The 1st Deadly Sin

the display, citing a number of complaints he had received from local churches, merchants, and outraged citizens. So the bikini-clad Saint Nicholas was moved to the back of the store, the window filled with miscellaneous erotic Christmas gifts, and Flo and Sam decided to inaugurate the extended-hours shopping season with an open house; free Swedish glug for old and new customers and a dazzling buffet that included such exotic items as fried grasshoppers and chocolate-covered ants.

Daniel Blank and Celia Montfort were specifically invited to this feast and asked to return to the Mortons’ apartment later for food and drink of a more substantial nature. They accepted.

The air was overheated-and scented. Two antique Byzantine censers hung suspended in corners; from their pierced shells drifted fumes of musky incense called “Orgasm,” one of Erotica’s best sellers. Customers checked their coats and hats with a dark, exquisite, sullen Japanese girl clad in diaphanous Arabian Nights pajamas beneath which she wore no brassiere-only sheer panties imprinted with small reproductions of Mickey Mouse. Incredibly, her pubic hair was blond.

Celia and Daniel stood to one side, observing the hectic scene, sipping small cups of spiced, steaming glug. The store was crowded with loud-voiced, flush-faced customers, most of them young, all wearing the kinky, trendy fashions of the day. They weren’t clothed; they were costumed. Their laughter was shrill, their movements jerky as they pushed through the store, examining phallic candles, volumes of Aubrey Beardsley prints, leather brassieres, jockstraps fashioned in the shape of a clutching hand.

“They’re so excited,” Daniel Blank said. “The whole world’s excited.”

Celia looked up at him and smiled faintly. Her long black hair, parted in the middle, framed her witch’s face. As usual, she was wearing no makeup, though her eyes seemed shadowed with a bone-deep weariness.

“What are you thinking?” she asked him, and he realized once again how ideas, abstract ideas, aroused her.

“About the world,” he said, looking around the frantic room. “The ruttish world. About people today. How stimulated they all are.”

“Sexually stimulated?”

“That, of course. But in other ways. Politically. Spiritually, I guess. Violence. The new. The terrible hunger for the new, the different, the ‘in thing.’ And what’s in is out in weeks, days. In sex, art, politics, everything. It all seems to be going faster and faster. It wasn’t always like this, was it?”

“No,” she said, “it wasn’t.”

“The in thing,” he repeated. “Why do they call it ‘in’? Penetration?”

Now she looked at him curiously. “Are you drunk?” she asked.

He was surprised. “On two paper cups of Swedish glug?

No,” he laughed, “I am not drunk.”

He touched her cheek with warm fingers. She grabbed his hand, turned her head to kiss his fingertips, then slid his thumb into her wet mouth, tongued it, drew it softly out. He looked swiftly about the room; no one was staring.

“I wish you were my sister,” he said in a low voice.

She was silent a moment, then asked, “Why did you say that?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think about it. I just said it.”

“Are you tired of sex?” she asked shrewdly.

“What? Oh no. No. Not exactly. It’s just…” He waved at the crowded room. “It’s just that they’re not going to find it this way.”

“Find what?”

“Oh…you know. The answer.”

The evening had that chopped, chaotic tempo that now infected all his hours: life speeding in disconnected scenes, a sharply cut film, images and distortions in an accelerating frenzy: faces, places, bodies, speech and ideas swimming up to the lens, enlarging, then dwindling away, fading. It was difficult to concentrate on any one experience; it was best simply to open himself to sensation, to let it all engulf him.

“Something’s happening to me,” he told her. “I see these people here, and on the street, and at work, and I can’t believe I belong with them. The same race, I mean. They seem to me dogs, or animals in a zoo. Or perhaps I am. But I can’t relate. But if they are human, I am not. And if I am, they are not. I just don’t recognize them. I’m apart from them.”

“You are apart from them,” she said softly. “You’ve done something so meaningful that it sets you apart.”

“Oh yes,” he said, laughing happily. “I have, haven’t I? If they only knew…”

“How does it feel?” she asked him. “I mean…knowing? Satisfaction? Pleasure?”

“That, of course,” he nodded, feeling an itch of joy at talking of these things in a crowded, noisy room (he was naked but no one could see). “But mostly a feeling of-of gratification that I’ve been able to accomplish so much.”

“Oh yes, Dan,” she breathed, putting a hand on his arm.

“Am I mad?” he asked. “I’ve been wondering.”

“Is it important?”

“No. Not really.”

“Look at these people,” she gestured. “Are they sane?”

“No,” he said. “Well…maybe. But whether they’re sane or mad, I’m different from them.”

“Of course you are.”

“And different from you,” he added, smiling.

She shivered, a bit, and moved closer to him.

“Do we have to go to the Mortons?” she murmured.

“We don’t have to. I think we should.”

“We could go to your place. Or my place. Our place.”

“Let’s go to the Mortons,” he said, smiling again and feeling it on his face.

They waited until Flo and Sam were ready to leave. Then they all shared a big cab back to the Mortons’ apartment. Flo and Sam gabbled away in loud voices. Daniel Blank sat on the monkey seat, smiled and smiled.

Blanche had prepared a roast duckling garnished with peach halves. And there were small roasted potatoes and a tossed salad of romaine and Italian water cress. She brought the duckling in on a carving board to show it around for their approval before returning it to the kitchen to quarter it.

It looked delicious, they agreed, with its black, crusty skin and gleaming peach juice. And yet, when Daniel Blank’s full plate was put before him, he sat a moment and stared; the food offended him.

He could not say why, but it happened frequently of late. He would go into a familiar restaurant, alone or with Celia, order a dish that he had had before, that he knew he liked, and then, when the food was put before him, he had no appetite and could scarcely toy with it.

It was just so-so physical. That steaming mixture to be cut into manageable forkfuls and shoved through the small hole that was his mouth, to emerge, changed and compounded, a day later via another small hole. Perhaps it was the vulgarity of the process that offended him. Or its animality. Whatever, the sight of food, however well prepared, now made him queasy. It was all he could do, for politeness’ sake, to eat a bit of his duckling quarter, two small potatoes, dabble in the salad. He wasn’t comfortable until, finally, they were seated on sofas and in soft chairs, having black coffee and vodka stingers.

“Hey, Dan,” Samuel Morton said abruptly, “you got any money to invest?”

“Sure,” Blank said amiably. “Not a lot, but some. In what?”

“First of all, this health club you belong to-what does it cost you?”

“Five hundred a year. That doesn’t include massage or food, if you want it. They have sandwiches and salads. Nothing fancy.”

“Liquor?”

“You can keep a bottle in your locker if you like. They sell set-ups.”

“A swimming pool?”

“A small one. And a small sundeck. Gymnasium, of course. A sauna. What’s this all about?”

“Can you swim naked in the pool?”

“Naked? I don’t know. I suppose you could if you wanted to. It’s for men only. I’ve never seen anyone do it.