs that 
sometimes happened to American girls, legs that traveled half the distance 
of their bodies, right up into tight high buttocks and wide enough hips; her 
thighs full and white that pressed her cunt into a thick triangle of 
vigorous hair. Macdonald squinted his imagination until he could paint the 
harmony of her white curves, decorated only by the riotously red shield of 
her cunt hairs. A remarkably restrained canvas. "Only America produces such 
women," he lamented, "with their hideous minds. Well," he breathed with 
Scots sagacity, "the left bank's as good a place as any not to find eternal 
love." He pulled his suitcase from under the bed and disappeared Merlin-like 
in a billow of dust and ashes. When the particles settled he was still there 
to hear some whimpers pouring through the patches in the door. 

"Macdonald," her voice called faintly from the enemy's side of the 
partition, "have you killed me?" 

"Yes," he reassured, "you've been dead about twelve minutes." 

"Is that all?" her doubts pursued him from the other world. "I can't 
remember ever having lived." 

"How ungrateful," he lit a Gauloise, "when you consider it was I who first 
brought you to life." 

"You," she snorted, "I'm sorry I ever told you that." 

"You couldn't avoid it my dove, all that cursing and fainting and rolling of 
eyes." 

"It was just such a surprise." 

"I bet." 

"That you, the ugliest reptile I'd ever condescended to sleep with should be 
the first to make me come." 

"The same old story of beauty and the beast." 

"Of course, I only came because of your complete insensitivity. I just 
figured, he's not a man, I'll use him." 

"Like a raw carrot." 

"You've always taken advantage of me because of it," her voice contorted 
into an attack. 

"Unfortunately untrue, it's trapped me these three years. Every time I fuck 
you I behold the virgin Mary defiled." 

"I was not a virgin," he could hear her struggling to her feet. "I counted 
for you once, I had twenty-three men before you. Twenty-three beautiful, 
virile well-educated, rich, talented men." 

"And never that consummating spasm of joy." 

"And then comes you," she continued, "a thing of such ridiculous physique 
that mean mothers hold their children up to get a good punishing look at 
you. Entire villages are disrupted when you enter, bets taken as to your 
species." 

"It was charity and pity that made you surrender your virginity to me," he 
suggested. 

"I was not a virgin." The concierge five floors below moved her huge bulk to 
escape the sound. 

"Old story Martha, old American Tragicomedy. All you poor pretty bright 
things sitting in black stockings and tennis shoes confessing: I lost my 
virginity at seventeen and didn't regain it until I was twenty-five, at 
which time it was too late to do anything so I came to Europe." 

"It wasn't you," she tore off his insignia of the Most Distinguished Order 
of st. Michael and St. George. "It was the change in my diet. Wheat germ and 
yeast, it was that. A healthy body builds a healthy mind. I'd become less 
neurotic. Any man," she insulted, "could have given me an orgasm when you 
did." 

"You cried for three days," he girdled a cord around the suitcase. "You had 
a raging fever for five, you kept kissing my toes and licking my armpits and 
telling me I was greater than Frank Sinatra. Not many men could have pulled 
through that." 

"I was insane." 

"I thought you were less neurotic." 

"Neurosis has nothing to do with insanity." 

Macdonald sighed. "Imagine if you had read two books instead of one?" 

"Macdonald," the sound tore out of her like the blues blasting out of New 
Orleans, "Macdonald, I don't have any clothes on!" 

"What cad went and told you?" 

"Macdonald, have you gone mad, let me in. Macdonald," she shrieked, "Let me 
in. Let me in my room," her voice was a travesty of control, "the room my 
mother's occasional checks pay for." 

"Bread," he reminded her, "as always, the conflict is about bread." 

"I'll have you arrested, Macdonald." 

"Scab." 

"I'll go to the Scots Embassy, I'll tell them all about the two abortions 
you gave me after your passport expired eighteen months ago, I'll tell them 
everything, everything. You'll be guillotined for this, I swear to you. 
Macdonald, the little father's coming up the stairs, Macdonald, answer me," 
she pounded the door frantically, "miserable jealous flunky sadist, what are 
you doing in there? Answer me," she sobbed against the relentless silence of 
the wooden door, "answer me, what are you doing?" 

"I'm packing, I've opened my valise and I'm folding my property into it. Any 
more questions?" 

"Monster," she spat at him, "vulgar perverted ugly monster." Macdonald 
pulled a chair to the door and sat down tiredly, opening the fresh pack of 
Gauloises. 

"Macdonald," she slipped into the pose of rational social worker, "we know 
we're finished, must we end it with this humiliation, must we finish 
despising each other, can't we salvage a speck of dignity?" 

"From what, Martha?" 

"We have meant something to each other." 

She paused. "I've never loved anyone the way I've loved you." 

"How revolting," snarled Macdonald and moved away from the door to the 
window. "I can still smell the bread," he shouted, "the concierges must all 
be buggering their cats, hurry wee one." He knew with shrinking heart and 
belly that it'she didn't relent, he would. 

All the exercise and running back and forth to windows and tossing of dead 
weights was a decided departure from Macdonald's usual sedentary life, and 
his appetite responded. Would-be writers, he rediscovered, do not incline 
towards athletics, which was why so few of them had made memorable records 
at the Olympics. He opened the door and found the hall gloomy and empty in 
the diminishing afternoon. No Martha, only the faint rustlings of paper 
emanating from the room that the French, out of respect and affection for 
the English language, identify as the water closet. "Martha," he called, 
forced into the offensive, "are you going?" 

"Is the hall empty?" 

"I am in it." 

"You don't count. I mean people, not baboons." 

"Three baboons are standing next to me." Macdonald counted with slow 
authority, "I am the only recognizable human. But you may say that including 
me there are four baboons in the corridor." 

"Pig," she grunted, and he heard the latch of the bathroom door lift. Martha 
emerged clothed in patches of France-Soir, Le Monde, ll Observatoire, and 
upon her breasts, Ullumanite". 

"I'm not going back there," Martha pointed. "I'm going to stand here and ask 
the first person who passes to help me." 

"If you were English," Macdonald cheered her, "every policeman would be 
required by law to give you two shillings," and he brushed past her 
accidentally touching a lighted match to the kiosk. 

Getting to the courtyard was not for Macdonald the automatic process of 
walking down familiar steps and through familiar doors while the creative 
plains of his brain were left free to transport him to reckless adventure. 
All of his stealth, all of his cunning had to be invoked for his encounter 
with the enormous owneress of the hotel. All day, huddled and hidden in the 
folds of her flesh, her fury waited for him. On alternate Fridays of August 
at four o'clock when Madame bathed, then and only then could Macdonald and 
Martha pop in and out of the building, which they did from six to eight 
times with the wild abandon of the fluctuating franc. Today she guarded her 
post, and most terrible circumstance, someone was paying his bill. That 
always cheered her, and cheered she leered in a savage exposure of ivory. He 
tried to confuse her with slow dragging steps, disguising himself as an 
unfamiliar cripple, but she was on to him with an immobile leap. 

"M. Macdonald," she shouted, "M. Macdonald, we must speak of your note." 

"We must, Madame," he said in correct breathless eighteenth-century French, 
the language for concierges and locataires and dogs, "we must, Madame, but I 
regret now I must rush or miss rehearsals." 

The plot was to give her pause. In that snatched second of marvelous 
hesitation the total destruction of Paris could occur. 

"Then I will be brief," she promised, not removing her bulk from the bill 
payer. "Today, you pay, or tomorrow we pack all your disgusting property and 
protect them in the cave." She turned to the Swede who was obscenely 
displaying ten thousand francs. "They are so rich, Americans, and never they 
pay their bill." 

"I am not an American," announced Macdonald in his precise French, "I'm a 
Swedish subject." 

It was the persistent incredulity of the Swede that he had not conquered the 
simpering language of his host, and he drank to still his surprise. 
"American?" he asked of Macdonald in Garbo accents, smiling a little 
drunkenly. 

"I am one of the two hundred thousand unemployed Hungarian freedom 
fighters," Macdonald nodded. 

"Demain," snapped the patron, who knew that she was being insulted, "demain 
you take your filthy rags and wife with you." 

"What is she saying please," the Swede arranged the English words like heavy 
slabs of marble, "her voice is so high I can not hear her." 

"She is asking you to leave her hotel because yesterday you fucked four 
little boys in the afternoon, one of them her husband's sister's youngest 
son." 

"Madame," roared the Swede, "Madame," clutching the ten thousand francs, 
"Madame, I demand privacy. In Sweden," he turned to the Hungarian, "we would 
burn her instantly. First we would tie her lacerated bleeding form to a 
ladder and then we would push the ladder into the cool flames." 

"How curious," Macdonald said, his head waving in serpentine hypnosis to the 
rhythm of the large swaying franc note. "You must come to my room, number 
twenty-two, the fifth floor, and tell me many of your country's customs." 

"Of course," agreed the Swede, "Paris is still the center of the world for 
the exchange of ideas." 

"And the comparison of cultures." 

"Exactly," the Swede ecstatically raced his mind down the phrase book. "In 
my city of Bofors there is not much culture." 

"But is everyone as tall as you?" 

"In our schools," smiled the tall man, "we are required to learn English. It 
is necessary for commerce. We are a commercial people." 

"And why not," said Macdonald to his brother. 

"Commerce and drink," lilted the Swede poetically. 

"And skiing and suicide and pederasts," grinned Macdonald helpfully. 

"Yes, yes, you must visit to me one day, I give you my address. It will cost 
nothing, you will be an honored guest. In my cold and distant land guests 
are honored as they were to the ancient Greeks." 

"Not to speak of ass-holes," understood Macdonald heartily. 

"All is honored in Bofors. We are manufacturers of steel," and he placed two 
thousand francs into Macdonald's dry palm. 

"Of course," said Macdonald, folding the money into his pocket. "Skol," he 
congratulated the laughing Swede, eager to escape the locataire's insidious 
glare. 

"Wait," called the disastrous drop in the French birthrate, "I have a letter 
for the Madame." She handed him the envelope. "It is thick and from 
America." Everybody knew what that meant. 

Macdonald fingered the envelope. The envelope looked possible. Two thousand 
francs in his pocket and an envelope with possibilities in his hand. Had he 
been too harsh with Martha? She was, after all, an American. Strange and 
unpredictable prosperities came from America that were unknown to a 
Scotsman. And it was rather charming the way she pounded on the bed and 
screamed obscenities when she came. He hoped that she was back in the room 
unpacking his bag. 

Macdonald hardly noticed the first four flights. It was only from fourth to 
fifth that his breathing apparatus deteriorated and he took the cigarette 
out of his mouth grabbing the banister and dragging himself to their door. 
He'd left the door open on his hasty exit, and so it waited. Martha was on 
the bed sitting Buddha-like in great but pretended dignity. His valise had 
been kicked empty to the floor, and surrounded by Macdonald's clothes, she 
was busily sorting those garments she had razored into shreds from those she 
had not yet achieved. 

She looked up distractedly and said, "Oh, hello Macdonald, I'll be finished 
in a minute." 

"You bitch. What we do to each other is one thing, but property is sacred!" 

"I wanted you to know what it felt like to wander naked in this world, it's 
really been a liberation for me. I thought," she razored a stubborn sleeve 
with quick clever fingers, "that it would be a good idea for you to become 
an Adamite. It would make a great picture story for Life magazine, and if 
you weren't too lazy and kept a journal," she tugged with straining arms at 
the lining of his revoltingly moss green tweed jacket, "they might use it to 
caption the photographs." The jacket surrendered with a wounded shriek that 
came out of Macdonald. 

"You'll break something, Macdonald," she cried, and snaked away from his 
raised fist. Her body slipped over the mattress edge and her fingers 
encircled an empty wine bottle. It flew for his head, and landed on his 
shoulder. Macdonald shook himself as if a nerve long dead had died. "Let's 
not fight, really you'll thank me one day. A man like you should travel 
light and fast and far." 

"Where did I put it," he asked dizzily. 

"What, Macdonald?" Martha asked conversationally. 

He concentrated on the pile of lint that had been his wardrobe, kicking bits 
aside with his toe, fastidious as a practiced clochard. He bent swiftly and 
picked up a slice of leather which looked as if it had once been part of a 
belt, though it was small enough to have been part of a wrist band, small 
enough indeed to have been part of a Chinese dinner. He held the leather in 
his palm. 

"Oh, Macdonald," Martha implored, "don't hit me again. Why don't we fuck 
instead? It's practically the same thing." 

"None of your Freudianisms," Macdonald warned. He pulled her cruelly by the 
long red hair, dragging her off the bed and bouncing her carelessly on the 
floor. "Don't give me any of your American shit." He kicked her ribs. Martha 
rolled away from him, and then rolled recklessly back grabbing his ankle and 
biting viciously for the bone. Her teeth reddened with his Celtic blood. 
"Except if you're impotent," she called up. "If you can't fuck, then beat, 
but you won't be fooling me, old man," she licked her teeth clean. "I don't 
think it's so grand and virile of you to kick me. Pricks tell me more than 
feet." She kneeled in front of him and dared him: "Just let me look, 
darling, I want to see if it's still there. If it's not there anymore you 
can kick me again. Just let me look," and she pleadingly unbuttoned his vile 
trousers. "There it is, all folded away and shrunken like a great shy 
schoolboy, come on," she cooed, and pulled the inactive member into 
prominence. She nipped it with her tongue, and suctioned the staff into her 
mouth the way Macdonald had taught her. In the most revolutionary tradition, 
the student was conquering the master with his own techniques. Macdonald let 
the battle be lost, he let the new generation ascend, he let the pupil 
lesson the teacher, he let her suck. She clung to his thighs, hiding her 
head bashfully in the shadows of his pubic hairs, rubbing her cheeks timidly 
against his thin-skinned sacs. His malevolent maleness swelled angrily in 
her tight mouth, rocking his loins into alertness, teasing the erect rod 
away from her, and then remembering that she hadn't eaten all day and 
magnanimously feeding it back into her wide open mouth. She curved her 
fingers around his hips, serpenting for his anus and pinioning his anger 
deep in her throat. The brazen gulping gasps quickened, and she fell away 
from him when he least wanted freedom. He hadn't taught her that timing; no 
man had ever taught a woman such mutinous timing. His throbbing cock led him 
slavishly to her hole, and she was on the floor wide open and wet for the 
assault. "Well," sighed Macdonald, "what the hell," and plunging into her 
gave her unconditional victory. There were other ways to die. His body 
pounded hers under the bed, and they rolled crazily to the window. They 
grunted in concentration, secluded and separate in their own pleasure. "It's 
up to you, Martha," warned Macdonald, rotating his hips so that the lever 
inside of her could touch off every battery in her hole. "Keep going," she 
gasped. "Keep in me, stay in me, roll in me, that's right, don't stop, don't 
get lazy, think of other things, think of your mother, Macdonald, think of 
New Year's in Glasgow, darling, think of all the Americans you've fucked, 
yes," she crooned, "don't think of me, just fuck, Macdonald, fuck me faster, 
darling," she urged him, "suck a lovely little Scots fucker you are, yes, my 
angel," she moaned, "don't stop, Macdonald, don't stop, don't stop," and he 
could feel her sex throbbing surrender. He came with her, invited by the 
inhalations of her sex and long after they were both good for nothing, 
Martha was still screaming, "Don't stop." 

"Enough, darling," said Macdonald, "the neighbors will think I'm beating 
you." 

 CHAPTER 3 

Martha was propped up on the pillows eating black bread and cheese. 
Macdonald beside her emptied the wine bottle into the glass. 

"Really, don't you want any, Mac?" asked Martha. "I'll make a sandwich for 
you." 

"No sweet, I'm not hungry, just thirsty." 

"You should eat something." 

"Later." 

"You mean," she tore out a mammoth mouthful, "I should leave some bread and 
cheese for you?" 

"No, wee one," he said, "it's all for you. I'll get something in a cafe 
later." 

"Did we inherit money, Mac?" Martha turned to him and ran her finger over 
his bare chest, he trembled his approval. 

"Do that again, can you manage to eat and do that at the same time?" 

"Wait till I finish my sandwich." 

Macdonald sighed. "You're so clever, such fine coordination, why don't you 
work up a juggling routine." 

"I don't see you drinking wine and sucking my cunt at the same time. Why 
should I be expected to be the clever one?" she wandered off and bent down 
to kiss his thigh. "There's something delicious about you, Macdonald," she 
admitted bewilderedly, "I hate to admit it," she caressed his belly, "but 
your flesh is gorgeous." 

Macdonald patted her shoulder. "Be a slave to lust," he recommended, "every 
woman should be trapped in her sexual appetite." 

"You really think so? You're not just saying it out of greed? You think 
women are more interesting when they're all cunt?" 

"I think women are fascinating when they have nothing but cocks on their wee 
minds." 

"I could be that way, Macdonald," she traced his breast bone down onto the 
end of his swelling rod, "if I didn't have so many other things on my mind." 

"Empty that empty vessel," he advised with laconic authority. "Don't think 
of anything. Remember," he scratched his irritated groin, "all a female has 
to worry about is getting a cock inside of her twenty times a day." 

"That's an awful lot of times, Mac." 

"Then nineteen," he conceded. "The less she has, the more she should worry 
about it. The idea is to stay worried." 

"When I finish my sandwich," she promised, "I'll worry." 

"Here, have some wine." 

"The bottle's empty. You pig, couldn't you save some for me?" 

"Woman is created for sacrifice." 

"They always gave plenty of wine to sacrifices," Martha complained, "that's 
the one joy of being a sacrifice, wine and drugs." 

"You'd rather eat than drink anyway," Macdonald reminded her. 

"Must everything be a choice? Must every preference exclude?" 

"Here, drink," he shoved the half-filled glass at her, "but don't finish 
it." She lifted the glass gracefully to her lips and gurgled it to 
depletion. 

"After Victoria nobody wants to drink," the empty glass rolled on the 
treacherous incline of the cement floor. 

Moodily, Macdonald watched its journey. "This room looks like we shit and 
piss in it, couldn't you occasionally clean?" 

"I'm too busy." 

"I never see you move out of bed." 

"But I'm thinking all the time, lying here and thinking. How can I be more 
seductive, yesterday I had seventeen pricks in me, the day before twelve, 
before that eighteen. Why can't I be a complete female? Why can't I hit 
twenty. Just thinking of it exhausts me, Macdonald," she sat up and stared 
into his face, "I think I'll wash." 

"Don't think about it, just perform. Be capable of a spontaneous act." 

"Nothing as sophisticated as washing could be spontaneous." Martha carried 
tepid potfuls of water to the tin bidet and squatted. 

"Don't use the face cloth," warned Macdonald. 

"Would you rather I used your face," she massaged soap into her tender 
membranes. 

"You're the dirtiest woman I've ever known." 

"I was brought up in a country with plumbing. I can't learn to bathe in 
sections, it's necessary for me to totally submerge." 

"Americans," he grunted, "barbarians." 

"That's why we're winning," said Martha. "While you're all communing with 
your precious dead souls we're making like Eskimos." 

"Is that a private joke?" 

"One you may share," Martha offered magnanimously. "What I mean is ... " 

"Oh Christ, I forgot, your illiterate mother wrote to you," and he leaned 
over the life-giving bed for his battle green trousers. 

"What does she say?" Martha stood up from the bidet and began the fruitless 
search for a towel. 

"Don't use the face towel," Macdonald repeated. 

"Is that what she says," Martha nodded, picking up the towel and patting her 
thighs. "She has eyes in the back of her nose." 

Macdonald reached her in one leap. "I live here too." 

"You and your medical training," snorted his drenched concubine. "These 
vestiges of sanitation. You're like an unfrocked priest who refuses to fuck 
choirboys." 

He wrenched free the towel and returned to the bed. Martha, legs spread, 
surrendered to drying at room temperature. "Read it out loud," she demanded, 
squeezing her pubic hairs. "It is from my mother to me." 

"First we must determine if I can read it at all. She writes like you wash. 
I begin," Macdonald looked up for attention, wiping his nose with the towel, 
Dear Marty, "that explains a lot," enclosed is five dollars, he pulled the 
sheets of paper apart, and taped to one corner of the third sheet of the 
manuscript was a brown green square of money which he detached and laid 
tenderly on the table. It should go a long way in Europe, the letter 
advised, since we read here that Europeans will do anything for American 
dollars. "Even fuck Americans," agreed Macdonald agreeably. I'm sorry I 
can't send more, but in America Americans will do anything for dollars, too, 
and most of them are doing more than your father. "She has a mind like 
Bertrand Russell," he looked up. "Shall I repeat that line?" 

"Just read the letter once," Martha sat at the edge of the bed. "Does she 
say when she can send more?" 

"Next line, J wish I could promise you more, but I'm afraid this is it for a 
long time. Aren't you writing anymore? I should think you could make some 
money that way. I don't expect you to be a great serious genius like Edna 
Ferber and Fannie Hurst, Macdonald's face tinged yellow and the words 
thickened, but at least you could get something in "Ladies Home Journal' or 
Saturday Evening Post." Don't they pay anything for stories? You used to 
write such nice stories. I always said, and I still say, why not a happy 
ending? You know what I mean dear, it's the same thing as it's as easy to 
love a rich man as a poor man. I never could understand why you had to kill 
off all your characters, unless your stories were detective thrillers and 
it's just to deep for me. "Did you explain to her that you couldn't have 
orgasms at that stage of your literary development," demanded Macdonald 
seriously. Martha stared at the wallpaper opposite the bed. 

"Mac, were those blue flowers peonies or bluebells?" 

"I think they were bachelor buttons." 

"Let's get dressed," Martha said suddenly. "Let's get dressed and get the 
hell out of this room." 

"I have two more pages." 

"Read the last line." 

Poor soul, Macdonald read, I guess it all happens for the best. Love Mama. 
"I see where you derived your style," he sympathetically sucked her teats 
and then finding her sex as soft as his staff was bony and burning, sank 
into her. 

"There's a P.S., Martha. Do you want to hear it?" 

"More than anything in the world," admitted Martha, holding a lighted match 
to the comer of the airmail stationery, "but I'm a terrible masochist." 

Speeding down Boulevard St. Germain in a rush not to be late for the early 
quitters, Martha, trotting beside Macdonald, relented. 

"What did she say in the P.S., when was I coming home?" 

"Something like that." 

"I'm never going home," he saw the serpent fear in her eyes. "Rather, I am 
home. I mean, must home be where you were born? Can't someone decide that 
he's home because he finds a place where he feels comfortable?" 

"I do think home is a feeling," Macdonald agreed, "I'm not so sure it's a 
comfortable feeling." 

"What do you mean," she snapped nervously, "don't quote lines at me. You 
know I'm a ignorant American." 

"I just made that up as we were going along," he assured her, "but it's so 
good it's a pity to waste it on you. If we don't get in too late tonight 
I'll start on a book or play about someone who stands still so that home can 
run away from him." 

"Another forty-seven minutes marathon of genius." 

"Why the hell should I write that play," he reconsidered, "I can only 
accomplish two things with it, make people feel better or worse. Let them 
find their own diversions." 

"You can help them to understand what's happening," Martha found God. 

"Dear child, why would anyone bother watching a play it'something was 
happening." 

"Well, most great writers write because they must, they have no choice, or 
paint or compose for the same reason." 

"I'm not discussing psychopathic behavior, forgive me but I'm talking about 
myself." 

"Actually, Mac," she complimented, "you do have excellent ideas. You're an 
idea man. You belong on Madison Avenue." 

"And you belong in a home for the incurables," he offered her an equally 
attractive retreat. "What can't I cure?" 

"Sex, mama, home, money, food, success, men, you, all the diseases of your 
beloved homeland." 

"Every homeland has the same story, the same problems. It's just that in 
America we're articulate, we're eager for self-improvement. We've read 
Freud. Between Europe and America there is only a difference of vocabulary." 

"Like the difference between Shakespeare and Faith Baldwin." 

"Yes, that's what I mean. You know, Macdonald, before I met you I'd bad some 
pretty dark days." 

"Better to have dark nights and no days at all isn't it?" 

"And sometimes I'd think of going back to America, just for money, you know, 
money and comfort and all those things that don't matter." 

"Only an American," Macdonald intervened, "giving his life for those things 
that don't matter could make that statement. It's the heroic part of your 
nature." 

"And then I'd remember my mother." 

"Enough said. After reading her letters, I'm afraid of going there on the 
one hundred and ninety-one million chances to one that I might meet her." 

"Then I think, Macdonald, if my mother had been normal, even semi-normal, 
how ordinary I'd be. I'm sure it's ignorant mothers that produce 
extraordinary geniuses." 

"Like you?" 

"Apparently you had an intelligent mother." 

"Yes, but her mother was moronic, and I have reached back a generation for 
my dominant genetic characteristics." 

"I read somewhere that all Scotch women were intelligent and the men 
frightening dullards." 

"Scots, my dear," he corrected her, "Scotch is a spirit, not a nationality." 

"You're so sensitive," she admired him. 

They passed St. Julien le Pauvre. "Is today Saturday?" she demanded. 

"I forgot to check with my secretary." 

"If it's Saturday I'd like to go to church tomorrow. Let's come tomorrow and 
hear an orthodox mass. They have glorious services." 

"You go and then tell me all about it," recommended Macdonald. "It would 
make our relationship more dynamic." 

 CHAPTER 4 

Posted on pillars high above the head tops in constant and severe judgment 
leer the two wooden mandarins. They regard not each other, their unfriendly 
shoulders at forty-five degree angles, nor at the pilgrims beneath their 
thrones. The smoke from chainless ends of cigarettes rise to their feet and 
so they preside in a heavenly shifting of clouds over the swarming magenta 
velvet benches. So deeply afflicted are the penitents of the Deux Magots 
with their own guilt that were the overseering deities to relent and forgive 
they would cling to the damnation of cigarettes and talk. In more than one 
tragedy, the punishment has absorbed all of life. 

Into this undescribed circle of Dante's hell, or anybody's circle or 
anybody's hell drifted two. Their eyes wandered from table to table gliding 
flatly over the unfamiliar dead bodies lying cold on the left bank of the 
Seine. They looked into all the faces with the terrified persistency of 
parents requested to identify and claim their young. The disaster had been 
enormous, all the chips had gone down. In panic their eyes would flicker 
recognition into locked eyes, recognition but not intimacy, and with the 
reluctant hope that their own were not amongst the victims, they continued 
the dreadful search. 

These two who entered were creatures of another time. Two of the many who 
had not packed their doctrines in time when the existentialists had been 
ordered out of Paris. As women will fling themselves into philosophies 
without reservation, saving reservation for their men in the calamity of 
their men not being their philosophies, so the girl appeared the more 
indoctrinated of the two. She was clothed in her beliefs and her face had 
not happened until granted full membership. Viewed from the floor, the 
practiced perspective of the cafe, she revealed in orthodox restraint no 
inch of her flesh. Between flat black Italian slippers and tight black 
cuffless corduroy slacks was a bridge of black stocking. The stocking moved 
up under the tight pants that moved up beneath the curtain of a wide black 
coat into a black high necked long sleeved sweater. Her shoulders were bent 
in vague imitation of the man, squared and stooped as it'she were 
apologizing for having been born the Prince of Wales. Above the black habit 
glared her violently white face, white and expressionless as a white and 
expressionless stone. Not the ovens of summer or the abrasive currents of 
winter could stimulate color onto her bleached cheeks, so inviolate to the 
elements was her water-repellent mask of white powder. She could have dived 
into the waveless depths of the Mediterranean and struggled to the surface, 
her epidermis an unchanged white. Everything the cosmetic manufacturers 
promised, it was, and the simple addition of prickly heat powder to the 
mixture, rendered the powder an even whiter white than educated biologists 
and chemists had achieved. Often, out of desperation, the layman will exceed 
and add to the knowledge of the scientist. Only Macdonald suspected her 
black secret, that beneath the white powder there lay vanquished the rosy 
unscrubbed American cheek. 

Martha's talents did not stop with her whiter than white on white canvas, 
for on the colorless cloth she outlined black and enormous eyes that 
transformed the abstraction of glacial prelife into a surreal portrait, 
vital as a statue, grave as an insect. Her face stood away from an 
electrical red frame, a work of dedication and love, a combination of 
concepts preserved from antiquity that could only have been assembled in the 
twentieth century. 

Macdonald's face, being less ancient was less restricted to the modern and 
its surface bore the markings and creases of many centuries. 

His was not the actor's stock expression of hero or victim, but the 
confusion of one who had been cast as both, played both and been found 
ill-suited for both. Where Martha's face was smooth, Macdonald's was 
corrugated, where she was a monochrome, he was a kaleidoscope, where she was 
ancient he was old. Where her garments were as inflexible black, his 
resembled an unscraped pallette. 

"That girl," Martha asided to him, laboring not to move her mouth or nod her 
head in that direction, "she's looking at us and writing in a notebook." 

"Don't smile," Macdonald warned, "she might have a camera." 

"Shut up," Martha snapped, and then quietly, "she might have a tape 
recorder. There's Fioren-zaio," she cheered quickly, "he's sitting at a 
table alone with fourteen other Gurgeffians. I think he's trying to 
telepathize a greeting to us. And there's Gregoriansky, he's sitting with 
someone who looks like the Finnish ambassador's daughter, anyway she's got 
clean hair, all shiny and yella, I think he's reading from one of his 
notebooks, yes, yes, I can tell from how his mouth is moving. Now Macdonald, 
don't you think that is a very strange neurosis for a white Russian to have, 
even if his mother and father were deposed Princesses, to write down 
everything that he says to everybody, and nothing that anyone says to him? 
And then to insist on reading his words to everyone? And since the only time 
he speaks is when he reads what's written down, he keeps writing down and 
reading the same things." 

"Very strange," agreed Macdonald. 

"There's that English cunt who says you have eyes like Aly Khan. God, she 
has ugly straight white teeth." 

"I found her a sweet child." 

"Child! Maybe you're referring to her youngest aged daughter. I mean that 
old haggard smiling British Commonwealth cunt sitting at that table alone 
waiting for someone of her class or an exotic, like a man for instance, to 
fuck her, that's who I mean. There's Conrad, he's waving at us, don't wave 
back. Who is sitting with him?" her voice elevated wildly. "It's so 
unattractive. It's got a head exactly as wide as its neck, which is narrow 
even for a turtle. I mean really, Conrad is so public domain, oh god more 
waving, say something Macdonald, pretend to be talking, I'll pretend to be 
listening." 

"If you will help me," his words trembled in her ear, "just a few moments 
longer," his heavy hand landed on her shoulder, "and guide me to a quiet 
table on the terrace of the Cafe Flore, I would be so grateful, my child. 
Though I am old and blind, and appear to your young and clear and blessedly 
healthy eyes to be a pauper, in truth I am the richest prince of saudi Arabi 
who plucked out his eyes, but not his fortune, when I viewed the West for 
the first time after a sheltered life spent on an oasis, wherein my father 
had built artificially cooled skiing slopes and ponds of frozen champagne so 
authentic that it was there that Eisenstein chose to film the finale of 
Alexander Nevsky, reshooting in his scandalous perfectionism the drowning 
sequence so often that our entire slave population was drowned in ecstasy 
and genius, and all alone I was forced to Europe in search of seventy-eight 
new concubines in order to replenish our tribe. No sooner had I landed in 
Paris when the Formosans as a test of their strength and as a propaganda 
stunt for Life magazine, later commented on in Time magazine under the 
curious heading of Personalities, invaded my oasis with fire throwers and 
melted my cherished father's slope, thereby washing away the last landmark 
of my ancient civilization. Indeed, where my empire stood, high, white and 
cold, now lies the desert, low white and hot. Even with a map, 
anthropologists have been unable to relocate it, and so I am without people 
or land. Fortunately, my money, invested in Swiss banks ... " 

"I'm going to sit with Conrad," Martha scratched at his claw grip. 

"Come back," cried Macdonald, "come back my angel, my sight, my heaven, I am 
old and blind and you young and blessed with twenty-twenty vision, let me 
drape you with rich furs that I may feel them, let me put diamonds big as 
cow bells around your ankles that I may hear them, let me douse you with 
rare perfumes ... " 

"Let go of me, Macdonald, you're dangerous when you get like this. If you 
don't take your filthy bones off my shoulder, I'll scream." , "Just your 
voice ... " 

"Stop it now. Anyway that girl left, it's all down on tape, you can stop 
now." 

"Do you think she believed any of it?" 

"All of it, especially about me being young and blessed." 

"Well quick, get her empty table. Harvest the comforts I laboriously plant 
for us." 

"You're sure you don't want to sit with Conrad?" 

"The reward of long union is familiarity. I am sure, as you are so sure, 
that I don't want to sit with Conrad." 

"I'm a little tired of just hearing your voice." 

"How strange, conversely I've only just noticed yours." 

"I think we should make an effort to be more social," Martha hinted. "I 
wasn't born into this Siamese state." 

"Our attachment is your illusion, my dear. Do go sit with Conrad. I assure 
you that the operation will cause no loss of blood and little or no pain. 
None of the miracle drugs need be employed." 

"Why don't you stop protecting yourself? You know how it would devastate 
you, absolutely devastate," she emphasized in expanding doubt, "if I got up 
and left." 

"If you don't stop beating yourself," Macdonald pushed her onto the bench, 
"I'll cry." 

"I'm going to sleep with that man," Martha threatened Macdonald. 

"What man, darling? Not Conrad, I hope? Conrad's already been tested and 
disproved, hasn't he? I thought he was one of the Neanderthals who preceded 
me in your exhilarating climb to my sophisticated pinnacle." 

"No not Conrad, the other one." 

"Other one," Macdonald sat across from her, "ah, I follow now. You refer to 
turtle head." 

"There," she triumphed, "you're insulting my future lovers. You hate him. 
You're ravished by jealousy." 

"Consumed is the accepted expression. Consumed by jealousy." 

"I don't speak in cliches." 

"Just think in them." 

"It's time, Macdonald, that I made a concerted effort ... " 

"That's better." 

"What's better?" 

"Now you're thinking and speaking in them. That's the unchanged untouched 
girl I took home with me three eventless years ago." 

"Cleverness is just defense." 

"I wouldn't be surprised." 

"If you'd let yourself feel something as frequently as once, you'd probably 
find out that you're made of marshmallows." 

"Not a toasted nut in me." 

"Conrad is looking at me," she whispered, "so is the turtle." 

"Martha, you confound me. How, with your back to them can you see what I 
can't see with my front to them?" 

"Mirrors." 

"A secret passed down from father to daughter?" 

"Mirrors, mirrors," she said impatiently, "you're so dense about decor, 
Macdonald. The mirrors all around the room. This is a good table," she 
stared at nothing and combed her hair. "From the mirror up there," she 
pointed, "I can see everything to the left and behind me. From that mirror 
over there," she forced him to turn around, "I can see everything to the 
right and behind me and also the revolving door." 

"That's the best mirror of all, isn't it?" he innocently tried to five in 
her cosmology. 

"They're all important," she said shortly. 

"You never can tell where fate enters and sits." 

"And then from that mirror there, I can see everything in front of me." 

"It is declasse to look directly at anything? It does seem an excess to use 
mirrors where a direct glance would serve." 

"Mirrors are better," she talmudically shook her head. "It's always better 
to appear not to be looking at anything." 

"But you do take the chance of getting an extremely narcissistic reputation, 
never taking your eyes off mirrors. People might get the revolting 
impression that you're looking in the mirror to find your own reflection." 

"Only Italians do that." 

"A simple race." 

"Prenatal." 

"What, beside death, could be simpler." 

"Conrad is coming over," she whispered dramatically. 

"Explain further, Martha, seeing the world through mirrors as you do, do 
people appear to be walking away from you, when indeed they're approaching? 
Or do you turn to the right when they're coming from the left, or do you 
think they're still stuck in the mirror when in fact they're standing on 
your toes burning your nipples with their real hot, red hot cigarettes?" 

"Don't be so precious, Macdonald. Soon you'll be sending orgies of 
pneumatiques to yourself." 

"What will I say," he asked entranced. 

"You'll say that you'll kill you if you don't leave me alone." 

"I'm going to send it tomorrow. Could you jot that down for me?" 

"He only went downstairs to the men's room. Now he's coming back up again." 

"I'll never again spend days wondering what gifts to buy for you, Martha, 
thank god that dilemma is resolved. For our golden affair anniversary you 
will have a golden mirror, for our silver a silver, for our wooden a wooden, 
but for our glass, which is I believe the third brittle year of connubial 
bliss, I will purchase a hand wrought comb and brush set." 

"Why," she turned away momentarily from the mirror. 

"Just as a surprise." 

"I can't see anything, if I'm looking at you. What's Conrad doing now?" 

"He's sitting on the floor playing with that damn kangaroo of his. A typical 
American affectation." 

"Cunt," she returned to the mirror. "Turtle head just spotted me. Move your 
shoulder a bit, you're cutting his head off." 

"How symbolic." 

"Can you see him." 

"Yes," Macdonald granted, "but if you'd move your shoulder a bit you'd save 
me that mishap. He doesn't know about mirrors-he hasn't taken his eyes off 
the back of your head." 

"Jealous cat," she exulted, "what do you think of him?" 

"The turtle analogy is an adequate one, but I find that he has more a thick 
neck than a thin head, which gives that comparison such weighty inaccuracy. 
However, the overall effect is of an inquisitive darting look which I find 
rather sympathetic." 

"A coffee," she said to the long neglected garcon loitering near them. 

"Be wicked," suggested Macdonald, "get it with milk." 

"If you will." 

"A coffee and a cognac," Macdonald dismissed the garcon. 

"You find him revolting," Martha asked directly. 

"Physiologists of the nineteenth century tell us that a man's body changes 
every seven years. In time I might come to be delighted with him." 

"You're pushing me into his arms," she resented. 

"On only one condition will I push," Macdonald asserted, "that's if his 
wealth made him one of the more sought after undergraduates at Oxford." 

"You think he's English." 

"I meant it metaphorically." 

"I want facts," she poured the cold black coffee, "facts and opinions, not 
philosophy. Anyway I'm not interested in him for his money." 

"What then, his gorgeous shell? I never could understand infidelities among 
the poor," Macdonald admitted. 

"I have a heart, too," she crushed the rock-like cubes of sugar with her 
spoon, "and soul and desire and ambition." 

"In turtle head," he wondered, "you hope to find the same." 

"Why not? Don't be spiteful, you're afraid that you're seeing your 
successor." 

"That's the tragic flaw in every great man." 

"It's not that I don't admire you, Macdonald," Martha rehearsed her farewell 
address, "it's just that I must be independent of you." 

"Can independence for a woman be found only through the agency of a new 
man?" Macdonald spoke directly to his empty cognac glass. "Are you an 
infectious microbe which can survive only the short flight from one diseased 
and exhausted organism to another presumably healthier." 

"I am infectious, aren't I?" 

"That's what I was trying to say." 

"You're trying now at the last minute to tell me that you love me." 

"How did you guess." 

"But it's too late, Conrad is coming now." 

"If the boy is rich, marry him," said Macdonald ominously, "then nothing can 
separate us." 

"Yes," Martha clapped her hands in childish anticipation, "then we can all 
live grandly meaningless lives and sit at the Ritz and drink martinis." 

"Don't wait for Hemingway," he ordered, "or I'll never get rid of you." 

Conrad leaned low over their table and said in the confidential voice which 
coxswains project into megaphones, "I have an old friend from Texas sitting 
at my table worth about forty million dollars in transferable stock. He'd 
like to meet Martha. Would she like to meet him?" 

"Martha was just saying," Macdonald chuckled, lifted his fiancee by the 
elbow, "how bored I was with her." 

"Go on," laughed the soft-spoken Conrad so that heads beyond the heads in 
the mirrors turned in alarm, "Paris wouldn't be Paris without you two 
together." 

"If you were convinced of that," Macdonald held her up, "I should think 
you'd all pull for the short straw to see who destroys Martha." 

"Why me!" she roared. 

"I'm older than you." 

"You coming," said Conrad abruptly, looking back at his table. "I don't want 
to leave him alone too long. Any of the cunts in this room might get their 
hands on his money." 

"We'll be over as soon as I finish my cognac, old boy." 

"Don't finish nothing," Conrad advised, "my friend will buy you a new one, 
with those little bags of salted almonds." 

"Let him finish his drink, Conrad," Martha intervened irritably. 

"All right," Conrad began to fade, "excuse my gaucheness. I don't know what 
he sees in you anyway, Madame spook face, he must have been brought up in a 
country where they never had no snow." 

"That's your beloved Conrad," said Macdonald drinking slowly. "America's 
reason for Europe." 

"I'm leaving. I don't want to sit with them." Martha stood up nervously, 
hastily gathering her bag that wasn't here. 

"Sit down, you've accomplished this whole situation by pounding your 
powerful brain waves against turtle head's banks. Now you must act the 
gentleman." 

"I was only kidding," she whimpered, "it's become so serious, must I go over 
there and fuck him?" 

"Now child," Macdonald held her, hand, "you don't have to fuck anybody. Just 
be nice to him, he seems an intelligent chap and a devoted sensitive friend 
to cultivate." 

"I'm not good at that, I'm better at not being nice and fucking." 

"So many ways to skin a cat," he said sadly. "You skin him." 

"My dear Martha, if he has the slightest insight into his homosexuality, 
which is latent in all of us and overtly latent in the rich, I will 
personally ask turtle head to ask you to leave the table." 

"Is that a promise?" 

"It's a prayer." 

"All right then, we'll go. But just for one drink." 

"Come little one," Macdonald lifted her to her flat Italian shoddings, 
"Let's not be late for school. Now, which expression will you cast on our 
splendid tortoise, the furtive glance, or the aggressive? I think neither 
will do, possibly the contemptuous, the rich adore being hated, they're much 
too valuable to hate themselves. Or, the inviting glance, threaten him with 
his own attractiveness." 

"No expression," they neared Conrad and their prey, "no expression at all." 

"That might be best," Macdonald gravely concurred, "it's best to relax and 
be natural in these demanding situations." 

 CHAPTER 5 

Conrad said, glowering up at Martha from his chair, "I only stand up for 
ladies, not for their ghosts." But James Dykes was not so secular. He looked 
at Martha with indescribable admiration. "Sit down," he jumped up and 
offered his velours throne, "please sit down." Martha condescended in 
rigamortal nonchalance, concentrating all of her female intensity on a rim 
of dirt that had wedged itself into her thumbnail. "Introductions," called 
James Dykes, pronouncing his words with an inherited authority that hinted 
the hardness of his pink and gold tortoise shell. It had more than hardened, 
it had petrified under the intense pressure of all of his fathers, mothers, 
grandfathers, grandmothers, great uncles, maiden aunts, blood cousins, 
kissing kin's money. Hardened almost at the moment of his conception, 
leaving the petulant, squeezing, fetal expression smeared all over his face. 
They all waited his displeasure. 

"The lady," James enthused, "present the lady." 

"Martha Heck," Conrad called her to the stand, "the pantomine queen of st. 
Germain." 

"Splendid conception." 

"Whose," demanded Martha, bristling suspicion, "his or mine?" speaking smack 
into Macdonald's reproachful stare. 

"You're perfect, Miss," James Dykes accorded, "you're perfect," and turning 
to Conrad repeated with small alteration, "she's perfect," and then for 
Macdonald the same construct, "she's perfect." 

"For what?" 

"For my purposes, of course," James responded to Macdonald's piquant humor. 

"Exactly what purposes," pressed Macdonald, eager to talk prices. 

Martha lifted her heavy eyes. "Purposes," she echoed, "must I have 
purposes?" 

"Tell them your purposes, James," Conrad urged with an interested and modest 
enthusiasm that people tongue the rich. 

"You tell them my purposes," James grandly relegated in that interested and 
modest enthusiasm with which the rich get tongued. 

"James is a painter," Conrad began, "all the while he was organizing his 
wills, trusts, investments, inheritances, property, lands, houses, peons, 
stocks, bonds, accounts, coupons, oil wells, tennis courts, orange groves, 
rubber plantations, steel mills, atomic plants, stables, kennels, and 
aviary, he was thinking of being a painter. Am I correct so far, James my 
boy?" 

"For ten years I've thought of little else," James confessed. 

"I can see it's a heartbreaking story." 

"I can hardly tell it," Conrad admitted, "help me, promise you'll help me," 
he turned to James, "if I choke up." 

"We'll all help," said Martha. 

"No, no," James rapped her mental knuckles, "give the man a chance. Let's 
not condemn him until he slips up." 

"Stout fellow," Macdonald's enthusiasm unburdened itself from between the 
crevices of his teeth. 

"You're a healthy man," James knighted Macdonald, "quick healthy reactions." 

"If it's reactions you're after, offer him a drink," Martha recommended. 

"I'm not after anything," James said quietly. "I'm just like everybody 
else." 

"Can I continue?" 

"Continue," and Conrad continued. 

"Now James didn't want to be another ordinary painter like Cezanne or 
Michelangelo or Breughel, or any of them guys." 

"I should say not." 

"He didn't want to make the mistake they all made." 

"What do they serve if they don't make our mistakes for us?" 

"Because James is no ordinary artist. It's not his forty million smackers 
that separates him from the lesser men..." 

"If anything that brings them closer to him," Martha plunged on. 

"You've got real understanding," James assured Martha. 

"She understands everything," Macdonald tore away the first of her many 
veils. " ... but his theory." 

"Delicious, I just adore theories, don't you," Martha turned boldly to 
Macdonald and held him sparrow-like in her fluttering eyes. 

"Fiercely." 

"His theory being ... " 

"Could I have a drink with the theory?" Martha would interrupt. 

"Excellent," said Macdonald, "Let's be a still life having a drink." He 
motioned to an ambitious garcon overhead. "Four cognacs?" he gave the 
statement to the waiter and the question to them, allowing the words to hang 
for approval 

James did not drink cognacs. He didn't drink cognacs as actively as most do 
drink, who do drink, cognacs. "I'm drinking juices, pure juices," he 
explained. "I do not wish to make sewage of my glandular system, but 
please," he insisted magnanimously, "do so with your own." 

"James Dykes Theory," calmly continued Conrad to give a Socratic atmosphere 
to the group poisoning, "is that it's better ... " 

"Healthier." 

"Forgive, healthier to copy than to originate, since you never know what's 
going to come when you paint a painting for the first time, unless it's 
being done on commission or the subject is the Royal Family of Great 
Britain, so that painting the Royal Family is the next healthiest thing to 
do but you've got to be English to do that. James has had the original 
theory of copying rather than, I've lost it," said Conrad dazed. "It's gone, 
I held it too close and it choked to death. Gone." 

"You'll hear from my lawyer in the morning," joked old James Dykes with an 
expression so cheerful that none of them dared to laugh, or chuckle or even 
smile or grin or cry. 

"At the moment I'm copying Picassos," he picked up his own crudgeon, "not 
only because it's healthy, and he's healthy, healthy old spic," he produced 
another infectious interlude of mirth. 

"The heart of the matter is," said James, coining a phrase, "that imitation 
should be the highest achievement of mankind. After all, just look around 
us." They all did as they were told. Martha didn't see one attractive man in 
the salon. Not one. She noticed that they were all looking around too, over 
heads, through hairs, past nostrils, darting, piercing, searching, inquiring 
looks. As James Dykes explained, they were all looking for something to 
imitate. "What's originality," he pounced, "what's creativity? Man deciding 
that he's God, man creating in his own image. And what chaos," he launched 
enthusiastically into his concept, oblivious to the cognac content between 
Macdonald and Conrad. "Now is man God?" he asked good-naturedly. 

"More a horse's neck," supplied Macdonald. 

"Correct," James was falling in love. "A sage remark from a sage. And the 
wage scale," added James mysteriously, "and the demands for leisure time, 
and all this nonsense about God resting every seventh day. My grandfather," 
his voice trembled noticeably, "would stop rolling in his grave if he knew 
what salaries I paid. It would just kill him. But did he have the problem of 
hiring Gods? He did not. Did he hire men? He did not. He hired parts of men, 
and that's what we've got to go back to. He lived in a world that worked. 
Try it with Gods," James dared them. 

"God forbid," said Conrad piously. "Thank God I don't have your problems." 

"Imitation is the answer," James leaned forward with a cunning expression in 
his glacial eyes, "instead of letting artists create, I create artists. Do 
you get me?" He shoved his question into Martha's ribs. "Once an artist 
arrives, I copy him. Once an originator crawls out of his cave, I glut the 
market with him. If it's Picasso, let it be Picasso. But it's going to stop 
at Picasso. Follow me?" 

"All the way," Macdonald was becoming God without lifting brush or pencil, 
just lifting those cognac tumblers that got lighter and lighter. 

"And though collectors fill basements with Picasso, hiding him away, trying 
to destroy him so that they can push a new God, I protect his sacred name. 
For every Picasso they turn to the wall, I paint thirty of the same period. 
Ha," laughed James Dykes, "how I loathe the man. Every idea he has thrown 
immediately on a canvas." 

"Do you sign them all Picasso?" Martha drank in the pause. 

"I sign them Dykes," he blushed blue, "but my signature is remarkably like 
his. Only an expert can distinguish a Dykes from a Picasso." 

"Think of the confusion in eight thousand years," Macdonald exclaimed, "when 
there are only three Picassos and eight Dykes existent. Picasso will be 
hailed as the copyist." 

"Let's hope so," said Dykes, "greater Gods have been lost in civilization's 
shuffle." 

"But then," emerged Martha, "the ersatz will be the real and the real the 
... " 

"Use that word again, Martha," her fastidious lover threatened, "and I've 
fucked you for the last time." 

"So particular." 

"Now I'm on his vile Harlequin period," James pursued, "and this, young 
lady, is where you come in." 

Martha looked around wildly for any entrance that could be used as an exit. 

"Me?" she said like Chicken Little. 

"I want you to model for me." 

"But if the paintings are there, already." 

"Oh come now, do you think the models Picasso used looked any less like his 
paintings than you do?" 

"But I hate paintings," she admitted feebly, feeling like one of the 
underpaid pinboys in a bowling alley, "and painters," she developed, "and 
gouaches, watercolors, line drawings, woodcuts, sculptures, collage, 
mobiles, photographs, old tapestries, old maps, lithographs, pen and inks, 
fragments of ancient statuary, samovars, ceramics, colored crayons, pencils 
and St. Germain jewelry." 

He brushed her dislikes aside like so many autumnal droppings. "It's just 
that you feel your creativity is hampered by your ability to have children, 
dear woman, a common disorder of your species." 

"That's it," Martha lost, "why did I have you," she raved fiercely at 
Macdonald, "I've lost three years to art having you." 

"Stop shouting," Macdonald stood up so that he could lean closer to James 
Dykes. "You won't find another model like Martha, James, she's just reached 
the same period. A fortuitous historical calamity. The only remaining 
problem is, what will you pay?" 

"Pay," said James in alarm, weakened by Macdonald's fetid breath, "pay?" 

"Of course," Macdonald explained, "you've got to give her a reason, an 
excuse for being great. You understand, she wasn't born to greatness, or she 
could do it for nothing." 

"Ahh," said James, "I see what you're getting at." 

"It'she were born you, she wouldn't have to vulgarize everything by talking 
prices." 

"I'm not talking prices," Martha bit into the dirty nail, "you're the vulgar 
one." 

"I'm protecting James," Macdonald's eyes were like thick thumbs on her white 
mouth. "James doesn't know how expensive you are when you give something 
away for nothing." 

"I can imagine," James despised her with his baby blues. "I want to be 
fair," he pleaded with his advocate, "how much are models getting?" 

"Three thousand francs an hour," Macdonald could neither dream, speak or 
think higher. 

"What's that in dollars," he included Conrad in the enormity. 

"About the same," Conrad broke his silence over all the heads that twisted 
around to him. 

"Well, that's not too bad," James agreed, "three thousand it shall be. Can 
you begin tomorrow?" 

"Wait," she said, getting up from the table and clutching her long coat 
around her narrow body, "I've got to go telephone my solicitor." She pushed 
three people through the revolving door before Macdonald caught her. 

"Don't be a fool," he grabbed at any extremity, landing her elbow, "don't 
throw our opportunities away." 

"Our, our," she shouted for all the gratified tourists clustered around the 
kiosks, "when did we form this combine?" 

"All right, yours, I didn't want to give you selfish reasons. Do you realize 
what James Dykes can do for you, not for us, for you? Do you know how many 
Socony secretaries are saving their salaries and virginity for a crack at 
James Dykes?" 

"They have my blessing," she pulled wildly out of his grip, "I despise them, 
I despise him." 

"How can you despise the man who could buy you a wheat mill, a yogurt 
factory, a juice still? Together you and James can be a degenerate symbol of 
American health for all the gum-bleeding Europeans." 

"Don't compare us, don't couple us," Martha's voice softened. "The thing is, 
Macdonald, he scares me. Really, I mean he's more than a nut, he's insane." 

"Therein lies his charm," Macdonald patted her auburn disorder, "imagine him 
sane. Just imagine James Dykes sane and moderate," he shuddered, "there 
would be danger." 

"If you find him so charming," Martha snapped, "why don't you fuck him? Do 
you hate wheat mills?" 

"Darling, I promise you, if he didn't maintain this admittedly insane pose 
of heterosexuality, if he had even a clue to his obvious preferences, I'd be 
tickling his ass-hole. If he had a sister who liked degenerates or a mother 
who preferred innocence, if by any peregrination I could endear myself to 
the Dykes, I would not be standing here endearing myself to you." He walked 
Martha slowly back to the Deux Magots. His head lowered over her luxurious 
head, he spoke with the tenderness and intensity of a student selling vacuum 
cleaners. "Martha," he said quietly, "it's not just the white of your face, 
you are getting older, and worse, you are looking older. You need 
nourishment, you need more than I can give to you at this moment; later with 
James Dykes' assistance I may be able to give you everything I dream of." He 
lost the tissue thin thread of concern, "and if he can make you come," he 
finished haphazardly, "you'll be free to spit in my face." 

"You feel pretty safe saying that, don't you, old scout?" 

"Imagine if he can make you come," Macdonald pounced on his victory. "That 
means you're free, no longer in a neurotic trap, after him anyone can make 
you come. Except possibly me. Make him your litmus test." 

"If I turn blue it means it didn't work, that's the only danger." 

"Did you ever see anyone laugh at a millionairess just because she was blue? 
You'll set a whole new fashion, every girl will be crazy to be blue with 
pale green lips." 

"My lips aren't green," he had her inside the grand ballroom. 

"They're not exactly roses." 

"To sleep with him," she trembled, "to get into bed and fuck him. Fuck him!" 

"Don't think about it," Macdonald shuddered in real sympathy, "thinking kept 
you frigid for twenty-five years. Don't think of anything except wheat, 
cheese, olives, grated carrots, unsalted nuts, hearts of palm, brown sugar 
and yeast ... help yourself. Every woman who comes has to give her mind a 
little push in that direction." 

"If I agree," she spoke mesmerically, "will you disengage my elbow so that I 
can unburthen myself in the ladies' room?" 

"Dear Madame," he smiled his release, "do you call me such a tyrant?" 

At the table Conrad asked, "Will she do it?" 

"She's agreed," Macdonald settled back into his chair, and for his battle 
and for his deceit ordered another cognac. "She'll model for you, James, and 
I'll tell you something, lad," Macdonald spoke in the soft Scots burr that 
broke through the boundaries of sex or age, "the lass is willing because of 
you. I don't think she's changed a whit her ideas on art. It's you she wants 
to work for, not the world and not Picasso. It's the way of women," 
Macdonald chuckled, "to appreciate the wee things." 

"When will she be ready to begin," demanded the eager Mr. Dykes. 

"Oh she's ready now and I'd start her immediately," advised Macdonald in his 
confidential old baron of a roue pose, "you know women and their changing 
ways." 

"No," James admitted eagerly, "do they change more than men? Maybe that's 
the difference people keep talking about." 

"Well" said Macdonald cheerfully, "people really aren't talking about it 
anymore, are they?" 

"You've got real understanding," persisted James Dykes, "you're the most 
healthy person, mentally and spiritually," he amended, accounting 
Macdonald's display of sparse black teeth, "that I've met outside of banks." 

"You should meet him in a bank," said Martha on her return, "he's radiant." 

"You, on the other hand," James Dykes playfully pinched Martha's cheeks, and 
then brushed his white thumbs on his dark greys, "need help." 

"Your help!" Macdonald grandly developed. 

"What she needs is a good lay," ad-libbed Conrad. 

"That's a good one," roared James, laughing till he wept like Niobe, "you 
sure do come up with some wows, Conrad, I've got to remember that one. What 
she needs is some good hay," the catastrophic laugh happened again until the 
terrace as one human crawling organism turned toward him, the 

Americans nervously lighting Gauloises and demanding more Pernod in their 
Pernods. 

"Lay," corrected Conrad, "I said, lay." 

"Hay is better," Macdonald silenced him. 

"Whore," she whispered. 

"Of, of course," said James mysteriously, and ordered another round of 
cognacs for them. "I always thought I'd be sitting here one day drinking 
cognacs," he expanded pleasantly. "Instead I'm here drinking sun-kissed 
tomatoes." 

"Sure you are," Macdonald let the eager garcon confiscate his empty glass. 

"Harlof s heart," breathed Martha. "I'm not finished yet," she attacked the 
over-zealous waiter, "don't rush me." 

"After this one," James decided, "you all come around and see my studio. 
It's got a wonderful exposure, probably the best in Western civilization." 

"I think it would be better," accepted Macdonald, "if I came around and 
looked at it during the day. Understand, first impressions are the only 
lasting ones to me and I might never come to appreciate it if I saw it now. 
But Martha's enormously imaginative, she never gets impressions," he 
disclosed grandly. "Why don't you and Martha go there and straighten it up a 
bit, and if tomorrow's a clear day, I'll look in at you." 

"Only a really healthy man," James reiterated, "is so careful of his 
sensitivities." 

Macdonald lifted Martha out of her chair and snapped the joints of her 
mechanical knees into locked upright. "Tomorrow little one," he promised, 
"be a good model and daddy will give you a big red all-day sucker." 

"I want a green one," and there the game ended. She moved hesitantly away 
with James, looking reproachfully at Macdonald who was graciously accepting 
another libation from Conrad. 

"Goodbye Macdonald," she called grievously, and inside of her a child's 
voice long dead echoed, "goodbye for ever." 

 CHAPTER 6 

There was an elevator to lift them to James' atelier and as it carried them 
silently to the top floor, it separated her from Paris and Macdonald as 
surely as a planet fired to remote planets. 

"It's quite comfortable," James was assuring her, "not as comfortable as 
something we'd be accustomed to in the States, but one can lead quite a 
healthy life there. Particularly," he said with relief, "since I put in a 
refrigerator. I don't see how the French live without refrigerators." 

"That's because they have no heat," she pedantically supplied, an early 
earthman describing dead customs to an anthropologist. "The rooms were so 
cold," she detailed, "butter could stay fresh for weeks. That is," she 
particularized, "if one had butter." 

"What fatty substitute could one employ," he inquired more deeply, "in place 
of butter?" 

"Wine," she said seriously. "Everyone just substituted wine." 

"Then the cuisine centered around pot-au-feu, bouillabaise, bourgogne, and 
casseroles. Am I right?" 

She shook her head meaning no fight. 

"Abominable," he brought her sharply to her senses, "every mouthful 
jeopardizing survival of the civilization. And did they perform abominations 
on eggs?" 

"Abominable," she confirmed, "they boiled them for years, right in the 
shell, and then left them to solidify a few more years on cafe counters." 

"The Chinese bury them in the ground." 

"The French were much too proud for that." 

"We're here," he welcomed them, opening the iron drape that guarded the 
elevator shaft, and leading her into a warm carpeted hall. "I've got my key 
handy," and he showed her how he managed that, pulling a stretch chain from 
under his lapel at the end of which dangled the key. "I worked in one of our 
department stores," he admitted, and she knew that "our" meant not his and 
hers, which etymologically it might have, but his, which it still meant. The 
door opened onto an enormous studio which had: gold walls, a black ceiling, 
Louis seize, Queen Anne, and Knoll furnishings, two silver and crystal 
chandeliers, one orange French men-at-work lamp, a Persian rug over which 
was thrown Japanese mats, upon which were scattered rectangular black patent 
leather pillows. He walked quickly across the room and pulled open a heavy 
black curtain with the huge letter D embossed in its center. "This is my 
pride and joy," he confessed, revealing a jeweled stain-glass window. "Some 
Egyptologists claim it's older and finer than the windows at Chartres. I 
don't care," he struck a blow for freedom and democracy, "I think 
comparisons are onerous." 

"Aren't they!" 

"Could I get you something to drink? I'm afraid I've only got fruit juices 
and vegetable essences in the house, that's all I generally imbibe," he made 
light pleasantry. 

"That would be just fine, I find them especially good with solids, like ham 
sandwiches for instance," she recommended. 

"Of all the meats I do not eat," James roared, "dirty pork is the one I 
don't eat most. But by all means, sandwiches," he softened. "I'm afraid I've 
only got black bread, rye bread and fresh ground com bread with wheat germ 
added." 

"I'll take the latter," she said dreamily. 

"And for fillers," he advised, "there's watercress, cucumber, sliced white 
solidified yogurt, unbleached Holland cheese, unbaked freshly-ground cashews 
and caviar which turns out to be surprisingly rich in iodine." 

"I'll take the latter," she repeated ecstatically. "Two times latter," he 
checked. "I'd like more than two." 

"But not too much, Martha," he crooked a naughty finger at her, "we've got 
to stay thin for the Harlequin period. If our arrangement works out," he 
promised, "there'll be all the walnuts you can crack when we get to the 
Classical Interlude." 

"Oh, it will work out," she prophesied. 

"Now," he wrung his soft hands, "to begin. Would you like to browse around 
my books while I fix us some strength and energy, or would you prefer to 
listen to one of my five thousand long-playing records?" 

"I would actually like to take a bath," Martha hinted faintly. 

"A bath it will be," he promptly agreed, and not unlike a bearing Greek 
threw open a paneled oak Twelfth-century monastery carved portal to reveal a 
cushioned and carpeted bathroom. He drew open a black curtain with a large 
embossed B centering it and revealed the Paris skyline. "I think that the 
most important room, from the view point of view, is the bathroom. I do 
prefer looking to reading or thinking, at those moments," he explained, "and 
I do believe that the organism relaxes and performs most efficiently in that 
circumstance. One is hardly aware of the process of elimination," he 
laughed, "while sitting before this enchanting vista. Good body habits and 
reflexes to vistas," he chuckled joyfully, "have caused me no small 
embarrassment in the Eiffel Tower and at the top of Notre-Dame." 

"No kidding," she laughed, quite willing to appear ignorant. 

"I'll just turn the hot water tap for you," he began almost immediately to 
disappear in a billow of vapor, "and here are the towels," he handed her two 
huge black thick squares with the initial D thereon embossed. "Don't put 
your clothes back on," he said as efficiently as a concentration camp 
attendant. "I've got a costume that we'll be using for work." 

"Of course." 

With that James Dykes left, and Martha stripped to the slightly rosier than 
her face skin, lowered herself into the pouring crypt and leaned back 
luxuriously, indifferent to its coffined contours, allowing the weeks of 
coupling and filth to soak deeper into her pores. The pleasure and heat of 
the bath were hypnotic and she closed her eyes in a surrender more complete 
than anything Macdonald had known. Macdonald! Her eyelids flung open. 
Macdonald was probably, at this moment, finishing a hot bath in a well 
organized American girl's apartment. In the fog of the room she stared out 
at the crystalline fragility of Paris-and felt herself stranded as a London 
streetwalker peeping into prosperous windows. On the blackened window 
stretched before her she projected the familiar seduction scene. The heat, 
the pleasure, the surrender, the jealousy flooded the arteries of her heart 
as she heard him faintly promising the young secretary at the embassy: 

"Of course you're normal my dear child, a European has just to look at your 
adorable figure and sweet pensive face to know that you're normal, possibly 
a little more sensitive than you should be, but if we make that sensitivity 
work for you, well lass, it will be all the more pleasure for you and that I 
promise." 

"You do understand me," an ignorant blonde voice echoed. 

"Let's say I understand beauty," Macdonald particularized. "And I understand 
that the boys you've known in the States," (carefully he called boys, boys) 
"couldn't understand you, and my little angel let's be fair, maybe you 
couldn't understand them." 

"Oh, but I did." 

"Did you now," he praised, "and were you noting how much like your mother 
they were? Now how can a sensitive beauty like you be gratified," the word 
rolled spaciously about the cavern of his lying mouth, "by boys like your 
mother? You've been asking too much of yourself, lass, you've been asking to 
do alone, what must be accomplished by a minority of two, and no wonder 
you're tired, and no wonder your body's tired, yes, move a little faster, 
like that, and no wonder you've come here to France for a rest. And as 
exercise is the best tonic for the body, and movement the greatest ease, 
I'll ease you, my bonny one, I'll ease you good and proper." 

The pig. She studied the Eiffel Tower in the hazy darkness, hating it as she 
always hated it. The pig, and the tower seemed to be swaying ponderously 
close to her tub. She picked up a black washcloth and scrubbed her private 
parts. She was hot with revulsion, eager to be out of the bath, to rush to 
Macdonald, to pull him out of her doubledecker's arms, to tell him clearly 
that they were finished in case he'd missed the heavy nuances of her 
goodbye. 

Mighty as Athena, she loomed out of the bailing water. Soap had not touched 
her body and the dirt would dry back into the pores, protecting her skin 
from the vagaries of the Paris winter. James opened the bathroom door and 
she could faintly make out his outline through the heavy steam. "Are you 
still there?" he called. 

"Just getting out." She wrapped herself in the hygienic absorbance of the 
towel. 

"Here," he shouted as if the fog created great nautical distances, "I'll 
just put these things on the dressing table. The food's ready when you are," 
he added jovially. 

"Can't I dress after I eat?' Martha revealed her tendency to get to the best 
parts first, to search out the dirty passages in dirty books, to eat cheese 
before salad. She revealed herself as a gross sensualist, and James Dykes 
responded as a formalist. "You will dress first, please," he admonished, 
"then we'll see how much you're allowed to eat." 

Martha dried herself carelessly, and stumbled to the black mirrored dressing 
table. She groped for the promised garment, and her hands encountered 
nothing but two sticks, each one foot long, tapering into dangerous points. 
She opened the door, letting some steam out and some outline in. "I can't 
find it, James," she called him by name for the first time, "all I see here, 
and I can't see very much, are two sticks." 

"That's right," he shouted back, "tonight because of lack of light we're 
just doing the black and white, pen and ink Dance With Banderillas, circa 
1954. I am often forced to adjust the circus to the time of day," he 
resented. "If you'll just hold one banderilla in each hand, I'd greatly 
appreciate it." 

"Sure," she said, "why not," she elaborated, and following counsel danced 
into the studio where James, in a traditional High Lama's robe, was 
reclining cross-legged on the smallest and highest of the patent leather 
pillows. 

"Oh," he rose hastily as she entered, and she thought how well mannered the 
rich were, clinging so wisely to grandfather's money and customs, "oh," and 
this time she detected dismay in the monosyllable, "this will never do. Why 
you're all pink," he accused her, "I will not be forced into the Rose Period 
now," he stamped his foot, "and you're pink pink pink." 

"If you just have a little prickly heat powder in the house," she assured 
him. 

"It's not the same thing," he insisted, "if I wanted to work that way I 
could use mirrors." 

She stabbed a thick caviar sandwich with her banderilla. 

"You're too pink to eat," he said shrilly, grabbing for the floating dark 
bread. 

"If you touch my sandwich," Martha said quietly, "I shall have to kill you." 

"By all means, eat," he deflated, "be fat and pink. What difference does it 
make?" 

"That's what I say," said Martha, poising her weapon for another. 

"Only don't use my costume," he thundered, "use your fingers the way all fat 
pink women do." 

"Gladly," she consented, "I'm too warmly dressed anyway," and she put the 
darts in each reach at her side, refilling each hand with a sandwich. 

"Don't be so Oliver Twist," he insulted her. "Eat one at a time, I promise I 
won't take them away." 

She shuddered. "I don't even like to hear you joke about the possibility in 
the negative. Do you mind if I move the tray a little closer to me?" 

"Well I might want one." 

"Just ask me," she suggested generously. "Service will be prompt and 
cheerful," and she laughed with her mouth full, knowing instinctively that 
that would get him. James Dykes reacted as if he'd been shot, stretching out 
on the Japanese mat and fitting his neck into the curve of the patent 
leather pillow. He closed his eyes and pretended to meditate. 

"It's all so boring," he was medium to his own dead spirit, "it's all so 
boring the sameness, oh God," he said wearily, addressing himself, "health 
turns out to be the same as disease, the exotic the ordinary, the unexpected 
the expected." He turned in inner agony on the wooden leather-covered 
pillow, "I think I'll eat a steak tomorrow. It's all the same, it's all so 
boring." 

Martha knew certain things, she knew these certain things axiomatically, 
absolutely, unquestioningly, and it was from these certain things that she 
derived her woman wisdom. One of these certain things that was axiomatic was 
that any man who propounded at length on boredom was impotent, and any rich 
man who so propounded was certainly impotent and possibly completely lacking 
in a genital appendage. There was something cockless about James Dykes. That 
had been her first impression, and now the intensified impression returned 
as fact, releasing a gush of almost love in her. The woman in her responded 
fragrantly, like a sun-ripened, room-rotting fruit, to his impotence. She 
moved closer to him and calculated his thin silk robe lying flat on his flat 
body. Surely no staff hid beneath the folds. Magically she became woman, 
releasing the long-latent goddess within her. She relished the vigor and 
splendor of her physicality, and abhorred mind. 

"Of course, darling," she breathed. "Of course it's all so boring." 

He turned bored eyes on her. "Do you know how boring it is?" 

"I'm only a woman," she swelled with mammalian power and containment. "I 
know nothing, but I can feel a male's boredom. I can feel how boring it must 
be for him. The closest I can come to knowing," she stiffened her empty 
fingers, "is through feeling what the man is knowing, because" she entwined 
her body with his, letting her luxury of scarlet tresses cascade his weary 
face, "I'm only a woman." 

He looked with deepest contempt into her eyes. "Woman, he intoned, "do you 
know the boredom of boredom?" 

"It is not my province to know," she smiled knowingly. "I am essentially a 
creature of feeling, therein my strength of weakness, but," she comforted 
him, "though you may despise me, you need me, therein lies your boredom." 

"You do understand," he said wondrously. 

"That is for you to judge," her body sheltered his, "Leave me only my 
intuitions and instincts." 

"Martha," he nestled, fetus-like, closer to her warm dark body, "everything 
turns to shit." 

"What difference my darling," she dismissed his male dilemma, "why question 
the rhythms of life? Do the rhythms of life question us?" 

"That is easy for you to say," he complained. 

"Yes," she hastily interposed, "being a creature of rhythms, it is in me to 
feel and accept rhythms, as deeply as I feel and accept cycles. To question 
rhythms, would be for me to question life," she kneaded his taut shoulders. 

"But it is just that which I question," his eyes, crazed for comfort, 
searched hers. "I question life." 

"Hero," she chided him, "hero and fool, smaller in your greatness than am I, 
WOMAN, greater in my smallness. Foolish God," she caressed his brow, "silly 
creator, how you push into the future, how you rush on into progress. 
Eternally bored giant," she chastised the trembling figure, "bored with 
today in anticipation of tomorrow. If only you could intuit that tomorrow is 
yesterday you could attain the mockery of freedom which, with my rhythms, my 
never-ending monthly cycles, I try to impart to you. But of course I can 
not," she exulted, "for then you would be woman and I would be shit. So 
struggle, my beloved," she urged him. "Suffer, push, create, fail, fly and 
fall again and again to earth, and I as woman will wait always on earth and 
brush you off." 

"Martha, I was not always a copyist," he confessed. 

"I accept you," she covered his lips with her lessoning fingers. 

"There was a time when I kneeled to originality." 

"As god is your absolute," she prayed, "man is my absolute." 

"And I realized that to originate is ultimately to copy, and I decided that 
it was greater to begin at the end of the process, to sacrifice the agonies 
of originating for the ease of copying." 

"Tyrant," she attacked him, "banging your mortal head against the walls of 
the world, as you punished the walls of my womb. Resenting your emergence 
into a world I made and never leave." 

"If I were a woman ... " 

"Hush," she hastened, "hush, the gods are surely listening." 

" ... I would never bring more miserable bored sons on the earth." 

"Occupation, housewife," she changed. 

"Of course, one must do something," he comprehended, "Let's you and I do 
something, Martha." 

"We are doing something my beloved," she compassioned, "even more, we are 
being something. Together, we may achieve nothing." 

"Suck my cock, Martha." 

"Pardon?" 

"My cock," he repeated, "suck it, Martha." 

"But why?" she shrilled. 

"That's one question I've never asked," he admitted, "and now that I hear 
it, I know why. The answer doesn't particularly interest me. I doubt if 
there even is an answer," he untied the silken cord of his silken robe, "I 
doubt if it's even a rhetorical question. Who knows," he removed the robe 
and lay on the Japanese mat in emaciated thick-necked nudity, "maybe it's a 
truism." 

"I hardly know you," Martha stuttered. 

"I'm not asking you to know me," he conceded agreeably, "just my cock." 

"But it looks so much like you," Martha quibbled. "It looks enough like you 
to be your twin." And it did. His staff was an enlarged miniature of the 
rest of him. It was very white, very long, the exact thickness of his neck, 
small and quizzical at the head. 

"It's fantastic," she touched it hesitantly. "It's repulsive." His balls 
seemed inconveniently, uncomfortably forward, pushing the entire massive 
machine within easy reach of a mouth. The rod was colorless, erect, strong, 
healthy and somehow bored. A fond mother couldn't have distinguished between 
James Dykes and his privates. 

"It doesn't seem possible," Martha meditated. "Can it talk?" 

"Maybe to you," James conceded. "It never says a damn thing to me." 

"Does it have your tastes in music and literature and such trifles," she 
pressed. 

"Mouths," he enunciated. "Mouths, ass-holes and cunts, that's all I know 
about its tastes. For the rest, we leave each other alone." 

"Do you ever compete for the same women?" she indiscreetly pressed. "Or do 
you ever have disagreements? Does sometimes it hate one of your women, or 
force you into a degrading relationship?" 

"I always choose our women," Dykes pronounced heavily. 

"Doesn't it resent that?" She stared at it and it stared back with James 
Dykes' witless expression. 

"It works," he said belligerently, "and that's all we care about. We work 
well together. I don't ask it questions, and the converse is respected." 

"Does it eat what you eat?" she researched further. 

"It seems to prefer being eaten," he hinted in an apparent sarcasm of 
boredom, "and frankly, I prefer it to be eaten too. So if you'll just 
remember your eternal function of acceptance and stop asking questions the 
answers to which would include intellect and exclude you, we'd both be 
happier." 

"You promise it won't eat me, James," she lowered her head in fear and 
trepidation. "It looks so stupid and mean." 

"Suck," he commanded, pressing her head into action and luxuriously 
spreading his thighs, "suck, suck, suck, suck." 

Fuck you, Macdonald, were her last thoughts as her head sank, fuck you, 
Macdonald and your inscrutable plans. 

"Noises," James Dykes insisted. 

"How dare you," she lifted her wet face indignantly. "I'm perfect at this, I 
never make noises!" 

"I want you to make noises," he thundered. "Loud ugly sucking sloppy 
drowning gushing noises, noises infantile slobbering unquenchable and 
despicable. like this," he sloshed an enormous fountain of spittle down his 
thick throat. His rod finally had its mute say, jumping up right in absolute 
accord. Perversely her mouth dried in stage fright, there was nothing but 
the silent perfection of her sucking. "Noises," he bellowed. "Water," she 
gasped. 

"Good, good," he rotated his hips, "pretend you're burning up on a log in 
the middle of the sea. I am the sea," he transcendentalized, "my prick is 
the log, cling to it, suck it, suck it for moisture, taste its poisonous 
salts that will relieve your thirst into agonizing thirst. Ahh." he threw 
himself into the piece, "how hot it is, ahh I'm burning, suck, suck," and 
she choked obediently on the gross raft that whipped her into a whirlpool of 
shooting sperm. "Now drink," he panted, "don't let a drop escape. Quench 
your thirst, it will make you thirstier, drink," he ordered, "suck it all 
out." 

"So you're one of the talkers," she fell away from him on the mat. "Nothing 
like fucking a cheerleader, my team always loses." 

"That wasn't too bad," he tied the silk cord of his silk dressing gown 
around his waist and stood over her inert form, "I'll brush my teeth and 
then we'll try another version, maybe we'll even switch roles," he tempted. 

Martha crouched beneath his high looming figure. "Deceived," she wept, 
"deceived; why," she attacked him, "do you pretend not to have a cock if you 
have one? Why the cruel game?" 

"So many questions, my dear," he reprimanded her, and disappeared into the 
bathroom. "There's a white ring around my black ebony tub," he called out to 
her. "Do you know how it got there?" 

"Some say he floated, others say he just walked over the waters," she 
answered darkly and groped her way to the long table and poured unsweetened 
lemon juice into an emerald and ruby-encrusted chalice. She drank until she 
couldn't hear his voice anymore. Her next conscious recollection was his 
pulling the cup from between her clenched teeth. 

"Let's adjoin to the bedroom," he suavely suggested, "beds are old-fashioned 
but sometimes they're fun." 

"Yes," Martha intuitively understood, "one shouldn't throw the baby out with 
the water." 

"Shouldn't one," he wondered, "I've often wondered about the wisdom of that 
conundrum. Babies are such a bore," he reminded her, "always crying about 
property settlements and inheritance taxes. I shouldn't wonder if a baby 
didn't originate that little parable." 

 CHAPTER 7 

The bedroom was not a disappointment. The walls were bare except for floor 
to ceiling murals of the twelve apostles and their concubines. The bed 
itself was a surprise: narrow as a Vestal Virgin's, it had thrown casually 
over its spine a black spread with the letter D embossed upon its center. 
The slender cot was canopied by a black drapery that divided in two and had 
on each of its halves the letter D contained within a triangle of the same 
color. The rug was a deep smoky black, bare except for a few dozen white 
roses that appeared to have been accidentally dropped there and forgotten, 
supplying the only decorative release. But their freshness revealed the 
deft, decorator's touch. It was a serious room, almost formal, and Martha 
felt that she had trespassed into James' tomb. 

"Do many people enter this room," she asked quietly. 

"As many as I can make enter," he modestly admitted, "I believe a man's room 
is his inviolable right. And as many enter, leave," he continued, and left 
it for her to interpret, as assurance or reassurance. 

Fuck the rich and their lousy money, Martha thought. I hate them, her mind 
labored, they think it's such a privilege to hate them. Well fuck them, she 
meditated, they're not so special, I hate everybody. 

"I'd hate you just as much if you were poor, James," she didn't realize her 
thoughts had become words. 

He led her as his bride to his black narrow bed and pulled the black cover 
back to reveal the black silk sheets. But hiding under the blackness, 
obscene and groomed as any hospital bed, were taut white sheets. 

"White sheets," she flung her head back and laughed freely, "how clever." 

"Much more healthy," he interjected, "and sanitary, easier to detect dirt, 
no dyes to damage the skin tissues." 

"Of course," she brushed his esotericism aside, "I've always slept in white 
sheets, and my mother before me." 

"Some traditions," he repeated, it was revealing itself as his theme, "are 
best guarded." 

"No point," she agreed, "to throw out the diamonds with the broken chain." 

He lifted her high in the air and playfully dropped her onto the middle of 
the bed. She realized that the mattress was even narrower than it had 
appeared when draped with the black drape. It was, in fact, no wider than an 
ordinary kitchen chair. 

"Why so narrow, James?" she queried. 

"You'll find out," he promised in his best cavalier manner, and left her to 
the cruel game of inquiry without answers. "Excuse me a moment," he begged, 
and disappeared as discreetly as a head-waiter, but certainly not a French 
headwaiter, who never appears, or his Italian brother, who never disappears. 

"And now my test, beware, MacDonald, you may lose me," she intoned, and she 
started to masturbate as a head start and stopped only when she realized 
that that could be considered cheating. Though she should have felt joy at 
the prospect of severing her humiliating ties with Macdonald, at the thought 
of meeting him one day in the streets, possibly when she and James returned 
from the Hague, pushing the mink collar of her mink coat away from her face 
and saying, "Oh, by the way I came, I came all over the place," she felt 
instead a sadness, the deep disturbing sadness of loss. It was magnanimous 
to suffer Macdonald's losing her and it indicated to her a spiritual bond, 
no other word volunteered, that neither of them suspected. Leaving Macdonald 
was not just this cold business of switching cocks, of substituting luxury 
for penury, there was the deep hidden tragedy of two lovers who had touched 
and not known that they had touched. Macdonald might even destroy himself, 
she began to cheer herself. He wouldn't do it in a vulgar ostentatious 
Seine-plunging way, but privately by drinking wood alcohol and slowly going 
blind or not treating a carefully acquired syphilitic infection and slowly 
going blind. Again and again the image of Macdonald as a blind Oedipus 
formed. Or was he a blind Homer? The brow was Homeric, but the tragedy 
Oedipal. There would be those who would not understand that she was the 
cause of Macdonald McBlane's disease and decay, but slowly through the 
years, stories of a discreet trust made out in Macdonald's name would be 
credited to her, until it was inadvertently revealed to all of it. Germain 
that it was for Martha, the beautiful rich but remote Martha that Macdonald 
had destroyed himself. And who would not sympathize with him? And who, 
seeing her seated alone and small in the back of the chauffeured limousine, 
would cast the first stone? "James," she called fiercely, "James, come 
consummate." 

The lights in the room lowered as he entered, and he stood a moment at the 
doorway, and then moved quickly toward her, balancing a small Japanese bowl 
in the outstretched palm of each hand. Carefully he placed the bowls on the 
low tables that stood at either side of the bed. "Pick the two most perfect 
roses from the rug," he invited her, "and float one in each of the bowls." 

Martha crawled along the rug, lifting and studying the remarkable buds. It 
was revelatory how the apparently perfect revealed its imperfections on 
close examination. Here was one rose with a white petal missing, another 
with the inner tips tinged faintly brown. Here a rose seed fallen fallow on 
the black rug, a pistil bent, a piston missing, a leaf torn, a stalk rough, 
a thorn blunted. "None of them is perfect," she confessed, "tulips might 
have been better. Roses are so complex," she kicked one aside, "I doubt if 
there exists a perfect rose. One could probably dedicate a life to the 
development of a perfect rose, and then not approach its realization." 

James checked the time. "Any two will do." 

"Will they, yes," she realized, "we can love them for their imperfections. 
Is beauty not exaggeration? Shall I choose the two most imperfect, James?" 
her voice thrilled with adventure. "The most imperfect which shall reveal 
themselves as the most beautiful." 

"Is it going to take you as long as the first search?" he said suspiciously. 
"Is there going to arise the issue of which is more essential in the rose, 
the piston or the pistil? I smell a rat," he finished. 

"It might take as long," she gaily conceded from the rug. 

He rushed to her and pulled her upright. She was captured with three roses 
in her hand and he wrested them from her, throwing one to the floor. "These 
two will do fine." 

"In the end one is arbitrary, isn't one," she dragged the lesson homeward. 

"In the end one is bored," he corrected, "but not stiff. Watch me," he 
suggested, "so you can teach your grandchildren, God forbid. I put a rose in 
each bowl, and as we mate I shall play with the buds and in that way, by 
mental distraction, sustain physical prowess. It is now two o'clock in the 
Sunday morning; with distraction I can assault you until two-thirty o'clock 
in the morning. It is a method naturally learned from the Orientals." 

"Naturally darling, but how can you assault me when there's no room for me 
in the bed. It does seem a bed made for one person." 

"You will lie under me, he explained. "In that way there is room for even a 
third person, either over me or beneath you. The bed is limited to 
verticality, but it is within limitations that the greatest freedoms occur." 

"For sure," Martha slipped under his lean form, "good luck." She closed her 
eyes and prayed. "God, if you make me come I'll never steal another pair of 
gloves from the Bon Marche." 

James was breathing and snorting like a pedigreed cat. "It's so exciting," 
he gasped, "you're such an exciting woman lying there, motionless. What 
style, what aristocracy, not a spark of passion on your face or in your 
body, passive, perfect. If you don't move, I think I'll come," he warned 
her. "It's not fair to excite me this way. Wait! Help me to prolong our 
union. Don't just lie there like a gorgeous, veined marble statue, oh," he 
groaned, "oh," and dived for the roses. His staff was bruising her thigh, as 
massive and stony as the steeples of Chartres. "Put my cock in you," he 
urged, his hands obviously occupied, "Lead me into your filthy womb, direct 
contact always stops my passion. Quick," he commanded, "shove it in or I'll 
come." 

"I'm trying," she squirmed under his weight. 

"Ahh, that's better," he sighed suddenly, "that's better." 

"You're not in yet," she wrestled with the large insensitive hook. "I can't 
get it in." 

He lifted a hand out of the rose bowl and dipped it into her sex. "Why are 
you so dry," he demanded. 

"Just excitement, I guess," Martha conjectured, feeling a chill, surely 
death, spreading up from her toes. 

"Make me come," the voice inside of her was howling. "God make him make me 
come." 

"So many women have that," he muttered. "Dry as glass. I guess we're both a 
little too excited," he admitted. 

"Something like that. If it would be too profane," she hinted, "maybe a 
little water from the bowl would cool my cunt." 

"One up for you," conceded James, massaging a rose petal against her rose 
petals until entry was achieved. "That feels good," he gasped just like 
anybody else. like her mother always said, "They can't take their money to 
bed with them." He pointed in and out of her in callisthenic rhapsody. 
"Beautiful motionless cunt," he changed, "I love to have a woman under me 
paralyzed with excitement, too passionate to breathe my pink beauty, my 
Classical Interlude." 

Martha suspected that she wasn't there, that it was all happening to the 
couple upstairs. "Macdonald," her heart wept, "Macdonald, I'm all alone." 

"How does that feel," he rammed it into her hard, "and that," he pinioned 
her against the mattress, "and that," he riveted them together with his 
prick high and deep inside of her. 

"Very good." 

"Say suck," he commanded, "say suck." 

"Again with the suck," she moaned. 

"Say it," he punished her body, "say it." 

"Suck." 

"Again." 

"Suck." 

"Again." 

"Suck, suck, suck, suck, suck," the word became a disembodied sound, an 
inarticulation, a moment before language. "Suck," she played, trying to find 
the contours and sense of the word again, "suck, suck, suck." 

"Ahh," he groaned, "tell me when to come, tell me when I can come, are you 
almost ready?" 

"Suck." 

"Bite my ear cold, dry, passionate savage, bite my ear I despise to be 
bitten. Bite my ear in your passion wretched possessed woman." 

He thumped her mightily, perverse possessor of a steel erection that 
tempered and strengthened and hardened in her bruised loins. Obediently she 
caught his lobe between her teeth, never recapturing the lost suck. 

"Harder," he groaned. "Harder, don't come yet," subtly implanting the idea, 
"don't come yet. No hurry, don't come." 

"Don't worry," she sank into his ear, and twisted her hips against his 
pelvis in sudden participation, promptly collapsing under his arresting 
weight. 

"You came," he misinterpreted her moment's activity, "bad girl came," he 
blabbered in nursery prattle, "bad girl came before James, now James," he 
mumbled jealousy, "this time James, now James," and crooning his name he 
emptied his hot burning machine. He fell off her body onto the black rug, 
his arms and legs spread chaotically like a tripod. His eyes remained closed 
and his breathing painful and staccato. Then slowly the lids sank open and 
he stared up fixedly at the gothic vaulted ceiling and temporized, "So much 
work, and in the end, all so boring." 

She experienced her first genuine flow of emotion for James, a deep and 
tumultuous loathing. 

"What you need is a pen pal, James, someone with whom you can exchange false 
photographs. I'll even give you one of mine," his sperm oozed amoeba-like 
down her thigh, "if you want to correspond with a woman." 

"Don't tell me what I need," he attacked brutally, "all my life women have 
been telling me what I need. First my governess, then my teachers, then my 
nurses, then my aunts, then my sisters, older and younger, then my 
grandmother." 

"You love it," she accused. "If only I had had a mother," James wept, "then 
I could have been homosexual like all the other boys at school. But no," he 
jumped up in his despair, "she had to run off to work in Schweitzer's leper 
colony, she couldn't learn the Bunny Hug or shingle her plaits. I admire 
her," he said bitterly. "That's what she's bequeathed to me, admiration. 
Nothing," he stood fixed before the twelve foot portrayal of the apostle 
Andrew, "is more boring than admiration." His hands wandered over Simon's 
mute flat face, "you had a mother too, Simon." He pressed the fishing hook 
with which Simon tormented his concubine's teat and one of her bulbous 
breasts sprung open to reveal a safe of neatly arranged bottles drugs 
needles alcohol stove burnt spoons and sterilized absorbent cotton. "Sex," 
his powerful teeth ground out a most hideous sound, "enemy of health, sapper 
of energy. Now you have my strength," he turned on her, "I hope you find 
better uses for it than I," laughter followed. James diluted the white 
powder, heating the solution in the blackest spoon. Needle attached, he 
skillfully plunged the filled hypodermic into his jugular vein and before 
Martha could find any employ for her new strength he returned smiling and 
starry-eyed to the bed. "Stay if you like my dear," he gallantly invited, 
"there's a matinee at the Cinematheque. They're doing Potemkin three times 
tomorrow, we can come in at the end of one show and see the beginning of the 
next. I do find Eisenstein's sense of color superb. It's too bad everybody's 
copied him or I would." 

"I should be going," Martha regretted. 

"By all means go," he seemed to prefer that agenda. "You'll find the 
elevator in the hall. It doesn't go down, only up, but if you use it as a 
guide and follow it down the steps you'll reach the street. I'd really love 
to take you home but I've got a great many esoteric thoughts to kick around. 
I'm also thinking of starting an hilariously funny book, called Then 
Buddhism, I think the title will go in England." He said clearly "an 
hilariously" so she knew it was time to go. 

"There's a question of my salary," Martha reminded him. "I hate to mention 
it," she blushed, "but the union will double my dues if I don't insist on 
payment." 

"That's one of the esotericisms I intended pondering," he found the 
bandelleros and hid them. "Could you come back next Friday for the results?" 

"No, I couldn't." 

"It's ambitious people like you, with adding machine brains who force me to 
retreat from reality. It's vulgar pedestrian bourgeois mentalities that 
crush me into my cocoon of brilliance, fame, creativity, beauty and wealth. 
Here," he said brutally, pressing a thorn in Christ's crown and flinging 
open the wall safe, "will this get you home? Will this rid me of our 
fleeting illusion of reality?" 

In blushing humility she gathered the bills off the rug. At last used all 
his stolen strength not to fling the money back into his impudent leering 
face. Her knuckles whitened around the enslaving symbols of freedom. A 
phrase that cut into his ambiguous soul rescued her dignity. "Apropos to 
something," she flung at him in vicious understatement. 

 CHAPTER 8 

"Oh Macdonald," she switched the glaring forty watts of overhead into his 
eyes and woke him instantly. "I thought I had left you." 

"Did you," he sat up in the disordered bed studying her vacantly in a 
concentrated and rapid effort at identification. 

"Oh darling, don't be so cool and sure of me." 

"I'll try." 

"Then I reached the hotel and there's a new man on night duty and he didn't 
know me and started accusing, you know how bored he must get sitting there 
all night making out fiches. You can't come into the hotel at this hour 
without a man, and I said very haughtily, I live here, as if he was the 
room-clerk at the Ritz style, and he said: What's your number, like we're 
all prisoners or something, so instead of giving him our number I said, 
Jesuis Madame McBlane, as if I was opening a charge account at Dior's and he 
was a reptile who just happened to be there, and then I marched up the 
stairs and left him tearing behind me. And darling it was so exciting to say 
Madame McBlane. I never dreamed anything could be so exciting." 

"You always do get a kick out of lying in French, Martha," he had no more 
confusion about the intruder's identity. 

"If it weren't for my mother, Macdonald," she realized, "I would marry you 
and be Madame Macdonald McBlaine. It is an improvement over Martha Heck." 

"But don't rush into anything precious, almost any name would be. But tell 
me, protecting my battered ego if possible, would your mother so hate the 
cadence of Madame McBlane." 

"Oh no darling, it would justify her entire life if I could write and say 
Dear mother, of all things I'm marrying a doctor." 

"I'm not a doctor." 

"You're not a practicing doctor. I wouldn't write, I'm marrying a practicing 
doctor, anyway. She'd never understand that." 

"Of course not." 

"But if I just said I'm marrying a doctor, what a surprise. She has the idea 
I live in filthy rooms with starving old bums." 

"What an imagination. Is it possible that your mother had a kind of 
repressed Lewis Carroll genius?" 

"No." 

"But she'd like a son in the professions." 

"More than money." 

"Don't get hysterical. And then darling what would she do with her valuable 
acquisition?" 

"Why she'd make you a partner in one of my father's haberdashery shops where 
you could really be doing something that made sense and tell the customers 
that you used to be a doctor. A doctor with a head on his shoulders, that's 
what she'd call you." 

"The image excites me," Macdonald confessed, "I think I'll marry you." 

"I wouldn't marry you." 

"Nothing impersonal I hope." 

"Of course not, I simply wouldn't marry anyone. I think marriage is 
obscene." 

"We agree," he exuded his surprise. "I wonder though," he hesitated, "if we 
have the same reasons?" 

"To get married," she promptly volunteered, "is like two people hiring an 
army to stand on either side of them to keep them together. And then all 
those filthy public confessions and trials and executions." 

"Our reasons differ," he smiled sadly, "but darling, I thought you were 
pushing commitments." 

"Private ones, of course," she insisted, "but it's vulgar to call out the 
militia." 

"A detail," he corrected, "but then, I'm not really against marriage." 

"Oh aren't you, Macdonald," she clutched him passionately about the knees. 

"Not so long as one of the parties of the first part has a lot of vulgar 
money. Marriage is dandy sport for the rich, like polo and incest" 

"You're loathsome, a loathsome calculating machine. One should marry only 
out of passionate attachment." 

"Exactly my sentiments." 

"You have no sentiments, only arithmetic," she attacked. "Marriage is for 
children, for reassurance, for two people to say to each other, I'm here 
today and I'll be here tomorrow and we have all the time and space we need 
to play in." 

"I think your convictions are becoming confused, Martha," he suggested. 

"They won't be at the end of the book," she smugly announced. 

"And will you then rewrite it, from the beginning?" 

"Certainly not," she expostulated. "What's so objectionable about 
confusion." 

"Order." 

"James Dykes," she dug deeply into the reservoir of her memory, extracting 
that almost forgotten name, "has more sense than you." 

"Forty million times more," sighed Macdonald, "tell me all about his other 
problems," he urged. 

"I'll tell you all about it tomorrow," she promised, "I just want to get 
into bed now and sleep, sleep, sleep. I'm dead. O how dreary to be so 
loved," her trousers crumbled limply around her trim ankle?. 

"It feels like tomorrow now, what time is it?" 

"It was four o'clock when I left James." 

"Then tell me everything now," he trapped her. "Then you can sleep through 
tomorrow." 

"All right, just let me get into that gorgeous bed. 

You didn't make the bed, did you? You were so sure I was coming back 
tonight, weren't you?" 

"Well I prayed," Macdonald admitted, "I couldn't do any more than wait and 
pray like all the other girls." 

"What did you do after I left?" 

"Nothing." 

"Nothing?" 

"Nothing." 

"And Conrad?" 

"We had a few drinks together." 

"What did he say about me and James?" 

"Nothing." 

"Nothing?" 

"Well you can ask him tomorrow, maybe he said something, I can't remember." 

"Did you miss me darling, did you feel ghastly?" 

"I still miss you, I still feel nasty." 

"Ghastly." 

"I'm not a member of the House of Lords, I don't even try to pronounce that 
word." 

"You're such a snob," she said blissfully crawling between burlap sacking 
and stretching her body against his. He kissed her judiciously between the 
breasts and she trembled. 

"Have you come home all hot and frustrated," he pushed her away in 
undisguised irritation. 

"Say that again, Macdonald." 

"The entire sentence?" 

"No, just the one delicious word, home." 

"Martha, James hasn't destroyed your senses, has he?" 

"I think so," she began to weep quietly at first and then huddled against 
him sobbing splendidly, "all of them. Oh Macdonald, it was so terrible. Why 
did you let it happen to me? Why didn't you warn me?" 

"I'm sorry, little one," he held her close, "I thought you wanted to 
experiment, you seemed so fretful this morning." 

"Don't ever think that again," she whimpered, quieting her mouth against his 
broad narrow shoulder, "I have no scientific instincts. Better," she moaned, 
"to experiment with other people. Are you sure it wasn't that?" she tortured 
herself out of his arms, "are you sure it wasn't you experimenting with me? 
Or me experimenting with you? Macdonald, tell me the truth, what did you do 
tonight?" 

"Nothing," he elaborated. 

"Does nothing mean another woman?" she moved away from him and prepared 
herself to accept any answer. 

"No other woman, wee thing," the one answer she was least prepared to 
accept. He pulled her heroically back into the warmth of his body. "Conrad 
and I had a few drinks and then I came back here." He carefully avoided the 
word home which she caught neatly between the ego. 

"Macdonald, are you still attractive to women?" 

"Haven't you been keeping your survey up to date?" he abused her. "You used 
to ask every woman with hair it'she was trying to fuck me." 

"Wouldn't it be hideous if we discovered that we were together because 
nobody else wanted us, and all the time we thought we were together kind of 
as a mutual protection league because everybody wanted us?" 

"There could be worse discoveries," he terrified the confused girl. "For 
example discovering that we were together." 

"I thought of that tonight," she admitted wistfully, "but only in terms of 
tragedy. I'm quite sure we'll never discover that while we're together." 

"Small comfort," he relaxed. "But didn't James want you, my adorable little 
puss?" 

"Say that word again," she begged. 

"Which of the fifteen have you selected this time, Madame?" 

"Puss, say puss. Why does it excite me? Puss, puss, oh God it's so exciting 
I think I'll go mad. Puss, puss, pussy cat, no that's not so exciting, 
pussy, yes, puss, pussy, maybe pussy is better than puss. Pussy." 

"Does this recitation come out of the San Francisco poets, or are you 
claiming insanity as a defense? Just answer my question." 

"I've figured it out," she gloried. "If you were an American you'd have 
figured it out. That's why men and women of the same cultural, religious, 
and economical background are so compatible. Pussy makes me think of ... " 

"Of your cunt, my beloved." 

"Well certainly not of yours! Can't tell you anything," she turned on her 
stomach. "First James and now the Answer King. No wonder I'm frigid," she 
elevated her fury into unctuous remorse, "no wonder I'm dead," and she shook 
the bed with her agony. 

"He couldn't make you come?" Macdonald rolled over to her side of the 
sloping mattress and pressed his mouth against her exposed back of neck. 

"Not exactly," she mumbled into the tearsoaked roll of metal filings. 

"You mean, he came," Macdonald compas-sioned. 

"Profusely." 

"And now you hate me because you're lusting for me?" 

"I don't need any excuses to hate you," her hysterical voice circled the 
circular pillow to reach him. 

"Turn over, darling," Macdonald pleaded, "I can hardly hear your pretty 
little insults. Come my sweet, I was so frightened you wouldn't come back to 
me, I tried to forget you. You dearest of the best Americans should be 
sympathetic. Isn't it written in your constitution as conceived by Freud at 
the battle of Gettysburg that hostility is fear? Be contemptuous of me, but 
be patient and turn over." He tossed her on her back, stretching his hand to 
cover the mossy mound of her cunt. His fingers dexterously found the 
concealed cave of neglect and he gently massaged the dampening walls. 

She said expressionlessly: "Don't bother, I have no feelings left." 

"Let me bother little pussy," her insides jumped against his fingertips, 
"forget about your feelings. Just you relax and tell Macdonald." 

"Don't," she stopped him. 

His ringers obeyed. "No, that's all right I meant don't call yourself 
Macdonald. He does that. He calls himself James." 

The fingers in her sex smoothed her brow. "Your taste improves, my love. 
Living with me has not been a complete waste, as I so often despair. I shall 
forget my name, I promise you. He's listening," he began. 

"And you won't stop what you're doing?" 

"Have my promise." 

"Well," Martha sighed and moved her hips to bury his hands more deeply in 
her abused womb. "It was terrible. When we left the Deux Magots he said to 
me. You have your choice my beautiful witch, that's what he called me all 
night, his beautiful witch, either we can tarry at my modest studio which is 
ancient reconstructed Gothic cathedral the Flemish embassy of the sixteenth 
century and now completely remodeled with steam heat and an automatic 
kitchen, or we can take my private plane and reach Zaragosa in time for the 
first bull. 

" 'Let's just tarry at your place,' I said, because I knew that would please 
him, and it did, so he hailed three taxis to show his pleasure and we walked 
around the corner to rue Jacob. A man dressed exactly like the Red Dean of 
Canterbury let us in and we went right past his private theatre upstairs to 
his private apartment." 

"Not all the details, Martha," Macdonald pinched her juicy berry for 
emphasis. "I'm more interested in psychology and action than decor." 

"I was getting to that," she spoke slowly. "So I won't describe his private 
apartment." 

"Good girl." 

"As soon as we arrived in his private quarters he locked the door behind me 
and whispered in a maniacal distemper, I'll never let you go now, I've been 
watching you for months. You've dominated my every awake moment and poisoned 
my dreams. I saw that was just a pose, because I've been around a bit so I 
said: Now James what is it you want, and that deflated him fast. He fell on 
his knees and cried, Just love me a little. Try to love me a little. I know 
it's preposterous to even hope for it but if you would just come and sit 
here with me when my need for you becomes most desperate, and let me touch 
your beautiful witch's hair and look into your beautiful witch's eyes and 
think on your beautiful witch's mouth ... 

"So I said: Doesn't my beautiful witch's body interest you?" 

"Good girl." 

"Faster, Macdonald." 

"Spoken for and done." 

"Darling, can't we fuck a little, just a little and then I'll continue the 
story." 

"Isn't that part of the story." 

"No, I'm asking you." 

"Don't be impatient, we have our senility ahead of us." 

"Macdonald, you won't ever leave me." 

"Not unless something better comes along." 

"Oh," she relaxed, "what security you give me." 

"Nothing compared to the security your analyst gave you." 

"Do you think I'm conceited." 

"To the point of insanity." 

"Macdonald, you are insane for me, aren't you? Just like James." 

"Ah yes, James," his clever fingers waited for her to continue. 

"Where was I?" 

"At the witch's body." 

"You make it sound so exciting. Doesn't my witch's body excite you. 'It is 
not your body but your soul, your mind, and your beautiful cold witch's 
heart that I want,' he told me. 'To have your body and not the rest would be 
empty mockery.' " 

"His life has been a series of full mockeries." 

"What?" 

"Go on." 

"So I said: 'Do you have something to eat?'. " 

"That sounds authentic." 

"It's all authentic!" 

"Of course, of course," Macdonald kissed her shocked lips. "Only some parts 
are easier to follow for an avid moviegoer like me." 

"You're wrecking your sensibilities," Martha warned him, reaching haughtily 
for his staff. 

"Good girl." 

"So he gave me something to eat and I ate. I can feel that you want to fuck, 
too." 

"And we're going to, but not at the best part." 

"You pervert. It excites your morbid sexuality to hear of my adventures with 
other men." 

"I knew you'd discover me." 

"If I'm telling you all this just to excite you, then I'll continue." 

" 'No man,' I said to James, 'has had my body and my mind.' 'I felt that,' 
he answered.' It was that that attracted me when I first saw you with that 
hulking Macdonald McBlane. Which does he have? Neither, I assured him, but 
since he is wise enough to realize this, he offends me less than other 
suitors." 

"Did you really say suitors, precious? I didn't know that was in your 
vocabulary." 

"There are a lot of things you don't ... " 

"Forgive the intrusion. You have my tension." 

"How whimsical. Let me be your protector, James insisted. I appreciate your 
unattainability more than an oaf like McBlane. Allow me not to attain you. 
If you like, I replied moodily, but I would indeed prefer to be attained. 
How lonely I become in my exquisite exclusion. And aren't we brothers in 
loneliness, James pleaded. How lonely am I in my incredible opulence? You're 
all women, he said to me, just like that, you're the illusion and the 
reality, the promise and the fulfillment, the realization and the denial ... 
you appear in the vestments of your incomparable body to seduce poor 
mortals, your white forearms alone are a drama that petrify me ... " 

"So you figured he was impotent and he fucked you," Macdonald jumped ahead. 

"What would you have thought," Martha wept. "Does anyone with balls so 
reason or speak, thought I to myself? Have I not wandered into the bosom of 
the cockless cult where woman is untouched in her white supremacy?" 

"And after he fucked you?" 

"He wept, Macdonald, I swear to you he wept. Another material vision, he 
wept, the woods are full of them. Another apparition that gazed in at me 
through the window of my feverish fixation and found fleshly form. Another 
... " 

"How much did he give you?" 

"I haven't counted," she replied frigidly except for her sex which boiled in 
independent alarm. 

"How much did he give you?" 

"Ten thousand." 

"Not bad, you might have gotten more if you hadn't fucked him." 

"Not a franc." 

"Like that." 

"He pays for his pleasure because he hates it so much." 

"Doesn't he soften when he's stoned." 

"Into granite." 

"Inclined not to give anything away when he's not there." 

"Exactly." 

"Well, ten thousand is ten thousand," spake the philosopher. 

"James Dykes got a bargain," Martha wept. "Another loathsome woman thing 
destroyed for ten thousand francs." 

"You're not destroyed, darling." 

"I'm frigid again, Macdonald. You know I am. Stop protecting me: admit that 
I am." 

"But sweetness, you've come twice in the just passed. Here, you're coming 
again." 

"How can you tell? How can you be sure?" 

"The tops of the fingers of my right hand have been snapped off." 

"I'm not sure. I'll never be sure." 

"Sure, you'll be sure," he assured her spreading her legs and fitting his 
staff in where it belonged. "This time we'll both be sure." 

 CHAPTER 9 

As soon as Macdonald realized that his eyes were open, he realized that he 
was alone. He closed them quickly in an effort to hold on to reality. A 
Sunday morning to himself, a Sunday morning of forgotten Sunday Times and 
cups of boiling tea. No, those were the Sundays in Scotland where mothers 
and sisters were born into servitude and men clung gallantly to their beds. 
This was a Paris Sunday, no discussion about that. The suspended airlessness 
of Sunday clogged his pores. He listened to the morning and lit a boiling 
Gauloise. The chambermaids, who lived in the halls, were playing with their 
electric drill outside his door. Another futile plot of the hotel proprietor 
to castrate his dead sensibilities. It was not the monotonous roar of the 
machine as much as its contemporanity that sent him wavering back to sleep. 
How integrate the decor of a room that had known no alteration except rapid 
decay in the past one hundred and seventy-two years with a noise that was 
undeniably modern? And if, lying in his eighteenth century bed on eighteenth 
century linens that had been disgrazziano when new, surrounded by the 
cracked and patched, yellowed and streaked smattered papered walls, he lost 
the twentieth century, the vacuum cleaner's roar could break his half nelson 
on sanity. Did the roar precurse the long feared judgment day? Or was it the 
end without judgment? During those panic-filled awakenings he welcomed dear 
Martha's screwability. This was not one of those severe mornings. Wresting 
Martha from her fears of frigidity had left him paralytically fatigued. But 
where was Martha! Perhaps, Macdonald leaned nervously over the side of the 
bed where the slope was most treacherous, he was being too soon tranquil. He 
searched the floor and she was not. Her uniform of black sweater and 
matching trousers also were not. Serenely he lit the second cigarette and 
heard the cleaning apparatus creep vermin-like through the vermin-made 
cracks in the door. When Martha was in the room she was in the bed, that 
being a genuine syllogism, because when she was in the bed, there being no 
other area in the room, she was in the room. He pounded on the suspicious 
mounds of blanket sheets and mattress, convinced for a dreadful moment that 
she was unsmothered in the dishevelment. "Martha," he called in his 
elaborately casual voice, "Martha," not wanting to sound the fool in case 
she wasn't there; wouldn't want anyone to think he was reading poetry aloud. 
Macdonald, man of taste, shuddered. Then, with a flush of intuition he knew 
that she wasn't there, knew it with the certainty that Columbus knew he'd 
found India. Macdonald dragged his long bony legs from under the cover and 
reached for his natty chartreuse Daks. From its pocket he drew forth one 
thousand francs, gift from the man of Bofors. In three minutes he had the 
bill unfolded, and chose coffee. In this most humane of all possible 
economies, it entitled him to coffee, no questions asked. Being rich enough 
to buy, he decided to charge, and pressed the button that echoed five 
flights below in the wicked woman's ears his intentions to add coffee to 
their unpaid bill. "Without coffee," he had explained to the monument with a 
human shape, "I cannot get to my bank." 

Macdonald selected his insouciant smile for the catastrophe and carefully 
arranged it on his face, waiting. There was the blast of a short angry 
endocrine in the corridor, which meant that the owner, hunched over the 
leftover croissants was informing the femme de chambre that someone on the 
fifth floor wanted something. Their code not yet being perfected, they were 
required to scream back and forth up the perilous leap of five flights, one 
hundred and six steps, until they determined by a process of elimination and 
telepathy that that despised someone was despised number twenty-two. Once 
established, the maid thumped violently on the fragile door. 

"Caid," Macdonald called forth, urbanely exhaling a nimbus of smoke, "je 
voudrais un petit dejeuner." 

"Complet Monsieur?" she inquired, her ironic 

French voice berlesqued into meaningless syllables by the ponderous addition 
of irony. 

"Oui," he agreed, guarding his insouciant expression and emptying his 
shrinking heart. It was not to be. "Avec de pain et du beurre ou des 
croissants?" she sadistically investigated. 

"Du pain, du beurre, de la confiture et un cafe au lait," he let the 
elaborate fantasy spew out. The hell with them. 

"Tout de suite, monsieur," she crackled and he could hear her sarcastic feet 
descend the five flights. The energy spent was a detail considering the good 
joke she would have had with the loathed locataire. The French will spend 
anything, so long as it's not money, for anything, so long as it's not food, 
for which they will spend anything, incredible sums of it. Motionless on the 
mattress, he measured her light foot up the stairs, and the thunder of her 
fist on the door. 

She mumbled something that sounded like the last line of a hilarious joke 
that was convulsing the narrator. 

"What?" He determined not only not to laugh, but not to understand. 

She repeated and so did he. In desperation the maid turned off the 
interminable roar of wasted electricity and repeated with slow relish: "The 
Madame says the banks are closed today." 

He didn't answer. Let her stand there thinking he was dead. Screw the French 
and their coffee and no Sunday papers. Screw them right up their oral 
ass-holes. At the apex of detestation, Martha invaded his despair. It was as 
easy as rolling on a log to fire all his hatred into her revolting bright 
white face. 

"Where the hell have you been, and why aren't you still here?" 

Metaphorically she removed her hat, tossed it on the bed and ran her fingers 
through her short blonde tight curls. 

"Out." 

"Have you had coffee." 

"Hours ago." 

"Hours ago, oh hours ago, John, simply hours ago. Good morning Myrna Loy, or 
are we being Googie Withers?" 

"I'm being myself. I'm not so depraved by my association with you that I 
can't occasionally be myself." 

"This quite early morning," he brutally pulled at his pistachio overalls, 
"that seemed to be someone you'd found in Havelock Ellis. May I ask if this 
late morning you have found a more congenial self in Modern Screen 
Romances?" 

"This morning I was something pathetic and possessed that you had created 
out of your deep loathing and fear for women. This late morning I am again 
in control of myself, aware of the blessedness of being a woman." 

"Congratulations, my good woman, would you be so womanly as to take that 
filthy empty glass over the sink and render it a clean empty glass through 
the application of soap and water and bring your tired man a cup of hot 
coffee from the cafe en face to the Hotel de St. Claude." 

"Do you," she responded to his speech, "intend lying like a grunting 
smelling pig in that bed the entire day?" 

"Why, my dear," he leaped, "has the fox hunt gone off without me?" And 
Macdonald separated himself nervously from the shroud that after long 
association he had come to resemble and rushed to the wash basin. "And have 
you," he inquired over his hairless shoulder, "been drinking coffee these 
hours that you've been 'up' or occupied in other endeavors?" 

"I've been to church," she quietly lit the longest butt. 

"To church." 

"And why not." 

"Why?" 

"In search of a morsel of compassion and tranquility." 

"But you're a Jew." His body twisted away from the sink, his piss spraying 
the concrete floor. 

"And are Jews," she blasted, "not entitled to compassion? Too bad you didn't 
know where to find me, you could have rushed in and stopped the services, 
screaming out your anti-Semitic rage. My mother always told me," she 
emphatically quoted, "Martha, remember they all hate Jews. They may pretend 
to like us but that's because they're afraid of our great brains. Take what 
you can get from them, she always told me, but never trust them." 

"So that's who you're being," nodded Macdonald, returning his generous 
stream of urine to the sink, "your mother. Why didn't you say so, my dear? I 
would have gladly been your father. You did tell me they never spoke." 

"Never," snapped Martha, "isolated in their fleshly bodies outside the body 
of the church, they discovered that they had nothing to say to each other, 
even in matters of money." 

"And in which house of our Lord did you tarry, my adorable?" Macdonald 
finished his daily ablution and rejecting the miserable invitation of his 
nuptial couch, buttoned his forest greens. 

"I can tell you," she agreed, "because I don't intend returning there next 
week. Each Sunday I shall visit another cathedral until I come down to all 
churches and end up at chapels. I was at Notre-Dame." 

"Notre-Dame!" amazement discolored his nostrils. 

"And why not? I consider it sinful to have been three years in Paris and 
never once in Notre-Dame." 

"And have you been to the Lido." 

"Of course not." 

"And do you consider that sinful." 

"That's different. I'm not on an expense account." 

"Then have you been to the Louvre." 

"I'm getting there." 

"Or Tour d'Argent, or Baudelaire's tomb, or the Folies-Bergere. Sins of 
omission heaped on sins of your father." 

"I intend." 

"Intentions, Madame, are discussed in heaven." 

"If you will please leave this room," she struggled for outer as well as 
inner composure, "I should like to bring some order into this disgusting rat 
hole." 

"Noble," he enthused, "make believe I'm not here. I'll curl up in a comer 
like a catatonic." 

"I'll see you, that will be sufficiently nauseatingly distracting." 

"One more question and I'm gone," he promised. "Did you attend the social 
and tea after services, exchanging recipes with our neighbors and friends, 
or did you walk moody and lonely along the Seine? You do know the Seine?" 

"We went and had coffee." 

"We? Is that you and our omnipresent maker or you and not so repressed 
mama." 

"We is a gentleman I encountered and myself." 

"Again this self, how the ego expanded and multiplied in the splendor of Our 
Ladies' parlor." 

Martha got down on her knees and gathered the handfuls of cigarette butts 
that had accumulated during days and nights outside of the Lord's 
compassion. She swept them into separate triangular stacks. 

"I conclude by your industry that you have invited this Viennese gentleman 
to tea." 

"How did you know, you've been spying on me?" she tripped angrily over a 
growing mound. 

"I promise to make my departure long before he makes his arrival. Is he 
perhaps watching across the street for my retreating figure?" 

"He's not coming." 

"Then I know nothing," Macdonald modestly withdrew to the door. 

"Stop, Macdonald, how did you know he was Viennese?" Hysteria deepened the 
implications of an otherwise simple question. 

"My dear child," Macdonald calmed her, "your gentlemen are always Viennese, 
the way chaps are English and guys are American. Allow me that much 
intelligence. I also read in that scandal sheet the New York European 
Edition of the Paris Herald Tribune that you can't meet anything but 
Viennese in cathedrals these days. They're making a regular religion of it. 
My methodology is logical, not mysterious. But most telling evidence of all, 
I must reveal to you, is the analyst's accent you have carried home from 
church." 

"He was right," Martha whispered vindictively, drawing her hair away from 
the ashes in a grim gesture. 

"In what was he right?" Macdonald to show his concern kicked a butt closer 
to her ash heap. 

"He told me I was bewitched. He said someone was tampering with my soul, you 
are the black prince, Macdonald." 

"Only an agent, a poor underpaid agent I assure you, or I'd be your fairy 
godmother. What is the informer's name?" 

"Adolf." 

"Quite right, inevitable indeed. Adolf brings echoes of sir James Dykes. 
James too found witchery in your wild ways. Is this not perhaps James Dykes 
disguised with a beard?" 

"How did you know?" 

"It is James Dykes," Macdonald triumphed. 

She looked up distractedly and said, "Oh, hello Macdonald, I'll be finished 
in a minute." 

"You bitch. What we do to each other is one thing, but property is sacred!" 

"I wanted you to know what it felt like to wander naked in this world, it's 
really been a liberation for me. I thought," she razored a stubborn sleeve 
with quick clever fingers, "that it would be a good idea for you to become 
an Adamite. It would make a great picture story for Life magazine, and if 
you weren't too lazy and kept a journal," she tugged with straining arms at 
the lining of his revoltingly moss green tweed jacket, "they might use it to 
caption the photographs." The jacket surrendered with a wounded shriek that 
came out of Macdonald. 

"You'll break something, Macdonald," she cried, and snaked away from his 
raised fist. Her body slipped over the mattress edge and her ringers 
encircled an empty wine bottle. It flew for his head, and landed on his 
shoulder. Macdonald shook himself as if a nerve long dead had died. "Let's 
not fight, really you'll thank roe one day. A man like you should travel 
light and fast and far." 

"Where did I put it," he asked dizzily. 

"What, Macdonald?" Martha asked conversationally. 

He concentrated on the pile of lint that had been his wardrobe, kicking bits 
aside with his toe, fastidious as a practiced dochard. He bent swiftly and 
picked up a slice of leather which looked as if it had once been part of a 
belt, though it was small enough to have been part of a wrist band, small 
enough indeed to have been part of a Chinese dinner. He held the leather in 
his palm. 

"Oh, Macdonald," Martha implored, "don't hit me again. Why don't we fuck 
instead? It's practically the same thing." 

"None of your Freudianisms," Macdonald warned. He pulled her cruelly by the 
long red hair, dragging her off the bed and bouncing her carelessly on the 
floor. "Don't give me any of your American shit." He kicked her ribs. Martha 
rolled away from him, and then rolled recklessly back grabbing his ankle and 
biting viciously for the bone. Her teeth reddened with his Celtic blood. 
"Except if you're impotent," she called up. "If you can't fuck, then beat, 
but you won't be fooling me, old man," she licked her teeth clean. "I don't 
think it's so grand and virile of you to kick me. Pricks tell me more than 
feet." She kneeled in front of him and dared him: "Just let me look, 
darling, I want to see if it's still there. If it's not there anymore you 
can kick me again. Just let me look," and she pleadingly unbuttoned his vile 
trousers. "There it is, all folded away and shrunken like a great shy 
schoolboy, come on," she cooed, and pulled the inactive member into 
prominence. She nipped it with her tongue, and suctioned the staff into her 
mouth the way Macdonald had taught her. In the most revolutionary tradition, 
the student was conquering the master with his own techniques. Macdonald let 
the battle be lost, he let the new generation ascend, he let the pupil 
lesson the teacher, he let her suck. She clung to his thighs, hiding her 
head bashfully in the shadows of his pubic hairs, rubbing her cheeks timidly 
against his thin-skinned sacs. His malevolent maleness swelled angrily in 
her fight mouth, rocking his loins into alertness, teasing the erect rod 
away from her, and then remembering that she hadn't eaten all day and 
magnanimously feeding it back into her wide open mouth. She curved her 
fingers around his hips, serpenting for his anus and pinioning his anger 
deep in her throat. The brazen gulping gasps quickened, and she fell away 
from him when he least wanted freedom. He hadn't taught her that timing; no 
man had ever taught a woman such mutinous timing. His throbbing cock led him 
slavishly to her hole, and she was on the floor wide open and wet for the 
assault. "Well," sighed Macdonald, "what the hell," and plunging into her 
gave her unconditional victory. There were other ways to die. His body 
pounded hers under the bed, and they rolled crazily to the window. They 
grunted in concentration, secluded and separate in their own pleasure. "It's 
up to you, Martha," warned Macdonald, rotating his hips so that the lever 
inside of her could touch off every battery in her hole. "Keep going," she 
gasped. "Keep in me, stay in me, roll in me, that's right, don't stone, 
don't get lazy, think of other things, think of your mother, Macdonald, 
think of New Year's in Glasgow, darling, think of all the Americans you've 
fucked, yes," she crooned, "don't think of me, just fuck, Macdonald, fuck me 
faster, darling," she urged him, "suck a lovely little Scots fucker you are, 
yes, my angel," she moaned, "don't stop, Macdonald, don't stop, don't stop," 
and he could feel her sex throbbing surrender. He came with her, invited by 
the inhalations of her sex and long after they were both good for nothing, 
Martha was still screaming, "Don't stop." 

"Enough, darling," said Macdonald, "the neighbors will think I'm beating 
you." 

 CHAPTER 10 

Martha was propped up on the pillows eating black bread and cheese. 
Macdonald beside her emptied the wine bottle into the glass. 

"Really, don't you want any, Mac?" asked Martha. "I'll make a sandwich for 
you." 

"No sweet, I'm not hungry, just thirsty." 

"You should eat something." 

"Later." 

"You mean," she tore out a mammoth mouthful, "I should leave some bread and 
cheese for you?" 

"No, wee one," he said, "it's all for you. I'll get something in a cafe" 
later." 

"Did we inherit money, Mac?" Martha turned to him and ran her finger over 
his bare chest, he trembled his approval. 

"Do that again, can you manage to eat and do that at the same time?" 

"Wait till I finish my sandwich." 

Macdonald sighed. "You're so clever, such fine coordination, why don't you 
work up a juggling routine." 

"I don't see you drinking wine and sucking my cunt at the same time. Why 
should I be expected to be the clever one?" she wandered off and bent down 
to kiss his thigh. "There's something delicious about you, Macdonald," she 
admitted bewilderedly, "I hate to admit it," she caressed his belly, "but 
your flesh is gorgeous." 

Macdonald patted her shoulder. "Be a slave to lust," he recommended, "every 
woman should be trapped in her sexual appetite." 

"You really think so? You're not just saying it out of greed? You think 
women are more interesting when they're all cunt?" 

"I think women are fascinating when they have nothing but cocks on their wee 
minds." 

"I could be that way, Macdonald," she traced his breast bone down onto the 
end of his swelling rod, "if I didn't have so many other things on my mind." 

"Empty that empty vessel," he advised with laconic authority. "Don't think 
of anything. Remember," he scratched his irritated groin, "all a female has 
to worry about is getting a cock inside of her twenty times a day." 

"That's an awful lot of times, Mac." 

"Then nineteen," he conceded. "The less she has, the more she should worry 
about it. The idea is to stay worried." 

"When I finish my sandwich," she promised, "I'll worry." 

"Here, have some wine." 

"The bottle's empty. You pig, couldn't you save some for me?" 

"Woman is created for sacrifice." 

"They always gave plenty of wine to sacrifices," Martha complained, "that's 
the one joy of being a sacrifice, wine and drugs." 

"You'd rather eat than drink anyway," Macdonald reminded her. 

"Must everything be a choice? Must every preference exclude?" 

"Here, drink," he shoved the half-filled glass at her, "but don't finish 
it." She lifted the glass gracefully to her lips and gurgled it to 
depletion. 

"After Victoria nobody wants to drink," the empty glass rolled on the 
treacherous incline of the cement floor. 

Moodily, Macdonald watched its journey. "This room looks like we shit and 
piss in it, couldn't you occasionally clean?" 

"I'm too busy." 

"I never see you move out of bed." 

"But I'm thinking all the time, lying here and thinking. How can I be more 
seductive, yesterday I had seventeen pricks in me, the day before twelve, 
before that eighteen. Why can't I be a complete female? Why can't I hit 
twenty. Just thinking of it exhausts me, Macdonald," she sat up and stared 
into his face, "I think I'll wash." 

"Don't think about it, just perform. Be capable of a spontaneous act." 

"Nothing as sophisticated as washing could be spontaneous." Martha carried 
tepid potfuls of water to the tin bidet and squatted. 

"Don't use the face cloth," warned Macdonald. 

"Would you rather I used your face," she massaged soap into her tender 
membranes. 

"You're the dirtiest woman I've ever known." 

"I was brought up in a country with plumbing. I can't learn to bathe in 
sections, it's necessary for me to totally submerge." 

"Americans," he grunted, "barbarians." 

"That's why we're winning," said Martha. "While you're all communing with 
your precious dead souls we're making like Eskimos." 

"Is that a private joke?" 

"One you may share," Martha offered magnanimously. "What I mean is ... " 

"Oh Christ, I forgot, your illiterate mother wrote to you," and he leaned 
over the life-giving bed for his battle green trousers. 

"What does she say?" Martha stood up from the bidet and began the fruitless 
search for a towel. 

"Don't use the face towel," Macdonald repeated. 

"Is that what she says," Martha nodded, picking up the towel and patting her 
thighs. "She has eyes in the back of her nose." 

Macdonald reached her in one leap. "I live here too." 

"You and your medical training," snorted his drenched concubine. "These 
vestiges of sanitation. You're like an unfrocked priest who refuses to fuck 
choirboys." 

He wrenched free the towel and returned to the bed. Martha, legs spread, 
surrendered to drying at room temperature. "Read it out loud," she demanded, 
squeezing her pubic hairs. "It is from my mother to me." 

"First we must determine if I can read it at all. She writes like you wash. 
I begin," Macdonald looked up for attention, wiping his nose with the towel, 
Dear Marty, "that explains a lot," enclosed is five dollars, he pulled the 
sheets of paper apart, and taped to one corner of the third sheet of the 
manuscript was a brown green square of money which he detached and laid 
tenderly on the table. It should go a long way in Europe, the letter 
advised, since we read here that Europeans will do anything for American 
dollars. "Even fuck Americans," agreed Macdonald agreeably. I'm sorry I 
can't send more, but in America Americans will do anything for dollars, too, 
and most of them are doing more than your father. "She has a mind like 
Bertrand Russell," he looked up. "Shall I repeat that line?" 

"Just read the letter once," Martha sat at the edge of the bed. "Does she 
say when she can send more?" 

"Next line, I wish I could promise you more, but I'm afraid this is it for a 
long time. Aren't you writing anymore? I should think you could make some 
money that way. I don't expect you to be a great serious genius like Edna 
Ferber and Fannie Hurst, Macdonald's face tinged yellow and the words 
thickened, but at least you could get something in "Ladies Home Journal" or 
Saturday Evening Post." Don't they pay anything for stories? You used to 
write such nice stories. I always said, and I still say, why not a happy 
ending? You know what I mean dear, it's the same thing as it's as easy to 
love a rich man as a poor man. I never could understand why you had to kill 
off all your characters, unless your stories were detective thrillers and 
it's just to deep for me. "Did you explain to her that you couldn't have 
orgasms at that stage of your literary development," demanded Macdonald 
seriously. Martha stared at the wallpaper opposite the bed. 

"Mac, were those blue flowers peonies or bluebells?" 

"I think they were bachelor buttons." 

"Let's get dressed," Martha said suddenly. "Let's get dressed and get the 
hell out of this room." 

"I have two more pages." 

"Read the last line." 

Poor soul, Macdonald read, I guess it all happens for the best. Love Mama. 
"I see where you derived your style," he sympathetically sucked her teats 
and then finding her sex as soft as his staff was bony and burning, sank 
into her. 

"There's a P.S., Martha. Do you want to hear it?" 

"More than anything in the world," admitted Martha, holding a lighted match 
to the corner of the airmail stationery, "but I'm a terrible masochist." 

Speeding down Boulevard St. Germain in a rush not to be late for the early 
quitters, Martha, trotting beside Macdonald, relented. 

"What did she say in the P.S., when was I coming home?" 

"Something like that." 

"I'm never going home," he saw the serpent fear in her eyes. "Rather, I am 
home. I mean, must home be where you were born? Can't someone decide that 
he's home because he finds a place where he feels comfortable?" 

"I do think home is a feeling," Macdonald agreed, "I'm not so sure it's a 
comfortable feeling." 

"What do you mean," she snapped nervously, "don't quote lines at me. You 
know I'm a ignorant American." 

"I just made that up as we were going along," he assured her, "but it's so 
good it's a pity to waste it on you. If we don't get in too late tonight 
I'll start on a book or play about someone who stands still so that home can 
run away from him." 

"Another forty-seven minutes marathon of genius." 

"Why the hell should I write that play," he reconsidered, "I can only 
accomplish two things with it, make people feel better or worse. Let them 
find their own diversions." 

"You can help them to understand what's happening," Martha found God. 

"Dear child, why would anyone bother watching a play if something was 
happening." 

"Well, most great writers write because they must, they have no choice, or 
paint or compose for the same reason." 

"I'm not discussing psychopathic behavior, forgive me but I'm talking about 
myself." 

"Actually, Mac," she complimented, "you do have excellent ideas. You're an 
idea man. You belong on Madison Avenue." 

"And you belong in a home for the incurables," he offered her an equally 
attractive retreat. "What can't I cure?" 

"Sex, mama, home, money, food, success, men, you, all the diseases of your 
beloved homeland." 

"Every homeland has the same story, the same problems. It's just that in 
America we're articulate, we're eager for self-improvement. We've read 
Freud. Between Europe and America there is only a difference of vocabulary." 

"Like the difference between Shakespeare and Faith Baldwin." 

"Yes, that's what I mean. You know, Macdonald, before I met you I'd had some 
pretty dark days." 

"Better to have dark nights and no days at all isn't it?" 

"And sometimes I'd think of going back to America, just for money, you know, 
money and comfort and all those things that don't matter." 

"Only an American," Macdonald intervened, "giving his life for those things 
that don't matter could make that statement. It's the heroic part of your 
nature." 

"And then I'd remember my mother." 

"Enough said. After reading her letters, I'm afraid of going there on the 
one hundred and ninety-one million chances to one that I might meet her." 

"Then I think, Macdonald, if my mother had been normal, even semi-normal, 
how ordinary I'd be. I'm sure it's ignorant mothers that produce 
extraordinary geniuses." 

"Like you?" 

"Apparently you had an intelligent mother." 

"Yes, but her mother was moronic, and I have reached back a generation for 
my dominant genetic characteristics." 

"I read somewhere that all Scotch women were intelligent and the men 
frightening dullards." 

"Scots, my dear," he corrected her, "Scotch is a spirit, not a nationality." 

"You're so sensitive," she admired him. 

They passed St. Julien le Pauvre. "Is today Saturday?" she demanded. 

"I forgot to check with my secretary." 

"If it's Saturday I'd like to go to church tomorrow. Let's come tomorrow and 
hear an orthodox mass. They have glorious services." 

"You go and then tell me all about it," recommended Macdonald. "It would 
make our relationship more dynamic." 

 CHAPTER 11 

Posted on pillars high above the head tops in constant and severe judgment 
leer the two wooden mandarins. They regard not each other, their unfriendly 
shoulders at forty-five degree angles, nor at the pilgrims beneath their 
thrones. The smoke from chainless ends of cigarettes rise to their feet and 
so they preside in a heavenly shifting of clouds over the swarming magenta 
velvet benches. So deeply afflicted are the penitents of the Deux Magots 
with their own guilt that were the overseering deities to relent and forgive 
they would cling to the damnation of cigarettes and talk. In more than one 
tragedy, the punishment has absorbed all of life. 

Into this undescribed circle of Dante's hell, or anybody's circle or 
anybody's hell drifted two. Their eyes wandered from table to table gliding 
flatly over the unfamiliar dead bodies lying cold on the left bank of the 
Seine. They looked into all the faces with the terrified persistency of 
parents requested to identify and claim their young. The disaster had been 
enormous, all the chips had gone down. In panic their eyes would flicker 
recognition into locked eyes, recognition but not intimacy, and with the 
reluctant hope that their own were not amongst the victims, they continued 
the dreadful search. 

These two who entered were creatures of another time. Two of the many who 
had not packed their doctrines in time when the existentialists had been 
ordered out of Paris. As women will fling themselves into philosophies 
without reservation, saving reservation for their men in the calamity of 
their men not being their philosophies, so the girl appeared the more 
indoctrinated of the two. She was clothed in her beliefs and her face had 
not happened until granted full membership. Viewed from the floor, the 
practiced perspective of the cafe, she revealed in orthodox restraint no 
inch of her flesh. Between flat black Italian slippers and tight black 
cuffless corduroy slacks was a bridge of black stocking. The stocking moved 
up under the tight pants that moved up beneath the curtain of a wide black 
coat into a black high necked long sleeved sweater. Her shoulders were bent 
in vague imitation of the man, squared and stooped as if she were 
apologizing for having been born the Prince of Wales. Above the black habit 
glared her violently white face, white and expressionless as a white and 
expressionless stone. Not the ovens of summer or the abrasive currents of 
winter could stimulate color onto her bleached cheeks, so inviolate to the 
elements was her water-repellent mask of white powder. She could have dived 
into the wave-less depths of the Mediterranean and struggled to the surface, 
her epidermis an unchanged white. Everything the cosmetic manufacturers 
promised, it was, and the simple addition of prickly heat powder to the 
mixture, rendered the powder an even whiter white than educated biologists 
and chemists had achieved. Often, out of desperation, the layman will exceed 
and add to the knowledge of the scientist. Only Macdonald suspected her 
black secret, that beneath the white powder there lay vanquished the rosy 
unscrubbed American cheek. 

Martha's talents did not stop with her whiter than white on white canvas, 
for on the colorless cloth she outlined black and enormous eyes that 
transformed the abstraction of glacial prelife into a surreal portrait, 
vital as a statue, grave as an insect. Her face stood away from an 
electrical red frame, a work of dedication and love, a combination of 
concepts preserved from antiquity that could only have been assembled in the 
twentieth century. 

Macdonald's face, being less ancient was less restricted to the modern and 
its surface bore the markings and creases of many centuries. 

His was not the actor's stock expression of hero or victim, but the 
confusion of one who had been cast as both, played both and been found 
ill-suited for both. Where Martha's face was smooth, Macdonald's was 
corrugated, where she was a monochrome, he was a kaleidoscope, where she was 
ancient he was old. Where her garments were as inflexible black, his 
resembled an unscraped pallette. 

"That' girl," Martha asided to him, laboring not to move her mouth or nod 
her head in that direction, "she's looking at us and writing in a notebook." 

"Don't smile," Macdonald warned, "she might have a camera." 

"Shut up," Martha snapped, and then quietly, "she might have a tape 
recorder. There's Fioren-zaio," she cheered quickly, "he's sitting at a 
table alone with fourteen other Gurgeffians. I think he's trying to 
telepathize a greeting to us. And there's Gregoriansky, he's sitting with 
someone who looks like the Finnish ambassador's daughter, anyway she's got 
clean hair, all shiny and yella, I think he's reading from one of his 
notebooks, yes, yes, I can tell from how his mouth is moving. Now Macdonald, 
don't you think that is a very strange neurosis for a white Russian to have, 
even if his mother and father were deposed Princesses, to write down 
everything that he says to everybody, and nothing that anyone says to him? 
And then to insist on reading his words to everyone? And since the only time 
he speaks is when he reads what's written down, he keeps writing down and 
reading the same things." 

"Very strange," agreed Macdonald. 

"There's that English cunt who says you have eyes like Aly Khan. God, she 
has ugly straight white teeth." 

"I found her a sweet child." 

"Child! Maybe you're referring to her youngest aged daughter. I mean that 
old haggard smiling British Commonwealth cunt sitting at that table alone 
waiting for someone of her class or an exotic, like a man for instance, to 
fuck her, that's who I mean. There's Conrad, he's waving at us, don't wave 
back. Who is sitting with him?" her voice elevated wildly. "It's so 
unattractive. It's got a head exactly as wide as its neck, which is narrow 
even for a turtle. I mean really, Conrad is so public domain, oh god more 
waving, say something Macdonald, pretend to be talking, I'll pretend to be 
listening." 

"If you will help me," his words trembled in her ear, "just a few moments 
longer," his heavy hand landed on her shoulder, "and guide me to a quiet 
table on the terrace of the Cafe" Flore, I would be so grateful, my child. 
Though I am old and blind, and appear to your young and clear and blessedly 
healthy eyes to be a pauper, in truth I am the richest prince of Saudi Arabi 
who plucked out his eyes, but not his fortune, when I viewed the West for 
the first time after a sheltered life spent on an oasis, wherein my father 
had built artificially cooled skiing slopes and ponds of frozen champagne so 
authentic that it was there that Eisenstein chose to film the finale of 
Alexander Nevsky, reshooting in his scandalous perfectionism the drowning 
sequence so often that our entire slave population was drowned in ecstasy 
and genius, and all alone I was forced to Europe in search of seventy-eight 
new concubines in order to replenish our tribe. No sooner had I landed in 
Paris when the Formosans as a test of their strength and as a propaganda 
stunt for Life magazine, later commented on in Time magazine under the 
curious heading of Personalities, invaded my oasis with fire throwers and 
melted my cherished father's slope, thereby washing away the last landmark 
of my ancient civilization. Indeed, where my empire stood, high, white and 
cold, now lies the desert, low white and hot. Even with a map, 
anthropologists have been unable to relocate it, and so I am without people 
or land. Fortunately, my money, invested in Swiss banks ... " 

"I'm going to sit with Conrad," Martha scratched at his claw grip. 

"Come back," cried Macdonald, "come back my angel, my sight, my heaven, I am 
old and blind and you young and blessed with twenty-twenty vision, let me 
drape you with rich furs that I may feel them, let me put diamonds big as 
cow bells around your ankles that I may hear them, let me douse you with 
rare perfumes ... " 

"Let go of me, Macdonald, you're dangerous when you get like this. If you 
don't take your filthy bones off my shoulder, I'll scream." 

"Just your voice ... " 

"Stop it now. Anyway that girl left, it's all down on tape, you can stop 
now." 

"Do you think he believed any of it?" 

"All of it, especially about me being young and blessed." 

"Well quick, get her empty table. Harvest the comforts I laboriously plant 
for us." 

"You're sure you don't want to sit with Conrad?" 

"The reward of long union is familiarity. I am sure, as you are so sure, 
that I don't want to sit with Conrad." 

"I'm a little tired of just hearing your voice." 

"How strange, conversely I've only just noticed yours." 

"I think we should make an effort to be more that would not touch the floor. 
It is dire to let a witch touch the floor." 

"What makes you so sure I'm a witch?" Martha challenged The Challenger. 
"Just because this lunatic-" 

"Are you a lunatic?" Adolf's eyes filled with tears of profoundest 
compassion. "Blighted witness, has she so enchanted you that the heavenly 
location of the moon cheats you of your sense?" 

"Is this basket big enough?" 

"Not for our purposes." Adolf smote his brow in what appeared to be a 
nervous habit that sent him to the floor. "I have neglected The Tortures and 
The Devices and Signs by which the Judge can Recognize a Witch." 

"Fool," accused Macdonald. 

"Help me," Adolf humbled himself, and with ecclesiastic strength pushed 
Martha into the wooden chair that with the disintegrated bed filled their 
household. "If you'll take the other end of the chair," which Macdonald did, 
"thus we will begin questioning. Forgive me for having endangered both of us 
by leaving her unbaptized limbs free. Now if you can help me to lift this 
vile burthen to the mattress, we will strip the victim and proceed with the 
test of needles. Hurry," he strained with Macdonald, "Lest she confess 
before we commence tortures. In spite of your screams and blasphemies, vile 
harlot, I know this will not hurt, unless the devil makes you sensible to 
pain in one of his vile jokes, whereby he terrifies unrepentant witches into 
greater unrepentance." 

Martha closed her eyes in a pose of absolute self-possession. When they 
opened, she smiled a soft woman's smile of greeting, devoid of sarcasm or 
humor, a simple smile of recognition, and Macdonald paused in his 
jubilation. "They always get like this," the Inquisitor sagely discharged, 
"as soon as you get them in chains with no part of their body touching the 
floor." 

"Do they?" 

"Disrobe her," enjoined the Prosecuting Inquisitor, "we will needle plunge 
for the devil's mark. Where she feels no pain are his revolting exits and 
entrances, whereby he possesses her soul." 

Macdonald approached the relaxed figure. "I think she's dead." 

"No, good man," laughed Adolf, "I know what a horrific sight to a simple and 
honest Christian is a Canonical purgation. Her taciturnity is a measure of 
her heresy, and one that the red-hot irons, we implore Almighty God for her 
Eternal Salvation, may purge." 

Adolf stood before her and made the sign of the cross. Fixed in a perpetual 
silence, Martha followed the two paths of his hand and laughed. 

"Truly a vile sorceress," shuddered Adolf. "They laugh hideously four times, 
at birth, at marriage with Satan, at the sign of the cross and at their 
glorious and deserved death on the burning stake." 

"Do they?" Macdonald moved closer to Martha. "You have a great sense of 
humor, Martha," he touched her hair and found it soft and burning hot 
beneath his palm. 

"Don't touch her," Adolf thrust him aside, "she will bewitch you into the 
most unnatural state. And look not directly in her eyes, lest she contort 
your features and curse all your progeny." 

He said: "Why don't you go home, Adolph, your mother's all nerves." 

"My mother was a foul witch," Adolf set the laden chair down on the 
mattress, "who I did ass in the town of Briesack in the diocese of Basil." 
He twisted rapidly to confront the motionless chained figure. He placed his 
hand flat on the head of the accused and recited, his eye sockets a glaring, 
rolling white: "I conjure you by the bitter tears shed for the salvation of 
the world, and by the burning tears poured in the evening hour and by all 
the tears which have been shed here in this world by the Saints and the 
Elect, that, IF YOU BE INNOCENT YOU DO NOW SHED TEARS." The room filled and 
flickered with her profound quiet "She cries not," Adolf gloated, pressing 
his thumbs against her dry cheeks, "she knows not the grace of tears." 

"That's her most bearable quality," Macdonald agreed. 

Adolf turned away from the fearless Madonna and walked to the opposite side 
of the dark chamber, then staggered backwards, struggling with his flowing 
beard and skirts, until his back confronted her, pivoting on his heels and 
ripping her shirt away. 

"Leave her alone," Macdonald shouted, "don't abuse her." 

"You have touched her unprotected," Adolph accused, "and she has seduced you 
from torturer to slave. Stand away from me slave, I will proceed alone. You 
shall be cast into the flames with her if exorcism purifies not your 
addiction." 

"The needle will reveal to us what we already perceive and prejudge, damned, 
obstinate, stubborn impenitent." 

"Give me that," Macdonald wrestled with the judge, "can't you see she's in a 
coma," he rattled his words to disturb her pitiless silence, "you've drugged 
her, or something, you've planned this whole business with her." 

"Here," lunged Adolf, "our first visitation." The needle swifter than 
Macdonald's anger sank into Martha's breast, deep enough to touch her heart. 

"Madman," screamed Macdonald, and flung Adolf aside. Martha sat in 
triumphant unperturbed calm. 

"Lustful seduced fool, wicked in your foolishness, you see that she feels 
not and cries not and bleeds not. She is completely possessed of the devil. 
She is the bride of the Prince of Death, the wife of the Prince of Liars, 
the concubine of the Serpent, the Adversary, the harlot of the devil of 
fornication, Asmodeus, filled with the swollen pride of Leviathan and the 
avarice of Mammon." 

"Get the fuck out of here." Macdonald searched for the wound that the pin 
had punctured her flesh, caressing the white firm breasts. 

Adolf limped to his feet, "I will shave her hair and her spell over you will 
be broken." 

"Martha," Macdonald grabbed her shoulders with chaotic urgency, "Martha 
please, he was your idea. I didn't invent him." But his words were intense 
as tinsel in the volcanic grandeur of her silence. Then she opened wide her 
lips, but the sounds could not come. She contorted in the chains, and 
Macdonald swiftly unhooked them. Again she tried to speak. 

"The devil of wind, the Prince of Gales blows in her body," cried Adolf with 
fear, "for when he sees a Vicar of the Most High and Holy Apostolic Church 
flung to the ground, he grows powerful and willful." 

Macdonald chafed Martha's hand between his palms. "Soon as he gets up, old 
girl, we'll send him away with his mechanical circus." 

"I speak from Toledo," a voice masculine, resonant and furiously amused sent 
Macdonald twisting to his knees. "I speak," the voice broke through Martha, 
"from Toledo. Toledo is the first word." 

"What is she saying?" 

"It is not she who speaks, lunatic," Adolf shuddered, "Toledo is the capital 
of the devil's most horrible empire, and the seat of their most vilified 
University." 

"I speak through my detested agent," the voice brought with it an echo of 
tumbling streams and the faint cadence of a lost piped tune, "who has always 
been my agent. 

"Women are my agents, all women have received from me the three sacraments 
of Baptism, Priesthood and Marriage. My poor emissaries," the sounds 
collected slowly and awkwardly within her mouth, "they have forgotten their 
contract, and know not why they are feared or unconquerable. 

"My gifts of prophesy, healing, sacrifice, fertility, fidelity, fleshly 
beauty, lust, strangle them. They suffer for me and know not why they 
suffer." The voice became old, aged with compassion and Martha's tearless 
eyes glinted. "From Toledo I watch them waste and decay, pulling down with 
them the empires of men. They cannot break their contracts with me," he 
roared out with young delight, "for all their piety, their patience, their 
purity, their purgings, their profanity, their protests, their penances, 
their priests and their pretense. They are mine," Martha's hands caressed an 
invisible head, "and the more you abuse them, the more they are mine. 
Despise them and they forget their secrets. Worship them, and they worship 
me," she transmitted jealousy. "Keep them chaste, and they are ovens of 
lust; or as whores, and I freeze their hearts. 

"Marry them, and choke on the ashes of their divine fire. Oh so, so divine," 
the vulgar disembodied voice pursued them "Mother to you and wife to me. 
Lucky devil, he never had a mother. And let me tell you," he forced them 
into chilling intimacy, "that in a confusion and fury of unappeased appetite 
the women eat their children and hunger for me. What can I do?" demanded the 
antagonist, in a exaggeration of sympathy, "if there's only one me?" 

"I say the woods are full of you," burst from Macdonald. 

"Oh no," came with fading regret, "the woods are nearly empty." 

"How lonely for you," the rage, the impotent rage sucked Macdonald down a 
cone of insanity. 

"It's lonelier for the women," the syllables formed in the drafty corners of 
the room. "Bad season, bad contract. I signed up the ladies but the men 
won't play. Be careful my boys, be careful, the game will go on without you 
... " 

"Burn her," screamed Adolf, "burn all of them." 

"Macdonald," Martha exhaled the woman's voice, stretched exhausted on the 
collapsed mattress. "Could I have a cigarette?" 

"Sure," he groveled in his torn pocket, "Let me light it for you. Here." His 
shaking hand extinguished the unused flame. He tried another match. Martha 
held his wrist to steady the flickering fire. 

"God it tastes funny, so cool, like a mentholated cigarette. Don't you have 
a Gauloise?" 

"Don't serve her lusts," Adolf struggled between them. "She is a 
self-confessed romancer." 

Adolf extracted two ordinary pipes from the debris that had preceded him to 
the floor. "There are facilities for a wood conflagration?" 

"Have you got a real cigarette, Macdonald?" Martha drawled. 

"Would you like a cigar," he blasted, spiraling between their demands. 

"Why? Have you had a baby?" 

"Yes," he said, "and it's colic, it won't stop laughing." 

"Is that him over there," Martha turned lazy eyes on Adolf, "why don't you 
go away, Adolf? You'll miss the matinee of the Ten Commandments." 

"Jewish folklore," said Adolf with contempt. 

"That's right," Macdonald rose enthusiastically, "she can't be a heretic, 
she's a Jew." 

"Who?" demanded Adolf, shrinking behind the density of his beard, "who dares 
pronounce Jew to me?" 

"I'm a Jew," Martha groaned, "my real name is Martha Sheck, the immigration 
officer ran out of ink and shortened it to Heck." 

"Then the trial, the admissions, the witnesses, the tortures, all for 
nothing," Adolf roared, "for doesn't the last Canon Law concerning Jews say: 
His goods are to be confiscated and he is to be condemned to death, because 
with perverse doctrine he opposed the Faith." 

"I'm sure that refers only to converts who convert," Macdonald mediated. 

"This is not a valid objection," thundered Adolf Moses Hexenhammer, "be they 
apostates or abjurers of the faith, the essential principle is they are 
witches ... " 

"The other twelve were Jews too," baited Macdonald, "twelve succulent 
Semetic succubi." 

"Where are they," Adolf whirled in his flounces, "I want them all. All to 
burn as my mother burned, all to confess as she confessed, to confiscate all 
their possessions as hers were confiscated." He smiled. It was worse than 
either of them had anticipated, and they feebly intertwined. His delight was 
a precise sheltering of stunted teeth, the lips pursing together, creating 
an undisturbed garment of the beard that grew from his toes up and until his 
nostrils. "If the witch could turn ecclesiastic evidence, she might be 
granted a year in case. We might leave her in this foul dungeon," he scanned 
the room with buyer's eyes. "There are ear chewing famished rats, I 
presume?" 

"I'm here," offered Macdonald. 

"Who are the other twelve, Martha Shock." 

"Never," she swore. 

"The notary will record," glared Adolf. "One Never." 

"Never," Martha repeated. 

"Sisters," comprehended Adolf, "a family of witches." 

"Never," pursued Martha. 

"And the foul mother, of course." 

"That never was the father, I think." 

"Ten thousand women witches for every man," recited Adolf, "but with Jews we 
find equal dedication to the filthy practices." 

"A family that burns together, yearns together," said Miss Sheck. 

"Do you really find that?" Macdonald pursued. 

"I go to hunt the Nevers, sisters, daughters and obscene parents. You will 
guard the prisoner until my return, Goodman Macdonald?" 

"She won't leave this room." 

"You will feed her on bread and water, taking care not to eat her fetid 
feces." 

"I'll try." 

"Preventing her from forming lead idols in your urine." 

"If I can." 

"Permitting her to bury no objects, such as single threads from the shrouds 
of recently deceased nuns," 

"With all my might." 

"Avoid her turds," intoned Adolf, "they are assuredly lethal." 

"When will you be back, Adolf?" Martha remembered her manners. 

"That depends on the Nevers." 

"You'll give them my regards." 

"What witch," he roared, "dares hire me as messenger. Suck on your devil's 
mark, and they will feel their blood flow. Whisper to your familiar, and 
will not their familiar whisper to them. Warn them," he said ominously, 
"warn them that Adolf approaches." 

"Don't you want to surprise them?" 

"When," said Adolf, gathering his tools as Macdonald showed him to the door, 
"have I ever surprised a witch. When," he sobbed, "where, how?" 

They heard the over-laden Inquisitor charging and vibrating down the stairs, 
"He's gone," Macdonald sighed down on the mattress and took a puff from her 
neglected cigarette. "That wasn't so amusing." 

"Oh he's not so bad," Martha decided she wanted the cigarette back, 
immediately, "he has a few eccentricities, but he means well." 

"He doesn't mean anything." 

"So nothing means anything." 

"You read that on a ruined Mimoan temple." 

"We were fucking," Martha reminded her lover. 

"Let's sleep, Martha," Macdonald studied her impassive pale face, "if you 
don't mind I'd like to sleep." 

"I don't mind anything." 

"Let's have the conversation again, substituting mind for means." 

"Will it work," she rubbed her silky teat. "Does it hurt." 

"Of course not. Is pain the only sensation?" 

"I don't know," he admitted, "it's the one I remember best." 

"What are you so solemn about. Has the franc dropped again?" 

"Martha you said some very strange things." 

"What did you expect, you two madmen chaining me to a chair and shrieking 
accusations, grace and tranquility?" 

"In a very strange voice." 

"Look, good man Macdonald, forget it." 

"How did you know about Toledo?" 

"My brother was an avid baseball fan." 

"What are you talking about?" 

"Don't ask me, I'm just answering questions. Who is Toledo?" 

"You brought Toledo into this, not me," Macdonald insisted. "And you said a 
lot of shit about women healing and fertility and fleshly beauty, and other 
maternal absurdium about women and mothers. I loathe theories about women," 
he sat upright on the mattress. "I hate all this phony mystery about cunts." 

"Is there an invisible idiot in this room disagreeing with you?" Martha 
offered him her back. 

"The only thing mysterious about women is how they occupy themselves." 

"Theatres, darling, cocktail parties, polo, flower shows, charge accounts, 
I've explained it all to you." 

"If they'd go to work like men," Macdonald pressed absently against her 
separated buttocks, "if they'd put on derbies and school ties and push into 
the metro at nine in the morning and try to fuck their secretaries, there 
wouldn't be any of this I hear strange voices crap." 

"Macdonald, if you're going to put it in, put it in, I'm getting all nervous 
and girlish." 

"Even mines," he shoved his angry cock into the pink and black dilation. "If 
they'd work as miners or truck drivers or short order cooks. If they'd just 
stop fucking around with lipstick brushes and babies." 

"Please my cunt, I come in my cunt," she reminded him. 

He reached for her sex obediently, rubbing it thoughtfully. 

"Tomorrow," she promised ecstatically, pulling at her erect nipples, "we'll 
buy me a new tie pin and suspenders, faster Macdonald, the fingers faster. 
Oh go deep," she shuddered, "go deep." 

 CHAPTER l2 

"Macdonald." She repeated her call for the tenth time, in her hospital, 
quiet please voice. "Macdonald." The body beside her was too motionless to 
be asleep. The breathing regular, but at that he was practiced. He did not 
credit her description of him asleep, twisting and farting in an agony of 
self-doubt that afflicted him only in unconscious states. Lying now in a 
pantomime of quiet repose, she knew that he was entirely awake, clinging to 
immobility with the belligerence of an hysterical child. "Macdonald, 
Macdonald, answer me." 

"I am answering you," the words roared out of his invaded tomb. "The upper 
classes answer with silence." 

"Macdonald, please." 

"Who is this Macdonald you keep blabbering about." 

"Macdonald ... " 

"Stop making that awful sound," he shouted, "that meaningless gurgle first 
thing out of your mouth every morning," 

"But Macdonald." 

"I'm not Macdonald yet Macdonald doesn't exist yet Unfortunately he's 
getting born now. He's suffering his way into the world, but don't push too 
hard mama, you may give birth to a monster." 

"Macdonald, I must talk to you." 

"Must I be here for that diversion. Must I, I, I, I, always happen when you 
make that sound, when anyone makes that sound Macdonald. Must you plug me 
into your switchboard before I even decide if I want to be Macdonald today." 

"Stop it" she cauterized her wound, "stop playing with me. I'll call you 
anything you want." 

"I'd get to hate another designation just as much," he sat up in the bed and 
lit a Gauloise. "I guess the whole idea is not to be called." 

"When did you decide this?" 

"I decide it every morning, but I forget it the way one always forgets 
pleasant dreams." 

"Would you like me not to be here in the morning?" she asked quietly. 

"You decide that," the smoke curled from the nose and mouth of his rigid 
head like escaping incense, "once I know for sure that I'm here, everything 
else becomes a detail." 

The tears came easily. "That's the crudest thing you've ever said to me." 

"Call me a detail," he suggested, "get even." 

"I don't want you to be a detail," she sobbed. 

"The white man's burden." 

"What?" 

"I said I know. In the end well both be fighting for the privilege." 

"What privilege?" 

"Of being details." 

"You've gone insane this morning." 

"Unfortunately I haven't gone anywhere, I'm still here. Still in the same 
old Macdonald. And there's Macdonald's pants on the floor, and his girl in 
the bed. And I wouldn't be surprised if Macdonald's Paris isn't outside 
Macdonald's window." 

"That's what I must talk about," Martha pulled her knees against her chest 
and the bed groaned its ready disapproval. 

"Macdonald's window?" 

"Paris." 

"Ahh, Macdonald's Paris. He apologizes." 

"We must leave Paris." 

"Shall I send for the car now." 

"There's nothing for us in Paris, let's leave," she persisted. 

"Don't you like all the pretty bridges and buildings?" 

"I can't spend my life standing here and admiring them, bridges, I'll build 
my own." 

"Oh let's stay," he fought with the blankets until they shrouded him to the 
chin, and covered her head, "you know how I hate this business of packing 
and calling agencies and making hotel reservations and changing francs into 
dollars and dollars into drachma and pesetas into yen and yen into lire and 
all that." 

"I'm getting out," she announced calmly. 

"Call for me when you've got the servants trained." 

"We can starve in Greece, can't we," her voice pursued him, "or somewhere 
where the sun happens. Did we have to pick the most miserable climate in the 
world to die in." 

"Well we didn't know, they lied to us. None of us knew what Paris was really 
like before we got here, or the place would be filled with nothing but 
French laughing at each other's accents." 

"I hate the French." 

"Of course you do. That's why you've never spoken to one in the three years 
you've been here." 

"There aren't any interesting people in Paris, I expected it to be swarming 
with important arguments and revolutions and vicious women and literary 
experiments and wild painters at wild parties, and instead it's this, this 
hideous stuffed room with filthy yellow wallpaper and that miserable Deux 
Magots crowd who want to break into French television or Italian movies or 
English publishing or Irish theatre or Greek dances, it's like living in a 
railroad depot. Why did we come here, Macdonald?" 

"Don't decide it's Paris," he said, "eventually you have to ask that 
question anywhere unless you stay where you were born and how you were born, 
in which case you're entitled to a life of important silence." 

"It is Paris and the French with their disgusting arrogance. They never 
learn another language, they never move to another country. And what's so 
hot about French. It's less masculine than Russian, less difficult than 
Chinese, less refined than Spanish, less euphonious than Italian, less 
concentrated than Greek ... " 

"Yankee go home." 

"Is that the answer?" 

"You must know by now," Macdonald was strangely more depressed than she, 
"that answers aren't my specialty, but they hate us for trying to crowd into 
their world. No, hate is too strong, they're just contemptuous." 

"It's not that I'm trying to live in their world," Martha pounced. 

"I know," Macdonald interrupted her, "it's just that you're trying to live 
out of yours, that's why they're contemptuous. They know we're all weak, 
allergic to mother's formula. Maybe they're right to despise us for 
abandoning the impossible." 

"Maybe they're wrong," Martha shouted, "what's so glorious about accepting a 
puny little destiny." 

"It has more dignity," Macdonald said strangely, "it has fidelity and 
tradition. It's correct, that's all." 

"I despise you for saying that," Martha wept, "you sound like an old beat 
ex-revolutionary. You make my liver crawl with defeat. You tired old 
failure. You've been here seven years, Macdonald, and what's happened to 
you?" 

"Are you after my bank balance, love," he reached calmly with trembling 
hands for the mirror at the side of the bed and with his disbelieved 
reflection. "Would that be a happening? Or are your values more elevated? Do 
you incline to names in illuminated neon and winners of Nobel prizes?" 

"I don't mean fame or money, those are accidents." 

"Are they?" 

"Well you can't expect them, you can't plan for them." 

"How charming of you to be exactly wrong," Macdonald patted her neighboring 
thigh, "fame and fortune are the rewards for the planners, the workers, the 
true believers." 

"If I thought that ... " 

"You'd start making plans immediately, you healthy young American. Your 
discoveries are my disappointments." 

"Macdonald, what are you after?" 

"Must you ask me all the questions you shouldn't be asking yourself." 

"All right, what do I want, what do we want." 

"Which shall I answer? For you, me or us? Trick me." 

"For you." 

"I don't want anything except another six hours of sleep." 

"Then you want nothing," she understood in dismayed innocence. 

"I'm not that dynamic. It's not that I want nothing. It's just that I don't 
want something. I haven't been handed the right application blank to fill 
in." 

"Have you?" 

"Well haven't I," she cried, "or have I been fucking my shadow?" 

"If you leave me," he advised, "you can note in your journal that you were 
with me for three years. But as long as you stay, as long as nothing 
changes, it's a bit eccentric to put heavy crosses on an invisible calendar. 
Go to sleep Martha dear. I'm tired." 

She was silent for the first time, then: "I'm leaving you." 

"Wise girl. I'm glad I'm here to help you out." 

"How have you ever helped me!" 

"Imagine if you had to leave yourself." 

"You're a dead man, Macdonald." 

"That's the secret of my great vivacity." 

"Please," the appeal was more for him than for herself, "don't you want me 
at all, Macdonald?" She searched his impassive lined face. 

"Immediately. My cock is throbbing with this enchanting dialogue." 

"Pig," she dynamited his congealed icy composure, "animal, monster. So proud 
of your appetites. So in love with your miserable needs." 

"I relish my appetites," Macdonald ignored her blazing eyes and concentrated 
on the pale quietude of her buttocks. "I love my appetites." His fingers 
violated her tight anus. "I like slobbering all over the earth and sucking 
on the great dried teats." 

"But why?" 

"I'm a masochist. I'm out to lose battles. I like losing control. I like it 
so much it makes me come. Turn over," he ordered. "Let me demonstrate." 

"I won't turn over. I won't be your accomplice. I won't fuck a dead man." 

Macdonald removed his fingers and lit a cigarette. "You're filled with 
prejudices and rules about deportment. New rule for the day. Never let a 
dead man fuck you in the ass. What is it about making rules and breaking 
rules that excites all you eager fivers so much? I think it's better to be 
one of the dead. So elect." 

"So boring," she groaned into the pillow. "So boring, so boring, so boring. 
All I do is lie in this filthy bed and smoke and talk and sleep and put that 
thing that manages to get hard into my anatomical depressions." 

"Wow," applauded Macdonald, "boredom really excites you and makes you so 
poetic." 

"I hate it," she raged. "I loathe myself and you and Paris and everything 
that's stinking of decomposition." She pulled herself frantically out of the 
bed. "I'm going to buy a clock, Macdonald, an alarm clock, and set it for 
eight o'clock and find out what the world's doing in the morning and push 
into crowded cafeterias at one o'clock and read newspapers and see the 
latest films and hate the bad guys and like the good guys and live with life 
and die when I'm dead. I'm going to drink one cup of coffee in the morning 
and one cup of wine at night. I'm going to sleep when it's dark and wake 
when that bell calls me and I'm going to sleep alone, all alone, until I 
find a man who knows when I'm in the bed with him and wants me there and 
keeps me there." 

"And you'll sleep for exactly eight hours and fuck for exactly twenty-two 
minutes every Saturday night. And be pregnant exactly eighteen months, and 
have exactly two children an exact boy and an equally exact girl and live 
exactly as long as you breathe and die exactly once," Macdonald roared, 
"being exactly exact all the time so that exactly nothing happens except 
exactly." 

"And what's so marvelous about how you're living?" Martha fled to the 
wasteland of competition. 

"Don't judge me, Madame Timekeeper, that's all," Macdonald lowered his 
bellow, "as you go rushing off to your well ordered, supremely scheduled, no 
opportunity for error life, because, you'll find out it's just as boring as 
the grand careless life of excess that's boring you now. In fact, my love, 
it's exactly the same thing spelled backwards which may improve your bowel 
movements and get you on television panels but it's just as rigid, just as 
stupid, just as empty, so get that noble, irritating, dedicated, righteous, 
idiotic expression off your face." 

"Macdonald, stop it. Help me. What can I do?" the words exposed themselves 
in virginal disorder. 

"Wait while I dig up my tabernacle," he directed, "which has seventy-two 
engraved commantiments that solve everything." 

Martha lay stiffly in the bed and located herself in the absorbing cracks in 
the ceiling. 

"Come on," Macdonald said, "Let's get a coffee." 

"No." 

"Infusion?" 

"No, thank you." 

"You feel like fucking?" 

"Go away. I'm thinking." 

"Can't you think and fuck at the same time?" 

"No." 

"Then stop thinking." 

He swung viciously behind her passive hips and pressed his prick against the 
firm dome. He was as stiff and firm as a bowl of strawberries and cream. 

"My hero," she said contemptuously. "My ravenous beast of a hero." 

"You're irresistible," he returned the love chant. "Help me out of my grave, 
make it hard." 

"I won't touch it." 

"Then suck it, use your mouth intelligently." 

"Suck yourself." 

"I'm not that self-sufficient." 

"I must think," she repeated in a dazed voice. "Excite me, what is your tiny 
mind for anyway?" 

"Not to serve your make-believe lusts." 

"Idiot!" 

"It's not that I'm against making love, Macdonald. It's just that there's no 
balance to anything. No proportion. Making love could be a part of our life 
together." 

"And you're going to diagram which part in your miniscule brain?" 

"If we were doing something," she pulled his trousers out of his grasp and 
clung to them, "anything, Macdonald, pushing buttons or washing walls, 
anything, instead of being great fornicating toads." 

He turned her head to the wall and said: "Ignore me," taking his penis and 
pressing the tip against her warm sex. 

"Could I have a cigarette?" her voice cams muffled from behind her shoulder. 

"Did you come already." 

"No." 

"You can't have a cigarette until you do." 

"I won't come." 

"Why not. Have you forgotten the only thing I ever taught you." 

"I discovered that you're not my type." 

"In that case I'll poison myself with some cafi cu lait." 

"I'll be packed by the time you get back," she turned away from him. "I'm 
leaving you and your appetites," she grimaced. "What a comedy. My shoe has 
more appetites than you." 

"Bon voyage little one." 

"Just like that you'd let me go, like that, just like that." 

"Let me for once be noble," he pulled on his trousers. "And impressed by 
your ability to make a decision." 

"You don't care," she flushed, "if I'm here or not here, if you're here or 
not here, if you love or don't love, eat or don't eat, sleep or don't sleep. 
You don't care." 

"I know," Macdonald whispered, "but don't tell the gang or they'll elect me 
Grand Prophet." 

"I care, Macdonald." 

"I had a faint suspicion." 

"Darling," she grabbed his sweater from the floor and pressed it between her 
hands, "maybe you do care. Maybe you have gargantuan colossal desires that 
are consuming you and potentially you're an enormous talent ... " 

"The only thing," he pushed her description away with the disdain of an 
undertipped waiter, "Less potential than a potential is a potential." 

"You want me to go, Macdonald. You're forcing me, leaving me no alternative. 
You despise me." 

"Run," he said, "run for your life." 

"All right. Yes," she handed him his sweater. "I'm leaving you, I'm leaving 
Paris. I'm leaving France." 

"Now don't start dragging that sturdy little personality all over the world, 
just take it home," Macdonald fought the tangled wool, "and let them see how 
big and strong it's grown." 

"You want me off the continent if you can't have me. Stop sending me home," 
she screamed in the first outburst of real hysteria. "What's home? Where's 
home?" 

"Home is where they mass produced all the unbecoming labels. That's why 
you've come here darling, to get a Paris fitting. The alteration is 
finished, now go home and show it off." 

"You mean I'm finished." 

"I promise you're not," he took her hand and studied the black nail 
crescents, "I promise you're just beginning, you're just coming through. 
That's what the restlessness is, and the boredom. Stay with it." He was very 
gentle with her and solemn. 

"Please stop sending me home," Martha twisted away from his steady gaze. 
"You don't know what's waiting there for me." 

"Your strength is there, Martha. Let me explain in another way," he rapped 
against her inattention. "I know home is a dirty word. I know home is where 
everybody knows everybody else except himself. I know the heavy labels 
called crosses that they hang on you, and how you come here and spit at all 
the wrong people just to learn how to spit. But your pipelines are sunk back 
over there, and they got twisted back over there, and you came here and got 
them untangled and a little bit of the essence is flowing through now, 
making you mad. Be mad, get madder, but go home and be mad. Get closer to 
the well and the energy will come gushing through you and give your dynamo 
power to balance those heavy crosses on the tip of one finger and go dancing 
up the hill." 

"Or on the end of my nose, entertain the onlookers. 

"Anyway, there are no hills in New York, except in the Bronx." 

"I'm glad I'm not a people's poet," Macdonald almost reached the door. 

"And I want to get into the sun." She compromised slowly. "First a few 
months in the sun, then I'll think about what you've said. If I don't decide 
to stay in the sun forever and live on ripe fruits and olive oil and home 
woven cloth and be a magnificent technicolor animal." 

"You'll be detouring, you're not being contemporary," he stood at the door, 
"if you're determined to be part of this world, and to look at it is to be 
part of it like Cinerama, you've got to go to the biggest, grayest, grimiest 
city, peopled with machines. The twentieth century was born in cities." 

"Come with me, Macdonald." 

"To the twentieth century?" 

"To the sun. Come, please come, Macdonald. It will be marvelous. We'll find 
a stone cottage in Malaga, you know you can get them for nothing, and we'll 
eat what the peasants eat, and they'll love us and carry barrels of wine and 
baskets of grapes and leave them at our door." 

"In payment for which we'll fuck with their eldest male infant." 

"Why not? And we'll have long walks and long swims, and long siestas and 
short conversations." 

"It sounds good," he laughed, "when the waltz is over, can I have the next 
dance?" 

"Of course we'll dance peasant dances and sing peasant songs. They can't 
trap us in Paris, Macdonald. We'll get so beautiful in the sun that people 
will worship us and we won't turn the pilgrims away, we'll build stone 
cottages twisting and turreting down to the sea and all our followers can 
live in them, and maybe I'll write a book about how we did it, how we 
rescued ourselves, and while I'm writing you'll keep building these villas 
down to the sea, sprawling down to the sea with cracked decadent walls and 
strange misshapen chimneys." 

"Such symbolism." 

"Symbolism?" 

"You make me ashamed of my privates." 

"Oh no Macdonald." 

"I thought you admired its contours." 

"I do darling, completely." 

"Remember what it used to feel like inside of you? Remember fucking in 
Paris, day after day, hour after hour, disregarding weather, economy, 
psychology, it always performed." 

"But we'll make lots of love in Spain, Macdonald, love is the most important 
part of it. I don't want to sound romantic, I know you hate romanticism and 
I know why but just talking about the sun makes me alive and happy. Yes 
happy. Please let's go, even if it's a stupid idea let's go. Don't let 
anything prevent us. I'll go to James Dykes, I'll borrow fifty thousand from 
him, when I feel like this I can make anything happen. Imagine tomorrow with 
no hotel owner and no filthy room to depress us. Macdonald," she paused and 
succumbed a moment to share his silence. "You are happy we're going, aren't 
you?" 

"The only curfew on my joy is will Paris survive my absence." 

"Wouldn't it be wonderful if it didn't. If there were never any Paris to 
come back to?" 

"Don't be bitter. Look what Paris has given you after three years. An 
absolute appreciation of sunshine." 

"You're talking like that because I'm being enthusiastic," she said 
knowingly. "Enthusiasm revolts you." 

"It makes me nervous," Macdonald admitted, "to scare away the evil spirits 
with loud noises." 

"Then I won't say another word, because I'm really sure we're going so 
there's no need for me to get desperate and excited. Is there?" 

"No, Martha." 

"Wonderful, wonderful," she went spinning to the door in three whirling 
umbrella steps and kissed him. "No, Martha." 

"What no?" she shook his hanging arms, "what no." 

"No thanks for the rescue. Go without me. Almost as bad as doing something 
is going somewhere." 

"You mean you'd stay here in this stinking little dungeon." 

"Stinking little dungeons, as you accurately describe our home, comfort me. 
I like dark dirty little things, they rest my world-weary eyes." 

"You coward," she shook him furiously, "you're afraid to come," he pushed 
her back to the bed. "You're afraid," she sank into the pillow, "afraid to 
live, afraid of your own shadow." 

"Of course I am," he admitted in that sudden sad voice, "and in little dark 
rooms my shadow disappears and it comes too sharp in the sun." 

"I'm not afraid." 

"Don't brag, just pack all the things you don't have and go find out." 

"You've cheated me," she howled, "you've all cheated me. Dirty cheats." 

"I can't figure out," Macdonald miraculously found a safety pin amongst the 
debris on the floor and attached his trousers, "if all those noises are 
delayed birth pains or retarded growing pains. But please don't let me 
interrupt you. Do get on with your screaming. I'll be across the street." 

"I'll be gone." 

"That's the third time you've left in half an hour." 

"Really I'll be gone." 

"If I miss the final exit don't write to me at the Plaza Athene. I despise 
that place." He managed to get one foot through the open door. 

"I'm not quitting, am I?" 

"What?' 

"Paris hasn't beaten me, has it?" 

"What do you mean, my love," he said tightly, "must you pillage the city 
before you can leave it? Must you rape all the men and decapitate all the 
women to entitle you to a borrowed railroad ticket?" 

"It's just that it's no good if Paris has beaten me," she lamented, "my 
defeat will glare in Spain, in the sunshine. I'll be rushing back for the 
next round." 

"Leave Paris alone," he demanded like a protective mother. "Paris never did 
anything to you. None of us did anything to you. Go fight with someone your 
own size." 

"You did," she screamed back, "it did. You chilled me and I want to scream 
and be vulgar and loud and hate all of you for being dry and dreary." 

"All right, hate us," Macdonald snapped impatiently, "who's stopping you. 
But remember, we gave you the courage to hate us." 

"I want to love," Martha wept in the empty room. "I want to be loved," the 
banal words slipping out of her brain as if they'd been hiding back there, 
spying on her all these days. Her legs kicked the mattress in infantile 
fury, and she clawed at the hard round tree trunk of a pillow struggling to 
release the gracious tranquil loving woman thing crushed under the anger. 


THE END
