Pierre stared in uninsulted puzzlement, then returned to the movie. Ben Johnson was saying, “Well, maybe the boy’s all petered out from playin’ on the beach with that little jumpin’ bean.”
Owen got on his belly to find a tipped-over beer bottle underneath his La-Z-Boy, and in One-Eyed Jacks an outraged Marlon Brando jolted up from the poker table, yelling, “Get up, you scum-sucking pig!”
Dick said, “Talking to you, Owen.”
Owen took a final gloomy swig from the beer he found as Brando upset the saloon’s poker table with a crash. Owen was horrified. “We’re outta beer, boys.”
Neither Dick nor Pierre made a move, such things being beneath their station
. Owen struggled his heft up. “Don’t move a muscle,” he told the friends who hadn’t. “I’m the host. I’ll go get more.” And then he executed an Elvis move in his wide-bodied way, holding the Falstaff bottle as if it were a mike as he exited to the kitchen. “Thank ya’ll ver’ much, thank ya.” And then he went outside, yelling, “Owen has left the building!”
Watching Pierre in an assaying way, Dick straightened his prelate’s soutane at his thighs and crossed his redstockinged ankles. “You been enjoying your trip through America’s spacious skies and amber waves of grain?”
Pierre regally answered, “No.”
“Seems to me I’d be pretty happy traipsing just about anywhere with such a pleasant companion.”
Pierre shrugged. “Perhaps, but only if he lets me pick out ze wines.”
“Wasn’t talking about Owen,” said Dick. “I was talking about Mademoiselle Clairvaux.”
“Oh,” Pierre said. “Her.”
They watched One-Eyed Jacks. Brando was saying, “You got right on the edge. You mention her once more and I’m gonna tear your arms out.”
Dick asked, “You two on the permanent outs?”
“What does it means, this ‘outs’?”
“In other words, you got a future together?”
Pierre fell into a crotchety mood, as was his wont. “She is my past,” he said. His fingers made antlers beside his head and he fluttered them wildly. “She is the craziness in my brains. She is so frus-trating and difficult and full of idiotic ideas.”
“Well, maybe it’s good you’re taking a vacation from each other.”
Owen sashayed back inside just then, cold beer cans weighting down the pockets of a blue Hawaiian shirt he’d changed into and on his skull a leafy headdress with Falstaff beer cans hung over each ear and plastic tubes feeding the liquid into his mouth when he sucked them. Owen grinned. “Brew Hawaii!”
Pierre arfed like a seal as Owen had instructed him to, and Owen tossed him a frosty one.
And Dick said, “I can see how Natalie must offend your delicate sensibilities.”
10
Wednesday evening in Mrs. Christiansen’s rooming house was serene. A hard-of-hearing old woman named Nell was sleeping in her Victorian room upstairs, as was Onetta, the mannish postmistress whose hobby was collecting the hundred varieties of barbed wire. Each of them claimed to be “plumb worn out” by The Revels. The sole teenaged girl in the house was a beautician named Ursula whose hair was, for the instant, orange and whose face was agleam with silver piercings, but she and her friends were out cruising the fairground’s parking lot in an Econoline van. Iona was in the basement hooting “Hoo, hoo” as she kicked and threw punches in accordance with the shouted instructions on her Tae Bo tape. And Natalie, Mrs. Christiansen, and Owen’s Aunt Opal were sitting in a yellow-furnitured parlor while the video of Gigi played on the VCR. Mrs. Christiansen and Opal were humped over a card table and cooperating in putting together a puzzle of a basket of colorful yarns and puffy calico kittens. Natalie lounged on the yellow sofa in the frilly white sundress and she was offending the ladies by tucking her nude feet and calves sideways on the cushion so that the skin of her sunbrowned thigh was overmuch on exhibit. Opal sighed over the Continent’s moral decline as she forced in a puzzle piece of kitten whiskers. She turned to Natalie and asked, “After you ditched your loverboy in such haste, how did you fritter away your afternoon?”
Natalie had never seen Gigi before and was caught up in the final chapters of the plot. Without turning, she flatly said, “We cooked dinner.”
“And she did the dishes afterwards,” Mrs. Christiansen said. “Without my beseeching, I might add.”
Opal called to Natalie, “Have you noticed how nice your hands feel?”
Natalie frowned quizzically at her, then at her hands. They did feel softer, creamier, even childlike. “Yes!”
Opal was trying to wedge in a puzzle piece. “We feel like that all the time here. The healing properties of Frenchman’s Creek ought to be a science project. Of course, it isn’t exactly Lourdes, but we aren’t so high and mighty as you people over there in Europe.” She fiercely pounded a puzzle piece and the card table jumped.
Mrs. Christiansen cautioned, “Opal! Would you try to be friendly to one of our houseguests for once?”
“I just won’t speak then,” Opal said, and she made a zipper motion over her lips. She blankly stared at the television. Heading into the final triumphant scene of Gigi, Hermione Gingold said, “Thank Heaven . . .”