The Royal Family (155 page)

Did you just propose to me, John?

Whatever. All right, so you won’t straighten my tie. I’m going. Make sure you double-lock when you go to work . . .

Let’s get married, John.

All
right
already. Twist the knife! Do we have to go on and on about it? No, cinch up the knot. Is it still crooked right here? Oh, Jesus, I’m late. I’m really late. You and your bugged olives . . .

They honeymooned in Hawaii, and then on a blue-grey Sunday John wanted to fly to Las Vegas to wrap up some Feminine Circus business with Brady (who in prison would resemble some old grey tree shooting up like the skeleton of a fabled pike, leaning each year farther against empty air). In the stretch limo which Brady had sent, the tulip-shaped glasses gleamed like rubies behind the long long windows, and the crystal decanters in their mirror-backed cases wore gold. John grinned and laid his hand on the back of his wife’s wrist.

Celia was in the bathroom, having just begun her first marital quarrel, during which
she’d sighed: I guess I’m just saying that I think there’s room for you to open your arms to more people than just yourself, and John, who’d heard it all before, was sitting on the bed removing his suits and her dresses from the garment bag when the phone rang. —What’s up? he said.

Brady, said the telephone.

Afternoon, Mr. Brady, said John. What’s the good word?

Say, Johnny boy—you mind if I call you Johnny?

Had anyone else been so presumptuous. John would have been filled with wrath. As it was, he was thrilled.

Downstairs, John and Brady shook hands. Brady was explaining: We want to make sure we always give the customer what he wants, where, when and how he wants it, at a low price and with no complications afterward. No complications may be the most important thing. That requires tact, foresight, and above all
innovation
on our part.

When he said that, he smiled with self-adulation over his latest acquisition, a hairless wrinked dwarf lady who whispered: Donald Duck! Donald Duck! and the men who went in to her had to pretend to be Donald Duck to make her happy.

Celia stood trailing her fingers along one of the railings which ran along one side of the administration room at Feminine Circus so that spectators such as herself could look down into all the various worlds, each of them as stuffy as a museum. To me, Feminine Circus was much the same as the SuperSaverStore where Irene used to go through heaps of cheap clothes for toddlers, trying to pick out Christmas presents for her cousins and her sister’s boy while John very slowly smelled a genuine cedarwood shoetree. (Tyler, hiding behind a chin-high mountain of Date Flakes, watched Irene picking out childrens’ books.) But to Celia this comparison would have rung entirely false. When she was thoroughly bored, she escaped into an echoing expectoration of dollar coins. Her own secret wish in playing the slots was always to get rid of this heavy burden of quarters which God had given her: when they came clattering out after she pushed the
CASH CREDIT
button, she felt pleased, even victorious; but once she’d gathered them into her fist she wondered what to do with them. In her pocket they made an uncomfortable bulge which resembled an erection. In the big plastic cup they weighed her down. When the machine ate them back again (“like a dog goggling his vomit,” says some medieval tract on apostasy), she felt relief.

No, the house percentages are really quite small, Brady was explaining to her husband. For instance, if everyone in the world were to give me five minutes out of his life, I could live almost forever, and don’t tell me any of those people would miss that time.

Retreating to the hotel room, Celia got underneath the bedcovers, turned on the television’s remote control, and wrote:

protocol update
prep memo to Heidi
make John promise to do dishes
3 x/week
make calendar for Ellen
update for Jeff
floaters to cover breaks
order cannister mailers
adopt puppy?
dining room set

I’m a slick girl, the TV said. You wanna get slick with me? Get
Slick
. Now available in pharmacies near you. Federal restrictions may apply.

Celia’s mind wandered. She pretended that she and John were hiking up Coyote Peak to see Napa Valley with its multi-greened corrugations of vineyard, and it was cool and windy with blue and turquoise shadows on the facing mountains, as if the newlyweds had entered one of the buccolic scenes on the labels of Calistoga mineral water. A tiny woodpecker drummed for them, accompanied by the buzz of a little plane. It no longer embarrassed her to be spinning fantasies. Sometimes clutched by insomnia, Celia had long since grown accustomed to imagining herself to sleep. She felt very secure to be married, and the inevitable disappointment after the wedding ceremony was best dealt with by careful planning for their future together, and, whenever that temporarily failed, by mental movies of her own devising.

She and John were supposed to meet Brady for lunch, but just as they arrived, Brady’s cell phone rang and Brady began a long conversation by saying: Those girls usually come by the pair, but maybe I can get you one on open stock.

He put down the phone for a moment to lift his wineglass, and Celia heard the client say: Well, I like this shape here.

Winking at Celia, Brady picked up the phone and said: These can be shipped. They’re very high quality.

Finally he hung up. Tapping his finger against his glass, he said to John: You know, they say a good glass is very important when you drink good wine. You see the parallel?

Excuse me, Mr. Brady, said Celia, clearing her throat. These girls you’re talking about are all virtual, right? I mean, nobody gets hurt, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the man said boredly. These girls come in all versions.

Gazing upward, Celia discovered chandeliers like flowers, crystal beehives, and transparent glass spiderwebs.

Actually, Brady said to her, we’ll give your husband a very special price. And listen, John. I can give you the same price for the next five years. Celia, after lunch I need to borow your husband for a minute. I guarantee I’ll return him in better shape than I found him. Perfect balance.

Celia stared miserably at the tablecloth.

Come and see this one, John, Brady was saying. It is
gorgeous.
You’ll see the hipbones. They’re extremely elegant pieces. And extremely strong. And extremely elastic.

I guess it all goes together, Celia said dully.

From his shirt pocket, Brady removed the transparent cast or likeness of a human nipple as astoundingly beautiful as the crystal stopper of a thousand dollar glass decanter. The thing was a dodecahedron each of whose faces sent the light back in a different shade of blueness.

No, John, said Celia. You don’t need another one.

Brady laughed. —I’ll bet you two aren’t the first pair who’ve come to blows in a place like this. And in a dispute like this, the wife always wins. Know how I know, John? Because you
brought
your wife. It’s not about you and any of these so-called pieces. It’s about you and her.

Celia was silent, so Brady patted her arm and said: You should give a Christmas present to your husband.

He’s already very spoiled.

So spoil him a little more.

Do whatever you want, John. I don’t feel so well. I’m going to lie down . . .

The air conditioning was as cold as a cretin’s hand.

You have been summoned, Domino said pompously, lolling back on her purple-sequined wrists. All the girls, come and kneel around the Queen . . . Where’s my ashtray?

Here, ma’am. Yes, ma’am.

Oh, brother, said John. This is lame.

Beatrice, I want you right now to go get the bitch. You are not in any trouble. Just go an’ get her.

That’s not Beatrice, John said to himself.

The Queen lay very still, lolling around on her swollen, abscessed legs, scratching at the purple sequins.

Now,
Chocolate!
she laughed. Chocolate, you little
bitch!
Come here. Siddown. On your butt.

The other girl was hanging her head in the corner with her hand held out and her other hand on her thighs.

That’s not Chocolate either, John realized.

I just brushed my hair, Domino was saying, smashing a beer bottle on the stage. Y’all are
crazy.
I want you to beat the bitch up. Take this, little motherfucker, and beat her up! I’m not playing. Awright. Now this is what we’re gonna do.

The whores were sitting in the corner at stage left, pouting and quickly wiping their lips before their cigarettes.

An’ every guilty woman, I want their pussies sewn shut, Domino mumbled. An’ all the men—
everyone
—I want them all brought to me. —You know who you are? You’re the first to have your pussy sewn shut. Do you want your teeth knocked out, too? How’d you like it if I took this cigarette and put it right out between your eyes? Oh, didn’t it hurt enough for you to scream? Well, let’s try it again, you little
slut.
Get out of my sight. Don’t drink that beer. It’s got that tramp’s lipstick all over it. Come ’ere, Sapphire little one. I’m gonna give you one chance.

The little one quickly put the Queen’s shoes on, and Justin tied them.

The Queen’s belly was sagging.

You’ll never be number one shotgun under me, she said. You’ll never be a shot-caller anymore.

The tall man was smiling vaguely under the long matted hair as he started taking the collar off, holding the chain, and the lady-in-waiting bowing double . . .

Sapphire tried to cling to her ankle. —Let go of me, said the Queen.

That’s not Justin, said John. That’s not Sapphire.

(He was right. Domino had sold the real Sapphire to Brady long ago for five hundred dollars cash. Sapphire had lasted for months. She’d been one of Brady’s star moneymakers.)

I want you to beat this bitch into oblivion, Domino was saying. Someone in the audience gasped, and she quickly said: Don’t worry, baby. It’s all virtual.

Somebody booed her. Pretending not to hear, she said to the ersatz Justin: I want you to bring her back when she has one breath left. Just
one
breath.

This is pathetic, John thought. This is embarrassing. This is Feminine Circus.

When he and Celia got back to San Francisco, he went straight to the Wonderbar and almost shyly asked the barmaid, whom he didn’t recognize, how business was, at which she froze in suspicion and fear, saying: We got no business here! and shouted something in Spanish, at which the solitary whore, fat, old and miniskirted, sent a hateful glance John’s way and went out. John never saw Domino again.

All Biblical citations are from
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha,
expanded edition (rev. standard), ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), although I have sometimes archaized certain passages.

BOOK I:–THE REDUCTION METHOD

Bacon epigraph—Sir Francis Bacon,
Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, New Atlantis
(Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Great Books of the Western World, vol. 30), p. 107 (
Novum Organum
[1620], Book I, paragraph VI).

BOOK II:–IRENE

Dostoyevsky epigraph—Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
The Idiot,
trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Bantam, 1981 repr. of 1958 ed.; orig. Russian ed. 1869), p. 299.

Extract from
Irène’s Cunt
—Lous Aragon,
Irène’s Cunt,
trans. Alexis Lykiard (London: Velvet Books / Creation Books, 1996), p. 65.

BOOK III:–VISITS AND VISITATIONS

Police manual epigraph—Wayne W. Bennett and Kären M. Hess,
Criminal Investigation,
3rd ed. (San Francisco: West Publishing Co., 1991), p. 298.

“Light and darkness, life and death . . .” —James M. Robinson, gen. ed.,
The Nag Hammadi Library in English,
3rd. rev. ed., trans. and introduced by the members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, California (San Francisco: Harper-SanFrancisco, 1990), p. 142 (The Gospel of Philip, II, 3, 14–20).

BOOK IV:–BILLABLE HOURS

Sulfuric acid epigraph—H. Clark Metcalfe, John E. Williams, Joseph F. Castka,
Modern Chemistry
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 258.

BOOK V:–THE MARK OF CAIN

Gnostic Scriptures epigraph—Robinson, p. 249 (Dialogue of the Savior).

Darwin on
Formica (Polyerges) rufescens—
Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
and
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
(Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Great Books of the Western World, no. 49, 1952), p. 2125 (
Origin
).

BOOK VI:–LADIES OF THE QUEEN

Psistratus and Athena epigraph—[attributed to Aristotle or one of his students]
, The Athenian Constitution,
trans. P.J. Rhodes (New York: Penguin, 1984), pp. 56–57.