Slapstick Or Lonesome No More! Part 7

"Eliza-" I said, "would it help at all for you to know that Mother will be sick for the rest of our lives about that awful thing we did to you?"

"How could that help?" she said. "That's the dumbest question I ever heard."

She looped a great arm over the shoulders of Norman Mushari, Jr. "Here's who knows how to help people," she said.

I nodded. "We're grateful to him. We really are."

"He's my mother and father and brother and G.o.d, all wrapped up in one," she said. "He gave me the gift of life!

"He said to me, 'Money isn't going to make you feel any better, Sweetheart, but we're going to sue the p.i.s.s out of your relatives anyway.'"

"Um," I said.

"But it sure helps a h.e.l.l of a lot more than your expressions of guilt, I must say. Those are just boasts about your own wonderful sensibilities."

She laughed unpleasantly. "But I can see where you and Mother might want to boast about your guilt. After all, it's the only thing you two monkeys ever earned."

Hi ho.

24.

I a.s.sUMED THAT a.s.sUMED THAT E ELIZA had now a.s.saulted my self-respect with every weapon she had. I had somehow survived. had now a.s.saulted my self-respect with every weapon she had. I had somehow survived.

Without pride, with a clinical and cynical sort of interest, I noted that I had a cast-iron character which would repel attacks, apparently, even if I declined to put up defenses of any other kind.

How wrong I was about Eliza's having expended her fury!

Her opening attacks had been aimed merely at exposing the cast iron in my character. She had merely sent out light patrols to cut down the trees and shrubs in front of my character, to strip it of its vines, so to speak.

And now, without my realizing it, the sh.e.l.l of my character stood before her concealed howitzers at nearly point-blank range, as naked and brittle as a Franklin stove.

Hi ho.

There was a lull. Eliza prowled about my livingroom, looking at my books, which she couldn't read, of course. Then she returned to me, and she c.o.c.ked her head, and she said, "People get into Harvard Medical School because they can read and write?"

"I worked very hard, Eliza," I said. "It wasn't easy for me. It isn't easy now."

"If Bobby Brown becomes a doctor," she said, "that will be the strongest argument I ever heard for the Christian Scientists."

"I will not be the best doctor there ever was," I said. "I won't be the worst, either."

"You might be a very good man with a gong," she said. She was alluding to recent rumors that the Chinese had had remarkable successes in treating breast cancer with the music of ancient gongs. "You look like a man," she said, "who could hit a gong almost every time."

"Thank you," I said.

"Touch me," she said.

"Pardon me?" I said.

"I'm your own flesh. I'm your sister. Touch me," she said.

"Yes, of course," I said. But my arms seemed queerly paralyzed.

"Take your time," she said.

"Well-" I said, "since you hate me so-"

"I hate Bobby Brown," she said.

"Since you hate Bobby Brown-" I said.

"And Betty Brown," she said.

"That was so long ago," I said.

"Touch me," she said.

"Oh, Christ, Eliza!" I said. My arms still wouldn't move.

"I'll touch you," she said.

"Whatever you say," I said. I was scared stiff.

"You don't have a heart condition, do you Wilbur?" she said.

"No," I said.

"If I touch you, you promise you won't die?"

"Yes," I said.

"Maybe I'll I'll die," she said. die," she said.

"I hope not," I said.

"Just because I act like I know what's going to happen," she said, "doesn't mean I know what's going to happen. Maybe nothing will happen."

"Maybe," I said.

"I've never seen you so frightened," she said.

"I'm human," I said.

"You want to tell Normie what you're scared about?" she said.

"No," I said.

Eliza, with her fingertips almost brus.h.i.+ng my cheek, quoted from a dirty joke Withers Witherspoon had told another servant when we were children. We had heard it through a wall. The joke had to do with a woman who was wildly responsive during s.e.xual intercourse. In the joke, the woman warned a stranger who was beginning to make love to her.

Eliza pa.s.sed on the sultry warning to me: "Keep your hat on, Buster. We may wind up miles from here."

Then she touched me.

We became a single genius again.

25.

WE WENT BERSERK. It was only by the Grace of G.o.d that we did not tumble out of the house and into the crowd on Beacon Street. Some parts of us, of which I had not been at all aware, of which Eliza had been excruciatingly aware, had been planning a reunion for a long, long time.

I could no longer tell where I stopped and Eliza began, or where Eliza and I stopped and the Universe began. It was gorgeous and it was horrible. Yes, and let this be a measure of the quant.i.ty of energy involved: The orgy went on for five whole nights and days.

Eliza and I slept for three days after that. When I at last woke up, I found myself in my own bed. I was being fed intravenously.

Eliza, as I later found out, had been taken to her own home in a private ambulance.

As for why n.o.body broke us up or summoned help: Eliza and I captured Norman Mushari, Jr., and poor Mother and the servants-one by one.

I have no memory of doing this.

We tied them to wooden chairs and gagged them, apparently, and set them neatly around the diningroom table.

We gave them food and water, thank Heavens, or we would have been murderers. We would not let them go to the toilet, however, and fed them nothing but peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly sandwiches. I apparently left the house several times to get more bread and jelly and peanut b.u.t.ter.

And then the orgy would begin again.

I remember reading out loud to Eliza from books on pediatrics and child psychology and sociology and anthropology, and so on. I had never thrown away any book from any course I had taken.

I remember writhing embraces which alternated with periods of my sitting at my typewriter, with Eliza beside me. I was typing something with superhuman speed.

Hi ho.

When I came out of my coma, Mushari and my own lawyers had already paid my servants handsomely for the agony they had suffered at the dinner table, and for their silence as to the dreadful things they had seen.

Mother had been released from Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospital, and was back in bed in Turtle Bay.

Physically, I had suffered from exhaustion and nothing more.

When I was allowed to rise, however, I was so damaged psychologically that I expected to find everything unfamiliar. If gravity had become variable on that day, as it in fact did many years later, if I had had to crawl about my house on my hands and knees, as I often do now, I would have thought it a highly appropriate response by the Universe to all I had been through.

But little had changed. The house was tidy.

The books were back in their shelves. A broken thermostat had been replaced. Three diningroom chairs had been sent out for repairs. The diningroom carpet was somewhat piebald, pale spots indicating where stains had been removed.

The one proof that something extraordinary had happened was itself a paradigm of tidiness. It was a ma.n.u.script-on a coffee table in the livingroom, where I had typed so furiously during the nightmare.

Eliza and I had somehow written a manual on childrearing.

Was it any good? Not really. It was only good enough to become, after The Bible and The Joy of Cooking The Joy of Cooking, the most popular book of all time.

Hi ho.

I found it so helpful when I began to practice pediatrics in Vermont that I had it published under a pseudonym, Dr. Eli W. Rockmell, M.D., a sort of garbling of Eliza's and my names.

The publisher thought up the t.i.tle, which was So You Went and Had a Baby So You Went and Had a Baby.

During our orgy, though, Eliza and I gave the ma.n.u.script a very different t.i.tle and sort of authors.h.i.+p, which was this: THE CRY OF THE NOCTURNAL.

GOATSUCKER.

by BETTY AND BOBBY BROWN.

26.

AFTER THE ORGY, mutual terror kept us apart. I was told by our go-between, Norman Mushari, Jr., that Eliza was even more shattered by the orgy than I had been.

"I almost had to put her away again-" he said, "for good cause this time."

Machu Picchu, the old Inca capital on the roof of the Andes in Peru, was then becoming a haven for rich people and their parasites, people fleeing social reforms and economic declines, not just in America, but in all parts of the world. There were even some full-sized Chinese there, who had declined to let their children be miniaturized.

And Eliza moved into a condominium down there, to be as far away as possible from me.

When Mushari came to my house to tell me about Eliza's prospective move to Peru, a week after the orgy, he confessed that he himself had become severely disoriented while tied to a diningroom chair.

"You looked more and more like Frankenstein monsters to me," he said. "I became convinced that there was a switch somewhere in the house that controlled you. I even figured out which switch it was. The minute I untied myself, I ran to it and tore it out by the roots."

It was Mushari who had ripped the thermostat from the wall.

To demonstrate to me how changed he was, he admitted that he had been wholly motivated by self-interest when he set Eliza free. "I was a bounty-hunter," he said, "finding rich people in mental hospitals who didn't belong there-and setting them free. I left the poor to rot in their dungeons."

"It was a useful service all the same," I said.