structure of the Fossil Extracts Conference in less than two months. He was appointed to do it, you were wrong Mimi, he said without bile for his stomach had been scoured by twenty years of their resentments, I have been assigned until further notice. His employer was one of ten member companies to the agreement, to the Conference, as they called it. Each of those companies converted fossil deposits into a convenient form for processing into plastics or fuels or packaging materials and sold the product to their own subsidiaries or to each other. The plants and animals that had laid down their lives to bubble into gastric slime had lived three hundred million years before, dying mindlessly in geomantic layers for heat and pressure to harden for the benefit of posterity. Those companies saw themselves as that posterity and benefited. But the companies multiplied, Mimi, listen to me and you will understand it, multiplied according to laws of available sustenance older than the vulcanised moors they dug. The answer was a cartel.
Think of it, Mimi, a cartel, and Humphrey began from scratch, he told her, it’s never been done like this before, on this scale. The Heads of Agreement were slim by comparison, but the ancillary contracts, the documentation, would fill half a dark room, memoranda and articles drawn and submitted and drawn again, Whereas the Parties Desire, by ten firms of lawyers, their names alone take up a page and a half, working in teams around the clock in shirtsleeves like poker players on a streak, that’s why I’m late, and lobbying for government sanction, delicate but we can, he told us over lunch, look to favourable consideration, he is a source close to the Minister, what’s good for the nation, though the Party contribution is a hundred grand more than we budgeted, but we should hear by Tuesday, by Friday he thinks, when it’s all done, Mimi, we’ll spend a few days at the coast, don’t bother she said, and Humphrey designed a staff structure stronger than a family tree but without, the Board laughed with him, the dead wood, and the recommendations are in, working capital, and lines of credit established in Dollars and Yen and Deutschmark, en demande, a phonecall and it’s there.
There.
The effort had drained Humphrey of his reserve. He was too tired to cover the childishness of his anticipation. I’ll be going to Japan, Mimi, as head of the Conference. Hong Kong and Japan first, Europe later.
No chance, she said.
We want you to go to Japan, they told him. The sheets of his recommendations were strewn the length of the Boardroom table, a crazy-path, Mimi, from the bottom to the top, you were wrong.
To Japan, they paused, as assistant to Butcher. Butcher of Mincorp, they told me, he will lead you. I know him, Humphrey said, a good choice, and closed the panelled door quietly as he left.
How can you hold up your head, she said, you’re as timid as a bird. You’re being screwed as usual. Anger hardened in his throat like a growth. I can do that too, all expense account, screw my prick off.
Screwing it on is the problem, she turned toward her dressing-room, you’ve forgotten where you put it. Humphrey sat on the bed.
So the march to destroy the spectre of competition begins, he called after her, not to the hymns of uniting workers, but to the rattling chains of capital. Humphrey pulled off his shoes. Think of it, Mimi, and as he thought of it, Humphrey knew the lapping tide of his laughter had begun to turn after a thirty-year ebb.
Humphrey’s glass was again empty. He did not know how many he had drained. The girl reached from the couch to the console, and Humphrey pushed his glass forward but she turned the volume louder and lay back, tapping her slicked belly to the rubber-ball syncopations of its catchy beat as if her skin had been tensioned.
She was the most beautiful object he had ever seen, a perfection that struck him as intensely inhuman. It reached beyond mood or character, as vacantly exquisite as a rich sarcophagus. Reaching beyond morality and inhibition; yet without prerogative or authority. She was entirely servile, an item of male plunder.
It excited him and he quickly confused this with manhood. She would do anything I want, he thought, that is what she is for. Anything at all.
This is a demesne some men are born to and others assume or appropriate; the Brothers who had taught him and the priests who married and absolved him must have known it though it was never directly spoken, and merely hinted in the displays of Asian and Roman and Egyptian antiquity to which Mimi had dragged him with the impatience of a schoolmistress through the interminable makeshift labyrinths of exhibition galleries, past the eyes of regents and their sacrificed concubines scaled with the ancient mail of their imperishable currency, past tribunes and their maidens in terracotta held together only by the diminishing humidity of an age, past deathmasks carved in pairs by whittlers who were somehow longer dead than the ageless cry they continue to immortalise, you do not understand it Mimi, but she would not listen; even he had not seen what they were really showing him, that each was master by merely acts of will; he understood it only at this very instant and the power of it made him sit upright, though he knew his straightening back was a metaphor for the pitiless hardening of his virility.
I will talk to her. But as he thought of it, scraps of adolescent failure rustled in his memory like old photographs. He fingered his gold lighter, I might give it to her, a present to inflame your admirers. Mimi had given it to him on their wedding anniversary the year before. The case held a roughly grained texture and felt heavy in the hand. He had seen it previously in the richly draped centrecase of a boutique at the corner of their street and had rejected the idea of it as a gift for her. An excess of expenditure over imagination, Mimi.
Three men now drank together on the opposite side of the bar. He had not seen them enter. She will light their cigarettes with an insolent snap but otherwise ignore them. The merchantman from Glasgow still sat alone, his mallet chin slumped onto the knitted bulk of his navy chest. He seemed to focus on her but could not hold it. He pressed his glass to his chest with both hands. Humphrey waited for it to shatter. The sailor stood as the stool tumbled slowly to the floor. His jowls began to work but their slabs made the stiff articulations of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He thought he was singing. Humphrey’s fingers tightened on the edge of the bar but the sailor made for the door in his fitful waltz to a heaving sea, the glass dropped and his hands reached for a steel railing. That seaman had, she will tell me in her whisper of a sad confidant, sat at her bar for the last five nights, pouring whisky into his hard mouth as mechanically as filling a boiler, chanting the slow homesick songs of Scotland. His ship, she will say it pressing the tips of my fingers, his ship steamed for home at five this morning.
His glass was again full. How many times might she have served it with such humility that no ripple of it reached him? Perhaps he had simply not drunk the last.
She sat facing the Japanese. Their conversation was solemn. She sat straight as a schoolgirl and the round of her buttocks gleamed the colour of waxed oranges. She would do anything I want, it is the way she lives, her vocation. How much will it cost? No matter, we can go to your hotel-room and relax, she will say. The money is little, enough to purchase the evening she would lose for her boss, she will tell me, to pay for another in her place. His gambling debts in Macao do not allow him to be more generous. I pull a lump of crushed notes from my pocket. The money is nothing. Her parents are two years dead. The rent of her high concrete room and its balcony flapping with gay laundry is a pittance. A top-coat she has on order for a month now, she tells me, is almost ready, the tailor is her uncle but he needs forty-two dollars for the material. A nice-girl’s coat, she says, I look respectful, I must be well dressed to keep my job.
Humphrey felt a sudden glare from her body on his cheek. She was turning toward him. Her face was as expressionless as beaten foil. She was her own reflected image. His breath caught in his chest as though he had been running and he could see her mouth move but he could hear nothing.
I will have her.
I will slip the first of my words lightly about her
