The Royal Family (76 page)

Then a woman screamed:
Ohhhhh!
—She’d hit a big jackpot. The coins began to patter out. Crowds clotted behind her and watched as the coins kept coming.

Suddenly an arrow comprised of neon lights began to shimmer on the floor, and a siren went off. A melodious female voice said: Ladies and gentlemen, the adult area of Feminine Circus is now open for play. Adults only, please!

The woman who’d won the jackpot looked around, and found herself husbandless. Masculine Circus, Brady’s playland for heterosexual women, remained a mere blueprint.

Following the long line of men, Tyler passed through a glowing pink door . . .

•

The introduction of [circumcision] into human customs may have come first from the women during early Mesolithic times; however, the men must have shown considerable resistance to such a barbaric act of symbolic castration . . . It was probably practiced regularly only in the centers where women wielded unusual power. . . . Polygyny without circumcision would be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain in a society in which the women expected and demanded to experience regular and frequent orgasmic satisfaction.

 

M
ARY
J
ANE
S
HERFEY
, M.D.,
The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality
(1973)

•

In addition to his cottonwood business, Mr. Brady was, as we see, an impressario. Why should I beat around some whore’s bush? He was the founder, chief executive officer, and fifty-one percent owner of Feminine Circus Enterprises, dedicated to the philosophy that love is the first and final cause. When I looked him up in
Who’s Who in Retail Management,
I read a competitor’s description of his face: “as vividly ugly as a fast food parking lot at night when a security light glares down on the pitted asphalt.” But the competitor, who was bankrupted by Feminine Circus, was hardly handsomer. Let’s not get in the way of love; let’s not halt love’s caravans, sexual traffickings. Love’s poison makes us strut like birds; then a woman’s ten outstretched fingers slide slowly down a man’s back. What comes of it? Wait nine months, till the baby sits serene on its mother’s lap, utterly contented by the writhing of its fingers. Is that love? Now the creature walks; again and again the mother bends faithfully down to the child whose hand she holds. Not much longer, and the child pulls away to be swallowed up in child armies. In the playground love marches with little boys stalking birds slyly, to pelt them with sand; when the birds scatter, little boys throw sand in little girls’ eyes instead, loving their screams. As soon as the weeping’s over, back come the boys, grinning, sand dribbling between clenched fingers, and the girls suspect no evil; being only at the beginning of life’s tortures, they haven’t yet learned to read the malignancy of other faces. Some never do. We call them retarded. This is the story of Brady, Tyler, and the Queen; but first it’s the story of a man who loved retarded girls, loved them with the tranquil smile and faraway glance of a doctor, not the other way at first, the way people leap up to watch a car accident, and I will tell you what happened on his journey for dear love when the world divided into armies.

(Could you allow me a driblet of authorial commentary right here, please? I merely want to say how embarrassed I am to introduce a new character so late in this novel—moreover, a character without a name. Dan Smooth and the FBI both know who he is, but his name is one hundred percent irrelevant; he’s but a puppet, a placeholder for our plot, a
supplier
to the grand machine known as Feminine Circus. I’m of two minds as to whether we even need him at all, and if I let his name slip, he might take up more than his allotted space, or possibly we’d get attached to him. Most of the chickens and pigs I’ve eaten didn’t have names.)

Growing up in hot California towns, our hero didn’t yet know himself because trees hung heavy and silent, obscuring the children from their shadows; overhanging roofs nipped the light like hatched clamshells, eating children every evening when the bicycles came home. He and his best friend used to masturbate together at his house or his best friend’s house because that was how the soldiers in love’s fight impelled each other, lying side by side in the stench of suspended breathing, not yet driven to attack for the booty
of breasts and soft thighs; in those days when it was just beginning he knew only his self and his craving that he had to release with both hands. His best friend said that a special way was to hang naked from pull-up bars until the penis swelled and jetted; he never tried that. That autumn when the rains fell like blood he began to think beyond the fact of his yearning, trying to imagine what girls’ bodies must be like, how to kiss without butting noses, which way the slit went, who opened whose legs which way. The ransom that he’d soon take drew him to devour any distance between himself and girls; he glared at his best friend for getting in his way. Mustered armies faced off at school, watching, wanting, not yet grappling the veterans’ tricks of fawning and pleasing; they knew only desperation. —Some say it’s but compensation, this awardment of flattery’s skills, for the sagging breasts and soft-ons which veterans must bear, but that’s not so, for the great captains, soul-takers, hymen-breakers, phallus-notchers, own both tricks and strength. They take the prize night after night. —His best friend joined that detachment, learning how to scan the swish of skirts, seeing which leg was past, which leg to come, but our hero, less lucky, was doomed to fall victim to one of the girl-captains who charged, mauled him to the ground and bridled him with the golden bridle. Her brain crawled like a balled-up octopus, writhing with need, straining to possess him forever. Suckered attractions burst from her eyeballs, flickering like lashes to lure him in; they licked out of her ears, eavesdropping on his every word’s weakness; they pried her lips apart into a smile, stretched down into her fingertips to caress the world hummingly, and then, full-bent, bowstringed her invasion. Stalking him even as he hunted others, she gobbled up his shadow, gained nourishment from that meal, crouched behind his unwary heels. There is no one quite so self-absorbed as a girl squeezing out her blackheads in front of the mirror. Yet even then she never stopped thinking of him, prizing him from the corner of her eye. He looked back at her and heard her high loud laugh and was embarrassed that others would hear. Discerning that he meant to flee, she closed in on him with licking and sucking little kisses, and struck him down into her conical mound of brown ring-ivy.

That night she slept with one leg over him, but he lay open-eyed, scheming how to return to his own lines. There was a girl he sought to prey on—not this one who’d defeated him. He lay stifling, panting for her, and the one who’d got him, exulting in her dreams, dreamed she was coursing him again, making him groan between her perfect white buttocks. At last he fell asleep again, only to be awoken by her fingers reconnoitering him, crawling up his leg like crabs. He could see her cruel teeth shining in the starlight. Her smile of exposed belly heaved; her navel blinked. As gently as a mother slows the arc of a swing to pluck her child out, he lifted her leg in his hands, thinking to roll free, but she sprang on him at once, rubbing her crotch against him until his weak-willed penis sprang up strong. When he’d satisfied her again she fell back on the bed’s sweaty battlefield and began to breathe more evenly, her eyes closing, the octopus-tentacles retreating back inside her skull to hug themselves like a ball of dormant roots. Asleep, dead asleep, she straddled the wartorn sheet-ridges in that hot black night whose stars winked out one by one. Now the wily one she’d thought to keep slid away inch by inch, down to the foot of the bed where it was cool by her softly clenching toes. He rose and stood above her; she was his fallen enemy now, and he gloated. Stalking into her bathroom, he closed the door, turned on the light, raised the toilet lid. When he turned to wash off crusted love-gore, his mirror-face knew him, and for the first time he felt that he could trust himself like a holy image; he was friends with himself. Together they’d
keep watch, strike, take the incarnadine plunder. They smiled at one another, and the double reached out a palm for him to touch, mirror-cold, glass-hard. Then he sidled out, dressed as silent as a breath, and left behind his grisly work. Unable to wake, paralyzed by the joy he’d given her, she lay still even when the back door opened and shut; only her eyeballs whirred uneasily beneath the sleep-sealed lids—

She woke weeping in that empty sweaty bed, already knowing she’d been routed, but her octopus held tight to patience regardless of dismay; it sent shock-troop fingers to caress her fibrulating heart until the frantic beats slowed; then, slithering between her ventricles with an invertebrate’s fluid beauty, it exposed and blotted her sequestered grief. In the bathroom, octopus-fingers wiped her tears and washed her face; ringing themselves with silver and gold, they dressed her in the perfumed garments of a sacred pledge. They found his five fingerprints on the mirror and tasted that spoor, but it was cold. Long tendrils flowered out of her in all directions to find the one she hunted. Eye-suckers, budding optic nerves, reached through the windowpanes and scanned dawn’s streets, greedy to see where he lurked. Octopus filaments bloomed through the telephone wires, and the steady yellow phone light showed that information was being transferred to her ear. By the time she’d made up her mouth and eyes (they’d be her battle-shield’s device), her pet, exhausted by emboldening her, had itself become nervous. Now it was her turn to take in trust those skinny octopus-arms that were swarming in her heart again (not stroking this time, but darkly flickering like a girl’s armpits up her short sleeves); so she damned the quarry aloud, swearing she’d find means to drown him in the dark blood of love. She combed her hair until it shone like the sun’s tiny triple gleams upon a sand-bound ant, patted powder on her cheeks and smiled into the mirror, not to commune, as he’d done, but to command herself; then, studying the loveliness of her throat, the sure wake of golden light on her forehead, her red-waxed lips, new soft sweater crackling with electricity, tight pants, she laughed aloud. She put on two earrings which would catch the sun like fishing-lures. Then she slung her purse over her shoulder and set out, far ahead of the sleeping platoons.

He was long away by then, in strange shaded places near the church, reaping other girls by the armload, sweeping them down on top of him to do his will. He netted them like birds, kissed them in a roar of lust that rolled their eyes up. They panted shining in his arms. By the time they were able to weapon themselves, he’d rushed off on other forays, and though they tracked him like wolf-dogs, hungry to gulp his blood back into their hollowed hearts, they’d become so crazed in their distress as to break ranks, rounding on each other to dispute the right to sniff his footprints, rending each other’s throats for panicked malice; meanwhile, he was tongue to tongue with some new victim, hypnotizing her to draw him into her house. He went in the front door, exited the back, came in the back door and went out the front, lunging, seeking only to spend himself. But the girl with the octopus mind, more prodigious in pride and lust than any battalion, sought him with rampant cunning. An effeminate boy in suit and tie sat on a shrub-bench with his knees spread like a frog, a cigarette between them. He turned his head in a series of
alert little jerks. She bore him home for a little sport, soldiered him, digested him and spat him out—she’d get the one she wanted in the end. Wetting her lips replete, patting her hair, she went out again, and this time almost won him, but he saw her first, and wisely bolted; there was another girl he lusted to strip. Would it surprise you to learn that he caught that one and pierced her well, drinking up her cries of joy? When he’d robbed her of everything but her broken heart, he retreated to his own lines where his best friend slapped his shoulders laughing, bushwhacking east with him along the north rim of the Grand Canyon, descending gulleys between steep tree-islands, then climbing step by slipping step up the slopes of slipping pine needles, breasting sunny walls of poison oak, climbing lichened limestone stairs and squeezing between oaks and pines that smelled like bees’ nests where birds sang and flies twanged like rubber bands and wide white rainclouds watched the two friends from each hill. They could see the canyon blue and red and purple-banded and vast and striated and old, so old, and a cold breeze wrapped itself around a lightning-struck tree behind which salmon-colored shards of limestone lay, and behind them were the great ridges and spurs of the canyon, and the air came rushing upward and there was a sound of seashells. Here they threw themselves down side by side to compose new strategies of covert penetration for future wars, inflaming each other with more longings for girls with eyes of blue enamel, chewing over the memory-fat of other live-plucked girls; but by then the girl with the octopus mind had fished up the latest jilted one, the corpse stripped empty of its encarnadine prize; her she bribed with sumptuous sympathy to tell all; that was how she learned of his habit of kissing girls’ eyes. —Yes, he kissed mine, too, she said to herself; that was the one thing I didn’t make him do. —At once, casting her new friend back into the pit of grief, leaving her to wail and rot, she returned home behind her bulkheads where the octopus was free to show itself; here, in sight of the bed where she’d been defiled, she tinctured her eyes with various drops until they dazzled the day: beautiful craft, the twin irises blue with green rays as light and narrow as minnows, the pupils glittering like polished hematite! Next she painted with cool marine colors her eyelids which not so long ago had been red with weeping. At last she fluffed her lashes out like lethal spears, and their points caught light and glittered. Thus armed, thus horned like a male gazelle, she set out for the front where her enemy roved. She marauded down the sidewalk-lipped trenches of blackness, spying out the porches, decks and lawns that hid behind the breeze-blown trees, hunting the couples sipping slurpies, prowling past the fatsos who swallowed down another Big Gulp, searching everywhere, stalking him with coaxing bombshells wrist-flipped into his mailbox just as a gas grenade might be launched behind the foe’s lines; in the moon-ridden heat of her frenzied nights her fingers scuttered from page to page of the phone book; and so, unsurpassed in mobility, eye-elevated in striking power, she flushed him out like the judgment of Heaven. Instantaneously she closed on him, raking and slashing with those love-lashes of hers, hooking him deep with every lash-point until he hung gape-mouthed like a trout, impaled and bleeding with admiration for her eyes; but just when he seemed defeated he somehow wrenched himself away, and his best friend sprang into the breach to woo her, see if she’d let him sow his crop while the other boy stanched his wounds in safety behind the lines. Whirling
him
aside, she pursued her prey, ripping her gaze through walls and windows to ground him, but he knew full well what to do, shielding himself behind a sweetfaced fat girl who kept pulling her sweatshirt back down her glistening paunch. Soon enough
he was sucking out of her all the bird-notes of mounting suspense. Just as some women in anger rip down handfuls of air, so the girl with the octopus mind lashed her furious blood with the wiry tentacles of crazed desire. Like some farseeing bird she found the fat girl stripped and vanquished, sobbing with desire for the one who’d loved her. Another new friend! Quickly, now, spread the snares of friendship! Artfully rubbing her back with tentacles that vibrated and veered, opening her up with tradecraft, she recruited the fool’s intelligence. So it all came gurgling out, in between sobs, how he’d kissed her belly, worshiping the soft bulk as if it were a god . . . That was the next weakness of his she learned about. When she’d finished listening shrewdly, milking her drop by drop, as if for affection’s sake, she whelmed the fat girl back down into the grave of sticky tears, leaving her to moan to her heart’s content. For those who regard solidarity in the wars of love will gain only ordinary prizes. Home she sped to her command post, there by that four-poster bed where she’d killed him once; if she carved out her future the way she meant to, he’d soon be tied there again. Behind the mirror where she kept her war-gear, she ran her glance down the ranks of unguents, selecting at last a bottle whose contents, pressed from the fruits of death, she thought to hang her next sortie on. Up with the sweater; expose the torso’s implacable turrets. Take them in hand, aim the nipples straight ahead, lock into place those gunbarrels of sizzling milk. Now for the lotion, worked in with a fingertip, round and round the aureoles that glistened like target rings; the hard nipples, ready to fire, bulged menacing and pink—an easy trick, once she had him, to make him charge her with milk to machine-gun him with while her belly swelled with new love . . . and she tied on her brightest bikini, knowing that multicolored breasts are far more dramatic than when the bathing suit comes off to reveal the same old lumps of gelatinous flesh like the fat girl’s belly: wait till she locked his mouth on those; the luna-moth green and yolk-yellow of her breast-cups would rush out at him like fast-moving troops! Lipsticking herself with no less care than those Greek athletes getting oiled before the wrestling bout, she set out mercilessly, and the door slammed behind her like thunder. This time she thought he’d not dodge her, no matter if he’d whizzed away in Broncos and Amigos with monster wheels, windows open, smog in, radios at maximum volume. From far away she intercepted his nocturnal emissions. Thinking he’d slipped away for good, he was browsing on girls like a buck deer grazing on the steep sunny slope, slowly lifting his legs, puckering his lips, leaning, stretching his neck most incautiously, while his best friend knelt in the high grass, with the sun brightening his antlers. She charged him very quickly, halting him with her eyes like a back-road poacher with his headlights, spearing him with the tips of her hot-colored nipples that dazed and wounded him right through her breast-cups, whistling into his heart to knock him down so that he convulsed and fouled himself with his own blood and the world went clammy, murmurous, but again his best friend roared and covered him with penile fire until he shook his head stupidly and got away from her one last time, the way you elude a breaking wave by swimming out past it, into the place where waves are only rolls of the sea’s fatty belly, lurching and quivering, lifting you effortlessly on ocean bellylaughs. But he was bleeding badly; everything dizzied him hot and smooth like her sun-girl’s breast.