Epilogue: Postludicrous

The final encounter between Margaret P. Bebette and Olney Garkle is underway at the house in Right Sock, B.C. It will prove to be a ceremonial stomping on the old and rib-warped Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Neither Belle Nipponovich, visiting her mother in Edmonton, nor Crusty Mantlecore, down East on a dope-finding tour, are in town to enjoy the occasion.

With Belle's hearty approval, Maggie's friends have organized a party to celebrate her freedom from Olney and her new job as Girl Worker Bebette in a local plant that manufactures robot snouts for tuber rooting. Her cute little body is no longer deformed by the stress of living with Olney's compulsive collisions with himself. Now, with each minimum-wage paycheck, she can lay the foundation for her future as the old-age pensioner she has longed to become (or so Olney snarls to anyone who will listen). The girl knows what she wants, all right (he will then conclude, with a disdainful harumph).

Olney sort of does too. But so often his aims and goals in life get lost in a thwarting miasma of cortico-scrotal obsessions. (Maggie couldn't agree more.)

§§§

The party has been under way for an hour or so. Several empty 40-ouncers of Alberta-made vodka dance on a table in the corner, their lively jig the result of jostling party-goers lunging for the ones still full. Indeed, the empties have oiled and unbunged everyone for the party's main attraction: The indictment, trial and conviction of Olney Garkle, Cad Extraordinaire.

The jurors are lining up now according to foregone conclusions. Their mirthless banter belies a jury gone Midwest with morals and fried southern for blood. The women, wearing lumberjack shirts, overalls, and Vibram-soled hiking boots, sidle up to Maggie, who, perhaps to remind Olney of what he will be missing, wears that yellow print dress that always inflamed him. A couple of male Olney-haters cross the floor as well, just to be safe. Standing with Olney are but three hecklers, their chauvinist grins already gelling on sweaty faces. A meat-cleaver thocks into a breadboard: someone's way of inciting order. After the opening obscenities subside to an uneasy shuffling (with intermittent rib-jabbing guffaws, whoops and sniggers), Olney steps forward.

"It's a clear case," he pleads, facing his thromboid hearties, "of the cowardice and bad faith exhibited by most investors of the female persuasion, such as Miss Bebette here--"

"Hey, hey, let's not worry about her," snorts a prosecuting juror. Another farts. Slipping outside, the fart coronas the moon.

"Yeah, get off it," sneers a third, "you're the one's in trouble."

"--Who are only interested in a sure thing," Olney resumes, unfazed. "So long as they get it without any effort, may I add." Boos and hisses abound. "Like most women, Miss B. was shopping around for a suitably intelligent and above all stable--and by stable I mean manageable--nest protector. One preferably with a contract insuring job security for life and signed by God, no less."

A team effort of flatulence, reminiscent of firecrackers bursting in gelatin, greets the defendant's opening statement. "My dainties. How sweet and delicate you are now, but the minute the deal falls through, you become a lowly, backbiting lot--"

"Don't get uppity with us," counters Mz Bebette. "You always think your arrogance is so smart. Well, nobody likes it when you're arrogant, least of all me. I hate it." She's mad, all right.

"Yeah, well living with you would have made a village idiot arrogant! Er…." Poor Olney. Seems his pomp's been circumcised right off the old (chops-it-back, fouled) bat. "If you hadn't resisted me every step of the way, things might've been different."

"I had to resist. Going your route, we would've been broke in half the time. You never had any real ideas to make money."

"Well, you were the one with the bucks. What was I supposed to do, everything?"

"Wait just a minute, I had to do everything. You were the one who came unglued the night before we left for Paris. I had to do all the packing, while you sat smoking, drinking and gibbering. I was always coming to your rescue."

"I know, but when I thought about what we were getting ourselves into, going insane seemed the only reasonable alternative."

The scratch of hispid legs rubbing vehemently against denim is mixed with a rotating antiphon of: "oh, brother"…"sniveling pig"…"feed 'im to the dogs"…"drown 'im with the cats", concluding with an apoplectic "paa-thet-ic" Olney's henchmen are disappearing within sight of themselves.

Teetering, he bloops back: "Anyway, the money had to come from somewhere. What if it'd been mine?"

"You'd have gone by yourself," shoots the Poot.

"Truer words 'ere ne'er spoken," slurs Valerie Crow, regressing to a moment of blazing comprehension experienced at recess some twenty years before.

"I would not've," defends Olney.

"You would too've." The Pootie is sure, all right.

Olney, in B.C. drag tonight, stalls for time by pulling moits of kindling from his Cowichan sweater. "Yeah, well I suppose you think you had a lot of money or something. Well you didn't, sugar pie. All we could afford for me to drink was that rotgut cognac from the Monoprix."

Outraged bellows erupt from the jury members. The bellows overtake fleeing molecules of air, searing them in epithets hurled with scorn.

Olney reloads and fires: "Why are you so obsessed with money? What about the things money can't buy? Like Vision and the will to Evolve beyond this compost heap of bitchy materialism, traits of a certain Himself such as me. Where are your spee-ree-tyool values?"

"Give ya five bucks t'hang yrself," sez Madelaine Dzcorpia, that stingy pervert.

"A bus ticket outta town's more like it," suggests local muff diver Gilda Lezowski, whose motto, "And no bones about it", is tattooed in flowing script above the cushion of her mons.

"So where were your spiritual values when it came to Rhonda?" the Poot explodes.

"Rhonda! Now why bring her up? Rhonda has nothing to do with what we're talking about, nothing at all." Olney's blithering for time here and everyone knows it.

Someone opens a new 40-ouncer, unscrewing the top with a gunshot-like crack. The sound cuts through Olney's nervous system on its way to some West Texas saloon, to the neck of a beer bottle breaking against the side of a pool table, ringsiders scattering. Maggie wants to continue on the subject of Rhonda, but Olney feverishly filibusters further.

"Money, that's what we're talking about. The item that scares women to death because there's never enough. Hey, you can get it anywhere. From an inheritance, for example, or the lotteries, or as a generous gift from loving friends and admirers, or from welfare. You can even get it by working, perish the thought. There's always some scratch around, someone's always got it. Why, even me, back there in former lives, even I had some. Plenty've folks owed me money once. Borrowed it regularly. Used to call, say, 'Hey Olney, got a five-spot till payday?' 'Sure thing,' I'd say, generous to the core."

"Yeah, but I'm talking about a couple of thousand," reminds the Poot.

"Your money was gonna pay for the merguez sandwiches and cognac while we evolved. You expected guidance for free?"

"You expect everything for free."

"All you ever thought about was Meat-loaf's End."

"What about your promise to sell wind-up toys on the street? You told me you had the address of someone who gave people jobs selling crazy gizmos and gadgets. Was that just a lie? I pictured you wearing your old peacoat in the freezing cold at the Luxembourg Gardens, winding up mechanical frogs that hopped around and made children laugh. I may have been naive, but it made me feel good. Especially when I thought of you down in the métro, standing across from that old woman with bright red lipstick, the one who played the accordion and sang like Piaf. Salope! You never did anything to help with the finances."

"I did too," defends Olney, "and it's salaud, God damnit, not salope."

"You did not." The Pootie is sure, all right, adding, "Salope of a putain!" for good measure.

Our boy: "What about the time I put up those room-for-rent signs all over Paris? I stuck 'em in every embassy and English-speaking hangout in the city. I walked. And saved the ticket money for you. Now that was a sacrifice. You know how much I loved riding the métro. Especially when it was crowded--"

"Please, don't go into that. Anyway, walking is another thing you love. In the end you rented the room--I really had no choice--to Rhonda, that goody-two-shoes who ruined everything." Olney winces. The wince thinks twice and switches to ruttish nostalgia as recollections of oestrual fragrance rise from the scrotal seat of his consciousness. Maggie, fuming: "You planned it from the beginning, set it all up. Wouldn't rent to a man."

"You know that wouldn't have worked. Men are always competing. And besides, a man would have been after you. I was your protector." Uh-oh. Pandemonium. Like harbinger enzymes signaling the imminent breakdown of burgers into bile, the jurors' raucous laughter threatens to render Olney to a blob of discardable lard.

"Men are creeps! thunders Sunshine Weiss, hale and muscular from a season's apple picking.

"W-w-women are c-c-cunts," blurts a heckler, going in occultation behind Olney.

"I didn't want anyone but you," the Poot's voice a tad tremulous. "And you wanted anyone but me. Was I stupid. I'm gonna find a man who's loyal. Above all, a man who can put meat on my table whenever I want it."

"And what kind of man would that be? No less than some fine example of culturally deprived genetic garbage with the attention span of a lobotomized gnat. To match yours, because you never pay attention. You refuse to pay attention. My best lines, most profound squeaks of recognition and deepest feelings you never even noticed." For Olney's viewing and listening pleasure, a string section of unmoisturized arms now pretend weeping violins, with a terrifying vocal approximation of same. Undaunted, he continues: "I did want you. Most of all, I wanted us to reach Go and then GO. It seemed so simple. But how was that going to be possible when you were always washing my white pants with those colorful Indian poplins, or burning the toast or putting frozen jars of soup on high flame or--"

"And just who left the same flame burning all day, no one in the house, because who was dozy too? And what about your crazy screaming at the neighbors upstairs, throwing my hairbrush against the ceiling and breaking it…."

"But how could anyone stand that racket? If it wasn't their rat of a dog yipping all day long, it was their baby doing weird, unbabylike things all night. We agreed, didn't we, that they let the baby out at night so it could pound on the pipes with a wrench. It was diabolical."

"I never agreed to anything. You just thought I did because I wouldn't answer. You drove me nuts, Olney Garkle, with your vile temper and sick perversions and hysteria. Yes, hysteria. Admit it, you're a hysterical person. You nearly had a nervous breakdown every other day. And when your infernal impatience backfired on you, like the day you forgot to close the drum on the washing machine and it started making that awful noise, you collapsed in a heap. You sat in the living room with your knees together like a crazy man, whimpering and biting your clean fingernails, smoking those stinky French cigarettes, and wailing, 'I can't bear it', while I calmly inched out the clothes and got the world's most simple washing machine going again."

"Simple? The operator had to memorize a hundred non-linear instructions to get that thing going, and then half the time it never emptied the water. And for all that, it was made for midgets.

"It was cute."

"Yeah, it was cute.". It was cute. And so was the Pootie. And cutest of all was when the Pootie used the word cute. "I'll be honest, cutie. I thought all that metal grinding itself to death meant we'd have to buy a new part, an expensive part, and pay for it with the cognac money. I'm really a bad person."

"Demagogue. Always trying to get people on your side. Well, you can't fool me. All I saw that day was fright and defeat. Face facts, you weren't up to it."

"I hate the material world, it's true."

"Is that supposed to make us believe your spiritual side is a big deal? You're a flub in either realm. And you were a basket case in Paris."

"My intentions were good."

"Your intentions were never good."

Zooming through the gray, roll-yr-own air, a loosely knotted cellophane Safeway fresh-fruits-'n'-vegetables bag partially filled with melting ice cubes lands on the bulls-eye of Olney's forehead. Failing to burst, it aborts a round of cheers at phoneme. He cavalierly hands it to a heckler in eclipse.

Maggie has more: "My intentions have always been better than yours. I looked after us, but you were only in it for yourself. And another thing. You never ever wanted to do anything I wanted to do."

"I did too." Olney's grasping for material…oh, yeah: "I always went with you to that excruciating wind race on the Seine to feed the damn ducks. Which, correct me if I'm wrong, was all you ever wanted to do."

"You wanted to knock the ducks out. You threw those crusts as hard as you could, you, you sadique."

A female hand comes down on her shoulder like a boxing glove filled with lead. Meant as encouragement and whole-hearted approval, it buckles Maggie's knees, which even now, Olney would love to lick. Especially the hot part behind, between the tendons, those tuning forks of the universe. The latest consensus on reality, however, has the girl gorillas grunting, with lots of supportive curses and the odd nasal beller.

"As for intentions, Little Red Mata-Hari Hood, if yours were so good, then why am I such an ill result?" Olney forces a couple of coughs. His chest convulses on cue. Oh, no, says the look on Maggie's face. She can't bear these gross exhibitions so dear to his heart. And yes, Olney's lungs do sound as if they're wearily pushing themselves up from an old Army cot, scratching their permanent three-day stubble. Upstairs, in his throat, glottal props whip up a yogurt of pale marbled phlegm garnished with seven-league chunks of masticated food, giving him the richly modulated basso of an impassioned wino coughing and gagging in smorzando. The dying resonance sounds like the first hint of a sun-baked corpse ready to unzip.

Valerie Crow rushes out the back door. Red and blue bandannas unfurl to wave like festive flags at some massive capitulation before sailing to the sweaty foreheads of their queasy owners.

Maggie refuses to look at him. He's probably drooling too. He always lets a ribbon of spittle slither down his chin at the end of these revolting performances. "You're a disgusting person, Olney Garkle. And a pervert too. I saw you that day in the British Library, on your hands and knees trying to look up that schoolgirl's dress. Thought nobody was looking, didn't you? Thought you were smart pretending to relax on the floor with any old book at hand. Thought she didn't notice either, huh? Well she did. I saw her blush."

Momentarily paralyzed, Olney lets go a moaner of recognition. For months he had left the known world several times a day to immerse himself in passionate contemplation of the deeply inverted gooseneck of love he imagined behind her white panties and his desire to be swallowed whole by its pulsating throat. Ah, but lost and gone forever was the untouchable flesh of the hottest goddess he'd ever seen, for the foul fate of the ardent connoisseur in a conservative world insures that whenever he should meet the Beauty that Booted a Universe, said Beauty is sure to have a copy protection scheme meant to keep her user-unfriendly until she attains the legislated age for legal deflowering. Oh, cruel world…and universe too.

"They ought to lock you up," Maggie says, embarrassed by his silence. "Girls aren't safe with you running free."

"Oh, yeah?" Frustrated in one parallel world after another, Olney returns to the foray with vehemence. "So how come every female in the world has perverted tendencies but you? I happen to know she liked it when I looked up her dress. But you, the only thrills you like are the ones that shudder up from a shovel when it hits a boulder in the garden. You're an intellectual and emotional hayseed whose idea of a good time is watching The Waltons with a cup of camomile tea."

"Asshole!" hoots a cod contralto. Her character assessment fries Olney's ectoplasm on the way to vaporizing the hackles of his hecklers. Little chickeny cheeps, like bullets whizzing through the propellers of World War I biplanes, zip neatly through their chattering teeth.

"That's not true," Maggie says, hurt and resentful. She's never understood his theatrical perversity, though a few kinky improvisations had caused her to marvel over the intensity of her orgasms. Especially that time in the subway…oops. Her blush adds a little color to the kitchen's smoky pallor. She would have died if anyone had noticed. Not that they were actually doing it, no not at all, but…his fingers…not even her nervousness and fear of being caught could stop what they did. He'd claimed it was more intense if you could look in a strange woman's eyes (or a strange man's, if Maggie preferred) while you were getting off. But she couldn't. That Olney was a pervert, all right, and too much trouble for most women. Oh, why couldn't he have been a little more reserved, less arrogant, and above all, why was he always so broke? "I lived in terror of people catching us," she says, returning from her own embarrassing silence.

"Eh?"

"I mean, oh, never mind. Anyway, you owe me some money. So when're you getting a job? When's the first payment coming? My mother says I should call the sheriff."

"Yeah, that's what they all say," sez our boy, nimbly filing his own unvoiced oops under: THINGS TO DO: 1) Wonder why…. "Well, ok, heh-heh. We all know a turnip eater when we see one. You know, the kind of person who has basements and root cellars filled with burlap sacks of turnips? So she can survive long after there's any reason to? Well, lemme tell ya, survival is for savages. Doing real penance on Earth are free spirits like me, while rutabaga scarfers like you are sick unto death from the fear of risk and change. You keep looking down, at the sod of survival, but never up, where everything else is, where life evolves."

"Of all the crap. You're supposed to learn the lessons of Earth first. You don't know any. You want to start at the top all the time. You're afraid to dirty your hands on the way up. You make everything fail."

"You're the one who scuttled our little ship, dearie--"

"Me! But you're the one who ruined everything with Rhonda."

"--With your incessant reversals in mid-stream." Olney rattling away like a chipmunk now. "Never once did we get to the other shore."

"We got to the other shore of my money."

"Too bad you didn't have more. Then you could have hired a male nurse to turn you over twice a day and keep you supplied with get-it pills."

"Instead I got a male fraud. A man who couldn't get himself to the other side, let alone the woman who'd put all her faith and trust in him. Sale bête!"

"Et toi, belle emmerdeuse de ma vie, tu n'as jamais rien compris, rien, rien, rien." Olney's startling Adam's apple leaps, with each negation, like the handle of a rake whose forks have just been stepped on by Oliver Hardy.

"Olney, why not admit it. All you care about is saving your own skin. You even told me stories about this despicable tendency of yours; trying to ease your conscience by playing the joker, I suppose. Didn't you once sneak out for a steak sandwich while the Splanchnik's, your good friends who were looking after you in Chicago, had to stay home and eat noodles and margarine because they were broke? And Benjn Rawjaw, your best buddy in the world, wasn't he delirious with fever in Mexico while you spent the last of the money on tostadas? You're a selfish rat."

Olney seems to be caught on a coathook here, legs kicking air. He hoists off with: "The Splanchniks loved noodles. If I'm not mistaken, they even bought 'em by the case. And Rawjaw was too sick to eat. What was I gonna do, starve too?" Surely that was it. But for a man too skinny to sweat, Olney Garkle was experiencing a most moist moment. "So," he sneers, "turning into a snitch, are we? Tattling feels good, does it?"

"You're always saying you'd never give up a good line."

"Yes, but for men there is such a thing as noble restraint." Olney's smug scorn introduces the corners of his mouth to the outer canthi of his eyes for a cigar-chomping handshake. "Women excel at hitting below the belt. It's a genetic trait."

Once again, the kitchen's acoustics are rousted by a stretti of: "Hey, wait a minute"…"Is this guy for real?"…"A fuckin' sub-species"…"Tr'r words'er ne'er ssp-rok'n…."

Here's Razorback LaGash: "Me, I'd rather have a rubber dick any day." Her voice growls through the hullabaloo and the chronic noise in her ears from driving tractors in the Okanagan. Everyone agrees it's a great party.

Olney rips: "Yeah, and women strip-nut heroes with their glands."

Maggie cleaves: "Yeah, and you couldn't hammer a nail in the wall. Some hero."

"I can too. "

"You can not."

"Yeah, well you wouldn't know a peak experience from a bucket of shit."

"Oh yeah? Well you'd step in one if someone didn't look after you. Phoo on you, Olney Garkle, I want to be taken care of for a change."

"Go, then. Find yourself some slack-jawed logger. You know, the kind with close-set eyes, no forehead, no chin, and no neck, the kind of guy you usually go out with. Allez. Hunt-bien. Your mum will love you for it."

"Ooh, you elitist prick! You think you're better than everyone, but you're worse, you're worse than anyone who ever lived!"

"Thanks to you. When I met you I felt like a million dollar hero, like how can I be so lucky and from here on it's going to be teamwork straight to the goal. But then, women have different goals than men. Men want to fly with their minds, to lighten gravity and enlighten themselves. But let's face it, mention The Void to a woman and what does she do?" He turns to his band of merry men for their considered opinions.

"Start's screamin'," yips the heckler behind him.

"Throws a fit," yawps the hooter behind the heckler.

"It's bloody awful," yelps the heel behind the hooter.

"Right," yammers Olney. "And why? I'll tell you why. Because women are the Maintainers of Samsara. Go on, deny it."

"Whuzzat, 'sham…saa…rul', huh?" Mz Crow is keen to know.

Sunshine Weiss leaps in from the living room, where she's been listening to the McGarrigle sisters and regretting her large-boned body. "I know what that is, and that's a crock, Olney. And we're sick and tired of keeping the home fires lit while you men chase off to impress the world." She then joins in for the song:

Men're little boys
With little boy minds
They like t'play hero
And kiss our behinds.

"Kiss our own behinds," mumbles Razorback with a roar.

"Ain't it the truth," says O. "A man falls to his knees the instant some woman weakens his purpose with her pheromones." He begins his own verse, "Wakening my porpoise with your feral moans," but his little song is cut short by a symposium of body language suggesting that just because they got to sing, doesn't mean this is some kind of amateur hour.

"Ok, ok, don't shoot," he says, "but it's true that a man's direction in life can be totally altered by these rhinoerotic top notes."

"'What's'e talkin' about now, rh'nosrusses?' queries Val Crow.

"A woman doesn't have to be wily or smart, doesn't even have to use her brains. All she has to do is turn on that goddessy power, her birthright, and there goes a man's sense of reality. Suddenly the four walls start shivering, trying to dissolve, because she's emitting again, using her flesh magic to stun him into a dumb brute and bring him to his knees. Yes, and we love you for it. We worship you. You're all we've got on this apparently God-forsaken planet. What else is there? And if there were something else--freedom, for example--what man, with all five percent of his hundred billion neurons working over time, would exchange you for it or any other unknown? Whose wild idea of a better, more fulfilling life could match being stuck on Earth with billions of women to choose from? Ain't no worship of "God" can top that."

"Whuz he hollarin'?" Crow again.

"On the other hand," O. on a roll, "some of our gender have managed to combine these elements of seemingly mutual exclusivity by worshipping pussy as the gateway to God. A fanatical element, say, ninety percent of the male population, believes that only through incessant penetration of those petalled portals will the seeker attain to God's eternal truths. Others, comprising a vibrant minority, have taken this worthy notion a step further by positing that God actually resides in pudendum." Turning to his revivified henchies, Olney poses: "If you were God, wouldn't you want to live in one o' them juicy thangs?"

"Sure would," drools the goat behind him.

"I'll go," slavers the swine behind the goat.

"Heat's included, too," slobbers the boar behind the swine.

"Exactly," salivates Olney. "The entrance to Heaven is the orifice leading to the organ which generates life, the matrix of all universes, where both 'cosms join hands. Just think of it, right under our twitching noses--"

"So," interjects the Poot, "that makes us God's house and the likes of you plenty expendable."

"Mechanisms. That's all men are," adds Madelaine Dzcorpia.

"You ask me, this one oughta be recalled," loudhailers Razorback LaGash under her breath.

"But wildest of all," Olney raves further, "is that religious sect from the East which guarantees nirvana when the meditant is at last able to visualize a pair of vaginal lips embracing each and every star in the universe. As you can see this is a very advanced level of training. According to statistics, this highly popular branch of a well-known religion claims the greatest number of converts from all the other religions. Unfortunately for the ultimate goal, very few get past the initial stage, for reasons I am about to divulge."

"Give us a break," thunder several disgusted workshoppers.

"You see, before reaching this august station, the neophyte must embark on a series of rigorous disciplines which may take years. One discipline you may have heard of--it's been favored throughout the centuries--obliges eager chelas to enter a state of samadhi while carrying maidens across creeks. Bizarre, you say? Not at all. In this way, the well-known koan: What is the sound of one scrotum clapping, is best contemplated. To facilitate one-pointed concentration, the maiden's legs snugly encircle the seeker's waist, while her arms are thrown around his neck. Somewhere on the creek's little bridge, with the monk's scrotum swinging to and fro against the maiden's throbbing perineum, the koan's meaning is inevitably revealed. The happy monk learns that the mind freed of attachment must go while coming. Of course, should the monk in his exuberant satori drop the maiden or cause them both to fall in the creek, he may fail the subsequent test put to him by his master, in which case, he must return to the maidens of the field and try again. Some monks live to be old men before satisfying their immortal masters with the right answer to the koan and its correct sequence of realization. Then, wobble-kneed and weak of heart, they are at last able to prove themselves worthy of embarking on the final stage of enlightenment, that of the Great Visualization of the Golden Pulsating Source within the Wish-Fulfilling Labia Majora."

"Objection!" cries an Olney-hater. "You're blaspheming the only sane religion on earth!".

"Objection overruled," barks Olney, "To begin with, it's not a religion, but it's a belief system with a sense of humor. At least among the teachers. Unfortunately, many of its followers tend to be bloodless, humorless zealots like yourself. Now where was I? Oh, yes. Leave us not forget the maidens of the land, so essential to the goals of holy men everywhere. Each maiden is herself fulfilled by these encounters. Safely on the other side of the creek, she can scurry home, satiated if not enlightened, to rejoin her loving family, one of many already populated by the offspring of this noble brotherhood. In the meantime, peppy though drained, the questing monk continues his search through sultry samsara for a porno nirvana. Explaining the ins and outs of his sect to head-scratching monks from other orders while strolling on to the next stream is, no doubt, more fun than a barrel of nuclear families, not to mention the bunion-attending uselessness of domesticated old age. I rest my case."

"And what a sad case it is," says Gilda Lezowski, sympathizing with Olney's apparently regrettable condition. "No clues aggressively displayed, an arrested development regarding sex, and a compulsion to autopodophagia."

"Whuzzat, 'ot-do…poda…feydagylll…' huh?" Val Crow is wagging her head.

"We're not just sex objects," says Maggie.

"You are too."

"We are not."

"So what's wrong with being a sex object? Such succulent housing women enjoy and what do they do about it? Complain. Always bitching and whining about being the center of the universe. And besides, women don't just have sex organs, they are sex organs. Your whole body is a sex organ. Don't you realize that men create empires and destroy them because of sexual love for women? Esthetics reaches its pinnacle with sensual investigations of the female body and the God-embracing orgasm it ultimately provides, both for you the home-owners and we the homeless."

"Jive suckuh," says Albeda Libido, that saucy California girl whose creamy centers are coated in chocolate. An old friend of Sunshine's, she's up from Oakland for the weekend. "You men just uses we girls's bodies like they was dolls. What you really aftuh is powuh."

"Power?" exclaims O. "Real men don't strive for power, they strive for snatch. The men you're talking about are the ones who can't get any, the dangerous creeps who become popes and presidents, who form rec room mercenary clubs hoping to pit peasant against peasant so they can sit back in their advisory roles and watch the bodies explode. These are the guys who can't get off with women because they're too lame, or with men either, because they're chicken. Unless," he gasps, "by power, you mean…." Somewhere in the heretofore hidden nun-cleaving room below the cellar of Olney's mind, a yellow, dimly watted bulb lights. "Listen," he says, larynx suddenly sweating, "Kissinger is wrong. Power is not the ultimate aphrodisiac. Pussy is. Unless, that is…." Olney wobbles at the head of a rickety staircase leading down, down, down. Is that faint glow shedding light on the source of the lust for power shared by all men? Dare he find out? "Unless, for God's sake, old Henry and the mercenaries are talking about doing awful things to their delicate victims, like…like…." Olney mops the sheer drop of his brow. His craggy neck looks as red as a Martian scarp. His upper lip crawls away from his teeth in a rictus like that of Kirk Douglas. Kirk Douglas? Yes, that's it. He listens closely and is cheered as Kirk speaks to Adolphe Menjou on the noble ethics of war. "Ladies," beams a relieved Olney as he modifies Kirk's timeless message, "power is for half-men scared shitless. So shitless, in fact, that the blocked shit gets recycled in their blood stream and smothers their hearts." Ready to turn his back on the blood-goosing room forever, he takes a confident last look, just to make sure. His eyes slump over the stairs, down, down, down. Wow! "Unless, old Henry…unless he's talking about…."

Olney is about to look for a high-powered flashlight when Maggie stamps her foot. "Olney, you're wandering. And stop being so silly about such a foul subject." Her sense of the implications of what he is seeing is mercifully restricted.

"Yes, you're right," he agrees hastily, slamming shut but not locking that cellar door. "Women, on the other chromosome, are a more practical lot. Like I said, they're looking for fiscal protection first and foremost. They'll go for any birdbrain with a bankroll--"

"Hah!" The Poot's got him now. "Then explain why any woman would look twice at you. A birdbrain yes. But a bankroll you'll never have."

"Let's roast the sexist pig." Madelaine Dzcorpia's got dibs on his hocks.

"I'm not saying all men are hung up on the body perfect," sez O., suddenly waving aloha to his swamped dinghy of credibility as it sails, rudderless, for the edge of the map. "A gold-medal part will do just fine. A long, slender neck, for example. If the rest of the body is utility grade, who cares? I mean, there's gotta be some redeeming feature. Otherwise, why would any sane man bother with women and their glandular treacheries?"

Oh, dear. All microscopic constituents of organic life stuck in the kitchen are grabbing their hats again. "Gimme the meat cleaver"…"He's another Clifford Olsen"…"Betcha five dollars he's a homo too"…"Where's my tractor, I'll flatten the fucker". Valerie Crow slips quietly from her chair to the floor. The color in her face slips just as discreetly, from dusky rose to lard white.

"Hey, hey, it was a good line. Where's your sense of humor for Christ's sake. Jesus…." Olney's voice trails off to a peevish silence. If only he had a tie to loosen.

"Your sense of humor is gonna get you punched or knifed one of these days," says Maggie.

"All I'm saying is if we treat you like sex objects, you get offended. And if we don't, you get bored. Women are always talking about 'where are the kind and gentle and sensitive men,' but that's not what it's all about deep down, and women know it. They need to be manhandled not Mr. Mum-handled. By the way," (tacking swiftly out of troubled waters--) "when you used the I Ching after we met, didn't you throw Chen, The Arousing, time after time?"

"Arousing rat's more like it. So what?"

(--only to crash into the bridge:) "Well, there you go. We both thought it meant me when it really meant four little walls, a garden and a basement full of turnips and camomile tea. Because that's what really turns you on."

"The Ching meant you, you snarky old bugger. It must have been wrong."

"Not when I used it. I got Youthful Folly changing to The Abysmal."

"You never did."

"No, but I would've if I'd known better."

"When did you ever know anything, you dilettante?"

"Better'n being dozy."

"I'm not dozy."

"You are too."

"I am not!"

§§§

The evening's first yawn, a modest Beaufort 9, further alarms the air with the odor of undigested chili beans and Greek salad. The swastika girls move to the living room where a Carly Simon song is summing up their attitude to men in general and Olney in particular. The hecklers switch to beer and mosey out back to Crusty's workshop. Reassured by the clutter of disemboweled appliances, each regains equilibrium as their conversation turns to spare-parts nomenclatures.

Maggie and Olney are alone in the kitchen.

A mist rolls out of her heart and into her eyes. She stands across the room from Olney, against the fridge; she won't look at him now, stares at her feet instead, bare though the spring night is cold. Little rosy toes gingerly roll a fallen old maid from the early evening's popcorn. She knows this is it, the end of history; well, theirs anyway. But now this house, this town, is history too. The whole province, the whole country. The one thing Olney managed to accomplish was to ruin her idea of home. As she steals a glance at him fidgeting by the sink, she finds herself making plans. She'll live frugally, save some money and head west, not east. Enough of Anglos and Western civilization. Work her way across the South Pacific is what she'll do. Maybe try Japan. Will this night never end?

Watching her just as guardedly, Olney's solar plexus takes a dive. A big sigh escapes his lips. It's all too, too sad. She should've been the Juliet. He'd been ripe, hadn't he? When they met, he felt his entire life had been a preparation. Or was he just gilding the hindsight of wishful thinking? Like so many of life's make believe turning points, this one had been an exploding cigar in the face of haphazard self-actualization. He'd been caught preening the incarnation again. And didn't it appear, by the way, that where hope there was, was also pain? Olney's nodding his inner head, sure of it. He'd needed to be in love was all, in love with Juliet, to be powerless to alter the body's momentum as it sped towards a destiny of swooning bliss. Instead, his need had caught the wrong train heading for the wrong destination, his heart merely along for the ride. And his mind? Reluctantly grabbing the handrails and hoisting aboard: "Going on holiday, are we?" The whole crew had been in the bar car for this one.

So here they were, a throwaway pilot for Dumb Romances, a badly scripted attempt at real life several removes from authenticity. And now their demo of frill was cracked and flapping in the little orb of the projector's smoky, merciless glare. Suffering diminishment from yet another encore of childish arguments, they had spent the evening, and most of their time together, fighting with baby fists to defend citadels of willful ignorance. They could have stopped hordes with the power of their convictions. And so they were convicts, imprisoned in the solitary confinements of ego, unable to comprehend an existence not their own.

In Paris, their battles had seethed and sillied on until she would about-face, leaving him, emptied, in the room. Or he would throw whatever was in his hand against the wall facing its sweep. Sometimes the one would break into a grin at the other's bombast, and then both would laugh, a good day or night suddenly ahead of them after all, the excitement and hope of their first days momentarily eclipsing the future and its scary implications: for a few weeks, or maybe a month, they had been those lovers kissing beneath the gargoyles of Paris, heedless of passersby who smiled, their day suddenly saved too.

Aye, he'd done her wrong, no doubt about it. A drunken tyrant driven to despair by his failure to be a self-starting genius, he exploded in daily rages over the least irritation. Then, after she and a host of invisible ogres had minced their way to safety, he wept with shame, not so much from a sense of moral degradation, but from the sheer waste of precious energy.

Lest self-abasement be overdone, she was no model of fruition either. If he drank too much, she was just as out to lunch, pensive to the point of disappearing. Maggie loved sex, but perversion scared the wits out of her, at least Olney's style. He liked inviting the blind world to catch them doing it; she lost her desire if she thought the neighbors were home. Maggie's resistance was the one he never broke. She didn't trust him and he didn't trust anybody, especially women. As time passed sous le ciel de Paris, they realized they'd both been had at the hands of each other.

Yet those first two weeks in the hotel, before the apartment was ready, were filled with rare, almost pathological moments of bliss. Or was that all Paris's doing? And then, moving in finally, a household of happiness took over, painting everything with an impressionist's warm, uterine haze. Mr. and Mrs. World-at-their-feet. But where was his mind through it all? Rugged up on the sofa, that's where. Oh, it coughed discreetly from time to time, just to let him know it was still alive.

And then came Rhonda. Whose ankles. Whose legs. Whose panties so fragrant…. Disaster wrapped in beauty coming to help with the rent. Tenant titillation stripping Olney Garkle of all five percent of his faculties, reducing him to a state of sperm-spattered flummoxy, utter devastation.

It wouldn't have mattered, Rhonda or no Rhonda. Like everyone who has ever drawn a breath, Olney and Maggie lived in adjoining mythologies, each speaking incompatible languages, each designing variations on a theme completely unknown to the other, each unaware of those inner worlds never for a moment seen or touched by any but the one who fashioned them. That they never understood this only tightened and reduced the perimeter of the zero in which they lived.

§§§

Olney looks longingly at the girl he had fallen in dashing, drooling love with. Who for years to come, every woman and every place would remind him of. His eyes bank over her shoulder to glide down her arm, gently strafing soft strands of blonde, almost invisible hair. Her wrists are not only thin, but small, like a girl's, like the wrists of his long lost premenarcheal angel, Courtney Faire. Christ, but they goosed his very quick, those wrists, lit a hotplate under every cell, accelerated his blood to particle-perceiving velocities. He knew they were only a fetish, but life in such a thickened atmosphere, under such overwhelming constraints, was inconceivable without a fetish or two. Life was moved by them, but they made you crazy.

He sighs again. Like a bottle of cheap, poptop wine, the whole thing had come to an end without meaning, without imparting any richness or elevations; he knew they had learned nothing. He had consummately failed the woman who needed anyone but him. Paris was the only souvenir, the city where even war was bound to become a cherished memory.

Maggie crosses the floor to give him a parting embrace. "Goodbye you big bad man." She joins the others in the living room. Olney drinks a glass of water and stares out the window into the night. A lone wolf, his old friend, howls at the arctic end of his soul.

The court is bleary-eyed. Blood pressures have equalized, putting at ease the squad of emergency unit sphygmomanometers wheezing in the ready room offstage. Workhorse neurons, wading in tumid brain-sponges, their switch-throwing capabilities impeded by cost-efficient alcohol, now activate bed-seeking instructions and the revelers drift out the door.

The party is over.

FIN

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