The Natural Order of Things (10 page)

He shudders. “Oh, you beautiful woman …”

She is incredibly skillful, knows exactly what he likes. She slurps, gags, makes funny quacking sounds, a lusty soundtrack that has him rocking on the balls of his feet and doing a dance to Eros. The finish comes quickly. He pumps, grinds, and groans, but just as his eyelids start to flutter, he happens to glance out the window and sees the dog imitating him, prancing around on its hind legs like some bizarre animal act at a roadside carnival. Perhaps sensing another opportunity to make mischief, Gonzago begins to howl with maniacal laughter, a single extended note that starts as a banshee’s moan and ends as a deafening siren that oscillates with horrific madhouse harmonics.

Elsie tenses, bites down hard, her jaws snapping shut like a spring-loaded mousetrap.

Squealing like misfortunate Abelard de-cocked for his grievous sins, Claude writhes on the floor, and through his tears, he resolves to take a swift and murderous course of action.

Wearing only his friend’s terrycloth robe, he steps out into the bitter October night and pads across the vast grounds in his bare feet. Trying hard not to make a sound, cringing every time the wind shakes the tall grasses, he slides behind one of the giant ghoul-faced topiaries that ring the property like the gargoyles on the cornices of a great cathedral. In the grotto behind the tall hedges, he spies Gonzago circling a statue of Francis of Assisi. Along with sorcery, Elsie is also a confirmed believer in superstitions of a more conventional nature, and she often lights candles here, hoping the revered saint will intercede on her behalf.

Claude creeps ever closer but now worries that he doesn’t have the
cajones
to carry out the job. To assassinate the dog when its back is turned seems a cruel and cowardly thing to do, but it is the watchful stare of Saint Francis that makes the deed
especially wicked. The saint’s serene eyes belie his outrage. He loves all animals and looks unkindly upon anyone who may wish them ill: “Those who exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity will deal likewise with their fellow man.”

Claude would never harm an animal, not intentionally at least, not unless he had an excellent reason for doing so. In silent prayer, he tells this to the cowled friar. He tells him other things as well: as a boy he owned a one-eyed cat named Hecuba (his mother was a professor of mythology), and when the cat died (tractor-trailer, rush hour) he barricaded himself in the basement of their Victorian house and wept for hours among the stacks of moldering textbooks and discarded term papers. Maybe a good father-son talk would have straightened him out, given him some perspective on this minor tragedy, but Dad was no longer in the picture, and Mother was so unnerved by his inconsolable blubbering that she insisted he receive professional help. With her arms firmly crossed and foot drumming against the cold white hospital tiles, she seemed prepared to bully the therapist into diagnosing him with a whole slew of disorders.

“Fifteen-year-old boys shouldn’t cry when the cat dies. What’s Hecuba to him? He’s not homosexual, is he?”

To Claude’s ears, the question sounded like a rhetorical one.

The therapist, tugging nervously at the tip of his Vandyke beard and wanting to be rid of this woman and her overgrown child as quickly as possible, said, “Perhaps he suffers from emotional dysregulation … as the result of low self-esteem?” Surely the standard diagnosis for boys of that tender age, but Mother wasn’t satisfied. She wanted to hear the word “abnormal” and spent the better part of Claude’s emasculated pubescence shopping around for a doctor who wasn’t too proud to use it.

Now, as he massages the angry teeth marks beginning to show on the shriveled shaft of his penis, he starts to think that maybe his mother was right and wonders, not for the first time, what Elsie can possibly see in him, a pathetic pencil pusher in her husband’s employ, who for fifty weeks out of the year toils away in a small windowless office near the airport, writing operating manuals for scales manufactured in Europe and distributed around the world, a mindless job that has turned him into a stammering, slovenly misfit with coffee stains on his shirtsleeves and a dusting of dandruff on his shoulders. He seldom socializes with people outside the office and has become so utterly incapable of meeting single ladies that he has turned to his best friend’s wife for consolation.

As if to remind him of his total incompetence, Elsie now calls his name from the bedroom window. “Claude! Claude, is everything alright?”

“Yes, yes, everything is fine.”

“Well, please hurry. We have to wake up early.”

A terse reminder that tomorrow is a day for country matters, a day for white magic rather than black. Elsie wants to leave at daybreak and drive along the lonely roads that wind through forgotten mountain villages so she can ransack the novelty shops for antique volumes of forbidden lore and visit those squalid frame houses hidden deep in the woods where, for an exorbitant fee, she can purchase glass jars of tannis root, cat’s claw extract, fennel fruit. The weird sisters who toil in the sinister basement labs claim their medicines can reverse the aging process and that they themselves are much older than they appear. He once asked Elsie why she bothers with such obvious chicanery.
“Because,” she snapped, “men don’t look at me the way they used to.” His heart started to pound with jealousy. “Men in general or just your husband?” he wanted to ask but lacked the courage to speak the words.

Claude closes his eyes and tries to stop the flow of distracting thoughts. He must focus on the task at hand, visualize the dog obeying his command (“Sit, boy, sit”), but when he turns around, he finds that Gonzago has disappeared. From the corner of his eye, he glimpses the beast bolting across the yard to the house.

“Son of a bitch!”

His heart pounding again, Claude remembers that he left the back door ajar. If Gonzago races upstairs and leaps into bed with Elsie … well, he doesn’t want to think about the consequences, the terrible penalty he will pay. Celibacy for one month? Two? There is no telling how long she will make him suffer, how long he will need to find solace in dirty magazines and masturbation.

He dashes toward the house, but before he can reach the door and put the leash around the dog’s neck, he feels his toes sink into a lumpy pile of warm shit. He cries out in revulsion and despair, furiously scraping the ghastly black crap from the bottom of his feet.

To his great relief, Claude tracks down Gonzago in the den.

Panting from all the excitement, the dog sits next to the master’s leather armchair and slurps water from a shiny new dish. Careful not to make any sudden gestures that might startle the animal, Claude removes the amber vial from the pocket of his robe and twists the cap off. His hands start to shake. A bead of sweat rolls down the bridge of his nose. He must not pollute his fingertips. Holding the vial at arm’s length, he pours the poison—one, two, three drops—into the dish. He almost expects to see an explosion of color, a small plume of pink smoke, a magnesium flare shooting across the room, but nothing happens, and Gonzago, after giving the fatal toxin an experimental sniff, laps it up like a king drinking from his favorite chalice.

Gazing pitilessly down at the dog, Claude whispers, “That’s right, drink deep before you depart.” Smoothing back his hair, he goes to the liquor cabinet and helps himself to a generous glass of absinthe. “Ah, now that’s wormwood,” he says, smacking his lips and sinking into the armchair.

Ironically, it was here, in this very room, that Edward de Vere, before leaving on his latest business trip, invited Claude to join him for a drink by the fire, two old friends, smoking cigars and nursing tumblers of green liqueur. As usual, Edward had a burning need to brag about his devious plans, the next forbidden excursion, the impending molestation while in Paris, or Copenhagen, or wherever he claimed to be conducting his shady business transactions. Edward frequented exclusive bordellos and other high dollar dens of iniquity recommended by the smarmy black market racketeers who offered him a choice of freshly deloused nymphets imported from the desert wastes of developing countries.

“Paris is lovely this time of year. Oh, it’s not Amsterdam, of course, but the girls are exceedingly professional … though they do tend to be a bit picky. They detest obesity.
Sometimes they refuse to service fat Americans.” He walked over to Claude and patted his belly. Claude glared at him, his nemesis.

Edward was wearing a poplin dress shirt with French cuffs, a silk tie from Hermes, handcrafted shoes from Milan. His nails were manicured and his teeth were bleached bone white. From the looks of it, he must have had his stiff curlicues and massive swoops of dark hair sculpted by Rodin, a great pompadour modeled after the Gates of Hell. His soul was sheathed in barnacles, his eyes black and empty as infinite space, his pupils so large and lifeless that they seemed to suck in light like a singularity.

“In some ways I actually prefer the Parisian whores,” he went on. “Maybe one day I’ll take you with me. I know a wonderful spot at the Place de la Contrescarpe. Best
maison close
on the Left Bank.”

Claude rolled his eyes at the way Edward gave the words a nasally accent. It seemed odd that he could speak the lingo at all. He had no talent or appreciation for languages. As boys at the Jesuit high school, they were subjected to hours of grueling college preparatory coursework and innumerable fire and brimstone exhortations on Cain and Abel, but while Claude succeeded at his studies, graduating near the top of his class, Edward proved a complete mediocrity, always struggling to earn “a gentleman’s C.” Somehow he cheated his way through Latin, which was compulsory for all students. His lack of intellectual curiosity was seen not as laziness or stupidity but as a personal affront to the Jesuits’ love of learning, and for his constant and intentional butchery of Virgil, the priests made Edward stay after school to translate entire chapters of
The Aeneid
, to no avail. He couldn’t understand a word of it, didn’t know Pyrrhus from Priam, a hawk from a handsaw, and like a lot of frustrated adolescent boys, Edward vowed to get even with his teachers.

To his credit, it didn’t take him long to amass an enviable fortune and to lord it over those same penniless priests who, in the days to come, were always looking to kiss the feet of some generous benefactor. By the time he was thirty, Edward owned a heavily wooded forty-acre lot in Avon. He conscripted a European architect with a dubious past to design a house of glass and steel that looked like a cross between a medieval castle and an iceberg, his very own Fortress of Solitude. On a promontory overlooking a dale, he built an infinity swimming pool, a tennis court with a red clay surface, a putting green and, some distance from the house, the pretty little grotto where, at night, his wife could light candles and prostrate herself before Catholic statuary. On the north end of the property, he constructed two large stables where he kept six impeccably groomed Danish Warmbloods that he showed on special occasions—state fairs and parades and children’s birthday parties. In short, he created a suburban fiefdom and crowned himself petty dictator … but a dictator whose throne could easily be usurped. For years Claude has been laying the groundwork. He knows this tyrant all too well, knows he is a man of many weaknesses. Now well into middle age, Edward is still very much a child, a sensualist blinded by the degenerative disease of narcissism.

“These trips abroad have become a necessity,” Edward said with a baleful smile, sinking into the chair where Claude sits now. The king’s throne. “You have no idea what I’ve been through this year. My wife has become a terrible burden. She burns through my money.
Burns
through it.” He takes a long, contemplative puff on his cigar. Above the rim of his glass and through the sheen of blue smoke, he stares at Claude and after a
pregnant pause says, “Maybe it’s time I finally got rid of her. I can only pray someone will take her off my hands, someone more suited to the job …”

How much time elapses before Gonzago actually dies, Claude cannot say; the animal makes no sound at all, no strangled cries of torment, but at some point in the night, after finishing his third glass of absinthe, Claude notices the dog sprawled across the rug, motionless, eyes bulging from its skull, tongue hanging heavy and wet from the corner of its mouth. In that alien silence devoid of the dog’s demonic laughter, Claude feels the alcohol cascading into the deep fissures of his brain. Though he is not a superstitious man and has always made a friend of reason and logic, he decides that it is probably best to bury Gonzago before joining Elsie in bed and sating himself on love. To let the dog rot in the open air seems an invitation to allow its stupid, slavering spirit to haunt his dreams.

After dragging the mangy carcass across the yard, Claude chooses a nice spot near the grotto where the earth is soft, and warm, and the worms look particularly eager to do their work. He finds a shovel in the tool shed and then begins to build a doghouse that will last Gonzago till doomsday. Like some infernal gravedigger, he tunnels into the loamy soil, uncovering the bones of the luckless squirrels and rabbits that Gonzago has brutally mangled and then buried with the jittery backward glances of an assassin. As he digs deeper, Claude uncovers a million subtle odors locked away in the earth, the fleshy green leaves transformed over the years into a brown soup that sends up fingers of steam into the evening air, eons of carnage artfully concealed by the moribund bouquet of nature.

Even after more than forty years on this cursed planet, Claude cannot comprehend the fact that one day he, too, will belong to that corrupt odor, his lingering stench the last trace of an existence that has failed to leave a more lasting mark. The maggots will have at him, and his sullied flesh will melt into the rich alluvial mud. Ultimately, his bloated carcass will make a fine meal for some wayward fiend like Gonzago. It’s for this reason that he plans to be interred in the deepest catacombs of a monastery where, despite the anonymity of his jumbled bones, there might at least be a small chance that his skull, polished smooth by the dripping limestone walls, will become a
memento mori
, a paperweight for the manuscripts of some future literary genius who decides to smuggle it out of the tomb and place it on the edge of his desk next to an hourglass, a vase of red roses, a glass of Amontillado.