bedroom. It wasn’t the first time, either. She still heard the voices. Things were still overflowing and burning all over the place. I didn’t need glasses to see the writing on the wall.
I managed to End a slice of ham in the fridge. I rolled it up like a crepe and bit into it. It was totally flavorless. I was still alive. Things were exactly as they should be.
24
There was one Sunday that was no fun at all. The weather, however, was beautiful. We got up fairly early. At the stroke of nine, there was loud knocking on the door downstairs. I slipped on some shorts and went down to see. It was a guy in a suit-perfect hair, little black hanky, perfectly folded, and a BIG SMILE.
“Good day, sir. Do you believe in God?”
“No.”
“Well, then I’d like to talk to you…”
“Wait,” I said. “I was just joking. Of course I believe.”
Big smile. VERY BIG SMILE.
“Even better. We put out a small booklet…”
“How much?”
“All monies go directly for…”
“Naturally. How much?”
“Sir, for the price of five packs of cigarettes…”
I took a bill out of my pocket. I gave it to him and closed the door. Knock, knock. I opened the door.
“You forgot your booklet…” he said.
“No I didn’t,” I said. “I don’t need it. I’ve just bought a little piece of Heaven, haven’t I…?”
While I was closing the door again, a ray of sunshine smacked me right in the eye. If it had been my mouth I might have said, “While I was closing the door a sourball slid onto my tongue.” A vision of sea and waves came over me. I ran up the stairs. I sent the sheets flying all over the room.
“Hey, I feel like seeing the sea!” I shouted. “Don’t you?”
“It’s sort of far, but if you want to…”
“In two hours you’ll be roasting on the beach.”
“I’m as good as ready,” she said.
I watched her stand up in the middle of the bed, nude, as if hatching from some striped egg. I put my naughty thoughts off for later, though-the sun wouldn’t wait.
It was a very chic spot-very trendy-but then there are assholes everywhere. They stay around all year, so the stores and restaurants stay open. Finding a beach that isn’t too dirty means paying for it. We paid for it. There was almost no one there. We swam and swam, then swam some more. Then we got hungry. You had to pay to take a shower, too… and to get your car out of the lot. And for this, and for that. In the end, I just kept my hands loaded with change, ready to toss it away on the slightest pretext. The place seemed like a huge money machine- nothing was free.
We ate at a sidewalk cafe, under a fake straw umbrella. On the other side of the street were about twenty young women, every one with a four- or five-year-old child-fair-haired boys with fathers in business and mothers who either sat home getting bored or went out to get bored. The waiter explained that the little darlings were there to audition for a commercial-to bring us to tears in a spot for an insurance company: BUILD THEM A FUTURE. I thought it was pretty funny. One look at those kids, full of joy, good health, and money, and you really didn’t worry much about their future-depending on how you looked at it, of course.
By the time we dug into our peach melba, they’d already been there for an hour, getting restless in the sun. The kids were running all over the place. The mothers were getting nervous. From time to time they’d call one over to fix his hair or brush away some invisible speck of dust. The sun was turning into an amphetamine rain-a crazy 110-volt shower.
“Jesus, they really got to want that stupid check,” said Betty.
I glanced over my sunglasses at the ladies, swallowing a scoopful of whipped cream and candy sprinkles.
“It’s not just the check. They want to build a lasting monument to their beauty.”
“They got to be crazy, leaving those kids out in the sun like that…”
The ladies’ jewels glinted in the sun. We could hear them sighing and bitching from across the street. I looked down, trying to concentrate on my peach melba. Madness is everywhere. Not one day goes by without human misery pouring forth before your very eyes. It doesn’t take much. Small details: some guy who catches your eye at the local market, just getting into your car or buying a newspaper, closing your eyes in the afternoon and listening to the sounds of the street-or having to deal with a pack of chewing gum that has eleven sticks in it. It doesn’t take much to see that the world is always laughing behind your back. I rid my mind of all those women, because I knew them too well-I didn’t need any more examples. I didn’t plan on hanging around. They could stay there burning to a crisp on the sidewalk if they wanted-
I was gone for quite a while. There were pay toilets and I was out of change. I had to break a bill at the cash register. The thing kept flushing by itself, and the stall door was on a timer… All in all I wasted a lot of time. When I got back to the table, Betty was gone. I sat down. A thin veil of worry came over me. It suddenly seemed to be much warmer out. I noticed that she hadn’t finished her dessert-the vanilla ice cream glistened. I was hypnotized by it.
I came to, thanks to the women yelling across the street. I hadn’t paid attention to what was going on-just some flock of seagulls squawking in the sun for no reason-then I saw that they were genuinely upset. They were looking in my direction. One of them in particular seemed especially shook up.
“Tommy! Oh, my little Tommy!” she screamed.
I figured that little Tommy had gotten sunstroke, or melted, like snow. It didn’t tell me where Betty was.
I was going to yell to them that I wasn’t a doctor, when I saw a dozen of them start across the street. I was going to yell that there was nothing I could do, but something stopped me. They stepped over the little wall that separated the cafe from the sidewalk, and surrounded me. I tried to smile. Tommy’s mother seemed totally out of her mind-she ogled me as if I were Quasimodo, and her friends weren’t much better. I was getting bad vibrations. Before I could figure out what was happening, the woman threw herself at me, demanding that I give her her child hack. I fell over backward in my chair, baffled. I scraped my elbow. I stood up. Thoughts were going through my mind at the speed of light, but I couIdn’t manage to grab hold of one. The woman burst into tears, shrieking as if she wanted to burn me at the stake. They had formed a semicircle around me. They weren’t bad looking, but at that precise moment I was probably not their type. One second more and they would jump me, I knew it. I knew, too, that I was going to have to pay for the heat, the wait, their boredom, and a hundred other things that weren’t my fault. This got me so mad I couldn’t even open my mouth. One of them had sky-blue fingernails-this in itself would have made me sick under normal circumstances.
“That girl you were with…” she hissed, “I saw her take off with my son…!”
“What girl?” I said.
By the time my words hit their ears, I had already jumped over three tables and was halfway inside the restaurant. I left them in the dust. Pack of witches. I heard them roaring, hot on my heels. I managed to close the door of the men’s room before they got me. They didn’t have the key. I held the door, looking around frantically. The waiter was finishing taking a piss. He raised his eyebrows. I pulled out a wad of bills. He agreed to hold the door for me. Behind the thin wooden panel, inlaid with cardboard Masonite, you could hear the women pounding and screaming. It was the kind of door you can go through like a ricecake, with one good kick. I stuffed two more bills in his pocket. Then I climbed out the window.
I found myself in a small courtyard leading to the kitchen. The garbage cans were overflowing, rusted in the
