Hot Night in the City Page 12

  "Sure. In fact, it's transparent. Even trite."

  "Trite?"

  "So how does this classic 'switch' sting of yours work?"

  "Like most landmark discoveries in mankind's slow rise from the stone axe to the atomic bomb, The Switch is based on simple principles. All these bumbling butchers around here run standard, banal dodges. They grope the fish's emotions by telling her she's beautiful; or they grope her mind by saying she's interesting; or they grope her self-esteem by faking a common interest in the Rolling Stones or Fellini or art nouveau. Me, I cut through all this tedious persiflage and do a complete switch—hence the name—on those worn-out ploys. Playing it for bittersweet, burnt-out, and tragic, I frankly admit that both she and I are here to get ourselves laid. Then I shake my head and say what a sick and silly thing that really is. Here we sit... so much finer and more sensitive than these animals sniffing each other all around us... and yet we find ourselves shopping in the same meat market as they, victims of corporal impulses that we can't fight, even though we know how stupid and ultimately unsatisfying it all is. I sigh and say that at least we can preserve our dignity by not conning each other with shams of tenderness and affection. We can call a spade a spade. (Note of caution for potential switch users: The 'call a spade a spade' line is a little dodgy when the target fish is Black.) And there you have it, Martha. My sure-fire switch scam... patent pending. After it's been run, the two of us finish our drinks while raking those around us with glances of superior scorn. We're a team now. We've both accepted reality, both admitted we're there to get laid. Ergo... let's get to it."

  "And that really works, Marvin?"

  "More often than not."

  "Hm-m. It doesn't sound very romantic."

  "We're not talking about romance. What we're talking about is more like giving blood, or taking a vitamin capsule, or pissing—which are, as a matter of fact, excellent analogies for the three major impulses that drive us towards random sex."

  Martha probed the bottom of her glass with a plastic swizzle stick. "Would you mind telling me something? Why didn't you take a shot at me? Didn't you notice me sitting here?"

  "I noticed you."

  "And?"

  "Well, you see... I've got this problem. I only target young fish, sprats. Lurking in the corners of my mind there is this notion that youth is a communicable disease that one can catch through direct contact."

  "Does it ever work, this chasing after youth?"

  "It always works... for about thirty minutes."

  She took the swizzle stick out and licked it meditatively. "I don't think your sting would work for me. Too complicated. Too devious."

  "Don't lick that. Plastic causes cancer." I must have swallowed too much hooch that night, because I found myself feeling something like compassion for her. So I decided to play it straight with her. "Martha? I told you about the switch game where the angler lays it right on the line with the fish. Well, there's a more advanced version of the ploy, one I call the Double Switch. That's where I tell some intelligent fish at the bar all about the switch game."

  She was silent for a couple of beats. "You're saying that I've just been a victim of the double switch?"

  "That's it. But remember... it's reserved for the smartest fish."

  "And that's a compliment, eh?"

  "Indeed it is."

  "Hm-m. But what about your taste for young flesh and all that business about youth being a communicable disease?"

  "Martha! Do you really think I have so little imagination that I am incapable of lying?"

  "...I see."

  "Like everybody else, I take what I can get. But because you're bright and witty, I thought I'd warn you. Particularly as this is your first night out on the hunt. Seems only sporting to give you a chance to get away."

  "I'm not all that sure I want to get away. Do you mind if I ask—do you love your wife?"

  "Sure."

  "But then... why?"

  "It's all about being fifty and not being a captain on the South China Sea or a farmer in Vermont. You're parked out in the lot?"

  "Yes. A cream Mercedes."

  "Convertible?"

  "Yes."

  "How did I know that? When this rain breaks, I'll follow you to your place."

  "Ah..." She put her elbow on the bar and her cheek in her palm, so that she was looking sideways up at me. "May I use the confessional now?"

  "Sure. I was almost through anyway. Confess away."

  "We can't go to my place."

  "Roommate?"

  "Sort of. There's my husband and my children. I don't think they'd understand."

  I looked at her, and suddenly I felt very tired. "You're not divorced."

  "Nope."

  "And this isn't your first time out cruising the meat markets."

  "Ah... no. Say, could there possibly be such a thing as a triple switch?"

  I rubbed my face. "So the Master Stinger got stung, did he? Well, how about that? Not bad, Martha. Not bad at all. Especially for a woman who found my crotch-scam too devious." I pushed off the barstool and went to the window. The rain had thinned to little more than mist, and streetlights were reflecting in shallow pools faintly opalescent with automobile filth. I couldn't tell if the hail had done any damage to my battered old Avanti, but I was sure it had harmed her Mercedes, and that was a comfort.

  "Marvin?" She joined me at the window. "One morning a woman who has been a good wife and a busy mother lifts her head from life's tasks, blinks and looks around, and she realizes that she's forty and the parade has passed her by while she was making plans for others. You know what I mean?"

  "Please don't batter me with this truth and sincerity stuff. I can't handle it. My whole life has been a celebration of artifice. Down with meaningful relationships! Up with the psychological barriers? Bring on the colorful hang-ups!"

  She was silent for a moment. Then: "I see. Well, at least we could console each other by making—what was it? The beast with two backs? I have enough money for a motel."

  I sat heavily in a chair by the window. "I'm sure you have, Martha."

  She sat across from me. "Your ego's hurt, isn't it."

  "Sure. Of course. But that's not really it. It would be pointless for us to make it in some motel with 'Genuine Western Oil Paintings' on the walls. In the morning, our strongest desire would be to shower until the scent of the other person was flushed down the drain. We'd be obliged to make up stories for people who no longer believe us. And a week from now, we wouldn't even remember each other's names. We don't have anything to offer each other, Martha. There's nothing we even want from each other. All there is between us is a low background fever of sexual curiosity."

  While I spoke, she smiled at me with amused patience that made it difficult for me to keep my eyes on hers. I felt burned out, vitiated.

  Sam Three started up the worn record of As Time Goes By, and Sam One went along the bar telling everyone that the storm was over and he really had to close.

  Martha continued to look at me, her eyebrows arched calmly.

  "It would be absolutely pointless, Martha. We probably wouldn't even perform very well."

  "So what happens now?"

  I sighed and stood up. "I'm going to take a walk."

  "And me?"

  "It's a big night out there. There's room for you to take a walk, too."

  "But not together."

  "But not together."

  She narrowed her eyes and evaluated me. "Marvin, you're really a washout, you know that?"

  "Yes, I know."

  I left Rick's Café Américain and walked around the empty streets for a couple of hours; then I decided I had to get away... go to someplace new and fresh! Canada, maybe. Or the South China Sea. I found my car standing alone in the lot, and I got in and drove north, with the rising sun glancing and glittering through the passenger side window.

  But about ten miles out of town, I ran out of gas. I took that as a sign—hey, maybe even a metaphor for my life
!—and I managed to get to my committee meeting at the university, unshaven but only a little late.

  THAT FOX-OF-A-BEÑAT

  The people of my village share with all Basque peasants an inborn reluctance to give out any information that might be used to our disadvantage, or, if not actually to our disadvantage, then at least to some other fellow's advantage, which must ultimately be the same thing, for God in His wisdom has seen fit to fill His world with fewer desirable things than there are people chasing after them, and so what the other fellow gets, I don't.

  Nowhere is our disinclination to burden others with accurate information more evident than in financial matters. It is common for a shepherd with a fruitful flock to complain long and bitterly, not only because God hates a braggart, or to prevent relatives from asking to borrow money, but also because the posture of poverty gives one moral leverage when selling one's cheese to the traveling wholesalers. The only peasants who do not claim to be impoverished are the truly poor, who seek to avoid the scorn of their neighbors and—even more galling!—the pity of those who might assume that their poverty is God's punishment for wrongs committed by past generations of their family.

  No one in my village is fooled by the conventions of speech and behavior that oblige the fortunate to minimize their possessions and the miserable to pretend they haven't a care in the world. Oh, those dim souls from Licq, our neighboring village, might be fooled by such dodges, but not us. We all know that those who pretend to be content with their lot are probably as poor as stones (and perhaps deservedly so, within God's Great Scheme of Retribution), while those who bemoan their poverty most shrilly are secretly well-off, like the Colonel, who became our village's richest man from his practice of snapping up land from the feckless and the unlucky, but who was so tightfisted that he even resented having to pay his share to repair the school's roof. But the Colonel no longer worries about collecting other people's land, not since God reached down last winter and collected him.

  Oh yes, we all know how the rich moan while the poor sing, but the glory of the Basque mind lies in its capacity to see subtleties within subtleties, so it is accounted a great gift to be able to judge just how rich are those who complain, and exactly how poor—and therefore vulnerable in commercial dealings—are those who walk about lighthearted and smiling, like an idiot stunned by a loose tile falling from a roof.

  But a wise old Basque dicton tells us: Every rule has its exceptions, even this one. Such an exception was the case of old Uncle Arnaud, who never complained about losing his best sheep to wolves and the lightening and never cursed the rich merchants of Paris (known collectively as 'the government') for depressing the price of wool so they could steal it from us. He accepted these strengthening Trials of God with a resigned shrug and a calm smile—exactly as though he were poor, while all the time he was as rich as a tax collector! But even the sly and subtle Uncle Arnaud was not so admired for craft and obliquity as the man who came to earn the title, 'that Fox-of-a-Beñat'.

  Beñat was our village idiot (or 'village innocent' as our parish priest insisted we call him, reminding us that the Treacherous Apple was the fruit of knowledge, and that those who know the least are often—indeed, almost always—better Christians than those burdened with facts and understanding). Every village in those days had at least one village idiot—save for Licq, of course, where nearly everyone could lay claim to that title—and it was not uncommon for dark and dire histories to be attached to these poor souls. Our Beñat attracted more creative biography than most, for he lived in the loft of the late Widow Jaureguiberry's barn, where he sustained himself on bread and raw onions—no doubt in penance for some (probably unspeakable) sin. Equally suspect was Beñat's custom of taking long walks—not walks such as some lazy dunce of a Licquois might take—but long walks from which he would return with muddled tales of Saint Palais, fully forty kilometers away down the valley, or of Saint Jean Pied-de-Port, half again as far, and over the mountains! Sometimes people encountered him on the road as he slouched along in his awkward, jerky gait, muttering and grinning to himself in that mysterious way of his, and there was no mistaking our Beñat, with his wide, crooked mouth and his huge ears, and eyes set not quite at the same level, to say nothing of the baggy, low-crotched trousers he had worn from longer ago than the collective memory of our village stretches. There were even rumors that Beñat had walked all the way to Paris and back, and the fact that he never spoke of Paris lent a certain credibility to these rumors; for isn't it just like an idiot to imagine he has only been to Saint Palais, when in fact he has been in Paris?

  The widespread suspicion that he had visited Paris was finally substantiated. Each fall, foreigners from Paris and Bordeaux appeared in our village, dressed in crisp new hunting costumes and filling our café/bar with talk of their prowess as hunters of the palombe. The money these northern hunters spent was important to our narrowly balanced economy, and it was a source of some puzzlement and distress to us that many of them were so stupid as to allow themselves to be seduced away from simple, clean accommodations in our honest village by the tarted-up restaurants and overdecorated hotels of Licq.

  These northerners sometimes mistook us for quaint rustics and amused themselves by imitating the chanting music of our speech, though they could never achieve the melody of our expression because they were crippled by the Parisian's inability to pronounce final e's. Naturally, we repaid their discourtesy by renting them only the worst bird blinds in the valley, while we ourselves shot and netted the palombe from the best positions and always had a few extra to sell to them, so they could support their boasts of manful skill when they returned to whatever Paris or Bordeaux they came from.

  One day several of these northerner 'hunters' were in the new café/bar that Monsieur Aramburu had made out of his father's old-fashioned wineshop by the simple expedient of changing its name and keeping a pot of filter coffee on the back of the stove. Aramburu was also our mayor, as he had the village's only telephone. Well, that Fox-of-a-Beñat (though he had not yet earned that title) came shambling past the window in his ragged old clothes, grinning and muttering to himself as always. One of us asked the tableful of boasting Parisians if they had ever happened across old Beñat on the road to Paris. The loudest and best-equipped of them (the ones with the fancy costumes never bag the birds, as Basque palombes are not so stupid that they cannot recognize a hunting jacket) winked at his companions and told us that indeed he had often seen our village innocent in Paris, riding through the park in a fancy carriage filled with young and beautiful girls. Well, of course none of us missed the wink, and we knew better than to think that any young and beautiful girl would ride about with a man who ate mostly onions, but we could discern a seed of truth in this story, nevertheless. Any man who was such a fool as to be unable to tell a good hunting blind from a miserable one would be perfectly capable of passing within ten meters of our Beñat without recognizing him. So here was this Parisian trying to ridicule us by pretending to have seen Beñat in Paris, when in fact he had seen him and was too stupid to know it! The laugh was on him!

  But it was not only because of his enigmatic wanderings as far as Saint Palais and Saint Jean Pied-de-Port (and now even to Paris!) that our village innocent attracted so many stories to himself. There was rich fodder for gossip in Beñat's very peculiar drinking habits.

  Beñat didn't drink. Never. Not a drop.

  It is true, of course, that our village priest (a man who had been educated both in Pau and in Bayonne, and who therefore knew something of this world, unlike that simpering simpleton who babbled from the pulpit of the Licq church) had often reminded us that good Catholics drink only in moderation. But who can claim that never touching a drop is 'drinking in moderation'? It is quite the opposite! There were two bodies of opinion concerning Beñat's strange immoderation in the matter of drink. Some suspected that perhaps the old idiot was not a Catholic but a Jew or a Saracen—or, worse yet, a Protestant!—and was therefore not obliged to drink in
moderation like the rest of us. Others dismissed this view as ridiculous, pointing out that Beñat spoke excellent Basque—for an idiot—and all the world knows that speakers of Basque must be Catholic, for Basque was the language of the Garden of Eden and is currently the language of heaven, although there have been efforts by French-speaking bishops of Paris to suppress this historical fact. The most widely accepted explanation for Beñat's suspicious refusal to take a little glass now and then was that in result of some grave sin committed while drunk during his youth, he had made a vow to give up the pleasure of wine forever. His great sin was understood to have involved you-know-what, and this meshed nicely with the newly uncovered reports of beautiful girls in carriages in Paris!

  When teased about his abstemiousness, old Beñat used to grin and say that he didn't drink because he was too poor. And this always elicited guffaws as men tugged down the lower lid of their eyes with their forefingers and nudged one another, because it was universally understood that Beñat was very, very rich. Not just rich as some miserly old piss-vinegar of a Licquois might be rich, but rich! As rich as an Amérloque!

  The evidence of his wealth was overwhelming. For one thing, following the rule that everyone who is poor pretends to be comfortable and everyone who is rich pretends to be wretched, it was obvious that old Beñat was wealthy beyond the dreams of a coin-biting merchant. Also, here was a man who was older than the church tower and had in all those years spent nothing on clothes and eaten nothing but bread and onions and the occasional blood-of-Christ apple 'borrowed' from the village's most famous apple tree. How could such a man fail to be rich? And what about all these mysterious voyages to Paris... and perhaps even beyond! Do poor men travel in search of poverty? No. Rich men travel in search of yet greater wealth. Poverty is something you can enjoy at home.

  Oh, yes, the evidence of Beñat's wealth was overwhelming. And it must be confessed that his hidden riches (in search of which the boys of my era spent many afternoons, digging in all the unlikely places a fox of an idiot might bury his gold) were a source of concern among the men of the village. You must not think that we envied him his good fortune. It is not within the Basque character to be envious—save for the grasping people of Licq, where it is understandable, as they have everything to be envious of. No, it was not envy that our people felt, it was a keen sense of the injustice of it all. We rankled at the knowledge that when poor old Beñat died, his fortune would pass to his family, the Hastoys, those rich and haughty owners of an espadrille factory in Mauléon. It twisted a man's heart to think that all those good gold francs scraped together throughout a long life of eating onions and wearing tattered old clothes would end up in the pockets of people who were already too rich to pass, as some camels are said to do, through the eyes of needles, particularly as one of the Hastoys had recently lost a chance to marry a plain, honest girl from our village and had ended up marrying a dolled-up strumpet from Licq, and we all know the circumstances under which that occurs.