WILL YOU PLEASE FUCK OFF?
Three Toby novellas and two short stories,
including
“Attack of the Giant Feminists”
and
“The Fat Girls Contest,”
and featuring characters in
Foreign Matter
Total Moisture and The Cad by
Robert MacLean
Pretentious Pictures Publications
From the Editorial Reviews of FOREIGN MATTER
“This was the most hilarious book I have ever read. I laughed out loud again and again. I kept thinking this is the craziest book I have ever read and why I am reading it and then I would hit another part that had me laughing some more. I was kind of sad when I finished it.”—Pat Thompson, Goodreads
“I could easily recommend FOREIGN MATTER for its laugh-out-loud plot, characters, and dialogue, but MacLean’s true mastery lies simply in his love of language and his endlessly inventive and amusing turns of phrase…MacLean also knows how to present physical comedy sequences that are on par with the best of Chaplin and Keaton.”— Jon Zelazny
“I’m surprised; I didn’t think the reviewers could be right, but this is a funny book!”— Theater/Film/Book-Critique
“A joy.”—The West Coast Review of Books
“A happy ending for nearly every one of the vivid characters who cavort across the pages of this fresh and spirited first novel.”—Publishers Weekly
“Fighting his way through blinding hangovers to somehow blunder through victoriously— but he’s enormously enjoyable while he’s at it.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A complete success. This is the funniest first novel I’ve read so far.”—Books in Canada
“A delightfully comic creation…the more we get to know him the less we expect from him”—The Montreal Gazette
“The word “romp” was created to describe this funny, ebullient comedy of errors”—Santa Cruz Sentinal
“The feel of a Peter Sellers movie done by Evelyn Waugh or David Lodge”—Wichita Eagle-Beacon
“Fast-moving and funny, as well as wickedly endearing”—Anniston Star
“Consistently amusing and at times hilarious”—Library Journal
“Could bode well for his future”—The New York Times
From the Customer Reviews of FOREIGN MATTER
“Take Foreign Matter to the beach. Take it to bed. It’s a total delight!”—Noreen Golfman
“Heartily frothy, shameless in its lightness and frivolity, it is totally uplifting and delightful.”—G. Kiourti “IK”
“I’ve published many books and taught writing for decades, and I take my hat off to this kind of talent when I see it.”—Collector Guy
“This novel is fast, subtle and funny, funny, funny, totally politically incorrect, a pleasure punctuated by out-loud loughs.”—ildijo
“Great fun—it would make a good movie.” —Malcolm Reeve
“This is a fun read…the Child had me laughing out loud!” —Vertical Leap
More Toby books:
Foreign Matter at Amazon and Smashwords;
Total Moisture at Amazon and Smashwords; and
The Cad at Amazon and Smashwords.
Also by Robert MacLean:
Mortal Coil: A Comedy of Corpses at Amazon.
The President’s Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy at Amazon.
And they’re all at Sony, Nook, Kobo, Diesel, iTunes —the whole street.
To contact Robert MacLean visit his blog, The Devil’s PleasureGarden.
Ebook design by 52 Novels www.52novels.com
Cover by Peter Ratcliffe www.peterratcliffe.com
The cover shows a detail from The Three Graces by Peter Paul Rubens.
“Attack of the Giant Feminists” was the last story to appear in Writers Magazine, and may have contributed to the demise of that organ.
Neither “Attack” nor “The Big Detective” is a Toby story.
Copyright © 2011 Robert MacLean
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted by any means, whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic, without written permission by the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law with the exception of public domain materials contained herein.
Smashwords Edition
Contents
THE FAT GIRLS CONTEST | ATTACK OF THE GIANT FEMINISTS
CERTAINLY SOMETHING | THE GREAT DETECTIVE | WILL YOU PLEASE FUCK OFF?
For David, Stefana and Octav
THE FAT GIRLS CONTEST
“Garsong, encore de fried potatoes.”
—P.G. Wodehouse, French
Leave
“Hey!” said Toad. “Let’s have a fat girls contest!”
We were reclining in a sidewalk cafe after the mid-day meal, drunk, orally sated, Paris as it were at our feet. In order of importance there was me—tall, with refined good looks. Taller than Toad anyway, as who is not? I was dressed in a style so subtle it was irrelevant to expense, which was a good thing. Understated jacket, open collar, my napkin tucked in at the neck.
Of course the napkin should lie on the lap, I know that, but if you like to lean back with your foot on your knee, or possibly on the table, it’s handier to be wearing a bib. One doesn’t want to spear an escargot and drip garlic butter on the lapels.
And in this laid-backness perhaps we have the best embodiment of my moral being. The problem as I see it is to negotiate the busy canal of life from the gondola of one’s passivity. I like the little things. Lunch. The nap. The haircut. Looking in the mirror all that time puts me in such a good mood. Content merely to exist, sort of thing.
It was otherwise with Toad. He was always looking for women with whom to excite himself. I’d rather just lie here and await ravishment. Amuse myself with the question, does a fax machine going off in a dark office make a sound. Drink myself to sleep. But Toad must up and gather rosebuds, which kept him pretty much on the hop.
He was not something you really wanted to look at. Short and watchful. The pouch under his chin palpitated as he waited, if you could speak of his having a chin. A mouth was what he had, a wide mouth that seemed to end at his shoulders and gave him a calculating look. A let’s-wait-and-see look.
And yet withal he had an effect on women that defied comprehension. No one knew how he did it. He did not, for example, own toiletries or extra shirts or any of the things we associate with personal pleasantness. He didn’t so much change his clothes as molt. He was the animal fact, maybe that was it. His chemistry—filled the air.
“Hi,” he’d say, “can I lie on you?”
They loved it, it was irritating to see. He could unroll his tongue and tickle a nipple into erection at a distance of yards. At times I was tempted to regard him as the externalization of my own libido. Wrinkled and mottled in repose, rigid and shiny when alert and so forth. But the idea of my phallus as a separate entity induces in me a castration anxiety so intense that I thrust it aside. Besides, he had too much energy to be written off as a symbol.
And energy was what it took. He was a connoisseur of female flesh. Of any flesh, really, you had to watch him. Continually pushing toward new frontiers, as I suppose he was doing when he sat up and expleted his suggestion.
I looked at him as at an alarm clock. “What?” I said.
I listened warily while he sketched the idea. It was a mistake to allow him to involve me in these things. Walking around in the service of your intentions is what gets you on the treadmill. The trick is not to have any intentions. But who escapes them?
And indeed, how was such a man to be accommodated? He wanted to soak himself in flesh, drown in it, extinguish for a moment his Toadness—and who can blame him?—in it.
Consider the luxury for someone like Toad, for someone like anyone, of encountering in the object of desire a maximum surface, of finding the object of desire if not limitless at least global. Planetary. The woman as world, if you will. Habitable. Not just the image of what is bigger than oneself, of what threatens, nay promises, to engulf one, but the very thing. I mean he’d done everything else. If I’d had his money I’d have hired a churl to carry me to the bathroom.
For Toad was rich. The idle rich, is what he was. Idleness is one of the few things I envy them. He could borrow money from you as only the rich can, as if conferring favor on an underling. Leave you feeling helpless and stupid. He could penetrate your resistance, that’s what it was. I am embarrassed by the sexual implications of the metaphor but it is useless to be embarrassed by Toad. One endures.
This, then, was my friend. My evil twin. Of course he wasn’t a gentleman. More or less of a cockroach, really. But each in his way gives himself to the world. And had we not wept together over love, over the young girl’s heart?
“The prize is a thousand bucks,” he said. “We’ll sell tickets for fifty. Between us we must know thirty guys! If twenty buy we’ve got the prize money!”
We, notice. Already I was spinning in the washer-dryer. “Your boredom is getting petulant, Toad.”
“If more than twenty buy in, there’ll be enough to cover expenses!” he said. Even the rich have expenses.
“I’ve sat in on some fairly twisted lives, Toad—”
“You don’t know shit!”
“Shit, Toad,” I reminded him, “is precisely what one does know,” but it was like trying to describe smells to the noseless when he was like this. He had a momentum all his own. I invite you to laugh at me. Always ready to help people, I guess.
Step One was the weighing in. Each escort had to be weighed. Toad lived in a loft on the fourth floor of the kind of building that has a ballet studio, a driving school, a shirt-maker and so forth. You rode up on an elevator, pushed aside the accordion gate, opened vertically sliding doors like jaws and confronted a large room with a plank floor and irregularly-spaced wooden pillars holding up a low ceiling. A few steps before you was the steel slab of a scale that was flush with the floor. You rolled your handtruck of cheese or whatever onto the scale and the meter, a sheet-metal headstone set into the floor beside it, gave you the weight in kilos.
It was the perfect place. Toad’s encampment comprised a double cot and a blanket, both of which, for the blanket was stiff with whatever, could be stood in the closet. Caterers would furnish food, wine and a table to lay it on, and a radio would be purchased out of the expense money and tuned to the jazz station. He proposed to cover the scale with a carpet and the meter with perhaps a table and cloth that would hide the dial facing the scale and hood the one facing Toad. He would stand by in a butcher’s apron holding a clipboard, greeting his guests as they paused before him and recording the reading. It was vital that each couple linger long enough for the needle to steady. This might require some care but it was generally felt that the French love of the receiving line and its attendant formalities would hold them till their statistic clarified. In the case of American or otherwise fidgety females Toad would undertake to detain them as best he could. Within the limits of dignity, of course.
Then the escort’s preregistered weight would be deducted from the couple’s total et voila! In fine, the only consideration was to be mass. There would be no points for volume or distribution and in each case Toad’s ruling, with my corroboration as Second Judge, was to be final.
But, “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Chester. “They’re gonna know! They’re gonna look around the room at all the other fat broads and they’re gonna know! They’ll fuckin’ kill us!”
Toad smiled patiently. “All women,” he said, addressing the applicants as if handing down the tablets, “see themselves as fat. It is a condition of femaleness that it is incapable of distinguishing between itself and obesity. They will see nothing but what they feel to be the truth projected before them.”
There was a rhubarb of assent to this and the men shuffled forward in their line-up. Each had his weight recorded on The List and was handed an engraved invitation that specified “NO PETS OR CHILDREN.” They weren’t much to look at. Teachers, hobos, actors—dispossessed second sons sort of thing. Marks looking for a little hope. Most of them had never seen a thousand dollars in actual cash.
It was a sober occasion. They had been careful not to drink because a liter of wine on board meant an automatic kilo to one’s detriment, a kilo more to be subtracted from the weight of one’s date. And in such a state to be handing over a fifty— Their faces were grimly fixed on the big prize.
“And,” said Toad, “there will be a bonus for anyone whose partner tops the hundred-kilo mark! We got thirty entrance fees here, that’s five hundred extra to be shared by all contestants with ladies over two hundred and twenty pounds! I,” he added with a flourish, “will pay the caterers myself.” That’s the kind of dog biscuit the rich can throw you.
The men listened open-mouthed as he thus wrung from them their maximum effort and, looking at each other, broke into a collective murmur of wretched optimism and pressed forward as in leg-irons.
Modulations on the mottled surface of all that is, so to speak. Unhappiness is so fatiguing.
And soon the big night arrived!
A finger-food buffet was spread on a long table, bottles of wine stood breathing and the caterers had laid on streamers and balloons. Louis Prima was on the radio. Large-ish women in dresses that looked like chesterfield covers rumbaed with shifty-eyed, ill-shaven, relatively emaciated men who were not yet drunk enough. Of course women blame you anyway, it doesn’t matter what you do. They elect you president and oppress you if it doesn’t rain. When the music became particularly lively the floor hammocked so hard it made the pillars lean.
The people in the apartment below, for there were other residences in the building, were a couple in late middle age who, singly or in tandem, approached Toad as he came and went in the hall (which he did to loiter by the ballet studio, sniffing as at the bouquet of bicycle seats) and asked him not to creak the stairs so loudly, not to run the water full-force when he was making coffee, not to cross certain areas of the floor with his shoes on at given times of the day and like that, and feeling they had not engaged his best efforts on the matter had taken their case to the landlord, reported him to the police and had his visa reviewed by the immigration authorities, so they were fairly sensitive to noise. It was their habit to sit in bed together holding an awning crank with which they hammered on the ceiling at the merest groan of a plank, after which they would dash upstairs in nightgowns, somehow they were always in nightgowns, bang on the door, interrupt his schtup with the evening’s blondette and demand an explanation.
But on the present occasion it was Friday night, and though the odd blow from below did work its way up through the stomping, we felt we could count on their indulgence just this once.
I of course was on the door. You didn’t expect Toad to do it. He hadn’t even arrived yet. My date was in there dancing solo, curling up floorboards where she moved.
She was one of my students. You can only live on loans for so long and certain among my friends had identified their shallowness by suggesting I Seek Work. The ocean of English washes all shores and so forth. At least I didn’t have to leave the flat, go out and trudge around in the dog shit.
In some cases I didn’t even get out of bed but for Marie-Danielle I made sure I was up and dressed. Few beds can have accommodated Marie-Danielle without steel slats and a joist. A little flabby-pooh. She looked like a kiosk. A news stand walking around.
She was bored with her husband, her husband was bored with her, I don’t know. Boredom had set into the marriage and she was taking English lessons. We were working on her R’s. Pronouncing the French R puts brackets around the mouth and we were trying to smooth out her brackets. Sit around and talk English sort of thing.
“Marie-Danielle,” I called as she jiggled past, “come here.”
She came over straight toward me and I had to direct her with maestro movements onto the rug. That was the hard part, getting them onto the rug. They came off the elevator in fours and sixes and I had to fabricate no end of persiflage to engage one couple while the other guys got their dates off the scale, after which it took a moment for the needle to settle. Then each of the other honchos in turn would have to say “Oh! Marcelle! You must come and meet Toby!”—c’est moi—and guide his entry onto the carpet where they posed as if to be photographed.
“Hi,” I’d say, watching the dial, jotting the number on the score sheet. “Having a good time?” We’d chat for a while and they’d move on, the guy watching my eyes for an indication of success or failure, and I would give him a minimal shrug, a mere drop of the eyelids because I had Marie-Danielle! She couldn’t miss.
It had all seemed too easy. God had dropped her into my hands so to speak, I just had to lie there! She stood before me now, arms out even as they hung at her sides.
“You wore that dress to excite yourself,” I said, not insincerely. She had breasts like apartment buildings. “Do you want me to give you an orgasm right now?”
“In the middle of everybody?”
“In the bathroom.”
It was a compliment rather than a serious offer but she was something of a literalist. She looked around at the room in question, a bare toilet bowl half encircled by a shower curtain that hung a foot off the floor, while I took her statistic.
I have elsewhere had occasion to mention the matter of British bathing habits. But the English and the French, though they’ve been throwing themselves at each other for a thousand years, are remarkably similar people—witness their tendency consciously to impersonate themselves—and not least in their disinclination to bathe, to which we owe an entire perfume industry. Until recently few Paris apartments had baths and this one was typical. Which suited Toad. Even on the seatless bowl his feet didn’t touch the floor.
“Wise idiot,” said Marie-Danielle, and floated off.
I would have given odds she’d break a hundred but she tipped in at ninety-five. Two hundred and nine pounds. Nine short of the money! I could have bumped it, I mean who’d know, but those were restless guys out there, I didn’t know what kind of audit they might insist on. I wrote her down as ninety-seven and a half.
There was still the grand prize, I didn’t see any real threats. But as I was indulging this smugness the jaws of the elevator parted and I felt rather than heard the approach of steps, as in a dinosaur movie. I turned to see Toad in the company of a woman I don’t quite know how to describe. Big, I guess. Six-eight or so. Across the shoulders. In her company Toad looked like a hood ornament.
As they came to a halt on the carpet I felt the frailty of my human existence. It was a profoundly disturbing experience. I was afraid!
So please you, his look said. “This is Toby. Toby, this is Olga.”
“Hi, Olga,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
I looked at Toad. At her. “Gee,” I said, “you’re tall.”
“Yes. Is good. All the top models are tall.”
“Oh!” I said, improvising, “you’re a top model?”
She smiled, flattered, shy. “Not really.”
She weighed two hundred and seventy-five pounds, I clocked her. You didn’t want to give her any mouth. A single backhand could affect your dental work for decades. I smiled and waved them through, and the scale gave a little groan as she stepped off. Each step she took shook me. I turned a softly eager face to the next arrival.
Soon though I persuaded Toad to take over and went to dance with Marie-Danielle. It was clear now that she was not to be the evening’s winner and I felt the irrational impulse to comfort her. Nice try, sort of thing. I mean where’s the logic there? I didn’t mention it.
The girls were fluid dancers, most of them. They were like naked porn stars running in slow motion, the flesh bouncing on their bones. Of course they were women, properly speaking, not girls. One wants to be politically correct. Fat women. Dancing among them was like being squeezed through an intestine. Massaged by flesh, one couldn’t really help it. I was beginning to see Toad’s point.
“Watch out for the pillows,” said Marie-Danielle.
“Pillars,” I suggested, ever the professional.
“They make me bruisers,” she said. “What’s the funny thing?”
“Is something funny?”
“You are the terrible babies, you and Toad.”
“The sorry?”
“Les enfants terribles. You have the reputation to don’t be serious.”
The hour arrived when Toad felt he could abandon his reception duties without fear of reproach and he got in there squeezing through, rubbing himself along the wall of orotundity, dancing for joy as a kind of asteroid around Olga. Must have been a hundred people there—word had spread and extra tickets had been printed and sold—but not one of the women came near Olga and he knew it. He was making money here.
Indeed it was difficult to think, now that one saw the shape of things, that he hadn’t had Olga in the bullpen when he talked us all into this idea, which of course was of questionable ethics. Hard glances from some of the men bespoke their suspicions but he exulted among them undismayed. A subcurrent of mutinous murmuring was beginning to be audible, along with the pounding of the ceiling below, beneath the music and laughter.
But I had already switched anxieties. Something now happened that brought me, propelled as I was by Marie-Danielle, to a standstill. The elevator doors opened and Gabrielle walked in.
Now, in order for you to understand this I have to go back and tell you about this kiosk in our neighborhood that we had to pass to get to Toad’s place, run by a guy named Gaston. Bad-tempered guy, and big enough that you didn’t call him on it. You took your Trib over the counter, waited for your change and steeled yourself against the inevitable sneer with which he dropped it onto your palm.
Toad noticed one day that the price he charged was in excess of that listed in the box in the corner, and pointed this out to Gaston, who merely sniffed and twitched his little mustache. “I put it to you,” Toad said, “as I put it to your wife last night.”
“My wife is dead, M’sieur.”
“I didn’t say it was fun.”
Gaston spoke English with just that degree of hesitation that placed Toad beyond retribution, but he suspected. He watched Toad. He listened to what he said, weighed it, handed him his change, watched him walk away.
He had a girl working for him called Gabrielle, and perhaps for her “girl” is a more appropriate term. She was opera-singer fat, tall like Gaston with a derriere like a pair of watermelons which she displayed in X-L coveralls that strained at the inner seam when she bent to heave a bundle of magazines, stabbing me with involuntary joy. Her relation to Gaston was unspecified—a girl in a leather change apron who tended the counter when he was out on the sidewalk stacking newspapers and clipping Match to the side of the kiosk, or when he wasn’t there at all.
On such occasions Toad would engage her in conversation. “I want to have sex with you,” he’d say, she perhaps less dismissive than was entirely appropriate. Which Gaston took note of when, down behind the counter at the endless sorting and filing that is the lot of the kiosk manager, he stood up and caught them. “Vas te faire foutre!” he leaned over and shouted. Go yank your yam. I urged Toad away but he hung from my grip and said, “Listen, fly, why don’t you stick your head up your hole and roll away,” and Gaston came out around the kiosk and we had to walk off real fast.
He didn’t know the meaning of fear, Toad. He didn’t know the meaning of anything. He didn’t know the meaning of three.
After that it would have been better to avoid the place—certainly we bought our newspapers elsewhere—but some combination of sleepwalking and daring and yearning after Gabrielle’s buns brought us along the same street some days later. There were customers at his counter anyway and we were passing along behind when Toad suddenly woke up and said, “Fuck! Where’s Gaston?”
“Touch wood,” I said and, all unconscious, I rapped on the door with a passing knuckle—at which Gaston opened it sharply, just a crack but enough to show us an eternal snapshot of Gabrielle, bent toward the people she was serving at the counter with her overalls at her knees while Gaston, ostensibly crowded behind her in the cramped space, was in fact, well, need I say? Her cheeks were vast, flour-white-pimpled-with-blue-goose-flesh, monumental.
Why had he opened the door? A reflex? Because he was onstage before the customers and felt obliged to acknowledge the knock? Because he expected someone he knew and was not above granting a glimpse of his good fortune?
We took in what he was doing, he took in that we were taking him in and he began to chase us, tucking himself in even as he tore himself from his situation. We ran. He ran. It was a stretch-and-grab-at-you kind of chasing, an all-out effort, I don’t even want to think about it. We flew on the wings of panic. Dogs joined in.
After that we didn’t go near there.
And now, here was Gabrielle! At the party! She wasn’t with Gaston we noticed immediately—for Toad too was watching—she was with Barry, a ticket-holder. Breath returned to us.
She was a respectable entry, one couldn’t fault Barry, indeed one had to admire him for stealing her out from under Gaston, so to speak, but one look at Olga of course and he knew. One knew.
Nevertheless there were formalities to be observed and Toad and I went forward to attend to them, he to take the reading, I to keep them on center. “How’s Gaston?” I asked her.
“I am bored of him,” she said. “He shouts at my ears till I am double as bored. Then he brings me flowers and I have to pass two days on my back with my legs in the air.”
“Why,” I said, “don’t you have a vase?”
“Toby,” said Toad. He beckoned me with a confidential jerk of the head.
“Be right back,” I told them, and went to Toad following his eyes to the meter. I checked the list. Calculating for Barry’s weight and converting to pounds we made Gabrielle at two hundred and eighty.
I looked at Toad. He at me. We at them. Barry couldn’t hold her any more and they were already on the dancefloor.
“Something’s wrong,” said Toad.
“Maybe she lifts weights. She’s solider. More densely packed.”
“I had this won.”
“There’s a lesson there, all right, Toad.”
I left him chewing his lip and went off to dance with Marie-Danielle. But, “I am tired to go forth and back all the time,” she said. “Shall we eat?” This was by way of asking permission. Marie-Danielle felt guilty about eating. “Tomorrow I am starting aregime so I’ll be better for looking at,” she said. “Let’s have some smashed potatoes.”
At the table there was competition. Already there had been depredations. Crumbs of blue cheese in the chevre, I cannot tell you how I hate that! But I plucked a little of this and a little of that and soon my plate was piled like a pyramid.
“You want fruits?” said Marie-Danielle. “I’m glad I’m not the wash-disher!” Her enthusiasm carried her along away from me while I stood and watched Toad take Barry over and stand him on the scale. He looked at the list, looked at Barry. The weight seemed to check.
The woman standing on my other side must have come in on Toad’s watch. “Hi,” I said.
“Hello.” American.
I liked the bend of her hatbrim. I don’t mean she was wearing a hat. She was no question about it fat but there was a form to her. Her hips were sort of saddle-shaped. Broad but, I don’t know.
“Is this your party?” she said.
“I’m a co-host.”
“What do you do?”
“As little as possible. Teach English.”
“Are you good?”
“At teaching English?”
“Yes.”
I shrugged. “I give emotional support. You want to dance?”
It was a good moment for it. The floor was vacant. Stan Getz was on, running his hands all over a melody. And as the push-button radio in my rusty Chevy taught me, change the music and you change everything. Lynn, her name was. I had that experience where the rest of the party disappears.
“I don’t trust you,” she said.
“Ah.”
“These women are all overweight. There isn’t a slender woman here. Are you making fun of us?”
It was a moment to speak the truth. Not to think first. But I hesitated. What was I going to tell her? I took refuge in silence and we danced looking at each other. I had no choice but to endure judgement.
The elevator doors opened and a woman got off so fat she had to come out sideways. Top to bottom she was a series of overhanging layers that spread on each other, making her wider than she was tall and obscuring her shoes. André followed her out, hands in pockets, tight little smile on him.
Toad, now besieged by serious thoughts, was immediately there to register them, and given her enormous presence she needed no slowing down as she crossed the carpet. He took his time, got a firm number and gave me a brief look of limited relief. Olga had her beat at least.
André didn’t care. He knew he was into bonus money, of which he could see at a glance there was now more than actual prize money and no one to share it with. He paused by us beaming insufferably. “This is Louise,” he said.
At the sound of her name his champion arrested her progress toward the food, rotated her bulk and gave us a flicker of smile before sweeping away to the table. André made a little bow.
“Nobody likes a smart-ass, André,” I said, and he went away to attend her.
“What is it,” said Lynn, “a theme party? I’m so glad to be included.”
“It’s not,” I said. What else could I say? We were still in the dance position, my arm around her waist. She had a waist. Her back, pliant. Her voice, what, elastic. Flat, soft, accepting, no doubt capable of a snap but it would be a moral rather than a vocal one. Only her look was stiff. Not her face, not her eyes. Something in them.
Fuck. I felt bad.
Louise had now presented herself at the table, people making way for her out of wonder, almost out of fear. Their glances back at her just kept travelling. She moved around gathering salmon, pate and cheeses with the dexterity of Minnesota Fats on a run, pushing it in with her palm, washing it down with Côtes du Rhône and moving on again, a spaghetto dangling from her chin. I mean this was not glandular, folks, I’m sorry.
André poured a glass of wine and sipped it with the exaggerated delicacy of one who congratulates himself in public. “Toad,” he said as this latter passed, “what time is the presentation?”
But Toad made no answer. He was clearly on his way to do something he wanted to have over with.
“A woman’s ultimate image of a man is power,” Gabrielle was saying to Barry, “but not a developed woman.” Then she saw Toad standing there.
“You’re cheating,” he said.
“One is not obliged to be faithful to za same man all za time!” she protested. “Don’t you believe in boredom? It is mathematically proved!”
He deployed his hands as to erase these errors. “You,” he said, “are cheating. You’re wearing weights.” He gestured at her midriff, at which she also looked. It was draped by a silk shirt that hung straight from her nichons. “Under there.”
She looked up at him. “You want to see under there?”
“Yes, please.” This was not uttered with the usual Toad lubricant. There was a certain edginess about it. A certain lack of confidence.
“Hah!” she said, not smiling. “I fold myself in half.”
People were gathering around. Only Louise continued to eat.
“You cheated, Toad!” said one of the men. “You had Olga all ready!”
Male voices murmured in sullen unison.
At the sound of her name Olga looked around, confused but pleased to be at the center of things, if only conceptually.
“There’s no rule against that,” Toad proclaimed, not taking his eyes from Gabrielle’s.
I didn’t look at Lynn but I felt her looking at me.
Marie-Danielle came and confronted me. “You took me here because of my grossesse, isn’t it! It’s really inferiorating!”
Other women were catching on and lifting their voices in an outrage from under which the men’s suddenly ran away and hid.
“This is not a big wise thing!” said Marie-Danielle. “Forget about your good-lookings! You must have made me the brainwashing!”
I stood there. I could think of no way to suggest a superior motivation. She turned and thumped away.
“This is awful,” said Lynn.
“Could I have my money now, Toad?” said André.
But Toad’s stare was locked on Gabrielle’s.
Gaston came in through the door to the stairs. No one heard him but I caught sight of him and became nervous. “Toad,” I said but he didn’t seem to hear me. Some kind of abrasive music was on by This, That and the Other. “Toad?” As Gaston emerged into the open area he struck the radio to the floor and, as that didn’t silence it, stamped on it till it died and lay crushed. Only then did the hammering on the ceiling below become audible. Otherwise there was silence. Everyone looked at Gaston but Toad, who looked at Gabrielle; and Gabrielle, who looked at Toad.
“I can no longer associate myself with this project, Toad,” I said.
He took Gabrielle’s shirt in both his hands and ripped it from her. A collective gasp. She stood there. Her breasts were, I don’t know. And below them, piled from her hips to her rib cage, were bandeleros of scuba weights. Gaston flew at Toad who, smirking around in triumph, saw him and ran. Olga turned her head like Brontosaurus Rex and looked at Gaston. If it came to shifting her whole stance, her look said, there’d be trouble. But he tore past her. Toad reached the window, threw it open and jumped out. Gaston climbed out after him, André behind him shouting, “Where’s the fucking money, Toad?”
We went to the window and watched Toad inch around on a sloped shingled ledge toward a latticework of beams supporting grapevines, across which he tight-rope-walked, Gaston in close pursuit, toward a vast intimacy of balconies from which he was separated by a glass roof over a conservatory in which singers and a string quartet were giving a recital to an audience in evening clothes, the baritone jerking his head back and forth, the soprano trembling as one about to void. Toad threw himself onto it and scuttled across, keeping as well as he could to the steel framework but slipping, breaking a window with a foot, dropping through up to the crotch, pulling his leg out and scrambling on, Gaston coming along behind him in much the same way, so that people looked up at them.
Behind us Gabrielle unvelcroed her weight belts and dropped them one by one to the floor, each clunk followed by a renewed vigor of hammering from below. Several policemen came in, saw Gabrielle’s breasts and blew whistles. This was timely because the women were regaining the momentum of their outrage and turning to me as Toad’s accomplice. The men, glad for the moment to escape their attention, egged them on—“He did it!” “C’etait lui!” and so forth—and I was doing what I could to back away while surrounded when the police broke through the angry knot to crowd at the window and blow whistles at Toad and Gaston.
Louise, meanwhile, now paused in her eating and drinking and, under cover of this activity, stole into the bathroom, drew the curtain around her and brought herself into whatever complicity with the bare porcelain she could negotiate to make her deposit. And it was here, where the dampness had seeped into the wood, that the shifting stresses on the floor found their focus. Under her superior weight the toilet was driven through the moldy planks and, ripping away a shard of understructure, dropped, still bearing Louise, into the next apartment. The neighbors, not content with having summoned the police, were still engaged in hitting the ceiling with the awning crank when the john hit with a wham that raised them off the bed.
Louise no doubt looked around and wondered where she was. One imagines a brief pause. What was there to say? They could only have seen this as an inconvenient intrusion, leaving as it did a gash in the ceiling that brought them into immediate communication with Toad’s loft and those of his guests who were staring down through the hole.
The immediate thing of course was for Louise to make her excuses, wipe herself as best she could and leave, but she now found her buttocks wedged so firmly in the mouth of the bowl that she could not, try as she did, rise from it. The impact, one supposes. It was not until an ambulance was called, and indeed arrived, that Louise could be wheeled out on a stretcher lying sideways in the seated position with the fixture still in place, though getting her into the hall required the knocking down of some of the wall by the front door. From there she was taken down by elevator, and in the emergency ward was delivered of the bowl by an orderly with a sledge hammer. Very tacky.
At the police station we stood around feeling morally repulsive while our guilt was assessed. Some of us. We had been whittled to a nucleus of the culpable and the curious. I felt forced to thoughts of what might be typical.
Gabrielle, still bare-breasted, dismissed Gaston’s attempts to cover her. “It’s over since a long time,” she told him. She took Barry by the head, kissed him long and hard and then pushed him away. “I don’t like the way you taste,” she said. She was enjoying herself.
André, not content with his triumph, insisted that Louise had eaten five kilos worth of groceries and the whole purse was properly his. Others argued that her weight had equilibrated during her visit to the bowl. Of course you shouldn’t speak of a lady that way.
Anyway it was academic. The presiding sergeant informed us that the entire amount might cover the damages to the conservatory roof and the ceiling and wall of the lower apartment—indeed the offended parties, still in nightgowns, were vocal about it—and anything left over should be applied to the ironing out of such visa problems as might emerge in the course of the investigation.
Toad said nothing. He stood there by Olga, whose presence beside him was touching, hands folded before him, silent, defeated, disabused of any notion he might have had of his worth, of the fitness of things.
I had ceased to care. Lynn’s presence at my side was as a rip in my surface, I couldn’t look at her. She stood there measuring the extent of the jape she’d been a victim of. Within her an audible abyss of disbelief froze into its opposite.
Out on the sidewalk she said, “Well, that was enlightening.” It was almost dawn.
I stood there with my hands in my pockets.
“How close did I come to winning?”
I shifted my weight.
“I would have thought someone like you would be interested in higher things,” she said.
There was no defense for me, and no use trying to make one.
“I am interested in higher things,” I said. “My last girlfriend had higher things. She was twenty. They were coming out of her collarbone.”
She looked at me.
We walked.
After a while I moved in with her. She was a translator for a business service. It wasn’t much money but we got by. My own practice had dried up, certainly I had lost Marie-Danielle’s patronage, and I gave myself to the pleasures of domesticity. Someone to exchange eternities with, show my sore thumb to. A new arrangement of one’s toilet articles.
Every once in a while you find someone willing to roll her history up into a moment for you, and before you know it you are her history. One becomes a different person, sees different movies. The tender nerve of the former self, healed over. For a while.
We lived together for several months till she was through with me.
THE END
ATTACK OF THE GIANT FEMINISTS
Naked, zombie-eyed, they loom over the landscape, advancing slowly, almost aimlessly, arms limp.
We fall to our knees in wonder, rabbits in the headlights of a final revelation. Their gaze excludes us.
Tall as banks they tower over us, are almost upon us. We must act or be trampled. Some of us run forward open-armed only to be flattened by the great feet. Their size and savor force us to rethink the line between desire and disinterest, and turn gay.
Others scatter and hide in the hills. Arms reach over the horizon, groping for us. We squirm together in crude hiding places, not daring to breathe.
Those who trust their gifts for flattery venture forward to negotiate, and are pounded down by huge fists.
We jump into our Porsches and race back to the city.
Behind us whole sections of countryside rise up as giant women, wounding our eyes with their beauty. They spread their arms and fly over us, menstruating on us until the sky is red. Their odors, which we have always understood to be natural, terrify us, and we speed on.
Under the wail of air-raid sirens we abandon our cars and crowd into the downtown trains. When we arrive the streets are already being barricaded.
They will not accept our surrender. Huge catapults are erected from which volunteers are shot into the arms of the enemy. They catch us in mid-air, wantonly suck our heads and swallow us whole.
We watch, appalled. Behind us our own women swell monstrously, bursting buildings as if being hatched, and rise against the sky.
Searchlights whirl. Huddled in a darkened bar we can see their silhouettes as they wander without, seeking what they might destroy.
On the radio they exhort us in flat, dead tones to submit. We will not be harmed, they say. We exchange looks.
A familiar calf appears in the street, and I run to the window. Carol!
Only now I have been consoling myself with thoughts of her shoulders, her proud kiss, her childish mouth—gifts I acknowledge with little gestures of passion. It hurts me that I do not install her in rooms, tell her my secrets, impregnate her. But no, the hell with that.
Now, rampage. She lurches on, unseeing.
We are calm. What has happened transcends our understanding, a thing we are used to.
Drinks are poured, rumors murmured. Brain-washing, the hot knife.
“Big,” says Chester, “sure they’re big. But they can hide in grass you wouldn’t think a cat could crouch in.”
We drink, pour. After a little silence Fulton speaks up. “What they need,” he says, glaring defiantly around, “is a good fuck!” Of course he is drunk. We stretch our jaws, study our drinks, glance up at one another.
Soon the mission is organized and we are stealing through the streets with each a bottle of Chivas in his shirt. It is less dangerous among the ruins of the core than in the flatter precincts at the edge.
We move along rail tracks, ducking when a giant profile moves past. A flare bursts into agonizing seconds of broad day and we flatten ourselves to the ground.
Not until we reach the suburbs can we be sure we have penetrated their lines. Patrols pass. We take cover in gardens, garages.
We have regrouped and are squatting for a drink when suddenly we sight it: the camp. One by one we rise to our feet while hilly farmland emerges as a vast terrain of sleeping giantesses. The horizon alters as one of them stirs.
We scurry across the road when our awe subsides and prowl in among them. They lie in loose array. Many snore heavily.
We freeze when one of them moans and threatens to roll over on us. Fulton gives us a knowing look and we pass on.
Suddenly another one rises to her elbow and nuzzles through the whimpers of her neighbor. They wrestle. Big as cinemascope they roll and thrash before us, shaking the earth. Only when they have mutually extorted whines and shudders do they drop back into sleep.
We stand rooted. It is some time before we can shake ourselves to and resume our purpose.
Arguing over specifications we search among them until we find her. She is lying spread-eagled with exhaustion. We leap into the air with glee and tiptoe around her, appraising as we go, until we stand midway between the sweeping forelands of her feet.
Cautiously we move in, subdued by the height of the canyon and the deepening darkness as it narrows. We can no longer see the upper slopes of her thighs outlined in moonlight.
We are close. Under the faint fish-cannery smell we form up defensively. And there, yes, as our eyes grow used to the dark, it is.
We hold back. Someone has to be first. I steal forward. The seam is a pucker of delicate elephant skin, so tall I must arch my head back to see the summit. I pat it with both hands, gentle it, put my ear to it for oracular rumbles.
Pulling nervously at my pants I glance up at the crests of her thighs. If they close I am done for.
Holding it, as it were, by the lapels, I engage. It is a potential cavity! I press my cheek to it and give it my best stuff, pry at it with my tongue, surrender to its warmth.
The fear seizes me that, tickled, she might bring her finger into play and pop me into the pit. I hover, do I not, before the primal abyss, and could easily slip in and be swallowed.
The moment passes. I’m going good now. From high over the mound comes a dreamy sigh. Pride engorges me. I grin back at the others, perhaps foolishly, for who can be dignified with his pants at his ankles, humping at a pair of theater curtains.
But they have already gone, scattered each to his tryst. And I, when I have confessed and collapsed, nestled and smoked a cigarette, I too buzz off to another flower.
It is a big night. We push ourselves to the limit, not noticing the streaks of dawn when they appear in the sky.
In sudden military unison they sit up and smash at us as at ants at a picnic. We scramble madly, colliding with one another, striving only to survive another second. At each blow the ground bucks beneath us and worries our confusion.
I dive for a ditch and skitter into a culvert. Fingertips block the ends. It is unearthed, lifted, shaken, bent in two, in four, thrown down. I lurk, peek out, run like hell. Oh, how I run!
An acre of shadow around me. She crash-lands almost on top of me and seizes me in her hand. “I want you,” she breathes. Wanda. She twists my testicles.
I am strapped to a chair, Wanda pacing before me. Her legs are so-so, and I have never found it necessary to look at her during conversation. Normally I pluck a hair from my chest and examine it. Even now my attention drifts.
Around me, debriefings, lectures on hand-to-hand combat, greased vibrators. A squadron in training chants, “Kill! Kill! Kill!”
I am slapped awake. Electrodes are taped to shaved patches on my head and thoughts are implanted, doctrines of sameness as dreary as all the wisdom of the East.
How long it goes on I can’t say. I am tired, tired.
Suddenly I am on my feet straining at the straps. “I’ve tried!” I scream. “I’ve done my best! I just don’t have a position!”
I slump to the ground still bound by the wrists, but the motion has freed my ankles, a fact that I am able to obscure as I am forced back into the chair. All night I work the thongs against the arm-rests. When they give I rub my wrists, look furtively around and vanish into the darkness.
It is days before I can get back into town. The bar, still undiscovered, observes black-out. Some of us haven’t made it.
We start on the Jack Daniels, exchange stories, back-slap to keep up our spirits. When troops pass in the street we appraise their ankles.
Mere bravado. We are beaten.
One night we catch one in a covered construction pit. She roars and kicks. We stake her out like Gulliver and whip her until she hurts. Then we let her go. What’s the point?
Then, slam-bam, everything changes. I am doodling on the bar with my swizzlestick when a nudge directs me to a shape on the ruined skyline—a shape with a swollen abdomen! We run to the window: more of them! Pregnant profiles everywhere!
They break ranks, forage, claw at delicatessens. Now they’re really mad.
We swagger against the bar and puff cigars, stand rounds. The rucus outside delights us. Have we fathered giant versions of ourselves, we wonder, or will hundreds of our own size emerge? Bets are arranged.
But even as their bellies swell the women themselves begin to deflate. Soon, with only a few exceptions, they are on a human scale again, and come looking for us. Now they want to get married! This is no good either.
At the last minute the Nude Police arrive to restore order. After months without contact the outside world has sent help. The Nude Police wear day-glo jockstraps color-coded according to rank, and affect high voices.
“OK there, that’s enough of that!” they shout. “Form two lines!”
Now there is only uneasy calm and the work of rebuilding civilization. When we invite the women to dinner they discuss the merits of their fathers’ as opposed to their husbands’ surnames. We are silent. They seek reasons to laugh at us, and stand when we leave the table.
Of course the Nude Police are vigilant. They are posted on each corner and shout “Just watch what you’re doing!” at everyone who passes. But incidents occur.
Some women snatch cigarettes from our mouths and break them. Others travel in groups and wait for chances to ambush us.
Two of them catch me in an alley and shove me back and forth between them, do the point-to-something-on-your-chest-and-tag-you-on-the-nose trick, and shove me back and forth again.
The other day I saw a rehabilitated feminist walking down the street and saluted her cautiously.
“Don’t forgive me unless I ask you to,” she said.
THE END
CERTAINLY SOMETHING
And thou shalt fear day and night,
and have none
assurance of thy life.
—Deuteronomy
1.
“Hey!” she hissed. She shook my shoulder. “Wake up!”
I was asleep. Funny how you don’t know you’re asleep until it’s too late.
“Hey!”
I decided to fake it. Door by door, anteroom by anteroom, I retreated towards my innermost self.
“Come on, you wise-ass, shake it out!”
I was dead. I lay there, dead.
But this is a useless ploy against the shaken shoulder. There is the pulse to give one away. The body warmth.
Eyes sutured, I raised the head.
“What is it, Mrs. McFee?”
I knew it was Mrs. McFee. The voice. The grip. Many more milirems of Mrs. McFee and my little badge was going to light up.
“My husband is gone!”
I groped for the timepiece, switched on a light, winced.
“Mrs. McFee,” I pleaded, “it’s four forty-one!”
“Four hours,” she calculated; then to me: “Get up and get him!”
I hung on my elbow, paralyzed by my options. What I needed was more sleep. Sleep is I guess you might say my natural element. You can’t have too much sleep, is my view.
Four forty-one!
“Where did he go, Mrs. McFee?”