Little Casino

A scherzarade

THE SCENE IS SO BANAL AS TO MAKE ONE weep in desperation, and yet, what an overwhelming sense of life!

“Nice of you to give your weekend, Ms. Paluka.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Pepp, I’m very interested in this account, it’s a real learning experience working on it. I’m grateful, really, for the opportunity.”

Surely, Mr. Pepp meant “give up.”

How careful she’d been about the clothes she’d packed for this working weekend — including her nightclothes! Sensual, she thought, yes, but not frilly. Expensive.

(Earlier, assuming that these two savvy and aggressive reps of a savvy and aggressive microchip firm did not just appear on the page without rambling through a lot of actual life, a bartender in the hotel lounge might well have been permitted a regular-guy cliché.)

In the hotel room, Mr. Pepp’s, since he is the senior junior assistant sales and marketing representative, while Ms. Paluka is his junior senior assistant, they get down to work. They prepare carefully, even exhaustively, for the meeting the next day with the big client. After a break for a room-service omelet with a crisp and somewhat reckless Chardonnay, she takes off her trim jacket, and suddenly feels wonderfully vulnerable, yet powerful and womanly in her white silk blouse.

Out with the laptop computers and the other stuff!

Time passes remarkably quickly when one is exhausting one’s self with demanding tasks in the unforgiving yet electrically charged world of microchips!

Mr. Pepp glances at Ms. Paluka’s breasts, breasts that slowly, and despite her M.B.A. from Stanford, heave, beneath the lustrous and creamy silk of her blouse. She pretends not to notice, and yet, a faint flush starts at her neck and rises swiftly toward her ears. How she wished she had a cigarette! Yet she had heeded the Surgeon General’s warnings and given them up several years ago. That Techmaxcon did not permit smoking, even in the immaculate parking lot, had had something to do with it. Thanks a million, Techmaxcon! she often breathed. She could actually smell the gas!

“Looks as if we’ve more or less got this baby locked up, Ms. Paluka. Now if we can start out on the same page with old Tromboner tomorrow, and convince him that our new hard-drive soft-disc microparticle floppy byte-generator is what his expanding business needs, I think that we should both be headed back to home base with smiles on our faces, and the guys’ applause awaiting us! (At Techmaxcon, all the employees were called “guys,” by common consent. There had been some grumbling about this at first, but a few motivational weekends of drumming and “jungle combat” had put everyone, at the end of the day, on the same page.)

She looks down at the traffic far below the hotel room window, the lights reflected in a dozen gleaming colors on the rain-slick streets. This is what it was all about! What an odd name Tromboner is, she muses. Perhaps he’s an ethnic person, an Eyetalian, they tend to have very strange foreign names, and so hard to pronounce! Russo. Zito. Gallo. Lupo. She couldn’t even think how to say them. Whew!

Earlier, in a nicely familiar flashback, it has been revealed that Ms. Paluka’s ex-husband, Brad, had tried every trick in the book to keep her from getting her M.B.A., even going so far as to insult Palo Alto. And how she wanted a child! Yet Brad, soft, pouting, selfish Brad, would not hear of sharing household tasks, and as for taking care of a baby while she attended her demanding classes, ha!

Certainly it wouldn’t hurt to have a bottle of Cognac sent up to the room! “A few snifters before bed won’t spoil us.” He was quite the rogue, Mr. Pepp was, and Ms. Paluka was beginning to understand why he had called the office volleyball team, “the Tex-Maxies.” He was just so fun!

“You’re not trying to get me tipsy, are you, Mishter Russho?”

“What?”

Oh dear, she’d forgotten his name for a moment, and knew that the Five Star V.S.O.P. Cognac, Hennesshy’s, had gone to her head. And yet, the boiling turmoil in her heaving breasts also had something to do with the emotion that filled her womanly being. But she was a junior senior assistant, for God’s sake!

“Quite all right, Ms. Paluka, even I’d forget my name if it weren’t attached to my shoulders, ha ha.” This Mr. Pepp is one heck of a good sport. Ms. Paluka feels a certain tingle as he becomes serious and notes, hesitantly, that he couldn’t help but notice her looking down at the traffic far below on the rain-slicked streets, and he’d been in enough lonely hotel rooms to know what that means.

Oh, oh, what did it mean!? Did she dare ask?

“By the way, Ms. Paluka, I—”

“You may call me Aspen … if … you l-l-like.”

“Aspen. Well, then, Aspen. I have been meaning to tell you that my infant son, Brett — I find this difficult to speak of, even now— that Brett died in infancy of an undiagnosed mystery disease.”

“Oh, Mister Zito, I mean, Peppo, no! No!”

Of course, his marriage has never been the same, his wife blames him for the child’s death, since the death occurred while he was entertaining a client, a big client, at the Grand Opera. And it turned out, oh, how strange fate can be, despite exercise and a sensible diet, that he didn’t like opera and the account was lost. The irony almost overwhelmed Mister Jerry Pepp, a man whom irony rarely troubled.

“Don’t … don’t cry, Mr. Pepp, Mr. — darling,” Aspen whispers, as she slips out of her clothes, blouse first, her eager breasts heaving sensually. “Come, come to my arms.”

And then the singing of the larks and nightingales burst forth over the shrouded dreamed-of moors as their voices soared into the cerulean blue that covered the ocean pounding again and again and again …

Is Mr. Pepp lying, and does Aspen Paluka care whether he is or not? Doesn’t Ms. Paluka, intelligent and attractive at thirty-five or so, deserve to eat the pâté, drink the cocktails, earn the big salary, make the bonus money, get the nookie? Doesn’t she deserve to read the latest books by the writers who wish to share their demanding thoughts on modern life in a clear and simple yet colorful style? Of course! Life, Ms. Paluka knows, is not just silk blouses and bras that fit right.

Note: Feel of bedspread. Lights from traffic far below on walls of room. Distant foghorns from the dark sea beyond the sleepless metropolis. Brief description of Mr. Pepp’s sadness as he muses on his little cabin in Vermont, a cabin that Mrs. Pepp has always hated, hated the fish and the beavers and the coots and the firewood, no, she preferred to stay at home in the comfort of their luxury co-op overlooking the Golden Gate. He was, then, always alone in the woods, with the deerflies and the wasps and the smell of skunk in the air and the splash of trout in the clear cold water, alone with his sad thoughts of Brett and his fading dreams …

“I LOVE Vermont!” Aspen laughs. And it turns out that her Dad was a Forest Ranger in the Smokies and that she was, dammit! almost weaned on jerky and hogjowl and boiled beans. Her Dad had a dream of the World Wide Web once, and had met Jack Kerouac.

They fall asleep in each other’s arms, and Aspen thanks her lucky stars that she thought hard about her important nightclothes selection so carefully. As the women liked to joke over that first cup of decaf, you never can tell when your boss will want to interact on a warm, personal level with you.

The author, at a loss to come up with anything new to say about the world of business (with which he is obviously unacquainted, and, grievously, unwilling to research), has apparently dumped the contents of some notebook scribblings onto the page and is hoping to pass it off as “innovative” literature. Not surprisingly, he is probably wholly unfamiliar with Gertrude Stein’s comment on Finnigan’s Wake, “The quarks are not literature.” Cryptic, so to say, yes, but true.

“She might be right about the notebook, Jerry.”

Prudence Rydstrom, battling her way into an Ooh-La-La French-lace-trimmed semitransparent peekaboo long-line torsolette with detachable brassiere, dayglo faux-bustier, six patent-leather semi-detachable garters with neon insets, and a battery-powered combination dildo/cocktail shaker, says that all the girls — even, believe it or not, her sister, Maxine — agree with her that Mr. Pepp and Ms. Paluka make a loving and romantic couple and that they deserve a little fucking happiness.

“So long as the gentleman employs a rubber on himself so as not to communicate an unwanted clap to the lady’s shameful parts,” Mary Connors, R.N., says. “It’s only right. Not that I make an implication that the gentleman has got himself a nice little dose, but you can’t be too careful nowadays, what with people copulating here, there, and everywhere, and with perfect strangers who could be festering with dread carnal diseases. We see a lot of it in our business.”

“Oh, these lovely ladies! Altogether,” Mr. Joyce says, “a scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightinesses. And perhaps you might check to be sure you’ve transcribed this correctly?”

[The decision to include this chapter in the work that became Little Casino was not easily arrived at. It was initially felt that the author[’s] “style” and approach were not commensurate with that of the rest of the work. Ultimately, if reluctantly, that view was modified, on the ground that “the content outweighs the … deficiencies of execution.”]