FELIX: Some. Sure.
GENEVIEVE: Until your brother came along.
FELIX: It's not his fault.
GENEVIEVE: It's your fault.
FELIX: Tell me how.
GENEVIEVE: The very, very end is coming up now. Are you sure you want to hear it?
FELIX: HOW is it my fault?
GENEVIEVE: YOU are so ashamed of him. You must be ashamed of your parents, too. Otherwise, why have I never met them?
FELIX: They're too sick to leave home.
GENEVIEVE: And we, with an income of over one hundred thousand dollars a year, have been too poor to visit them. Are they dead?
FELIX: NO.
GENEVIEVE: Are they in a crazy house?
FELIX: NO.
GENEVIEVE: I'm very good at visiting people in crazy houses. My own mother was in a crazy house when I was in high school, and I visited her. She was wonderful. I was wonderful. I told you my mother was in the crazy house for a while.
FELIX: Yes.
GENEVIEVE: I thought you should know--in case we wanted a baby. It isn't anything to be ashamed of, anyway. Or is it?
FELIX: Nothing to be ashamed of.
GENEVIEVE: SO tell me the worst about your parents.
FELIX: Nothing.
GENEVIEVE: Then I'll tell you what's wrong with them. They're not good enough for you. You deserve something far more classy. What a snob you are.
FELIX: It's more complicated.
GENEVIEVE: I doubt it. I can't remember anything about you that was the least bit complicated. Making a good impression at all costs--that accounted for everything.
FELIX: There's a little more to me than that, thank you.
GENEVIEVE: No. There was nothing to you but urbane perfection, until your brother arrived--and turned out to be a circus freak.
FELIX: Don't you call him that.
GENEVIEVE: I'm telling you what you think of him. And what was my duty as a wife? To protect your perfection as much as possible: To pretend that there was absolutely nothing wrong with him. At least I never cringed. You did all the cringing.
FELIX: Cringing?
GENEVIEVE: With your head in your hands, whenever he's around. You could die of shame. You think he hasn't noticed that? You think he hasn't noticed that we're all set up for entertaining, but we somehow never have people in?
FELIX: I've been protecting him.
GENEVIEVE: Protecting you, you mean. This lovely fight we've had--it wasn't about anything I said to him. I've been very nice to him. It was what I said to you that you couldn't stand.
FELIX: With a million people listening.
GENEVIEVE: Five other people in the reception room. And not one heard what I said--because I whispered it to you. But people as far as Chicago must have heard what you yelled back at me. I was actually happily married this morning--for a few seconds--before you yelled at me. I was feeling very pretty and cherished as I sat at the reception desk. We had made love this morning, as you may remember. You had better burn the bottom sheet--along with the draperies. There were five strangers in the reception room, imagining, I think, what sort of life and lover I must have to be so impish and gay--so early in the morning. Into the reception room comes a young broadcasting executive, flawlessly groomed, urbane and sexy. What marvelous New York bullshit! He is the lover! He stops and kisses her, and then she whispers in his ear. It was almost as though New York City were true. A couple of spunky kids from the Middle West, making it big in Gotham.
FELIX: YOU shouldn't have whispered what you did.
GENEVIEVE: I'll say it again: "Tell your brother to take a bath."
FELIX: What a time to say a thing like that.
GENEVIEVE: His play is opening tonight, and he stinks to high heaven. He hasn't taken a bath since he's been here.
FELIX: You call a remark like that romantic?
GENEVIEVE: I call it family life. I call it intimacy. That's all over now. (She hauls a suitcase from the closet, opens it, flops it gaping on the couch) Look how hungry that suitcase is.
FELIX: I'm sorry I said what I said.
GENEVIEVE: YOU yelled. You yelled, "Shut the fuck up!" You yelled, "If you don't like my relatives, get the hell out of my life!"
FELIX: It was over in a minute.
GENEVIEVE: YOU bet your English boots it was. And I walked out of that office, never to return. I'm gone, old friend. What a bore and a boor you were to follow me. What a hick.
(The closet contains mostly sporting goods, ski parkas, wetsuits, warm-up jackets, and so on. GENEVIEVE sorts through these, throwing what she wants on the couch, near the open suitcase. FELIX'S manly bumptiousness decays as he watches. He is a person of weak character, an actor who can't bear to be ignored. He elects to recapture GENEVIEVE'S attention by becoming pitiful and harrowingly frank.)
FELIX(loudly abject): It's true, it's true, it's true.
GENEVIEVE(uninterested): We never did go scuba diving.
FELIX: I am ashamed of my family! You're right! You got me!
(RUDY doesn't do anything through all this. He just sits.)
GENEVIEVE: Scuba was next.
FELIX: Father served a prison term, if you want to know.
GENEVIEVE (unexpectedly fascinated): Really?
FELIX: NOW you know.
GENEVIEVE: What for?
(Pause.)
FELIX: Murder.
GENEVIEVE(moved): Oh, my God. How awful.
FELIX: NOW you know. There's a nice piece of gossip for the broadcast industry.
GENEVIEVE: Never mind the gossip. What it must have done to your brother--what it must have done to you.
FELIX: I'm all right.
GENEVIEVE: There's no reason why you should be. And your poor brother--no wonder he is the way he is. I thought he had been born defective, that the umbilical cord had strangled him or something. I thought he was an idiot savant.
FELIX: What's an idiot savant?
GENEVIEVE: Somebody who's stupid in every possible way but one--like playing the piano.
FELIX: He can't play the piano.
GENEVIEVE: But he wrote a play--and it's going to be produced. He may not take baths. He may not have any friends. He may be so shy he's afraid to talk to anybody. But he wrote a play, and he has an extraordinary vocabulary. He has a bigger vocabulary than both of us put together, and sometimes he says something that is really very funny or wise.
FELIX: He has a degree in pharmacy.
GENEVIEVE: I thought he was an idiot savant in that way, too--theater and pharmacy. But he's the son of a murderer. No wonder he's the way he is. No wonder he wants to be invisible. I saw him walking down Christopher Street last Sunday, and he was as big and handsome as Gary Cooper, but nobody else could see him. He went into a coffee shop, and sat down at the counter, but he couldn't get waited on--because he wasn't there. No wonder.
FELIX: Don't ask for details of the murder.
(Pause.)
GENEVIEVE: That's a request I'm bound to honor. Is he in prison now?
FELIX: NO--but he might as well be. He might as well be dead.
GENEVIEVE: Everything stops--as I suddenly understand.
FELIX: Please stay, Gen. I don't want to be one of those jerks who gets married and divorced, married and divorced, married and divorced again. Something's very wrong with them.
GENEVIEVE: I can't ever go back to the radio station again--not after that scene. It was so embarrassing.
FELIX: I don't want you to work anymore anyway.
GENEVIEVE: I enjoy work. I enjoy having money of my own. What would I do--sit around the house all day?
FELIX: Have a baby.
GENEVIEVE: Oh, my goodness.
FELIX: Why not?
GENEVIEVE: DO you really think I would make a good mother?
FELIX: The best.
GENEVIEVE: What would you want--a boy or a girl?
FELIX: Either one. Whatever it was, I'd love it.
GENEVIEVE: Oh, my, oh, my. I think I'm going to cry now.
FELIX: Just don't walk out on me. I love you so.
GENEVIEVE: I won't.
FELIX: DO you believe I love you?
GENEVIEVE: I'd better, I guess.
FELIX: I'm going back to the office. I'll clean out my desk. I'll apologize to everybody for the scene I made. It was all my fault. My brother does stink. He should take a bath, and I thank you for saying so. Promise me you'll be here when I get back.
GENEVIEVE: Promise.
(FELIX exits through the front door. GENEVIEVE starts putting things back in the closet.)
RUDY: Ahem.
GENEVIEVE: Hello?
RUDY: Ahem.
GENEVIEVE (scared): Who's up there, please?
RUDY (standing, showing himself): It's me.
GENEVIEVE: Oh, my.
RUDY: I didn't want to scare you.
GENEVIEVE: YOU heard all that.
RUDY: I didn't want to interrupt.
GENEVIEVE: We don't believe half of what we said.
RUDY: It's all right. I was going to take a bath anyway.
GENEVIEVE: YOU don't even have to.
RUDY: The house back home is so cold in the winter. You get out of the habit of taking baths. We all get used to the way we smell.
GENEVIEVE: I'm so sorry you heard.
RUDY: It's okay. I don't have any more feelings than a rubber ball. You said how nobody sees me, how I never can get waited on ...?
GENEVIEVE: YOU heard that, too.
RUDY: That's because I'm a neuter. I'm no sex. I'm out of the sex game entirely. Nobody knows how many neuters there are, because they're invisible to most people. I'll tell you something, though: There are millions in this town. They should have a parade sometime, with big signs saying, TRIED SEX ONCE, THOUGHT IT WAS STUPID, NO SEX FOR TEN YEARS, FEEL WONDERFUL, FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE, THINK ABOUT SOMETHING BESIDES SEX.
GENEVIEVE: YOU really can be funny sometimes.
RUDY: Idiot savant. No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.
GENEVIEVE: I'm sorry about your father.
RUDY: He never murdered anybody.
GENEVIEVE: He didn't?
RUDY: He wouldn't hurt a fly. But he was still a very bad father to have. Felix and I stopped bringing friends home, because he was so embarrassing. He wasn't anything and he never did anything, but he still thought he was so important. He was very spoiled as a child, I guess. We used to get him to help us with our homework, and then we'd get to school and find out that everything he said was wrong. You know what happens if you give a raccoon a lump of sugar?
GENEVIEVE: NO.
RUDY: Raccoons always wash their food before they eat it.
GENEVIEVE: I've heard that. Back in Wisconsin, we had raccoons.
RUDY: A raccoon will take a lump of sugar down to the water, and wash it and wash it and wash it.
(Pause.)
GENEVIEVE: Aha! Until the sugar's gone.
RUDY: And that's what growing up was like for Felix and me. We had no father when we got through. Mother still thinks he's the greatest man in the world.
GENEVIEVE: But you still love your parents anyway.
RUDY: Neuters don't love anybody. They don't hate anybody either.
GENEVIEVE: But you've been keeping house for your parents for years and years, haven't you? Or isn't that true?
RUDY: Neuters make very good servants. They're not your great seekers of respect, and they usually cook pretty well.
GENEVIEVE (feeling creepy): You're a very strange person, Rudy Waltz.
RUDY: That's because I'm the murderer.
GENEVIEVE: WHAT?
RUDY: There's a murderer in the family, all right--but it isn't Father. It's me.
(Pause.)
(Curtain.)
*
Thus did I prevent my brother's fathering a child back then. Genevieve cleared out of the duplex, not wishing to be there alone with a murderer, and she and Felix never got together again. The child they had talked about having would be twenty-two years old now. The child Eloise Metzger was carrying when I shot her would be thirty-eight! Think of that.
Who knows what those people would be doing now, instead of drifting around nowhere, mere wisps of undifferentiated nothingness. They could be so busy now.
*
To this day, I have never told Felix about how I overheard his conversation with Genevieve from the balcony, and about how I scared her out of the duplex, never to return. I wrecked the marriage. It was an accident-prone time in my life, just as it was an accident-prone time in my life when I shot Mrs. Metzger.
That's all I can say.
*
I had to let my sister-in-law know that I was somebody to be reckoned with--that I was a murderer. That was my claim to fame.
20
THE MORNING AFTER Katmandu opened and closed, Felix and I were flying over a landscape as white and blank as our lives. Felix had lost his second wife. I was the laughingstock of New York. We were in a six-passenger private plane, traversing a southwestern Ohio which appeared to be as lifeless as a polar ice cap. Somewhere down there was Midland City. The power was off. The phone lines were out.
How could anyone still be alive down there?
The sky was clear, anyway, and the air was still. The blizzard which had done this was now raging somewhere off Labrador.
*
Felix and I were in a plane which belonged to Barrytron, Ltd., a manufacturer of sophisticated weapons systems, the largest single employer in Midland City. With us were Fred T. Barry, the founder and sole owner of Barrytron, and his mother, Mildred, and their pilot.
Mr. Barry was a bachelor and his mother was a widow, and they were tireless globe-trotters. Felix and I learned from their conversation that they had been to cultural events all over the planet--arm-in-arm at film festivals and premiers of new ballets and operas, at openings of museum shows, and on and on. And I would be the last to mock them for being such frivolous gadabouts, since it was my play which had brought them and their airplane to New York City. They did not know me or Felix, nor had they more than a nodding acquaintance with our parents. But they had found it imperative that they be at the opening of the only full-length play by a citizen of Midland City which had ever been produced commercially.
How could I not like them for that?
What is more: This mother-and-son team had stayed to the very end of Katmandu. Only twenty people did that, including Felix and me. I know. I counted the house. And the Barrys clapped and whistled and stamped as the curtain came down. They were so uninhibited. And Mrs. Barry could certainly whistle. She had been born in England, and in her youth she had been an imitator in music halls of various birds of the British Empire.
*
Mr. Barry thought a lot more of his mother than I thought of mine. After his mother died, he would try to immortalize her by having the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company build an arts center on stilts in Sugar Creek, and naming it in her honor.
My own mother effectively wrecked that scheme, persuading the community that the arts center and its contents were monstrosities. After that came the neutron bomb. There is nobody left in Midland City anymore to know or care who Mildred Barry might have been.
The scheme for turning the empty husks of my town into housing for refugees moves forward apace, incidentally. The President himself has called it "a golden opportunity."
Bernard Ketchum, our resident shyster here at the Grand Hotel Oloffson, says that Haitian refugees should follow the precedent set by white people, and simply discover Florida or Virginia or Massachusetts or whatever. They could come ashore, and start converting people to voodooism.
"It's a widely accepted principle," he says, "that you can claim a piece of land which has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, if only you will repeat this mantra endlessly: 'We discovered it, we discovered it, we discovered it....' "
*
Fred Barry's mother Mildred had an English accent which she had done nothing to
modify, although she had lived in Midland City for a quarter of a century or more.
Her black servants, I know, were very fond of her. She knew exactly what kind of a fool she was, and she loved to keep her servants laughing at her all the time.
There in that little plane, she imitated the bulbul of Malaysia and the morepork owl of New Zealand, and so on. I identified a basic mistake my parents had made about life: They thought that it would be very wrong if anybody ever laughed at them.
*
I keep wanting to say that Fred T. Barry was the grandest neuter I ever saw. He certainly had no sex Ufe. He didn't even have friends. It was all right with him if life ended at any time, obviously, since this was a suicidal flight we were on. He didn't care much if I died, either, or Felix or his mother--or the pilot, who had gone to high school with my brother, and who was scared stiff. If we had an engine failure before we reached Cincinnati, the nearest open runway, where could we land?
But the satisfaction Mr. Barry found in the company of his mother and in their harum-scarum visits to athletic and cultural events all over the world was anything but proof of neutrality. If he liked any part of life that much, he couldn't march in the great parade of neuters in the sweet by-and-by.
Or his mother, either.
*
Fred and his mother really had liked Katmandu, and they had stayed up late afterwards, so they could get early editions of the morning newspapers and read the reviews. One of the things that made them really mad was that none of the critics had stayed long enough to find out whether John Fortune had found Shangri-La or not.
Mr. Barry said that he would like to see the play performed sometime with an all-Ohio cast. He said that he didn't think New York actors could fully appreciate why it might be important for a simple farmer to die on a quest for wisdom in Asia, even if there wasn't all that much wisdom to find over there.
And that would actually come to pass in three years, as I've said: The Midland County Mask and Wig Club would revive Katmandu on the high school stage, and they would give the female lead to poor Celia Hoover.
Oh, my.
*
I keep calling Fred T. Barry "Mr. Barry," as though he were older than God. My goodness, he was only about fifty back then--which is my age now. His mother was maybe seventy-five, with eight more years to go until she tried to rescue a bat she found clinging upside down to her living room draperies.
Mr. Barry was a self-educated inventor and super-salesman. He had entered the armaments business more or less by accident. The timer on an automatic washing machine which he had been manufacturing in the old Keedsler Automobile Works turned out to have military applications. It was ideal for timing the release of bombs from airplanes--so as to create a desired pattern of explosions on the ground. When the war was over, orders for much more sophisticated weapons systems started coming in, and Mr. Barry brought in more and more brilliant scientists and engineers and technicians to keep up with the game.