Adios, Scheherazade

“Maybe I will,” she said, in a manner perilously close to a Mae West parody, and turned around and left the room. She paused just outside the doorway to give me a toodle-oo waggle of her fingers, and then she was gone.

I had that old dinosaur, penus erectus, of course, and I briefly considered going into the john and casting my seed in the toilet, but I had made a point of refraining from masturbation since my marriage, on the basis that I was ridiculous enough as it was, and the Mae West touch at the end had added just the right aroma of burlesque, thereby toppling me from the peak of my passion, and I was sure the dinosaur would briefly wander away by himself, so I simply went back to looking for my cigarettes, and in fact old dino did die, and I thought no more of him.

I had just completed my task, in fact, had found the right coat and the right pocket and had the Luckies in my hand, when the light came on. I’d been in there long enough by then for my eyes to have adjusted to the gloom, and the sudden glare of the overhead light made me squint like a mole. I also jumped like the guiltiest footpad of all time, which for some reason is what I felt like. I turned around, squinting and blinking, my heart thumping, and it was Kay again.

She was squinting, too, and I saw that her makeup was smeary and that the flesh of her face was sagging a trifle, from tiredness or drink or both. She made an indefinite sort of gesture with one hand and said, with artificial brightness, “I forgot to get what I came for.”

Of course, that was a perfect straight line, but I knew she hadn’t intended it as such and I also saw she was terribly embarrassed and ill at ease, and then I realized I felt the same way. We were like two strangers who, having met and together done something despicable, never expecting to see each other again, suddenly come face to face in the street.

It was one of the most acutely embarrassing moments of my life, I’m still not sure why. Holding up the pack of Luckies like a spieler on television, I said, my brightness as artificial as hers, “Well, I finally got mine. See you.”

“See you,” she said, and her smile was so painful it made me notice her lipstick, which made me think I might be wearing some of that lipstick myself right now. So I waved the cigarettes again, and stumbled hurriedly from the room, and stopped off in the john on the way back and checked myself in the mirror. Yes, there it was, the scarlet evidence. It was very difficult to remove, a faint pink layer of it seemed to have settled into my skin, but finally I rubbed and scrubbed my face so much that the rest of it was the same pink shade and it could no longer be noticed. With which, I went back to the living room, where I found Betsy talking with Dick, the husband of Kay, a circumstance that gave me a start until I realized that symbols are things that happen in novels. So I joined them, and I too talked with Dick, and a while later I saw Kay on the other side of the room talking with another group of people.

I think Dick was working on The Captain’s Pearls then. I think that’s the night he was discussing his theories of literature, which I find sort of boring. I’ll grant you the result is fine, The Captain’s Pearls was a funny book, but the theories behind it strike me as unnecessary. It seems to me Dick could have written that book without ever dreaming up a theory for it at all.

All right, I’ve mentioned the theory, I might as well explain something about it. I won’t go into the sort of detail that Dick does, because I’m not here to bore me either, but I’ll give it a skim.

What Dick says is, the conventional artifices are breaking down between the work of art and its audience. He says it’s most apparent in the movies, where the moviemakers are increasingly acknowledging within the movie that what you’re seeing is a movie, but that it’s happening in the other arts too. His examples are mostly movie examples, though. Like a movie called The Troublemaker, where, when Buck Henry goes to see this Chinese prostitute, the camera starts to follow him into the room, in fact he can’t close the door because the camera’s in the way, and he finally turns and looks at the audience in an exasperated way and tells them to go away. The camera backs up, and he shuts the door. Or in Tom Jones, where the characters stop every once in a while and talk to the audience. Or in the Bob Dylan movie Don’t Look Back, and the other movies using the cinéma vérité technique, where the camera frankly exists as an eavesdropper. He has examples from the theater, too, in fact he has examples from all over, but those are the ones I remember.