The Wapshot Scandal (33 page)

Emile was happy to resemble someone who had gotten a scholarship to college. Some of the stranger’s intelligence seemed to rub off on his shoulders. The rest of the crew began to straggle in and one by one they told him how much he looked like Paff. The first mate was a young man who knocked his cap to the back of his head like a ballplayer and who seemed cheerful, aggressive but not at all bellicose. The second mate was an old man with a thin mustache and a threadbare uniform who took a photograph of his daughter out of his wallet and showed it to Emile. The picture showed a girl in ballet costume, posed on the roof of a tenement. Then the cabin steward joined Emile and the cook. He was a young man with that identifiable gentility that is bred in the turf huts of Nebraska; a mode of elegance that is formed in utter despair. There were thirty-five in all. The last to come was a dark-skinned man carrying a bar bell.

Taxis took them out of the city. Emile sat in front with the driver and the cook, trying to make out Toledo. There were lights, buildings, a river in the distance, and there must have been a beach nearby because many of the people in the opposite lanes of traffic wore bathing suits. Emile felt with intense discomfort that he had not made his presence in Toledo a reality; that he had left the better part of himself in Parthenia. They crossed railroad tracks and went into a dark neighborhood lit by gas-cracking plants, with here and there a saloon on a corner. They stopped at a gate where a man in uniform sent them on at the sight of the cook and then they were in a wilderness until at a turn in the road they came into a broad circle of light and an uproar of engine noise where the S.S.
Janet Runckle
was being loaded in a night world independent of the fact that the sun had set on the banks of Lake Erie two or three hours ago and where, like the music of some romantic agony, the noise of cranes, winches, ore-loaders, fork lifts, donkey engines, hopper cars and boat whistles filled the air.

The passengers came aboard at midnight. The first was an old man with his wife or daughter. He climbed the long gangway directly but the woman with him seemed afraid. It was finally suggested that she take off her high-heel shoes and with a deck hand in front and one behind she was eased up the gangway. The next to come was a man with his wife and three children. One of the children was crying. The last to come was a young man carrying a guitar. At four Emile went on duty and hosed down the decks with the rest of the watch. He wore Paff’s waterproofs. The captain ordered a tug for five but when the tug was delayed he put two men overside in the bosun’s chair and warped the ship out into the channel with lines and winches. They blew their stack in the dawn and Emile wished on the morning star for a safe voyage.

The morning watch hosed down the decks and washed the superstructure and deckhouse with soap and water. The afternoon watch chipped paint. The work was easy and the company was cheerful but the food was terrible. It was the worst food Emile had ever eaten. There were powdered eggs for breakfast, greasy meat and potatoes for dinner and cheese and cold cuts every night. Emile was hungry all the time and his hunger took on the scope of some profound misunderstanding between the world and himself. The plate of cheese and cold cuts that he faced each evening seemed to represent, like a sacrament, stupidity and indifference. His needs, his aspirations and his time of life were all misunderstood and cheese and cold cuts exacerbated the fact. He left the galley in anger one evening and went back to the stern. Simon joined him there; Simon was the one with the bar bell. “This
Runckle
,” Simon said, “She’s famous all over the world for bad chow.”

“I’m hungry,” Emile said.

“I’m skipping ship in Naples,” Simon said. “I got four hundred dollars in travel checks. You come with me.”

“I’m hungry,” Emile said.

“There’s this American restaurant in Naples,” Simon said. “Roast beef, mashed potatoes. You can even get a club sandwich. You come with me.”

“Where,” Emile asked, “where will we go?”

“Ladros,” Simon said. “There’s this beauty contest I’m going to be in. The way I figure it is, you got just so many chances and I know one thing, I got my looks. I’m very good-looking. It’s the only thing I got and I better cash in on it before it’s too late. In Ladros you can pick up two, three thousand dollars in this contest.”

“You’re crazy,” Emile said.

“Well, there’s no doubt about the fact that I’m vain,” Simon said. “I’m a very vain man. I never go by a mirror without looking at myself and thinking there goes a very good-looking man. Never. But you come with me. We’ll go to this restaurant. Apple pie. Hamburgers.”

“Blueberry pie’s my favorite,” Emile said. “After that lemon meringue. Then apricot.”

Emile saw the Azores glumly across a plate of cheese and cold cuts. Gibraltar was meat loaf. He ate bloated spaghetti sailing down the coast of Spain and when they docked early one morning in Naples he felt, in spite of his indifference to Simon’s ambitions, that he had no choice. They left the
Runckle
in the middle of the morning and went to an American restaurant where Emile put away two plates of ham and eggs and a club sandwich and felt like himself for the first time since leaving Toledo. They took an afternoon boat in a choppy sea to Ladros. Simon got seasick. The contest headquarters was in a café in the main
piazza
and although Simon’s face was green the first thing he did was to enroll and pay his entry fee. They got cots in a dormitory near the port where twenty-five or thirty other contestants were boarding. Simon worked conscientiously on his muscle-building. He oiled and sunned himself and wore, like the others, something called a slip, a sort of codpiece. He rented a boat and exercised in this during the mornings. After his siesta he worked out with the bar bells. Emile, wearing voluminous American trunks, rowed with him in the morning and spent a pleasant time swimming off the rocks.

It was very hot and Ladros was crowded but the sea had a color he had never seen before and there was something in the air, a suspension of conscience, that made the white beaches and the dark seas of his own country seem censorious and remote. He seemed, in crossing the bay of Naples, to have lost his scruples. The contest was on Saturday and on Friday Simon came down with a bad attack of food poisoning. Emile bought him some medicine in a pharmacy but he was up most of the night and was too weak to get out of bed in the morning. Emile felt for him deeply and wished it were in his power to help. He had wasted his savings and if his sole ambition was ridiculous could he be blamed? Simon asked Emile to take his place and in the end he agreed. It was the brute power of boredom that forced his decision. He had nothing else to do. He got into his bathing trunks, put on Simon’s numeral and went up to the
piazza
at a little after four. The hot, bright sunlight could still be seen at the foot of the street but the square was in shade. There was a long wait. Presently a boatload of English tourists came in and filled up the tables at the edge of the square and then, in numerical order, the procession started.

He didn’t want to seem sullen, that after all would have been unfair to Simon, but he did want to seem disengaged, to make clear that this was not his idea, not what he wanted. He didn’t look at the faces below him but stared at an advertisement for San Pellegrini mineral water on a wall beyond the café. What would his mother have thought, his uncle, the ghost of his father? Where was the dark house in Parthenia where he had lived? When he had crossed the
piazza
he waited around with the others and then was led into the café by the proprietor and didn’t realize until then that there were only ten and that he was one of the winners.

It was getting dark by then, deepening into the grape-colored sky that more than anything else made him feel not unpleasantly far from home. Now the
piazza
was crowded. The ten men stood at the bar drinking coffee and wine, held together by the bond of a common experience and a questionable victory and alienated by the barriers of language. Emile stood between a Frenchman and an Egyptian and the best he could do was to speak a little crude Italian and smile hopefully but fatuously to prove that he was friendly and self-possessed. As it grew darker and darker in the
piazza
, as the light of day faded and as they stood under the bare lights of the café that had been arranged sensibly and economically to light the work of the bartenders and to flatter no one, they might, but for their lack of clothing, have been a group of workmen, clerks or jurors, stopping for a drink on their way back to wherever their lives were centered, to whereever they were awaited and wanted. Emile did not understand what would happen next and he asked the proprietor in dumb show to explain. The explanation was long and it was a long time before Emile understood that they, the ten winners, would now be auctioned off to the crowd in the
piazza
. “But I’m an American,” Emile said. “We don’t believe in that!”

“
Niente, niente,
” the judge said gently and explained to Emile that if he didn’t want to be sold he was free to go. In his own country Emile would have gone home indignantly but he was not in his own country and inquisitiveness or something deeper held him there. He was shocked to think that unfamiliar surroundings, lights and circumstances might influence his morals. To reinforce his character he tried to recall the streets of Parthenia but they were worlds away. Could it be true that his character was partly formed from rooms, streets, chairs and tables? Was his morality influenced by landscapes and kinds of food? Had he been unable to take his personality, his sense of good and evil, across the Bay of Naples?

In the
piazza
a band began to play and from behind the café a few mortars were fired off. Then the
padrone
opened the door and called to a man named Ivan, who smiled at his companions and went out onto the terrace where there was a block on which he stood. He seemed to acquiesce gracefully at this turn of events. Emile went out onto the terrace and stood in the shelter of an acacia tree. The bidding began lightheartedly, it seemed a joke, but as the bidding increased he realized that the young man’s skin was up for sale. The bidding rose quickly to a hundred and fifty thousand lire; but then it came in slowly and the stir in the crowd was erotic. Ivan seemed impassive but the beating of his heart could be seen. Was this sin, Emile wondered, and if it was, why should it seem so deeply expressive of everyone there? Here was the sale of the utmost delights of the flesh, its racking forgetfulness. Here were the caves and the fine skies of venery, the palaces and stairways, the thunder and the lightning, the great king and the drowned sailor, and from the voices of the bidders it seemed that they had never wanted anything else. The bidding stopped at two hundred and fifty thousand lire and Ivan stepped off the block and walked into the dark where someone, Emile couldn’t see who, had been waiting with a car. He heard the motor start and saw the headlights shine on the ruined walls as they drove off.

An Egyptian named Ahab came next but something was wrong. He smiled too knowledgeably, seemed much to ready to be sold and to perform what was expected of him and was knocked down at fifty thousand lire in a few minutes. A man called Paolo re-established the atmosphere of sexuality and the bids, as they had been for Ivan, came in slowly and hoarsely. Then a man named Pierre climbed onto the block and there was some delay before the bidding began at all.

Something had gone wrong. The bloom was off him. He had drunk too much wine or was too tired and now he stood on the block like a stick. His slip was cut scant enough to show his pubic hair and his pose was vaguely classical—the hips canted and one hand curved against his thigh—classical and immemorial as if he had appeared repeatedly in the nightmares of men. Here was the face of love without a face, a voice, a scent, a memory, here was a rub and a tumble without the sandy grain of a personality, here was a reminder of all the foolishness, vengefulness and lewdness in love and he seemed to excite, in the depraved crowd, a stubborn love of decency. They would sooner look at the prices on the menu than at him. His look was sly and wicked, he was more openly lascivious than the others but no one seemed to care. There was some subtle change in the atmosphere of the place. Ten thousand. Twelve thousand. Then the bidding stopped. This was the worst of all for Emile to see. Ivan had sold himself to God knows whom, a face in the dark, but it seemed more shameful and more sinful that Pierre, who was willing to perform the sacred and mysterious rites for the least sacred rewards, was wanted by no one and that for all his readiness to sin he might, in the end, have to spend a quiet night in the dormitory counting sheep. Something was wrong, some promise, however obscene, was broken and Emile sweated in shame for his companion, for to lust and to be unwanted seemed to be the grossest indecency. In the end Pierre was knocked down for twenty thousand lire. The
padrone
turned to Emile to ask if he wanted to reconsider his decision and in an intoxication of pride, a determination to prove that what had happened to Pierre could not happen to him, he went forward and stood on the block looking out boldly at the lights in the
piazza
as if he had in this way managed to come face to face with the world.

The bidding was spirited enough and he was knocked down for a hundred thousand lire. He stepped off the platform and walked through the tables to where a woman was waiting. It was Melissa.

She drove him up into the hills and through the gates of a villa where he could hear the loud noise of a fountain and nightingales singing in the trees and where he discovered that he had not brought his sense of good and evil across the bay. This eruption of his senses, this severance from the burdens of his life, was so complete that he seemed to fly, to swim, to live and die independently of all the well-known facts, that he seemed violently to destroy and renew himself, demolish and rebuild his spirit on some high sensual plane that was unbound from the earth and its calendar.