“So, you were saying. These seven women are all trying to hug and kiss you at once …”
Momentarily, I was lost in what seemed like a non sequitur, but then it came to me that he wanted me to continue the story I had begun long ago, before the quintuple interruptions, the story of what had happened before we met under such odd circumstances. I was in the process of losing that story; that is to say, the stories that each woman told, preceded by their attempts on my life, had superseded prior events. Or at any rate, the two stories were jumbling together so that it was difficult to separate what had happened and in what order. One of the functions of the old man must have been to get me to keep my stories straight. I was having trouble remembering what had happened before and then after the bump to my head, and the threat of amnesia hovered and cast a dreadful shadow.
“You left off, Sonny, with the girls in their Wild West costumes about to devour you with carnal desires?” He leered and waggled his eyebrows lasciviously à la Groucho Marx, and I half expected him to lift a cigar to his mouth beneath a greasepaint mustache.
“Don’t get me wrong. The moment when they rushed to greet me was more an expression of how happy they were just to see me, and after the initial kisses, my face was dotted with lipstick impressions, and I was in a state of euphoria. Tiny stars and moons and flapping bluebirds orbited my head, and the group moved forward as one from the piano recital and into the hallway. I had no idea how I was even walking, but the women chatted among themselves, wandering to and fro, paying almost no attention to me, and we reached a crossroads of sorts. To the left was my bedroom. A sharp right round the bend was the staircase, and farther along was the bathroom. My inclination at this point was divided into two distinct and competing urges. Did I dare suggest the bedroom, or would I be a gentleman and allow the mob to dictate the rules?”
“Seven women would require a full week.”
“Apparently the decision wasn’t mine to make. Into the bathroom they filed, some glancing back, one or two waving discreetly, and the last, Jane here, telling me that they needed a moment to freshen up.”
“A wise decision, I should think,” the old man said. “I myself have been a bit, shall we say, stale, and a quick wash, brush the teeth, and a dash of talc, and you’re good as new. Cleanliness is underrated as a virtue, and many people nowadays forget to scrub behind their ears.”
The rest of us, by reflex, checked to feel if the space behind the ears was clean, and each of us sighed with relief when fingertips grazed smooth skin. Nobody bothered to check the baby, of course, for it is a well-known fact that small children are almost always dirty, their folds and creases the hiding place for grime, and in the summertime, they usually excrete some clammy, sticky substance that covers their entire persons. Pick up a baby of your acquaintance at a July or August picnic, and you will be shocked. They can be as slimy as a three-day-old mackerel and often smell none the better. Moreover, they swarm with germs and harmful bacteria and carry untold diseases. One of the women in the firm is the mother of twins, and she is forever sneezing or wheezing or complaining about ear infections or some bug going around the day care, and thus the contagion travels outward from child zero until everyone has a cold or the flu.
“Well, I waited,” I told him. “First pacing up and down the hall, and then finally sitting on the top step. They took forever.”
The old man laughed. “What is it with women and bathrooms?”
All at once he was assaulted with flying objects—a wad of toilet paper, a sliver of soap, an avalanche of cotton balls, the cap to a can of shaving cream, my toothbrush! Even the baby tossed a few Oaty-Ohs at him, thinking their protest a new game. Beckett covered his head beneath the shield of his hands and apologized in a sonorous voice, “Désolé.”
“There were seven, after all,” I said, “but I was curious as to what was going on. The shower had been flowing for some time, and when it finally stopped, the singing commenced—”
“Ah, the same singer as when you thought the windows had been singing.”
“No, this was different. Seven voices in a kind of roundelay, the women singing each to each, a melody so entrancing and bewildering that I could have listened to it all night, and yet it lured me to the door and to the keyhole.”
“Why ever would you have a keyhole in the bathroom door?”