The Natural Order of Things (30 page)

“He thought his dog was a soulless machine,” says de Vere, “completely unconscious of the world.”

“Who did?” ask the whores.

“Descartes. His logic was a bit convoluted. If dogs possess consciousness then naturally they must possess souls. And if dogs possess souls then it only stands to reason that
all
animals possess souls, including oysters and sea sponges. But Descartes couldn’t stomach the idea of heaven overrun by mangy mutts marking their territory, pissing on celestial harps, shitting at Saint Peter’s feet, humping the legs of the dearly departed.
Ergo
, dogs do not possess souls. Ironic, since science has only confirmed what we have long suspected—that humans are animals, too. Isn’t that why we’re here tonight? To debase ourselves? To give in to our animal urges?”

The giggling existential whores do not agree. Sex, they insist, is not part of our animal nature; in fact, it’s what makes us different from the animals. Sex is cerebral, spiritual, a most solemn ceremony, a sacred obligation, as subtle and complex as any religious ritual. There are customs to observe, roles to play, small but important gestures to make.

With a rare feeling of contentment, de Vere leans back in his chair and sips his absinthe. If only he could remain lost forever in this wondrous world of philosophical rumination, this astonishing cognitive theater, but of course these enchanting reveries must always take a nightmarish turn. As evening falls, a dirty yellow mist creeps up the hill, snaking through the cobblestone streets and obscuring the moon that hovers above the rooftops like some giant unblinking eye with broken capillaries. At the sound of approaching footsteps, an ominous hush falls over the patrons. Even the waiters, bearing bottles of Beaujolais, set their trays aside and peer into the dense fog.

Like a gargoyle plunging from the cornices of the great cathedral, the menacing figure of a Great Dane comes bounding toward de Vere, snarling and snapping at him.

“Gonzago?” de Vere says, rising from his seat. “Is that you, boy?”

But the dog does not wag its tail and lick his face. It lunges at him, latches onto his arm, drags him toward the fountain at the center of the square, where his wife Elsie greets him with a baneful smile. She sits on the edge of the fountain, her ankles crossed, her hands folded in her lap, and in a voice that is simultaneously sweet and masterfully manipulative and so very typical of women of her station, she says, “Edward, darling, there’s a small matter we must discuss. You see, I’ve somehow managed to contract a nasty case of syphilis …”

She leads de Vere to the center of the fountain and chains him to one of the magnificent marble
putti
that pisses perfect parabolas of water into the sickening mist, and though he wants to escape into the night, he is prevented from doing so by Gonzago, who shreds his pants and claws his legs. Like some village idiot convicted of unlawful carnal knowledge, de Vere proclaims his innocence and rattles his chains and capers ridiculously around the shallow pool. The fog suddenly lifts, and tourists pour into the square to take pictures of him. Bulbs flash. Shutters automatically adjust to gather the meager lamplight. These people have traveled thousands of miles to witness this comic scene and aren’t going to miss it for the world, the Eiffel Tower be damned.

Gonzago seems to be enjoying it, too. He licks his enormous swinging testicles and happily manufactures mountainous heaps of fetid, fly-swaddled shit. All of Paris is soiled by dog shit—the people here are too posh to pick up after their mutts—but now, to de Vere’s disbelief, his wife stoops down and, using her bare hands, scoops up a warm pile of feces and fashions it into a ball. Without warning she flings it at his face, even massages it into his hair. The shit slides down his back and legs, but de Vere, far beyond any possibility of redemption, bows his head and endures this ferocious hailstorm with a stoic smile, his chin pressed against his chest.

He feels some vague sense of remorse for the ghastly things he has done to Elsie—the years of deception, the innumerable infidelities, and the terrible bout of syphilis that has gone undiagnosed for months and has obviously left her stark, raving mad.

The afternoon sun has managed to burn a small aperture through the thick clouds, briefly filling the world with a dazzling, orange light like molten steel pouring from a foundry, forcing de Vere to shield his eyes when he wakes from his troubled dream. Momentarily blinded, he rolls over and almost knocks heads with the woman sleeping next to him. Her mouth hangs open like a Venus Flytrap, better to capture the brown spiders that drop from the spinning blades of the ceiling fan. Her lips are dry and crusted over with an unidentifiable white glop, her face pale, swollen, a tapestry of despair stretched across the iciest trenches of hell. De Vere thinks of all the wicked things he can do to her right now. How many men, he wonders, have considered tying her to the bed, gagging her, slitting her throat, putting a quick end to the years of misery?

With expert precision, he slides from the sullied sheets, cringing as the cold floorboards groan like the waterlogged planks of a sinking ship. Bleary-eyed, whiskey-dicked, de Vere stumbles naked around the room, searching for his shirt and pants, but when he pinches his chin and smells the woman on his fingertips, he suddenly has a funny idea. He crouches in the middle of the room, tongue flitting in and out of his mouth like a snake trying to taste the early November air, and with a pleasure more exquisite than the wild hour of drunken lovemaking, he squeezes hard, grunting with the effort of it, and feels his bowels rumble and then suddenly, blissfully empty. Even his mind empties. A long, soft, stinking coil of crap oozes out of him, forming a terraced pyramid, and for one spectacular moment he is no longer a human being but a gigantic evacuating rectum, nothing more.

As he squats beside the bed, he takes inventory of the room—the empty bottle of bourbon on the dresser, the scented candles that line the windowsill, and on the nightstand, a stack of paperback romances with lurid covers featuring bare-chested men ravaging women in various poses of rapture, their lips parted in anticipation of long-awaited and much-deserved love. De Vere flips to a random page and cringes at the absurdity of the narrative, the wretched sentimentality of it, the overwrought descriptions of breasts and buttocks, the syrupy prose that sounds more ludicrous than lascivious.

With mild embarrassment, he wonders what the Parisians, lounging on the park benches that line the perpendicular walkways of the Jardin du Luxembourg, might say if asked their opinion of these masturbatory epics. “Why rely on such a poor simulacrum,”
they would invariably answer, “when you can have the real thing? Love is everywhere. It falls from the skies.”

In some ways, the French are very naïve and have a difficult time grasping the fact that Americans absolutely depend on sordid novels, pornographic films, and battery-operated toys. In the United States, any show of affection is considered taboo—hand-holding shunned, kissing on street corners and in public parks denounced as a kind of pathological disorder. Instead of spontaneity, Americans prefer long-term contracts and decadent wedding pageants, women in ridiculous, white gowns—
white
, of all colors!—a march down the aisle toward messy divorce, dysfunctional children, medicine cabinets crammed with mood-altering pharmaceuticals.

De Vere forces himself to read a few paragraphs more. Though he considers using the pages to wipe himself, he knows tearing them one by one from the book would make too much noise, so he uses the down comforter instead. He pulls on his pants and shirt, laces his shoes, but before exiting the bedroom, he spots the woman’s purple dress hanging from the closet doorknob. He searches through each of its hidden compartments until he recovers the wad of fives and tens that he gave her. He intends to use the money to buy a croissant and a travel magazine at the quaint coffee shop down the street.

Skirting the lumpy memento in the middle of the room, he hurries over to the door, and, in his haste, nearly collides with a little girl in a yellow dress standing in the hallway. She is perhaps four years old but looks younger. Her limbs are so bony, her hair so long and knotted, and her skin so tawny and smeared with dirt that she looks like one of those undernourished North African street urchins who lurk in the gloomy carpet shops along the Boulevard Barbes, waiting to accost tourists who have foolishly wandered away from Sacre Coeur in search of the Metro. De Vere used to visit a nearby brasserie there run by a family of Berbers. The proprietor served a drink called
buzo
, the best in Paris, and sold bags of hash and, if he trusted you, an hour with one of “the new girls” smuggled into the country from Algeria. “You will find her most cooperative,
monsieur
,” he promised, and he was never wrong. Intoxicants and copulation are the trades by which the world’s underclass survive.

The little girl sucks her thumb and stares with indifference at the pile of shit next to the woman’s bed.

“Come over here,” De Vere whispers.

The little girl skitters away from him, her eyes large and dark as nighttime in the Sahara.

“We don’t want to wake your mommy, do we? Are you hungry?”

She blinks again but doesn’t respond. With coos and simple hand gestures, de Vere coaxes her toward the kitchen. “Watch your step,” he says, kicking aside the pink guitar on the floor. He clears a space at the kitchen table and tells her to sit. After searching the drawers and cupboards, he finds a loaf of slightly moldy bread and puts two pieces into a toaster oven. Using a dirty steak knife from the sink, he lathers the toast with jelly scraped from the bottom of a jar.

“Guess I should have washed my hands first …” he murmurs, setting the plate in front of her. “What’s your name?”

She stuffs the toast into her mouth.

“I have a child, too,” he tells her. “A son. But he ran away from home. He was a bad boy. Very naughty. He stole lots of money from me. And stealing is the worst thing
you can do to someone. I wonder how he’s getting on. He’s not used to the real world. Eventually he’ll come back home. Sooner or later kids always do …”

As he speaks, the girl opens her mouth and lets the brown paste fall onto the table near his hands. He jumps away. She seems to find his reaction funny and pokes at the goop with her fingers, sniffs it, then rubs it across her face.

“Jesus,” de Vere whispers, “what should we do with you? Let me think about this. Oh, I know just the thing. You’d better come with me. Yes, that’s right, this way. Good girl. We’ll have you all fixed up in no time at all …”

The bathroom is small and windowless with a single bulb screwed into a wall sconce for light. The black and white tiles are covered with long tentacles of coarse hair, the corners crawling with mildew so green it looks radioactive. Bras and panties hang from the towel rack. Bloody tissue paper fills the small trashcan beside the toilet. De Vere opens the medicine cabinet, hoping to find oxycontin, vicodin, praying even for a single aspirin with codeine, but there are only vials labeled setraline, amitriptiline, duloxetine.

He instructs the girl to stand against the wall, pulls the shower curtain open, and plugs the drain in the tub. Though it takes a little effort, he manages to twist the faucets. Water trickles from the tap, cold and gray like the waters of the nearby river after a heavy rainstorm. Debris floats around the tub—nail clippings, pieces of plaster that have flaked from the ceiling, a thin sliver of blue soap.

“Raise your arms,” he says. “Hold still.”

De Vere lifts her dress. When he turns to check the water level he sees, framed in the cracked and spotted mirror, the woman’s face. From the look in her eyes and the knife in her hand, he knows what she is thinking. Clearly she is still drunk, high, confused.

To the girl the woman says, “You clever little bitch, how’d you get out?”

“Excuse me, but you shouldn’t talk that way …”

“Fuck you!” The woman jabs the knife at him, the blade bright red and dripping with jelly.

Obstinate in her silence, the naked girl clings tightly to de Vere’s leg.

He gives her a gentle push. “Go on. Go see your mommy.”

“Keep your stinking hands off my child!”

De Vere stumbles backward. “Listen, lady, I’m a million kinds of monster, but I’m not
that
kind of monster.”

The woman lifts the girl off her feet and practically catapults her into the hallway. Then she turns the knife on de Vere again.

“Stay right there, motherfucker. Stay right where you are.”

“Whatever you say.”

Without taking her eyes from him, the woman slowly backs out of the bathroom, slams the door shut, and turns the lock.

How long he is trapped there he cannot say—one hour, two? Only now does he remember leaving his watch on the nightstand in the bedroom. Eventually the woman will find it and pawn it to buy more drugs and liquor. He raps politely on the door, tries to reason with her, attempts to convince her that in time she will see him not as a monster
but as an angel in disguise and that this experience may prove to be the defining moment in her life, the long-awaited and yearned for epiphany that will liberate her from all her pain and suffering. For years to come, as she drinks coffee in the church basement with the rest of the recovering addicts, she will, in a voice that is small and docile and trembling with guilt and self-reproach, vow before God never again to touch booze or men. He tells her these things, but she does not answer, and De Vere understands that there are many steps to take before his transfiguration from sinner to saint.

At some point he hears her leave the apartment and hurry down the steps and, for a little while at least, he believes he is alone. Then he hears the strumming of the toy guitar and the little girl singing a plaintive melody in a foreign tongue. A prodigy, he thinks, until he realizes that she is repeating the same incomprehensible words and playing the same three chords over and over again. A ferocious heat seeps in under the crack near the floor, turning the bathroom into a sweltering blast furnace. The walls begin to converge, constricting his arms and legs, making it increasingly difficult for him to move, to breathe, to think clearly. He grows agitated, begs the girl to release him, to call the police, but no matter how hard he kicks and pounds and throws his body against the door, he knows the little girl will not come to his aid. She has been intentionally left behind to torment him.