Little Casino (13 page)

This is, without a doubt, faintly absurd, but one may read it with Beckett in mind, who remarks that one may “puzzle over it endlessly without the least risk. For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker. It is then that the true division begins, of twenty-two by seven, for example, and the pages fill with the true ciphers at last.”

Samuel Beckett, it may be recalled, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. So were many, many other people.

This woman, vexed and exasperated by life, is, in effect, saying, “I won’t cry anymore, and I wish you were here,” or “I wish you were here, but I won’t cry anymore.”

“Maybe, I mean just maybe, she’s really saying, ‘Come to the Mardi Gras!’”

Oh, for Christ’s sweet sake, don’t be so literary.

Speaking of literary, a list of selected, judiciously selected, Nobel Prize laureates in Literature, might be thought of as “the true ciphers at last.”

Four soldiers

H
E WAS ONE OF FOUR SOLDIERS IN A SALOON
somewhere, after so many years, it’s hard to remember. That’s what he says, in any event, probably a dodge. The others cannot be located, or accounted for, or so he says. A saloon in maybe Baltimore, or Blackstone, maybe Glen Burnie or San Antonio. This was another world, existent before probably three-quarters of the people presently dwelling, as best they can upon this earth, were born. There was a dance floor, big enough for three couples, just off the end of the long bar and near the two booths at the back of the room. The usual jukebox, some of the songs that year were “And So to Sleep Again,” “I Won’t Cry Anymore,” “Mixed Emotions,” and “Unforgettable,” the last cited the only one to have survived. A blonde. A pale-blue dress. Reminiscent of something that he could not quite place, but it may well have been important. He was giving this blonde some story about being shipped out in a week to FECOM, la-la, la-la, la-la. Then the pale-blue dress presented him with another image of another girl at another bar, OK, FECOM, oh yeah. The dress might have been a uniform, white, or an elegant sweater with tiny faux pearls in a fleur-de-lis pattern on the bosom. The feel of ice-cold fur with a hint of clean, fresh perfume.

Now, how to get this blond girl with her small breasts and lovely hips away from the other girls and his three pals, Privates E-2 Blank, Blank, and Blank? She was a little drunk and he was telling her a lot of lies, and her pale-blue dress was somehow responsible for the smell of ether and hospital meat loaf and cold, soggy carrots and peas. What the hell?

Yeah, they’ll be cutting our orders for Fort Ord in a couple of days, damn it. What a sorry-looking soldier he was, his khakis disgracefully wrinkled and stained with beer and whiskey and ketchup, his low-quarters scuffed, his brass dull, his tie missing, his cap in his back pocket. He looked at her, his face suitably and bravely stricken. Honor first, yet—apprehension. And love! Love! He slid his dirty hand down the smooth fabric of her dress till it rested between the small of her back and her buttocks, and she tentatively pushed her thighs against him. But where could they go, for God’s sake? A walk, a cup of coffee, a movie, bowling? Then, maybe, maybe what?

They might well have been in Wilmington, Delaware, for that matter. How come you didn’t join the Navy if you, gee, don’t like the Army? He told her, in hesitant speech, of his noble brother, nobly killed in action aboard the U.S.S.
Portland
in the Coral Sea, and how he’d promised their mother—an invalid now—that he’d never, never … oh, he told her many things, many ingenious lovely things. He had his hand on her thigh and could feel, through her skirt, where her garter clasped her stocking. He did not tell her that he didn’t mind the Army at all, that it was a place wherein you were safe in your
head,
but he dutifully pushed his groin against her belly, and she smiled at him, the lights from the jukebox flashing off the lenses of her glasses. Ah, how nice it would be to fuck her, all of her, her dress, her hair, her garters, and her glasses. She said that she really had to be getting home for supper, it was really getting late. Ah, he said. OK.

Soldiers often attempt to seduce women with announcements of their imminent dispatch into the Jaws of Death. It is an old and respected con, wholly understood by both soldiers and women.

WELCOME. MEDICAL REPLACEMENT TRAINING CENTER 2ND ARMY. FORT MEADE, MARYLAND.

One of the soldiers in the saloon on that late September afternoon had his face and both arms blown off while in action with the 5th RCT on Hill 923, somewhere near Obong-ni Ridge, North Korea; another died of multiple myeloma, as a result of exposure to radiation during a nuclear exercise in White Sands, New Mexico, where he was sent, with other troops of the 2nd Army, to serve as part of a ground-forces reaction operation; the third returned to Germany, where he had been born to parents who were soon burned to crisps in an American incendiary raid in 1944; and our man, “the dancer,” after a short and unremarkable military career as a medical-aid man, moved to California, where he immediately felt, as an absolute stranger among strangers who are themselves absolute strangers among strangers, in a state not meant for human habitation, at home. One day, he saw a Jodie suit, in faded blue denim, in the window of a hip men’s boutique in San Francisco.

What about the girl in the blue dress? What was her name?

The Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) designation for Medical Aid Man is 3666. During the Korean War, their mortality rate was just slightly lower that that of second lieutenants of infantry.

Martinis are blue

H
E LOOKS THROUGH THE WINDOW OF THE
ground-floor sublet that she’s living in for the year. Bitter cold winds, edged and violent, crash down the street from the river. Inside, warm lights, she’s in a pale-blue knitted dress that shows her figure in softened detail. His head is partly under her skirt, his hands hold her upper thighs, she leans against a dresser and opens her legs. Flurries against the streetlamps. He opens the gate onto the small area before the apartment door, she’s in a pale-blue knitted dress in the warm room, he puts his hands on her waist, she leans against him, ah, she says. Your mouth, he says.

The martinis are blue, and so they should be, blue ruin. They’re in a bar that they like, but that nobody else does. Outside, cold, wet flowers are bright and glistening in the florist’s flat lights. He puts his hand under the table and touches her thigh, her dark eyes are glazed with gin and lust, she half-smiles.

He knocks at the door, and she opens it to the sublet, her pale-blue dress in the orange light from the shaded lamp is arresting and also familiar, a kind of blurred and shifting image, piquant. Piquant? What did you say? she says.

I’m not drunk yet, she says, and lights a cigarette. She puts her little jewel of a Dunhill lighter squarely on top of the cigarette pack. He doesn’t really remember when he first saw her, or where, but he remembers that it was sweet, sweet and what else? It was piquant, she says, you are hopeless! Pale-blue dress, her sweet warm flesh stretching the fabric, blue ruin. Men turn to look at her, secretly, offhandedly, as if trying to recall something forgotten, or they look at her and then try not to look at her: What’s the use? She crosses her legs and pulls the hem of her skirt down deftly. He lights her cigarette. Looking in your eyes is like looking at your you-know, he says. How dirty and filthy you are, she says, and
now
I’m drunk. The snow begins, slight, dusty, whispery, and the wind dies.

He knocks at the door and she opens it, her pale-blue knitted dress comes to mid-knee, nice dress, he says, I think I’m going to have to look right under it. I thought you had that filthy perverted gleam in your eye, she says. He wants her to take the dress off and leave it on, he wants her to be naked and half-naked, he wants, he wants, he wants. This is a really nice apartment, he says, and pretends to look carefully around. Come on and fuck me, she says, pulling her dress off over her head. What kind of a boyfriend are
you?

They have a fourth martini, what the hell. Look at the snow, she says, I think we better get drunk. And go to a drunk bar, he says, a drunker bar, you know. The bartender looks at her breasts move under the knitted fabric. The place has the soft, warm glow of hope, faint hope, to be sure, but hope nonetheless. Or we can go to my place, she says, my beautiful furnished sublet, conveniently located near subway and bus stops, where you can do things to me all night long, even though you don’t really love me or even care? She’s right, but he smiles.

The pale-blue dress into which this young woman—let’s call her Margie—has been placed, probably against her better judgment, somehow reminds a musician, trudging through the snow past Margie’s ground-floor apartment, of Sonny Rollins’s supreme “Blue Seven,” which, or so the musician notes, “derives much of its uncanny beauty through the use of the Lydian scale.”

“And the Lydian scale has to do with Margie’s dress … how?”

The reader is always in my thoughts, especially when she is in the Lydian mode, which is often blue, as in knitted dress.

Oh clement, oh loving, oh sweet!

Pitie them that weepe