The Loo Sanction (30 page)

Stockholm
                                             28 Days Later

“. . .
I
n fact, the word ‘style' has been gutted of meaning. Overused. Misused. It's a critic's word. No painting has ‘style.' Come to think of it, few critics do.”

The audience tittered politely, and Jonathan bowed his head, losing his balance slightly and catching at the side of the podium. When he continued speaking, he was too close to the microphone, and he set up a feedback squeal. “Sorry about that. Where was I? Oh. Right! It is as meaningless to speak of the
style
of the Flemish School as it is to babble about the
style
of this or that painter.”

“You miss my point, sir!” objected the young, terribly intelligent instructor who had introduced the subject.

“I don't miss your point at all, young man,” Jonathan said, taking a sip from the glass of gin he fondly hoped passed for water. “I anticipate your obscure point, and I choose to ignore it.”

At the back of the auditorium, the with-it young American who was responsible for USIS cultural lectures in Sweden cast an anxious glance toward fforbes-Ffitch, who had flown over from London to see how the lectures he had co-sponsored were going.

“Is he always like this?” fforbes-Ffitch asked in a thin whisper.

“I don't think he's been sober since he came,” the American said.

fforbes-Ffitch arched his eyebrows and shook his head disapprovingly.

“. . . but you can't deny that the Flemish School and that of Art Nouveau are
stylistically
antithetical,” the bright Swedish instructor insisted.

“Bullshit!” Jonathan made an angry gesture with his arm and struck the microphone, causing an amplified thunk to punctuate his statement. He shushed the mike with his forefinger across his lips. “Of course, one can cite broad differences between the two movements. The Flemish painters chose in bulk to deal with natural subjects in a vigorous, healthy, if somewhat bovine manner. While the Art Nouveau types dealt with organic, hypersophisticated, almost tropically malignant
things
. But no painter belongs to a school. Critics concoct schools after the fact. For instance, if you want to look at ‘typically Art Nouveau' treatments of floral subjects, I refer you to the Flemish painter Jan van Huysum or, to a lesser degree, to Jacob van Walscappelle.”

“I'm afraid I don't know the painters to whom you refer, sir,” the young Swede said stiffly, giving up all hopes of having his thesis supported by this acrid American critic whose books and articles were just then holding the art world in uncomfortable thrall.

The great majority of the audience was composed of young, shaggy Americans, this USIS center operating, as most of them do, more as a sponsored social club for Americans on the drift than as an effective outlet for American information and propaganda. Jonathan's lectures had broken the usual pattern of boycotting and sparse attendance that resulted from strong feelings against America's failure to grant amnesty to the men who had fled to Sweden to avoid the Vietnam debacle.

“It's a wonder there's a soul here,” fforbes-Ffitch whispered, “if he's been drunk and nasty like this every night.”

The American diplomat-in-training shrugged. “But it's been the best houses we've ever had. I don't understand it. They eat it up.”

“Odd lot, the Swedes. Masochists. National guilt over Nobel and his damned explosives, I shouldn't wonder.”

Jonathan's voice boomed over the loudspeakers. “I shall end this last of my lectures, children, by allowing our joint hosts to say a few words to you. They are obviously bursting with a need to communicate, for they have been babbling together at the back of the hall. I have it on good authority that your USIS host will speak to you on the subject, Why has the nation failed to grant amnesty to young men who had the courage to fight war, rather than to fight people?” Jonathan stepped from the stage, stumbling a little, and the audience turned expectant faces toward the back of the auditorium.

The young USIS man blushed and tried to fake his way through, raising his voice to the verge of falsetto. “What we really wanted to know was . . . ah . . . are there any more questions?”

“Yeah, I got a question!” shouted a black from the middle of the group. “How come all this Watergate shit didn't come out until after Nixon got his ass reelected?”

Another American stood up. “Tell him that if he grants us amnesty and lets us come home, we won't tell anyone about the garbage he's made of the American image abroad.”

fforbes-Ffitch took this opportunity to say that none of this had anything to do with him. “I'm English,” he told two nearby people, who didn't care.

By then Jonathan had walked up the side aisle and had joined the flustered USIS man. He put his arm around the lad's shoulder and confided in a low voice, “Get in there, kid. You can handle them. After all, you're a government-trained communicator.” He winked and walked on.

“Well,” said the USIS man to the audience, “if there are no further questions for Dr. Hemlock, then I ask—”

The hoots and boos drowned him out, and the audience began to break up, chattering among themselves and laughing.

Jonathan made his way to a display room off the foyer. On exhibition were a lot of clumsy ceramics done by star students and faculty of a well-known California school of design, and brought there to show the Swedes what our young artists could do. One of the pieces had a title calculated to suggest creative angst and personal despair. It was called
The Pot I Broke,
and that's what it was. Next to it was a particularly pungent social statement in the form of a beer mug featuring Uncle Sam with black features and bearing the cursive legend “Don't drink from me.” But the star piece of the collection was a long cylinder of red tile that had drooped over during the baking, and had subsequently been titled
Reluctant Erection.

Jonathan took a deep breath and leaned his head against the burlap-covered wall. Too much. Too much hooch. He had been drinking for weeks. Weeks and weeks and weeks.

“Is it so bad as that?” asked one of the Swedish girls who had been looking around for him and was standing at the door.

Jonathan pushed himself off the wall and sucked in a big breath to steady the world. “No, it's great stuff. That's our subtle way to win you over. Dazzle you with our young art. A nation that can produce this stuff can't be all bad.”

The girl laughed. “At least it shows your young people have a sense of humor.”

“Don't I wish. Every time I see a piece of young crap, I try to forgive the artist by assuming it's a put-on—camp—but it won't wash. I'm afraid they're serious. Trivial, of course, and tedious . . . but serious. I assume there's a party somewhere?”

She laughed. “They're waiting for you.”

“Wonderful.” He went into the foyer and joined a group of young Swedes exuding energy and good spirits. They invited him to come along with them to dinner, then off on a crawl of bars and parties, as they had done every night. They were attractive youngsters: physically strong, clear-minded, healthy. He had often reflected on how life-embracing the Swedes were on average, forgetting the traveler's adage that the most attractive people in the world are those one first sees after leaving England.

Outside, the cold was jagged and the wind penetrating. While the young people waited, blowing into their hands, Jonathan said a very formal good night to the green-coated Beräknings Aktiebolag guard who patrolled the American Culture Center in response to repeated bomb threats. He felt sorry for the poor devil, stiff-faced and tearing in the numbing cold. He even offered to stand his watch for him.

A bar. Then another bar. Then someone's house. There was a heated discussion and a fight. Another bar—which closed on them. Someone had a wonderful idea and telephoned someone who was not home. Jonathan crowded with the four remaining students into a little car, and they drove back to the Gamla Stan to return him to his hotel on Lilla Nygatan, for he had been drinking heavily and had become embarrassingly antisocial.

They dropped him off on the edge of the medieval island, which is closed to private vehicles. Someone asked if he was sure he could find his way, and he told them to drive on—in fact, go to hell. When the red taillights of the car had disappeared into the swirling snow, he turned to find that a Swedish girl had gotten out with him. So. The party was still on! He put his arm around her—girls feel good in thick fur coats, like teddy bears—and they trudged around looking for an open bar or a
cave
. They found one, an “inne stället for visor, jazz och folkmusik,” and they sat drinking whiskey and shouting their conversation against blaring music until the place closed.

They walked unsteadily through deserted narrow streets, holding on to one another, the snow deep on the cobblestones and still falling in large indolent flakes that glittered and spiraled around the gas lamps. Jonathan said he didn't much care for Christmas cards. She didn't understand. So he repeated it, and she still didn't get it, so he said forget it.

A little later he fell.

They were passing through the narrow arched alley of Yxsmedsgränd when he slipped on the ice and fell into a bank of snow. He struggled to get up, and slipped again.

She laughed gaily and offered to help him.

“No! I'm all right. In fact, I'm very comfortable here. I think I'll stay the night. Say, what happened to my overcoat?”

“You must have left it at the party.”

“No, that was my youth I left at the party. How do you like that for a bitterer-than-thou tragic romantic riposte? Don't be swayed, honey. It's all hokum designed to get you into bed. You're sure you don't have my overcoat?”

“Come on. We'll go to your hotel.” She laughed good-naturedly and helped him up. “Does it embarrass you to do something like that? To slip and fall when you are with a girl?”

“Yes, it does. But that is because I am a male chauvinist swine.”

“Pig.”

“Pig, then. What are you?”

“I'm an art student. I've read all your books.”

“Have you? And now you're going to hop into bed with me. Proof of the adage that success has balls. OK. Let's get to it. Dawn is coming with a red rag among its shoulder blades.”

“Pardon?”

“Shakespeare. A modest paraphrase.”

There was a great rectangular weight in his forehead, and he tried to bang it away with the back of his fist. “How old are you, honey?”

“Nineteen. How old are you?”

He looked up at her slowly as the drink drained from his head. He was not well; but he was cold sober. “What was that?”

She laughed. “I said, how old are
you?
” The last vowel had a curl to it—a Scandinavian curl, but not unlike an Irish curl.

He looked at her very closely, glancing from eye to eye. She was a pretty enough little girl, but they were the wrong eyes. Not bottle green.

“What's wrong?” she asked. “Are you sick?”

“I'm worse off than that. I'm sober. Say . . . look. Here's the key to my hotel. The address is on it. You stay there tonight. It's all right. It's comfortable.”

“Don't you like me?”

He laughed dryly. “I think you're just great, honey. The hope of the future. Bye-bye.”

“Where are you going?”

“For a walk.”

         

The sun rose brilliant and cold over the placid water of Riddarfjärden, a crisp yellow sun that gave light without warmth. A single tugboat dragged a wake of glittering, eye-aching silver through the thick black green water, its chug-a-da the only sound in the windless chill. Jonathan's eyes, teared by the cold and squinting against the light, followed the tug's deliberate progress as he leaned against the fence near the Gamla Stan tube stop. His hands were fisted into his jacket pockets, his collar turned up, his shoulders tense to combat the shivering. The brilliant, crusted white of the snow that blanketed the quay was unmarked, save for a long single line of blue-shadowed footsteps that connected his still form to a narrow alley between the ancient buildings that clustered up the hill behind him.

Fatigue made him sigh, and two jets of vapor flowed over his shoulders.

A girl stepped out into the sunlight from the dank cavern of the Gamla Stan tube station, where she had passed the night sheltered from the snow and wind. She looked around disconsolately and pulled her surplus army parka more closely around her. She was burdened with a knapsack and a cheap guitar, and the American flag sewn to the butt of her jeans had come loose and frayed at one corner. Her monumentally plain face was gaunt, and her red-rimmed eyes showed hunger and misery. She looked at Jonathan with mistrust. He examined her with distant indifference. A grinning yellow sun-face sticker on her guitar advised him to “have a nice day.”

London and Essex, 1973

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*
¹
From the song “You're Driving Me Crazy” by Walter Donaldson, copyright 1930, 1957, by Donaldson Publishing Co. Used by permission of Mrs. Walter Donaldson.
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*
²
This tale is complete without footnotes, but there are also social, historical, political and personal observations available to you. You can download these cybernotes from
www.trevanian.com
or have a friend download them for you. Cybernote 1 will deal with “bog Irish.”
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