The Natural Order of Things (29 page)

It’s the first time de Vere has seen her in broad daylight, and he studies her features carefully. She might be thirty, she might be fifty, it’s impossible to say, but unlike the usual castaways he chances upon in hotel bars and restaurants—those lonely, ruminative spinsters politely sipping cosmopolitans and hoping, even well into middle age, to have a romantic encounter with a dashing stranger but who in the end always settle for the usual scamming rogues, men like de Vere and sometimes men far worse—this woman understands that romance is nothing more than a fantasy, a sickness, a disease no different from the angry sores erupting on her arms and legs or the black nodules spreading through her lungs.

He calls her name, but she doesn’t seem to hear, gives no sign. She climbs over the polished granite rim of the fountain and stares at something near the patinated bronze sphere. Using the lethal tips of her stilettos, she cracks the thin sheets of ice that have formed around the perimeter and then searches through the scattered bits of copper for the occasional glint of a silver coin. The pigeons follow her around like lost children and peck at her ankles. She tries to kick them aside and almost falls over.

De Vere decides to take a calculated risk. “Pardon me. What did you say your name was?”

She looks up and scowls. “I told you last night.”

“Tamar, isn’t it?”

“Why you asking if you already know it?”

Though he is mad with thirst, desperate for a glass of water, he says, “I thought maybe we could get a drink together.”

“A drink?”

“Yes, if you know a joint that’s open this early in the morning.”

Polishing a quarter on the hem of her skirt, she says, “You’re buying, right?”

“Naturally.”

“Okay, come with me.”

Since neither of them has a car they must travel on foot. Like children in a fairytale, banished to a forest of twisted black trees teeming with tribes of ravenous nightroaming trolls, they follow a trail of cigarette butts through the ruin and desolation
of the old neighborhood. They walk beneath the steel arches of a bridge on the verge of collapse; they pass boarded-up storefronts and faded billboards for cheap liquor and high interest loans; they slog up a gray ridge strangled by long tendrils of telephone lines; and in a weed-choked gravel lot, they battle through a cloud of buzzing flies and nearly trip over the remains of a dog, its belly bloated with corpse gas, its tongue angling toward a puddle of oily water.

“Gonzago …” de Vere mutters with affection.

“What you say?”

De Vere pauses to catch his breath. He rests his hands on his knees and asks, “Do you know what day it is?”

“Saturday, I think. I dunno.”

“No, no, no. What
holy
day is it?”

“The fucking Epiphany. How should I know?

“It’s the Day of the Dead, my dear.”

“Ain’t no such holiday.”

“There most certainly is. So it’s only fitting that we should find ourselves wandering the streets and alleys of this wretched necropolis.”

“Man, you like to talk a lot of shit, don’t you?”

As he wades through the brown surges of foul odor emanating from the sewers, he decides on a different approach. In the plodding English of this devastated industrial town—his mother tongue, brusque, arrhythmic, percussive—he jokes how the city looks like Montemarte after the long-awaited apocalypse, Sacre Coeur bulldozed to make way for a row of lamentable tenement buildings, a once-magnificent view of the Eiffel Tower obstructed by the sulfur-spewing stacks of a blast furnace. De Vere knows he must stop daydreaming about the charmed life he once led and learn to accept his precipitous descent into bankruptcy and hopeless destitution. He is a barbarian returned at long last to the provinces, the city of his birth, a puissant thanatocracy where not even the specter of death offers the howling, beggared multitude a way to escape from so much pointless suffering. Indeed, the Church has always taught him that it is only
after
death that the real suffering begins.

A dozen blackbirds explode from an abandoned duplex and wheel in the sky.

“In its own weird way,” he says, “this is a very pretty place.”

The woman snorts. “Yeah, sure, and someone once said that hell is probably a pretty place.”

Edward De Vere smiles. Yes, he thinks, life here is very different than in the City of Light. Different languages, different customs, different states of mind.

Famed as much for its bullet-sprayed bar as its handcrafted lagers and stouts, the brewery is part sanitarium, part hospice, part decaying church, its graffiti-covered toilet stalls a compendium of disgraceful customs and bawdy incantations culled from decades of drunken conversation, its cold ashen walls a safe haven for gangsters and hoodlums, a refuge for unemployed merchant marines and longshoremen, a retreat for heretical priests, a confessional for unrepentant sinners. Inside, a dozen or so men—bald, bearded, brutal, their teeth chipped or missing altogether, their skin translucent in the flickering
light of the television, their eyes blinded by the muddy daylight trickling through the dirty windows—hunch on their stools like things not seen in the open air but only in caves that have been sealed up for untold centuries. In silence they drink tall beakers of piss-colored beer and chew stale pretzels.

From the moment he walks through the door, de Vere understands that fist fighting is standard practice here. He skips over a pile of broken glass and makes his cautious way through a minefield of hostile stares. He has been beaten before, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not, and as he mentally prepares himself for the possibility of another thrashing, he flags down the ruddy Irishman tending bar and asks for a vodka tonic on the rocks (it’s best to anesthetize oneself beforehand) “with a twist of lime” (he refuses to abandon his more urbane sensibilities, even in the face of danger). He notes how his drink seems to irritate these men, makes them slurp their beer with purpose and glare at him with even greater intensity. Why such malice, de Vere wonders? Is it because he is too clean cut, his clothes too flashy, his hair too shiny, sculpted, and unnaturally dark? Maybe he should cut down on the dye, let a few gray strands grow in. He looks artificial, more mannequin than man. He uses his fading looks to disguise something ugly, but these men are not easily fooled by disguises. They sniff him out right away. He reeks of corruption, perversion, disease.

The bartender leans over and squeezes de Vere’s shoulder. His forearms are thick and hairy, his knuckles raw. His tongue moistens a busted lip. He blows angry jets of smoke in de Vere’s face and intentionally ashes on his shirt cuffs.

“Enjoying your cocktail, buddy? Having a good time? You know how to treat a lady? You gonna behave yourself?”

De Vere smiles sheepishly and thinks it wise to keep quiet.

The other men offer the woman a seat at the bar, hand her some cigarettes, buy her a few drinks. They ask how she’s getting on. Does she have enough money, enough to eat? Does she need anything—clean clothes, a safe place to stay?

“This guy bothering you?” they want to know.

“Him?” The woman laughs. “Naw, he’s a real gentleman. Can’t you tell? Went to some kind of finishing school. Looks like a wax dummy, don’t he?”

She throws her head back to swallow her whiskey and then nods with some vague sense of accomplishment, her eyes flashing like little strobe lights that briefly illuminate a dead, dreaming world. The booze cascades over her brain, baptizing her in a river of endless possibility. She smiles at her reflection in the dusty mirror the way a child might smile with equal parts fear and amusement at a total stranger passing on the street.

De Vere feels his guts suddenly rumble. He clutches his stomach and lets out a low groan.

“The shitter’s that way if you need it,” the woman tells him.

De Vere stands up, gives a little bow. “Excuse me, will you?”

“Oh, I’ll be waiting, honey.”

He tosses a few bills on the bar and then darts to the restroom, where he locks himself in one of the filthy stalls. While he sits on the toilet, huffing and groaning in an unsuccessful attempt to jettison the hardened stool lodged inside his colon, he reads the limericks and racial epithets and homophobic slurs on the door. Above the roll of toilet paper, someone has written a story in a small, satanic hand, chronicling the lives of the reprobates who have descended into this stinking Hades—a high school quarterback, a
football coach, a guitarist in a death metal band, a failed writer, an oversexed teacher. Modern day scripture for the drunk and dispossessed.

Rocking back and forth on the seat, De Vere scans the lines but is unable to concentrate for long. He grinds his teeth, bears down until his face turns red, but it’s no good. He’s been constipated for days now. He pulls up his pants and buckles his belt. As he stands at the sink, scrubbing his hands, he pretends not to hear the violent clangor of chapel bells coming from the Jesuit school a few blocks away—his alma mater, hallowed ground where he first learned about the pleasures of the flesh and the awful prospect of eternal damnation.

Despite a few minor improvements to the hulking neo-gothic edifice, the Zanzibar Towers and Gardens appears uninhabited—and uninhabitable—by anything other than the long-tailed rats and mutant cockroaches that proliferate in the deep quarry of its basement. Some of the windows on the lower floors are shattered, some are missing altogether and covered in plastic sheets. Its brick façade is so blackened by soot from the nearby steel mills that it looks like it has been pieced together with lumps of charcoal. The weary Jesuits have labeled the place a “pest house” and have sought out ways to have it demolished, even pressuring building inspectors to fine the manager for failing to bring the property up to code, but the inspectors, realizing the cash-strapped city cannot afford the expense of clearing away another mountain of toxic rubble, always fall short of condemning the place outright.

The woman rents an apartment on the sixth floor, and by the time they climb the creaking staircase to the landing (there is no working elevator), both she and de Vere are breathing hard. She slides a key into the lock but before opening the door says, “Okay, let’s get down to business.”

“Fine with me.”

“Two hundred oughtta cover it.”

De Vere laughs. “I don’t have that kind of cash.”

“You a deadbeat or what?”

“I had to make bail this morning, remember?”

“I don’t give a shit. We agreed on two hundred.”

“When was this?”

“Last night.”

“We never talked money, did we?”

“Fucking loser. Why don’t you get lost?”

“Wait a minute.” He counts the remaining cash in his wallet. “I have seventy bucks.”

She snaps her fingers. “Hand it over.” Shaking her head, she stuffs the money somewhere under her skirt and then opens the door. “In here. Let’s go. Move it, move it.”

He is unable to see anything too clearly, but eventually his eyes adjust to the gloom, and he takes in the remarkable squalor of the place, the piles of dirty clothes, the broken toys scattered on the filthy throw rugs and sticky hardwood floor—a bright blue ball, a small pink guitar, a deck of playing cards. He steps around the remains of a blonde baby doll that has undergone several hasty amputations only to be partially reassembled
with tape and glue. There is something odd about the apartment, something that makes its claustrophobic rooms seem almost institutional, like a madhouse or some terrible dungeon in ancient Rome where the consumptive prisoners languished for years without trial. Then he understands the problem. All the doors have padlocks on the outside.

De Vere crosses his arms and gives a whistle. “Nice place you have here.”

“Screw you.”

The woman walks into the kitchen, pushes aside a stack of plates that wobbles and then crashes into a sink already overflowing with bowls of soggy cereal and sour milk. Under the shattered heap she finds two plastic cups and a bottle of cheap bourbon. She pours them both a drink.

“Bottoms up,” she says.

“Cheers.”

The bourbon has been diluted with water, but it seems to give the woman a second wind.

“Well,” she says, “we better get on with it before the brat wakes up.”

She unlocks one of the doors and leads him into a bedroom. Evidently she doesn’t often sleep here. The bed is still made, the sheets not too terribly soiled. He removes his clothes and finds that the mattress is surprisingly comfortable. He buries his face in the pillows, pleased that only an occasional strand of long black hair finds its way into his mouth. As he waits for her to join him, he props himself up on one elbow and chances to see himself in the mirror above the dresser—a wrecked Adonis, the high school athlete gone to seed, his pimply shoulders glistening with sweat, a roll of flab hanging from his midsection. The woman strips and stretches out next to him, her arms limp at her sides, her legs spread wide, the soles of her feet black and blistered. The years have taken their toll on them both, but if his body is ugly and pathetic, hers is tragic, covered in welts and bruises and cryptic tattoos.

He turns away from the mirror and, without asking her permission, begins to do outrageous and terrible things to her. His hostess endures the rough treatment without complaint, even taunting him at times, telling him to stop being such a fucking pansy, to “do the job right, goddammit!” He thrashes and bucks and growls. He tests the limits of her endurance, violates her every orifice, laughs every time she whimpers with pain, and after one hour of relentless grinding, he shouts, “Shit, yes!” before finally rolling over and falling dead asleep.

It has been an exhausting twenty-four hours for them both.

As usually happens when his belly begins to boil over with a devastating blend of booze, de Vere tosses and turns in bed and, before waking in a cold sweat, dreams in vivid detail of the good old days in Europe:

He finds himself sitting at his favorite sidewalk café below a swanky brothel at the Place de la Contrescarpe where, amidst the sentimental
chanson française
and the melodic laughter of the lovely young whores, de Vere and his fellow expatriates féte each other with great goblets of absinthe (frog-green and bitter, illegal of course, wreaks havoc on the nervous system) and spin tales of their latest excursions to the catacombs beneath
the famous cathedral and the galleries at the Museé de l’Homme where, for a small fee, tourists can view Descartes’ brain in the Cabinet of Curiosities.