Isn't It Romantic? (5 page)

The affair itself would be al fresco, around noontime and under the shingle oak shade trees beside Saint Bernard's Church over there on Third Street, the Reverend Picarazzi officiating. Chantilly lace gowns, layered organza, or tiers of tulle with little pearl beading. And for him a stroller or morning coat, with striped pants and a four-in-hand tie.

The hitch in his scheme was that Iona had no clue of it and she really ought to be involved—or so his
Modern Bride
hinted. And then there was the problem of the newly available Dick Tupper. She'd been trying to hide it since high school, but Iona was crazily in love with him, had been goofy about the older man since she was a little girl, even high-tailed it to Omaha because she thought she'd do injury to his wife over how she was mistreating him. So it was fortunate, Carlo thought, that Natalie and Pierre so glamorously waltzed into town. The mademoiselle was the kind of independent, educated, put-together lady Dick would be enchanted by, and Pierre, he was sure, was one of those wealthy, suave, and handsome louts that even smart women went ga-ga over. Carlo felt sure he need only play the spaniel, the pert and nimble spirit of mirth, and when Dick's attentions were wildly misdirected, and Iona's foolish choice became crushingly clear, Carlo would be there to commiserate, to superpraise her parts, to hold Iona as she cried, to offer forgeries of grief and insult, to agree that men were heels, lechers, scoundrels, and skunks—but not you, Carlo, you're different, Carlo, you're so generous, gentle, and good.

The liquor of such thoughts intoxicated him and it would be six before Carlo got into his Revels costume as the Marquis de Sade.

 

In Owen's living room, fourteen opened bottles of mixed shapes and sizes stood upright on the red carpet and, affected by drink, Pierre crawled on his hands and knees from one to another, sniffing inside with his scholarly nose as Owen talked on the telephone. “Orville? Owen here. Say, that wine-tasting day after tomorrow? Don't ask me how, but I came up with a genuine French
négociant
to be there. . .
.
Négociant.
. . . A merchant. . .
. Means he sells wines. . .
. Uh huh. All the way from Paris. . .
. No, not Texas; France. . .
. On a bus. . .
. Well, I s'pose he
flew
across the ocean. . .
. A
lot
of people do. . .
. You ask him that on Friday. And get the word out. . .
. Okay.
Au revoir
.” Owen hung up the phone. “Low-brow. Works on a snowplow in winter.”

Pierre slunk against an ottoman, thinking. “Are these use-ed bottles?”

Owen nodded. “I get 'em for a nickel a piece from the café and the Last Chance Saloon over there in Three Pillows.”

“The bouquet that I first thought so strange, he comes from the bottles, not the Big Red. You must sterilize.”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” Owen said.

“And always, always the Bordeaux bottles; never the Cutty Sark; never the Aunt Jemima.”

“I'll jot it on my shirt cuff,” Owen said, and hunkered next to Pierre, his elbows on his knees. “This is what I've been missing. The give and take. The badinage. The happy workshop atmosphere where strong opinions are meted out, not in a spirit of jealousy, but in a transparent desire to improve the final product.”

Pierre was at a loss.

Owen was brimming with a notion, but was holding on and tamping it down for fear it would burst out as an abject plea. But finally he could resist no more and said with the quietness of the sober-minded, “The fact is, we could go halvesies on it.”

“Have-sees?”

Owen stood and silently paced, his hand to his chin, prowling and ruminating, then turned and sat against the dining room sideboard with Husker dishware in it. He waved a hand at his surroundings. “House I grew up in. The gas station? My dad's. And here I am, in my thirties, big-boned, no wife or kids, just a fool of a Husker fan with a job any child could do and one great big impossible dream. You can make that dream come true,
mon frère
.” Owen's head hung. “Hell, I feel like I'm proposing here. Am I coming on too strong?”

Pierre answered weakly, “We are hardly even friends.”

Owen punched his left palm with his fist. “I
knew
it! I always
rush
! I'm such an
idiot
!” With frustration and shame, he stomped his shoes alternately, shaking the house. Owen faced him bleakly. “So where do we go from here?”

In the gas station office a frail female voice trilled, “Yoo hoo!”

Owen shot up and walked towards it. “Aunt Opal?” he called.

When Owen opened the office door, Pierre heard the elderly woman say in a faint giggle, as if it were risqué, “We'd like to rent
Gigi
for tonight.”

“Well, I aim to please,” Owen said.

Pierre tipped a final inch of wine into his plastic cup and sipped it as the transaction was completed. And then Owen closed the privacy door behind him again, no doubt wondering if their friendship had been chilled by the cold demands of business. But Pierre held up a bottle in the shape of a hula dancer and waggled its empty hips. “We have finished the one-point loss to Kansas State.”

Owen lifted up another bottle from the floor, read its back label, and woefully announced, “Miami.”

“
Encore!
” Pierre said, and held out his plastic wine cup.

The kitchen screen door creaked open and Dick Tupper made a grand entrance, his mustache waxed, his manner lacquered, costumed as he was in the scarlet satin cloak, soutane, and biretta of Cardinal de Richelieu. He held out a frock coat, tights, patent leather pumps, and a Louis XIV powdered white wig as he said, “I got your getup here, Pierre.”

9

A
nd so The Revels were royally begun at the fairgrounds that evening, the citizens of Seldom milling about like
Les Misérables
in the costumes of French chambermaids, urchins, revolutionaries, streetwalkers, and Parisian apaches, with one lone Mahatma Gandhi unsure of his history.

Mademoiselle Clairvaux wore a powdered white turban of a wig and an ornate Marie Antoinette dress whose architecture pinched her waist like an hourglass and made her still-youthful chest resemble melons riding on a shelf. She was given the job of cutting the ribbon at the weedy entrance to the carnival rides, and of announcing onstage what image a horrible mime was trying to convey: “Here he is trapped inside a box. See? He is feeling the many sides with his hands.” “And now a wind is blowing him. We see it is very strong. Oh, he's lost his hat.”

And then Pierre was forced to go up on stage in his silly leotards, crushed velvet pantaloons, and wig of a thousand ringlets, acting the part of the Sun King and shouting out the faulty French on a scroll that intended to detail how Bernard LeBoeuf chanced upon the area while trapping mink and thought he'd seldom encountered such pretty country. Owen shot a cannon into a cornfield as soon as Pierre concluded, and the wildly applauding Seldomites heaved their
bonnets rouges
high into the air, shouted a mysterious phrase they seemed to think was French, and then immediately commenced their Kiss-a-Pig Contest. (Won again by Chester Hartley, an old bachelor who raised barrows and gilts on a farm just east of Three Pillows.)

As king of The Revels Pierre was called upon to fire the starter's pistol that initiated the demolition derby, and he watched in stunned wonder as twelve cars peeled out in reverse, swerving to crash tail-first into each other, their trunk lids flying up and nodding, their mufflers and chassis scouring the earth, their wadded fenders floundering uselessly, until only Bert Slaughterbeck's new Buick was still running and he squirmed out the driver's side window and held his arms high in victory before he looked at his wrecked and steaming car somewhat quizzically, as if the consequences of the competition were something he had not completely thought through.

Meanwhile Natalie threw the switch that electrified the carnival's lighting, which was yellow in order to discourage a hundred varieties of whining insect, and she delivered queenly waves to the shrieking children on rides that were called the Zipper, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Upsy-Daisy, the Scared Rabbit. She was then permitted to go back to Mrs. Christiansen's rooming house, where she changed into a white sundress and affectionately sniffed her yellow King's Ransom rose as she watched with interest the video of
Gigi
with Marvyl and Owen's Aunt Opal.

A house north and across the street, Dick joined Owen and Pierre for chicken wings and Falstaff beer and their viewing of Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Ben Johnson, and Owen's friend Slim Pickens in a Western called
One-Eyed Jacks.
The Sun King had shed his wig, Cardinal Richelieu his scarlet biretta, and Owen found the good manners to hide the bulge of his codpiece with his untucked peasant shirt, but otherwise the three were still in their hose and regalia, which gave their viewing of the Western a certain incongruity. Pierre slumped on the sofa with jet lag, but he had never seen the movie and found himself riveted. Owen was less so. He asked, “You sure you wouldn't rather catch
Hobson's Choice
? Or
Witness for the Prosecution
? I'm in a Charles Laughton mood tonight.”

No one answered him.

“
Ruggles of Red Gap
then,” Owen said. “Winsome comedy where Laughton is delightful as an English butler won in a poker game.”

Still no answer.

“Elvis then.
Harum Scarum
?
The Trouble with Girls
?”

On the screen, an outlaw played by Ben Johnson taunted the outlaw played by Marlon Brando in a saloon poker game, saying, “How about some of your cash there, Romeo?”

Owen finished a chicken wing and tossed it into a rapidly filling Husker wastebasket. Still unsatisfied, he got another, defeated it with just a few chews, and grinned with red barbeque sauce on his lips. “Hey, this chicken tastes just like frog,” he joked.

Cardinal Richelieu cautioned, “Are you remembering your houseguest?”

Owen was shocked at his own rudeness. “No insult intended, Pete.”

Pierre stared in uninsulted puzzlement, then returned to the movie. Ben Johnson was saying, “Well, maybe the boy's all petered out from playin' on the beach with that little jumpin' bean.”

Owen got on his belly to find a tipped-over beer bottle underneath his La-Z-Boy, and in
One-Eyed Jacks
an outraged Marlon Brando jolted up from the poker table, yelling, “Get up, you scum-sucking pig!”

Dick said, “Talking to you, Owen.”

Owen took a final gloomy swig from the beer he found as Brando upset the saloon's poker table with a crash. Owen was horrified. “We're outta beer, boys.”

Neither Dick nor Pierre made a move, such things being beneath their station. Owen struggled his heft up. “Don't move a muscle,” he told the friends who hadn't. “I'm the host. I'll go get more.” And then he executed an Elvis move in his wide-bodied way, holding the Falstaff bottle as if it were a mike as he exited to the kitchen. “Thank ya'll ver' much, thank ya.” And then he went outside, yelling, “Owen has left the building!”

Watching Pierre in an assaying way, Dick straightened his prelate's soutane at his thighs and crossed his redstockinged ankles. “You been enjoying your trip through America's spacious skies and amber waves of grain?”

Pierre regally answered, “No.”

“Seems to me I'd be pretty happy traipsing just about anywhere with such a pleasant companion.”

Pierre shrugged. “Perhaps, but only if he lets
me
pick out ze wines.”

“Wasn't talking about Owen,” said Dick. “I was talking about Mademoiselle Clairvaux.”

“Oh,” Pierre said. “Her.”

They watched
One-Eyed Jacks
. Brando was saying, “You got right on the edge. You mention her once more and I'm gonna tear your arms out.”

Dick asked, “You two on the permanent outs?”

“What does it means, this ‘outs'?”

“In other words, you got a future together?”

Pierre fell into a crotchety mood, as was his wont. “She is my
past
,” he said. His fingers made antlers beside his head and he fluttered them wildly. “She is the craziness in my brains. She is so frus-
trat
ing and difficult and full of idiotic ideas.”

“Well, maybe it's good you're taking a vacation from each other.”

Owen sashayed back inside just then, cold beer cans weighting down the pockets of a blue Hawaiian shirt he'd changed into and on his skull a leafy headdress with Falstaff beer cans hung over each ear and plastic tubes feeding the liquid into his mouth when he sucked them. Owen grinned. “
Brew Hawaii!
”

Pierre arfed like a seal as Owen had instructed him to, and Owen tossed him a frosty one.

And Dick said, “I can see how Natalie must offend your delicate sensibilities.”

10

W
ednesday evening in Mrs. Christiansen's rooming house was serene. A hard-of-hearing old woman named Nell was sleeping in her Victorian room upstairs, as was Onetta, the mannish postmistress whose hobby was collecting the hundred varieties of barbed wire. Each of them claimed to be “plumb worn out” by The Revels. The sole teenaged girl in the house was a beautician named Ursula whose hair was, for the instant, orange and whose face was agleam with silver piercings, but she and her friends were out cruising the fairground's parking lot in an Econoline van. Iona was in the basement hooting “Hoo, hoo” as she kicked and threw punches in accordance with the shouted instructions on her Tae Bo tape. And Natalie, Mrs. Christiansen, and Owen's Aunt Opal were sitting in a yellow-furnitured parlor while the video of
Gigi
played on the VCR. Mrs. Christiansen and Opal were humped over a card table and cooperating in putting together a puzzle of a basket of colorful yarns and puffy calico kittens. Natalie lounged on the yellow sofa in the frilly white sundress and she was offending the ladies by tucking her nude feet and calves sideways on the cushion so that the skin of her sunbrowned thigh was overmuch on exhibit. Opal sighed over the Continent's moral decline as she forced in a puzzle piece of kitten whiskers. She turned to Natalie and asked, “After you ditched your loverboy in such haste, how did you fritter away your afternoon?”