Typical (8 page)

At the Unemployment Office he had been denied benefits because he had had no employer. His case worker finally did not doubt that he might have been fired after reading his aptitude questionnaire (under skills, Mr. Irony listed “left-handed”). When the issue of self-employment was broached, Mr. Irony denied stringently that he had been his own employer, a flatly ironic notion and one therefore not available to a reformed ironic. The entire affair—two days and six hours and forty-eight minutes from taking a number to being dismissed as ineligible for benefits—which once would have made his day, or week, was as disappointing as it would have been to the common fools down there trying to get something for nothing. He realized, finally, standing by the refrigerator, just before he opened it and
ate
the two olives and
scared
the roach and
squeezed
a green juice from the parsley Baggie, that
being down there
had been off limits; what was more ironic than getting paid for not working
only
if you could prove someone had deemed you
unsuitable
for working? Why couldn’t you be paid for not working if you were suitable? Only the unfit benefit. It was not Darwinian. It was ironic. It had been, he saw now, a close call, close to a “slip” in the parlance of reforming abusers of substance and, he supposed it was fair to regard himself, abusers of style. He was a reforming abuser of style, a reforming ironic.

There were no books for him, no post-or pre-traumatic stress syndromes, no Adult Children of Ironic Parents groups to go to, no women counselors that spent their lives holding your hand if you’d had too much fun abusing something and now wanted as recompense to hold hands with idle women. No nothing. He was alone. He might have been on Mars. This gave him comfort. At least he was not in a herd of whiners who pulled out a poker chip and explained its significance before they told you their name. Mr. Irony resolved he would carry a cow chip before a poker chip, if that was not ironic—already, he was relieved to discover, he was not sure what irony was. A positive sign.

Still, he was pretty certain that extracting from the pocket in a somber, proud, ceremonious fashion and confidentially beginning to explain to an innocent bystander that what this cow chip represented was … was ironic. Perhaps he could, for a while, find a substitute for irony. Substitute therapy was common, even if it itself was perhaps a little ironic.

He had recently witnessed a father and young daughter purchasing some candy for the mother’s birthday. The child, who was allowed to select the candy, decided on chocolate-covered peanuts, and decided that they were “pretend poops.” Indeed, the candies had looked like small, hard turds.

“But don’t
tell
Mommy we’re giving her pretend poops,” the father instructed.

The child grinned wickedly. “It’ll be …
pretty surprisy
!”

That, Mr. Irony thought, might be an acceptable substitute for
ironic: surprisy.
Irony he could quit, but, as methadone to his heroin, he could not quit that which was surprisy.

“Surprisy it is, then,” he announced, still leaning against the refrigerator, immediately looking less glum. He then crawled out of his own kitchen window and crawled back in. It felt good. He felt fine. Not himself, but all right.

“All surprising
right,”
he said, beginning a rubber-legged dance that came to him. He bandied this way through the apartment, saying “Surprise you!” to walls and paintings and furnishings. He told everything to surprise off. “Just get the surprise out of my way,” he said to a pair of boxer shorts, and deftly toed them—through an incredibly long arc—into the clothes hamper. Suddenly, badly, he wanted a uniformed maid working full time in his small apartment, altogether too small for such a servant, and he wanted
only new clothes.

Piling all of his old clothes into a heap, and thinking of how he might safely present himself at the haberdasher’s
naked,
he paused to congratulate himself: not just any man could kick irony once it had its teeth in him. A lesser man, one less surprisy, would have failed.

M
ARIO MOSCALINI PASSED ON
his way out the door every morning one of several Michelin guides to Italy that were kept open to his favorite passage about modern Italy. He sometimes glanced at the books, but he had long before memorized the passage:

Modern Italy.—In this land abounding in every type of beauty, the modern Italian lives and moves with perfect ease. Dark-haired, black-eyed, gesticulating, nimble and passionate, he is all movement and fantasy
.

This overflowing vitality appears in many modern achievements that may surprise the visitor. Improvement of the soil, industrial complexes, nuclear power centres, dams, motorways and skyscrapers, characterize the fantastic economic development which has taken place after World War II, giving Italy a new look and belying the legend of the macaroni-eating, guitar-playing Italian.
A
new way of life has been created in the country.

On Mario, one such modern Italian, these words had the calming, assuring effect of a psalm.

He was thinking specifically of the moving about modern Italy with perfect ease as he whipped his taxi through the customs gates at the port of Livorno to pick up his first fare of the day, a merchant seaman. Mario liked sailors. Unlike regular tourists, they were not finicky about what they wanted to see or do or where they wanted to go. They wanted food, women, to sleep, and they spoke in a direct fashion. With a sailor Mario was free to be himself, a man.

The sailor this morning was well-fed-looking, and Mario was not surprised to hear him ask for a
“puta”
right away. He turned to the sailor and said, with a conspiratorial wink, “I have large size.”

“Not a fat one,” the sailor said.

“No,” Mario said, “you do not seize my meaning.
I
have large size.” He held up his arm, flexed, his fist touching the ceiling of the cab.

“Non capisco Italiano,”
the sailor said.

“You not must to know Italiano. In plain English, I have large size.” He winked again.

“Let me out,” the sailor said.

“But we are not to
la puntana
so
presto
—”

“You take her,” the sailor said, stepping from the moving taxi and running down the street.

Mario Moscalini was nimble enough, to be sure, to have caught the man, but it was just a matter of a language barrier, or something, and the skipped fare was not large, so he elected to just move on with traffic. Later he regretted this decision somewhat, because the day proved very dull, and it would have been enlivening to have stopped the sailor and wildly demanded his fare—and more, as reparation for the rudeness—and generally to have demonstrated to the fool what passion can mean. The man had been at sea too long for his own good.

It was not until he was on his way home that things picked up. He was tired, and it was funny the way it worked, but the best things seemed to happen to him when he was too tired to avail himself of golden opportunity. And if ever a golden opportunity bore down on him, it did as he clicked off his duty lights. He saw Cicciolina, pornostar and parliamentarian, by the side of the road, alone and needing a ride. She was supposed to be in Rome making legislation or movies. But she was here under a streetlight. Something was wrong, entirely out of place, so he got her into the cab without pressing her for an explanation. She would volunteer her troubles if she wanted to. Mario respected a person’s privacy if he respected anything in the world. And he respected
l’onorevole
Cicciolina if he respected
anyone
in the world. If she had not had the sense to pull her dress up over her
tette
at her press conference at Piazza Navona in Rome when she won her seat in parliament, he had been told that the very irreplaceable Bernini fountain there could have been much more seriously damaged than it was. People acted as if they had never seen
tette
before. It was ridiculous. Still, hers were a bit special, they looked good in movies, and it made him wonder if they were like movie stars themselves—maybe not so great-looking in real life. He thought she would be glad to show them to him, even if she was in some kind of trouble, so he turned down an oddly unfamiliar street—he knew Livorno backwards, he thought—where he could park if she agreed to a showing, and they were suddenly surrounded by the blue lights of
polizia.
How could she be in trouble with the law? She
was
the law.

An officer approached Mario’s window, pointing adamantly in the direction they had come. Then he threw his arms to heaven and shook his head. Mario saw now the one-way signs he had—it was incredible—been going against. And he a professional driver. That was why the officer was so wild in his gesticulations probably. Mario had let down the fraternity of professional men on the road. He got out to face the officer.

When the officer again pointed and raised his arms in total surrender at a move so
un
nimble as Mario’s, Mario fell to his knees and sculpted giant breasts in the air before his chest as he had seen Greek sailors do many times when they danced in the port bars.

He was overcome by a passion that had not seized him so in the car—he suddenly knew why men had broken a foot off a river god when they saw
l’onorevole
Cicciolina’s
tette.
“Her
tette
were
credimi, eccellente
—
grande, pesante
—”

“Whose?” the officer said.

“L’onorevole
Cicciolina’s.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Now?”

“She was in the taxi with me—it’s why I took the bad turn—”

“Where is she now?”

“Disappeared, apparently. You did not see her?”

“No.”

“She’s fast. It’s almost incredible, but I think she’s in trouble with the law. That’s why she vamooshed. Is she wanted by the law?”

“You were in a fantasy,” the officer said.

“I doubt it.” Mario met the officer eye to eye. He held his ground. “I doubt that extremely.”

The officer pursed his lips. “Good for you. No ticket today.
Buon viaggio.
I’d like to meet her, too. Here’s my number.”

“Ciao,”
Mario said. He doubted that
l’onorevole
Cicciolina would consort with
polizia
but he held his tongue. Let the officer dream.

He sped homeward, thinking that if the officer had not been one policeman but a whole band of carabinieri with Uzis, and they had opened fire, he and Cicciolina would have looked a lot like Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in
Bonnie and Clyde,
except his Fiat was a little smaller than Clyde’s coupe, and Cicciolina’s
tette
were a lot larger than Bonnie Parker’s. He threw the officer’s number out the window, an act he would regret when he got home.

At his house the first thing he saw was a man looking into his windows. Fearing he might be an assassin, perhaps some new form of competition among taxi drivers, he circled the block until the man disappeared, discovering in his revolutions that his Fiat, though now getting on in miles, still got good rubber going into both second and third. When the man had gone, he realized that a taxi-driver assassin would not linger in the
absence
of a taxi, so he was probably fantasizing a bit, but still, you could not rule anything out these days. You have CIA, the Israelis are back-to-the-wall, look at Libya, and the French can be so snotty. Mario had had nightmares since hearing in childhood about tiny Frenchmen with wires who had been deadly on Germans who were caught patrolling lines—from behind, total surprise, wire through neck. There was an air of lunacy about it, but Mario thought it just could have been a lost Frenchman looking to kill him for some fantastic reason, kill him with a wire, if it was still true that they were good with the wire.

Getting out of his car, Mario stepped on a wire. This nearly gave him an
infarto.
But he saw, before he stopped breathing altogether, that it was only his radio antenna that he had yanked two mornings ago from the red hands of the neighbor’s six-year-old. He had given the child a very stern talking-to about antenna stealing leading straight to bank robbing and jail, gesticulating with a razor motion at his throat. The child, still holding the snapped-off antenna, did not seem to understand, so Mario choked himself until blue to demonstrate the effects of hanging as he had seen them in Westerns. At this the child dropped the antenna and ran off laughing. Mario left it there. It was not sightly to reconnect a ripped-out antenna, and less sightly to stick in its place a coat hanger. Besides, his radio did not work. It had blown out one night as he passed a nuclear power station. He had a vaguely dishonest feeling after scolding the child, because the radio was useless and because he had himself wanted to be a bank robber before circumstances led him into taxi driving.

He approached his house with caution. Seeing no one, he entered. The house was wide open and well lit. It looked to have been robbed. Drawers and closets were open, some of his wife’s dresses were on the bed, others hanging askew on their hangers half out of the closet. He checked immediately beneath his pillow for his pistol, a German officer’s Luger which he had purchased from a man at a flea market who had restored the finish expertly and filled the barrel with lead. His gun was there. So, for a heist, they had not been cleaned out. The scum had missed the real treasure.

In the kitchen he expected to find the pasta water on and, by extension, his wife, but she was not there. There was a note on the kitchen table. He looked under the kitchen sink to see if the bastards had found his shoeshine kit. They had not. It was safe. The little kiwi birds on the brush handles looked at him serenely, as if to say,
We held our ground.

He wanted to get the pasta going but couldn’t decide on what type. He stopped just before salting the water, sat down at the table absently eating rock salt, and looked at the note. It was, apparently, from his wife. The salt was very salty, he noticed. He decided to secure the doors and windows against a return of the scavengers and sit in the dark waiting for them. He had seen the American detective Mannix and perhaps Jack Nicholson in
Chinatown
do this. They couldn’t tell where you were, but you could see them by the streetlights outside. What was dangerous in this case was that they would not be able to see his Luger. If he lit a candle, perhaps they could see the gun, and maybe just enough of him, like Marlon Brando in
Apocalypse Now,
that he would look terribly menacing and slender. Also, he could read his wife’s note. It was beginning to interest him.