Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [64]
PAMELA WASN’T SURPRISED to see me. She was insulated against surprises by alcohol. The first thing she said to me was, “No.” I hadn’t said anything yet. She thought I had come to make love to her. I could understand why she might think that.
I myself had started thinking that.
And then she said, “This has certainly been the best year of my life, and I want to thank you for being such a big part of it.” This was irony. She was being corrosively insincere.
“When are you leaving?” I said.
“Never,” she said. “My transmission is shot.” She was talking about her 12-year-old Buick 4-door sedan, which she had gotten as part of her divorce settlement from her ex-husband. He used to mock her efforts to become a serious artist, even slapping or kicking her from time to time. So he must have laughed even harder than everybody else when her 1-woman show was blown off its pedestals in Buffalo.
She said a new transmission was going to cost $850 down in town, and that the mechanic wanted to be paid in Yen, and that he hinted that the repairs would cost a lot less if she would go to bed with him. “I don’t suppose you ever found out where your mother-in-law hid the money,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Maybe I should go looking for it,” she said.
“I’m sure somebody else found it, and just isn’t saying anything,” I said.
“I never asked you to pay for anything before,” she said. “How about you buy me a new transmission? Then, when anybody asks me, ‘Where did you get that beautiful transmission?’ I can answer, ‘An old lover gave that to me. He is a very famous war hero, but I am not free to reveal his name.’ ”
“Who is the mechanic?” I asked.
“The Prince of Wales,” she said. “If I go to bed with him, he will not only fix my transmission, he will make me the Queen of England. You never made me Queen of England.”
“Was it Whitey VanArsdale?” I said. This was a mechanic down in town who used to tell everybody that he or she had a broken transmission. He did it to me with the car I had before the Mercedes, which was a 1979 Chevy station wagon. I got a second opinion, from a student, actually. The transmission was fine. All I’d wanted in the first place was a grease job. Whitey VanArsdale, too, is now buried next to the stable. He ambushed some convicts and got ambushed right back. His victory lasted 10 minutes, if that. It was, “Bang,” and then, a few minutes later, “Bang, bang,” right back.
PAMELA, SITTING ON the ground with her back to the tombstone, didn’t do to me what Zuzu Johnson would soon do to me, which was to identify me as a major cause of her unhappiness. The closest Pam came to doing that, I guess, was when she said I had never made her the Queen of England. Zuzu’s complaint would be that I had never seriously intended to make her my wife, despite all our talk in bed about our running off to Venice, which neither one of us had ever seen. She would open a flower shop there, I promised her, since she was so good at gardening. I would teach English as a second language or help local glassblowers get their wares into American department stores, and so on.
Zuzu was also a pretty good photographer, so I said she would soon be hanging around where the gondolas took on passengers, and selling tourists Polaroid pictures of themselves in gondolas right then and there.
When it came to dreaming up a future for ourselves, we left GRIOT™ in the dust.
I CONSIDERED THOSE dreams of Venice part of lovemaking, my erotic analogue to Zuzu’s perfume. But Zuzu took them seriously. She was all set to go. And I couldn’t go because of my family responsibilities.
PAMELA KNEW ABOUT my love affair with Zuzu, and all the hocus pocus about Venice. Zuzu told her.
“You know what you ought to say to any woman dumb enough to fall in love with you?” she asked me. Her gaze was on Musket Mountain, not on me.
“No,” I said.
And she said, “ ‘Welcome