Enderby`s Dark Lady

6

What had happened, so Enderby was to learn later, was that a disaffected busboy or bellhop, mandatorily stoned, had filled a familysize Coca-Cola bottle with gasoline siphoned from the hotel manager's car, glugged this inflammable out in the empty thirdfloor bedroom two doors away from Enderby's own and then enflamed it. He had then got the hell out with a cashbox containing something under a hundred dollars, there not being much cash around these days of credit cards. When Enderby got by taxi to the hotel he found a fire engine there, summoned from Indianapolis, with the firemen pumping not water but a grey chemical substance over all available surfaces. Not much of a fire, but the third floor had been evacuated. Enderby found his suitcase, fortunately closed, covered with grey dust and his decent clerical grey suit suited in a deeper grey. His tea mug and kettle were no longer around, but the rest of his stuff rested, along with other defiled luggage, by a pillar in the defiled foyer. He should by rights demand compensation for defilement but contented himself with getting the hell out, not paying his bill, and asking the taxi driver who had brought him hither and was staying to share in the excitement to take him and his defilements to the Sheraton Hotel in Indianapolis.

The driver insisted first on showing him the town he was to dwell in for a space, or it may have been a matter of his not knowing where the Sheraton Hotel was and hoping to find it by dint of cruising the entire city around. Central Park, Monument Place, radiating Massachusetts, Indiana, Virginia and Kentucky Avenues. State Capitol, Court House, Board of Trade building, Central College of Physicians and Surgeons, Blind and Deaf and Dumb Asylums. At length he said, with no hint of triumph, "Well, here it is." And there it was. Enderby expected sympathy from the reception clerk for his refugee condition and the state of his baggage but got none. But he was permitted to submit his suit for dry cleaning.

Lying on his bed, smoking a Robert Burns, he noted that he had been carrying all this while, and in spite of more immediate emotions and preoccupations, an inflated shlong, as she called it, and all because of her. Then he wondered about the fire and dismissed a superstitious supposition. Then he remembered that she was staying in this same hotel: he had heard a girl in the big open secretarial area of the theatre's offices confirming her reservation on the telephone. Then he lusted for strong tea and raged in frustration. He would have to go out and resupply himself. He went down, overcoated though without his tout cap, and found a kettle and mug in a kind of hardware store off Kentucky Avenue and, in a supermarket entitled rather soberly EATGOOD, bought brown sugar lumps, canned milk and a box of two hundred tea sachets of unstated provenance, also a brand of toothglue he had not previously met called Champ. And then there was a new variety of stomach tablet named Whoosh. Rather exciting, really, all this consumerism. Fairly pleased, he took his purchases back to the hotel. In the lobby he saw Ms April Elgar. She was being silently admired, and no bloody wonder, by God. She was also flipping through mail that had arrived for her, frowning crossly at it. Enderby went straight up to her and said:

"Not much of a fire, really. But, as you see, I have been evacuated. I have the pleasure or honour of, both I suppose. As you observe."

She did not at first seem to know who he was, a matter of his not wearing the tout cap, but his fag British accent presumably rang the bell of recognition that rang. "Hi," she said.

"A few essential purchases," excusing the brown bags under his arm.

"I guess so," distractedly. And then: "You and me have to rap."

"Rap?" Oh Christ, more spiritualist nonsense. "I should be delighted to er."

"Okay, the bar." She swayed her way ahead to it. Enderby removed his overcoat but found it necessary to hold it folded on his lap. The linen trousers were thin. An insincerely cheerful matron dressed like a whore took their orders: whisky sours for both.

"More sweet than sour," Enderby remarked. "Something of a misnomer."

"You always talk like that?" she said. "All these words."

"Well," Enderby said, "the British have no real slang on the American pattern, I mean not one diffused throughout the entire social system, if you see what I mean. Also, I am a poet, Enderby the poet. Also, I live alone and speak little English these days. It's becoming, from the spoken angle, something of a foreign language for me."

"What do you mean, live alone?"

"In Tangiers, with these three boys."

"Jesus, so you're another of these screaming fags."

"No, no, far from it, although you will, of course, naturally assume that all the British are fags. That's because your American fags tend to speak with a British accent. A bit illogical, really. Cart before the horse, sort of. I am unimpeachably heterosexual." And, by atavistic instinct, he confirmed the testimony by slapping his crotch smartly. "Too many fags around," he added. "Especially in the theatre."

"You can say that again."

"Too many fags a -"

"And dykes too. Listen. This is my show, right?"

"Well," Enderby said with care, "it's supposed to be Shakespeare's really. And let's get this straight about this er fag element in his life. He had an affair with the Earl of Southampton, no doubt about that, but it didn't express his true nature, which was passionately heterosexual. He had to climb through the pretence of ah faggishness. Not uncommon at that time. Their sexuality was so intense that it expressed itself in many forms. But in the sense that the Dark Lady is not only a woman but also a kind of destructive and creative goddess at one and the same time, and even perhaps a disease, well, yes, it is, to some extent your show."

"So the opening number is me, a production number. I'll put the shake in Shakespeare, I'll put the spear in too. Establish," she said, much in Enderby's manner, "priorities."

"Where did you get that from?" Enderby asked with some admiration. "That's rather witty."

"Just thought of it. Sharp as a pistol, brought up in Bristol. The white man's knavery sold me in slavery. Hey," she hailed the serving matron. "Two more of those."

"Thou art," Enderby said, "as wise as thou art beautiful."

"Oh, come on."

"Quotation from. Titania says that to Bottom. But," Enderby said with some urgency, "the beauty is real enough, God knows. I say this with total objectivity. Your beauty is overwhelming, of a kind rarely seen. But this, of course, you must know."

"Yah," she said, "I know it. My beauty is my bread," she added with mock solemnity. "Talent, too, baby, I got talent."

"That," Enderby said, "I still have to see."

"You better believe it. Right. That fag Silverass is on his way and you gotta have words to give him. Songs, baby. So I want you to steer your pinko ass into that elevator and get up to your room and start writing."

"Gladly," Enderby said. "After dinner. I thought," he thought for the first time, "we might have dinner together."

"That's nice, that's real nice. Like in old movies. Not tonight, baby, some other time."

"You," Enderby said, "have already arranged to dine with some other ah guy. I see."

"No, you don't see." She sipped at her fresh whisky sour and Enderby at his. The tumescence was terrible. "You see nothing. Ah has mah prahvit lahf."

"At least," Enderby said, "you've stopped saying shit all the time. That's a word I've heard Americans use even at table. They don't take in the referent of the word. It's become just a neutral expletive."

"Okay, no shit." And then a great handsome man of her own colour, though much darker, bore down on their table. She rose in shrill ecstasy and they fondly embraced. Baby honey-bunch and then an unintelligible duet in what Enderby took to be Black English. He drained his whisky sour unnoticed and unintroduced and stole off with his coat and packages. His shlong settled to neutrality. Black bitch and so on. Christ, jealousy, a dark wine long untasted. He hadn't come all this way to be jealous. He would leave it to her, bitch, to sign for the whisky sours.

But up in his room, strengthened by mahogany tea, he got out his yellow legal pad and started to scribble to her will. Lyrics, seeing her in a richly crimson silk farthingale belting them out, brown bosom fully exposed in the Tudor manner to proclaim, like the Queen herself, putative virginity. This vision was physically very painful. He had to cart the engorged shlong three times into the bathroom and, on a face towel monogrammed with a fanciful S, fiercely discharge his heat. He saw himself fierce in the lighted mirror doing it and nodded fiercely at the fierce reflection. Then, less fierce, indeed encalmed, he went down to dinner and ordered a beefsteak and a half bottle of some ruby Californian muck, both restorative, indeed freshly inflaming. The waiter, a frail Viennese PhD immigrant, seemed to ask him what dressing he would take with his salad. No dressing because no salad. Green stuff was not good for you. April Elgar and her co-coloured fancy man were not there. Swiving like rattlesnakes some place. He, Enderby, willed himself not to care, finishing his french frieds with his fingers, ordering apple pie with ice cream on it. Then he belched his way back up to make tea.

The white man's knavery

Sold me in slavery

To an unsavoury

Household.

I slept in an attic all

Foully rheumatical,

Bedbugged and cobwebbed

And mouseholed.

I slaved like the slave I was,

Ripe for the grave I was,

But I was brave, I was

Ready

For my master's remorse and my

Freedom of course and my

Carriage and horse and my

Monetary source

Safe and steady.

Now see me here in London,

Ready for revenge -

All England will be undone

From Carlisle to Stonehenge

On the dayyyyyyyy

I get my wayyyyyy.

But here, by God, was corruption. You cease to celebrate the greatest poet in the world's history and ennoble nothing but lust of one kind or another. Goats and monkeys. Toplady was, after all, no fool.

I'll screw some sex into Essex,

I'll scourge Walter Raleigh's raw hide.

I'll make Francis Drake

Chase a duck on a lake

And eat Francis Bacon fried.

I'll inject the shakes into Shakespeare

And stick in the spear as well,

Wrench out Queen Bess's

Carroty tresses

And make her bald as a bell.

Right under your gaze

I'm going to raise

Elizabethan hell.

Enderby groaned, but not now with lust, that foul fundamental whose harmonics were admiration, awe and even the most dangerous word in the language. He had been drawn into the celebration of America, not Shakespeare. What voice from the dead had condoned the travesty to come? Robert Greene, perhaps, putting on the tame tiger's hide in his cunning. One in the eye for Shakescene. Enderby got blearily off his bed (lyricizing was bloody hard work) and dug his contract out of the dusty suitcase. He should have read the small print before signing. Sold into slavery, by God. Suable if he reneged. Best to embrace one's enforced corruption. He started to write one more song before sleep.

To be or not to be

Smitten by you

Bitten by you

Teased as a ball of wool is teased by a kitten by you:

That is the question

Which harms my digestion

Marry, à propos. He swallowed six Whoosh tablets with chlorinated water and got ready for troubled slumber.

The next day Enderby left them all to it. Let the bastards get on with it. He tried to work in the hotel lounge, but perpetual sedative music got in the way of his rhythms. He went to see the bell bald manager about it, but the manager did not easily comprehend his complaint. Anaesthetization of the ear or something. Offwhite noise. He returned to his room to find the bed yet unmade, but he was used to unmade beds. He stuck the DO NOT DISTURB notice up outside and made himself more tea. Fed up, fucked up and far from home. He dragged Ben Jonson grumbling from his long sleep and made him sing:

Ale and Anacreon,

Beer and Boethius,

Sack and Sophocles, these

Please my heart

More than the farting littleness,

Borborygmic brittleness,

Jokes and japes

Of the apes and jackanapes

One sees

Courting the great

At court, on estate -

Fleas!

He foreheard the bemerding response to that and crumpled the yellow legal paper up. Yet he needed Ben Jonson to sneak in a few extra blank verse lines to make the revival of Richard II relevant to the Essex rebellion which immediately followed and thus have poor Will bemerded. Keep out of the great world, sirrah, stick to your word games. I, your Queen, tell you so. Lucky for you your head rolleth not like his, that runagate traitorous earl, on Tower Hill. Get you gone from my royal sight. Will was turning out to be a very bemerdable character.

Then he wrote lines to April Elgar:

Edwardian brass, O enigmatic kingdom,

Apostolic musicmaker, nobilmente

Clashes the green roots, outyells returning swifts,

Derides the cuckoocall. I cannot go on I

Cannot go on

Cannot

Enderby

He folded them into a Sheraton envelope, scrawled her name on, went downstairs overcoated, told the reception clerk to put it into her box. Surely surely. Then he went out to get drunk. He settled at length into a low bar behind the Board of Trade building. An old man whined to the bartender, who consoled him surely surely. Enderby ordered Scotch linked and beer to pursue it. Workmen came in in hard hats. They heard Enderby's accent on his third ordering of the same again and derided his Britishry with what what and all that son of rot jolly good eh old chap. They seemed to have watched a fair quantity of old films on television. Enderby grinned at them, unoffended. Then one man said that the Queen of England was a whore. Enderby grinned at him, unoffended. Then, Orpheus with his lute, he came out with:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war -" Then he took a drink. The workmen looked solemn, as in church: Lincoln 's speech was a powerful cantrip. They bought Enderby the same again. He was told that it was only kidding about the Queen of England being a whore. He said: "Her circumstances hardly allow it. Of course, your President Kennedy was a whoremaster or lecher, but that son of thing is expected in a male leader. A double standard, you know." Somebody put a dime or quarter into the jukebox hidden in the corner in deep shadow. It illuminated itself and thumped and twanged. Unformed male voices pitched high excreted nonsense with bad rhymes. Kennedy, he was told, slept with Marilyn Monroe. Now they were conveniently dead, both assassinated by the FBI, and were screwing away in heaven. No such place as heaven. It's got to be heaven if you're screwing Marilyn Monroe, you better believe it. Then the disc changed and Enderby heard a known voice:

"Give the world a kiss

Although it rates a kick

Get in double quick

And give the world a kiss"

"Ah God," he said. There, said somebody, is another one that screws. All dinges screw, they got no morality. She's here right now in Indianapolis, screwing. Screw a dog, screw a beer bottle, bottom end. "Oh God," moaned Enderby.

"There may be roars

But there are roses

A fiddle and a flute

There may be wars

But underneath your nose is

Juicy fruit still unpolluted"

Juicy fruit, I'll say. Give the world a fuck, I'll say. Enderby had to get out. You tell the Queen of England from me, fella, she ain't no whore. Enderby was surprised to find it dark without, street lamps on, hail spinning lazily down. He had been there longer than he thought. He wove his way back to the Sheraton. He carried his key in his pocket, always forgot the number. He made several stabs at the wrong door, somebody yelled, muffled, "Who's there?", then found his own, 360. That number meant something, he couldn't for the moment think what. He fell inside, doffed and threw at the television set his overcoat, then fell on the bed.

He was awakened by knocking. He got up with considerable difficulty and groaned his way to the bathroom door. It was not at that that the knocking was proceeding. He opened another door and blinked painfully. She, paper in hand, dispossession notice. She wore scarlet tailored slacks and matching jumper, heavy beaten bronze earrings, scarfed montage of European cathedrals about her throat. Enderby's heart thumped from drink. He bowed her shakily in. She sat down on the one chair with arms and looked at him. He said:

"I heard you singing. In some low place. Not you personally, of course. I must take something. Heartburn. If you'll excuse me." He went to the bathroom for Whoosh and water. He came back with a foul headache. He sat on the edge of the bed. That in your hand," he said. "I see what it is now. Doesn't make much sense. Nominal fantasy. Had to go out. Drank a little. My apologies."

"What gives with you?" she said. "I've never met any dude quite like you."

"Double agony," Enderby said. "I adore Shakespeare. I adore you. Somebody has to be betrayed. You'll swallow him. You're swallowing me. Old as I am. Ugly. Unworthy. You try that on for size," he said with bitter jocosity.

"You mean you want to get laid?"

"That's right," cried Enderby, head cracking, "bring it down to animality. Things aren't as easy as that. Shakespeare didn't want just to get laid, as you put it. She was stitched into his senses, made his soul drunk. He cured himself, but only through his art. He had to lose his only son first. Oh yes, sex came into it, with all its connotations, universal, cosmic, yin and yang, ultimate sex. You don't get over it by screwing, as those men said."

"Which men said?"

"The men in the pub, bar. They said the Queen of England was a whore. You can't complain if they said the same about you. Bloody animality. Then we come to the most dangerous word in the language, and you know what it is. A declaration of faith with little hope and not much bloody charity. Why aren't you with that bloody man you were with last night?"

"What? Who? Oh, him. That was Ben Jonson, my brother, and don't call him bloody. He plays piano with Mitch Frobisher's combo. Ah, the greeneyed dingus. And so you get paralytic." Not a just word, he considered, looking down at his tremor. He said:

"Jonson with an aitch, I suppose. Without would be going too far. Although there's an aitch in Westminster Abbey. And where does the Elgar come in?"

"He was a British composer. I always liked that what I used to call when I was a kid Pompous Circus Dance of his."

"He wrote a bloody sight more than that," Enderby said. "Edwardian hubris and neurosis, an incredible combination. And I suppose the April is really June."

"Not far out. May Johnson, brought up Baptist. If they want to fantasize over the April Elgar image, okay, let them. That's what it's there for, I guess."

"Funny," Enderby said, "girls are called after spring, only men after summer. Augustus, I was thinking of. But of course that's the cart before the horse again. Forgive me."

"Like that thing in Kant, I guess. Noumenon and phenomenon. May Johnson is the dingus an sich."

Enderby gaped. But, of course, everybody in this country got educated at the State U, a kind of superior high school. Then they forgot their bit of education in order to make money. Very sound, really. And then they could paralyse their interlocutors with Kant when they didn't expect it. "I'm parched," he said. "I have to make very strong tea. Will you join me? But I only have this one mug. I'll buy another tomorrow in case you. You can use this one first and I can swill it after."

"Real English genlmn. But it's dinnertime. Wipe that white stuff off of your mouth and drink three glasses of water. Then I take you up on us having dinner together, okay?"

"I couldn't eat a thing."

"Then watch you lil friend eat."

The three glasses of water prescribed renewed the heartburn ferociously, but a couple of powerful martinis at table put him right: the headache merely hovered over like the awareness of a decorated ceiling. He felt he could tackle red meat. He looked with tolerant disapproval at April Elgar's cottage cheese and salad with thousand islands dressing. His tumescence did its best to find its aetiology in the Aprilian and Elgarian and leave May Johnson alone. How bloody beautiful she was, each functional eating gesture a shorter lyric. Men at other tables kept sneaking glances of envy at him. No one could say: that ugly old bastard is her father. And sick desire at her. Their wives ignored him and knifed her with bitter hate. Enderby monologuized, awaiting his red meat. "Salads dry up my saliva. Green things have something unnatural about them. The most dangerous word in the language, as I said. Onanism is a logical safeguard, you know, a device of protection of the deeper emotion. Nobody wants to lust after people: images are what are required. Though love is a bloody nuisance. Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. Funny he should say that disparagingly. He felt differently when he got to Cleopatra."

April Elgar picked on that along with a forkful of salad. She said: "Right. Cleopatra. Think of Cleopatra and you won't go far wrong. Stick an asp on my left tit if you like at the end, but it's me they got to remember. A blaze of gold, you see that?"

"Don't use that word," Enderby groaned.

"Which one?"

"That one."

"Tit? Sorry, old boy, old boy. Bosom. Breast. Knocker."

"Oh my God."

"We'll beat the bastards, you and me. May sheow, cold felleow."