Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [20]
Nancy, barefoot and wearing a thin white nightgown, descended bravely into the forward cabin, which was a pool of candlelight and pine-needle perfume. The companionway hatch was closed and locked behind her.
Nancy’s emotions and the antique furnishings of the cabin were so complex that Nancy could not at first separate Billy the Poet from his surroundings, from all the mahogany and leaded glass. And then she saw him at the far end of the cabin, with his back against the door to the forward cockpit. He was wearing purple silk pajamas with a Russian collar. They were piped in red, and writhing across Billy’s silken breast was a golden dragon. It was belching fire.
Anticlimactically, Billy was wearing glasses. He was holding a book.
Nancy poised herself on the next-to-the-bottom step, took a firm grip on the handholds in the companionway. She bared her teeth, calculated that it would take ten men Billy’s size to dislodge her.
Between them was a great table. Nancy had expected the cabin to be dominated by a bed, possibly in the shape of a swan, but the Marlin was a day boat. The cabin was anything but a seraglio. It was about as voluptuous as a lower-middle-class dining room in Akron, Ohio, around 1910.
A candle was on the table. So were an ice bucket and two glasses and a quart of champagne. Champagne was as illegal as heroin.
Billy took off his glasses, gave her a shy, embarrassed smile, said, "Welcome."
"This is as far as I come."
He accepted that. "You’re very beautiful there."
"And what am I supposed to say—that you’re stunningly handsome? That I feel an overwhelming desire to throw myself into your manly arms?"
"If you wanted to make me happy, that would certainly be the way to do it." He said that humbly.
"And what about my happiness?"
The question seemed to puzzle him. "Nancy—that’s what this is all about."
"What if my idea of happiness doesn’t coincide with yours?"
"And what do you think my idea of happiness is?"
"I’m not going to throw myself into your arms, and I’m not going to drink that poison, and I’m not going to budge from here unless somebody makes me," said Nancy. "So I think your idea of happiness is going to turn out to be eight people holding me down on that table, while you bravely hold a cocked pistol to my head—and do what you want. That’s the way it’s going to have to be, so call your friends and get it over with!"
Which he did.
He didn’t hurt her. He deflowered her with a clinical skill she found ghastly. When it was all over, he didn’t seem cocky or proud. On the contrary, he was terribly depressed, and he said to Nancy, "Believe me, if there’d been any other way—"
Her reply to this was a face like stone—and silent tears of humiliation.
His helpers let down a folding bunk from the wall. It was scarcely wider than a bookshelf and hung on chains. Nancy allowed herself to be put to bed in it, and she was left alone with Billy the Poet again. Big as she was, like a double bass wedged onto that narrow shelf, she felt like a pitiful little thing. A scratchy, war-surplus blanket had been tucked in around her. It was her own idea to pull up a corner of the blanket to hide her face.
Nancy sensed from sounds what Billy was doing, which wasn’t much. He was sitting at the table, sighing occasionally, sniffing occasionally, turning the pages of a book. He lit a cigar and the stink of it seeped under her blanket. Billy inhaled the cigar, then coughed and coughed and coughed.
When the coughing died down, Nancy said loathingly through the blanket, "You’re so strong, so masterful, so healthy. It must be wonderful to be so manly."
Billy only sighed at this.
"I’m not a very typical nothinghead," she said. "I hated it—hated everything about it."
Billy sniffed, turned a page.
"I suppose all the other women just loved it—couldn’t get enough of it."
"Nope."
She uncovered her face. "What do you mean, ’Nope’?"
"They’ve all been like you."
This was enough