A case of curiosities (31 page)

He responded in kind, returning missiles with an accuracy perfected during youth. His anger grew as his ammunition diminished until, unthinkingly, he reached for the Portrait in Little he had always cherished, and flung it at the woman it portrayed. The miniature shattered against the wall.

With nothing more to throw, the assault turned verbal.

Claude cried, "You flirt with men and ideas alike, dropping one for another, absent of constancy."

Alexandra replied, "It is better than your pathetic lip wisdoms and your childish manipulations."

The two grappled. In the strain, sweat accumulated on Alexandra's fuzzy lip and negated the cosmetological efforts she had made earlier behind the screen of the tub room. Her face grew so overheated that her makeup—a combination of bacon grease and vegetable rouge that received the approval of an academy — began to drip. A tiny velvet beauty mark slid down her chin. At that moment, aggression turned to passion, as if the two emotions were linked together. The couple fell to the floor. Alexandra tore through Claude's clothes. The jingle of broken household goods and personal effects was replaced by the grunts and groans of angry love, a sound interrupted only occasionally, when the linnet chirped overhead.

Under the wings of Claude's creations, they made love with desperate intensity. But less than an hour after Alexandra had mounted the stairs and then Claude, the union was over. The mistress gathered together her belongings, hitting her head yet again while reaching for the pocketbook that had been pushed under the drawbridge bed by a flailing leg. She picked up her handkerchief and washed herself with rainwater from Claude's clever basin. Plucking hay off her skin and clothes and adjusting her wig, she reapplied her face as much as she could without aid of toilet table and domestic. She organized her scrippage, then fiddled with a gold chain that held a cross and the ribboned bell Claude had given her. Unable to decide whether to put the chain over the ribbon or the ribbon over the chain, she removed the ribboned bell completely and left it on the table. Then, sensing her lover's distress, she picked up the bell and tied it, with some reluctance, to an inner fold of her dress.

Claude contemplated the failure of the rendezvous as Alexandra prepared to leave. After the skirmish, he would happily have lingered in the mingled residue of love. Alexandra responded oppositely. She had done nothing in anticipation of the meeting and now wanted to deterge herself completely of it. For Alexandra, Claude's love was an annoying sore that had been picked and required treatment. Once fully clothed, she stated her feelings with insensitive redundance. "I wish to make the finality of this last encounter perfectly clear," she said. "I can no longer afford your diversions, and I have sent a letter to Livre stating so. He will receive it tomorrow, if it is not already in his hands. I have bills to pay. Expenses. Substantial expenses." She unfolded a piece of paper that had fallen from her handbag, and read aloud:

Memorandum of fees of the Officiality relative to one Jean Hugon, wigmaker, accused by his wife of impotence:

— for the order of 29 March appointing physicians and surgeons to visit the said Hugon 12 livres

— for the recess of the cross-examination on same day 24 livres

— for the recess for the various reports 24 livres

— for the fees paid to the physicians and surgeons 48 livres

— for paper 1 o livres

"A total of 118 livres. And that is just one visit. There were several. 1 wish I could say the accounts are all paid and add this to those scraps." She looked at Claude's wall of paper. "But I cannot. And I must point out that these are just some of the stated costs. Bribes more than double what I have had to take loans on. All of which makes expenses such as you, my little mechanician, impossible."

"Was I only an expense?"

"Not only, no. But an expense nonetheless."

Claude felt dismissed like some hired hand. He fought for her, out of desperation, arguing blindly. "I was informed that your financial situation was quite secure, that the court's decision provided you with an annuity."

"You know that, too, do you? Well, perhaps it has. My allocation is well specified. I have been granted a chambermaid, a valet, and a life income of 500 livres. That is not enough. I seek a widower of some substance, preferably a man with an indulgent nature."

Claude, close to tears, tried to be logical, which is the last refuge of a lover denied love. But Alexandra said coldly, "It is over. I have no regrets, and you should have none either. I was unfortunate enough to marry a man with a penis the size of a wart and testicles smaller than two field peas. You allowed me to forget his inadequacies. For that I thank you. My God! Do you know what it was like to pass whole nights with him upon me? My body was forced to suffer inconceivable distress and pain. A thousand vain efforts, from book readings to the crude application of clenched fists and ironwork. And despite all that, he left me in the same state in which he found me. Do not forget that you have benefited from our liaison. I have given you time and funds. We should both be thankful. Now I must leave." She ended her speech and made her way out the door.

Her last words were these: "We will never set eyes on each other again."

The claim was disputable; Claude's suffering was not. That is why he was crouching under the' enema-pump fountain in a tear-stained daze, his sobs competing with the linnet's chirp.

Piero was the first to hear of the rupture, and though he made efforts to sympathize, the Venetian miscalculated the depths of his neighbor's despair. He had never himself been in love. While he made any number of appropriate comments, those comments lacked conviction. He ran out and returned with an apple bought for waxing. He wiped off the clay and plaster (he was testing out Benoist's method) and offered it to his friend.

"I wish my life were over," Claude said.

Piero responded with awkward humor. "Consider the im-practicalities of self-murder. Arsenical soap is too expensive. The house's framework would probably not support the strain of a rope. And that dormer is misplaced to effect a dramatic plummet. Even if you were to squeeze through, Alexandra has already coached off, so that landing dead at her feet is now impossible. I propose something else. A collaboration." He pulled out a catchpenny print of an abada. "It was just caught off the Bengal coast. I think we can do one up with a chicken, two oxtails, and a horse's head, though the horns will be difficult to apply. But we can try to turn that pain of yours into beauty and transform your anger into art. The world hasn't come to an end. And if you think that it has, then create some mighty mechanical Apocalypse. Construct the Destruction of the World at the moment of the Last Judgment. I am sure you could outdo Diirer's Fourth Horseman."

That was the last comparison Claude wished to consider. The mount's monstrously large organs of assault did nothing to cheer up the rejected lover. Nor did it ignite the inventive flame that had been blown out when Alexandra closed the garret door.

Piero tried more compliments and more jokes. But the compliments were of no consequence, and the jokes fell flat. Claude decided to leave his lodgings. He felt oppressed and needed to escape the site of his humiliation. He had planned to meet Plumeaux and the coachman after his teunion with Alexandta, to ptovide them with details of conquest. The encountet would now take on a mote melancholy tone.

As he was leaving the gattet, he met the wet nutse passing through the couttyatd. Matguetite asked what was wtong. He did not have the sttength to resist telling net.

The wet nurse said, "It seems this woman could forgive anything but happiness." She tried to comfort him by redirecting his thoughts in much the same way Piero had. "Surely, the pleasures of construction will distract you from your pain."

He shook his head.

She wanted to give him a hug, but, encumbered as she was by a baby tugging at her hair, she could not. Sounding uncannily like his mother, she offered up a homily. "The young," she said, "are subjected to splinters, scrapes, and scars." The baby drooled. "The traumas of men take place here." She reached out and touched the general vicinity of Claude's heart. The baby wailed, and Marguerite gave over her finger to the infant's tiny hand. Instinctively it grabbed on.

THE COACHMAN AND the journalist did what they could to bolster their unhappy companion. Since one of Claude's friends was a voluptuary of food and the other of women, there was some disagreement about which of the deadly sins would most help to alleviate the hurt. The coachman suggested a pub crawl at the outskirts of the city, where he had intimate acquaintance with a string of taverns purveying hearty food and decent, untaxed wine. Plumeaux thought a hunt for venereal pleasures would better serve their wounded friend. In the skirmish between gluttony and lust, gluttony won out — at least, at first.

The coachman hitched Lucille to a loppy carriage mare and pointed her toward the Royal Drum, a wine shop beyond the city limits. The Drum was famous for crude graffiti and dented tankards that could be cheaply filled with modest wine.

As they entered, the coachman and Plumeaux displayed the kind of excessive enthusiasm found in those hungry for good cheer. Claude and Plumeaux settled themselves in a dark booth while the coachman tested out one of his schemes. Pulling up his breeches and grabbing the attention of the hostler, he cited rules prohibiting the use of lees for house wine. (They could only be turned into vinegar.) The hostler had heard the ruse before. "And do not try improper stoppling or bogus measuring cups or the charge of imbuing the wine with false aromatics. All those gambits have been used." The hostler threatened not to serve them, and so the coachman quietly paid for the drink and returned to his friends.

Claude recounted the story of his rejection. His friends stared at their tankards before drinking deeply and ordering another round. The coachman dispensed praise of Claude, while the journalist poured contempt on Alexandra. The mix was awkward and offered little in the way of solace.

The coachman lifted himself out of the booth to order a carbonade. "Consider it homage to our first encounter at the Pig."

"I have no appetite," Claude said meekly.

Plumeaux said, "She wasn't good enough for you. She suffered from chronic distraction. Given the chance, I would have her ducked. I do not refer to the normal method of naval punishment in which one forces the harlot to straddle a thick batten. That seems hardly adequate. I was thinking of ducking the way they do it in Marseille. Your Madame Hugon should be shut up, stripped to the shift, in an iron cage that is fastened to the yard of a shallop." The journalist indicated the rest of the procedure by the leverage of his arm. "After a few of those, I have no doubt she would repent."

"But, surely, our friend here can come up with an even nastier invention," the coachman said when he returned to the booth.

Claude refused to oblige them with mechanical improvements on Plumeaux's method of retribution. "What is the point of producing new devices when the others were so casually dismissed? Besides, I will no longer have the time or funds to fashion my ingenuities. I will be returning to the drudgery of the Globe."

"So end your association," the coachman said. "With your talents, you could get funds fot projects through subscription. Fotget the bookshop. Putsue yout plans, the goals outlined in your lecture."

"The coachman is tight," the journalist said. "The wealthy are quick to toss money at invention, as long as it does not threaten."

"That has not been my experience," Claude said. "Besides, how do you expect me to leave the Globe?"

"If you want to leave, you must make Livre want you to leave. The alternative, Claude, is to be held in the perpetual employ of a chutlish, brutal, rude, pathetic little snarler."

The coachman hiccuped and rolled his eyes. "Plumeaux. You're not being paid by the word."

The three drinkers fast moved to a more demonsttative state of inebriation. The journalist sang a ballad of his own composition. It concerned Madame Hugon's husband. While the words do not translate all that well, the final refrain went:

Oh the wondrous three E's

Oh how they do please

Entrance, Erection, and Ejaculation

One man's short-coming is another's salvation.

The coachman laughed uproariously under the burden of the final pun. Soon other patrons of the Royal Drum joined in, shouting what was latet chapbooked under the title The Ballad of the Impotent Man. The evening progressed with the singers drinking and the drinkers singing, until all the patrons of the Royal Drum were pounding their greasy tankards to the beat of the ballad, a rhythm of release Claude very much needed. He stared out at the bottles behind the bar. The glass and crockery swayed and underwent change. The hostler became a stout, talkative btandy bottle, and the coachman turned into a cloth-wrapped demijohn. The transubstantiations unsettled Claude.

"I think it best if we leave and get some air," he gasped.

The three drunken friends worked out the bill with the hostler and stumbled to the coach. Insulated by the padded comforts of Lucille's interior, Claude confessed his anguish. "I was part of her diversions but never a part of her life. How is it that venom and sweetness can intermingle so freely? A paradox. How is it that the moment I most despised her was the moment of greatest rapture? My ecstasy and hatred were never more profound." Claude then leaned out the window and vomited.

Plumeaux said, "I am well acquainted with the path of inebriation. From feeling gay, one turns sullen and sick—you have just gone through the sick state. From there it is on to furious lewdness. What you need now is a means of enduring that final condition." He told the coachman to take them to a street behind the Palais-Royal.

They reached their destination at an hour when most tower clocks had stopped striking. Plumeaux and Claude jumped off Lucille. They stumbled. "You're as pickled as broom-buds jarred in brine," the coachman said before driving off. The two friends careened onward by foot, pausing to listen to the offers of a hot-potato seller and a gap-toothed streetwalker dotted with beauty spots. Both enticements were declined. They paused to urinate prodigiously against the shutters of a wigmaker's shop. Plumeaux fished into his pockets and pulled out a brass coin. He slapped it into Claude's hand. "It's not regular currency. Consider it a token of my affection. Of should I say a token for someone else's."