A Night at the Movies

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS

It is dark in Rick’s apartment. Black leader dark, heavy and abstract, silent but for a faint hoarse crackle like a voiceless plaint, and brief as sleep. Then Rick opens the door and the light from the hall scissors in like a bellboy to open up space, deposit surfaces (there is a figure in the room), harbinger event (it is Ilsa). Rick follows, too preoccupied to notice: his café is closed, people have been shot, he has troubles. But then, with a stroke, he lights a small lamp (such a glow! the shadows retreat, everything retreats: where are the walls?) and there she is, facing him, holding open the drapery at the far window like the front of a nightgown, the light flickering upon her white but determined face like static. Rick pauses for a moment in astonishment. Ilsa lets the drapery and its implications drop, takes a step forward into the strangely fretted light, her eyes searching his.

“How did you get in?” he asks, though this is probably not the question on his mind.

“The stairs from the street.”

This answer seems to please him. He knows how vulnerable he is, after all, it’s the way he lives—his doors are open, his head is bare, his tuxedo jacket is snowy white—that’s not important. What matters is that by such a reply a kind of destiny is being fulfilled. Sam has a song about it. “I told you this morning you’d come around,” he says, curling his lips as if to advertise his appetite for punishment, “but this is a little ahead of schedule.” She faces him squarely, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, a sash around her waist like a gun belt, something shiny in her tensed left hand. He raises both his own as if to show they are empty: “Well, won’t you sit down?”

His offer, whether in mockery or no, releases her. Her shoulders dip in relief, her breasts; she sweeps forward (it is only a small purse she is carrying: a toothbrush perhaps, cosmetics, her hotel key), her face softening: “Richard!” He starts back in alarm, hands moving to his hips. “I had to see you!”

“So you use Richard again!” His snarling retreat throws up a barrier between them. She stops. He pushes his hands into his pockets as though to reach for the right riposte: “We’re back in Paris!”

That probably wasn’t it. Their song seems to be leaking into the room from somewhere out in the night, or perhaps it has been there all the time—Sam maybe, down in the darkened bar, sending out soft percussive warnings in the manner of his African race: “Think twice, boss. Hearts fulla passion, you c’n rely. Jealousy, boss, an’ hate. Le’s go fishin’. Sam.”

“Please!” she begs, staring at him intently, but he remains unmoved:

“Your unexpected visit isn’t connected by any chance with the letters of transit?” He ducks his head, his upper lip swelling with bitterness and hurt. “It seems as long as I have those letters, I’ll never be lonely.”

Yet, needless to say, he will always be lonely—in fact, this is the confession (“You can ask any price you want,” she is saying) only half-concealed in his muttered subjoinder: Rick Blaine is a loner, born and bred. Pity him. There is this lingering, almost primal image of him, sitting alone at a chessboard in his white tuxedo, smoking contemplatively in the midst of a raucous conniving crowd, a crowd he has himself assembled about him. He taps a pawn, moves a white knight, fondles a tall black queen while a sardonic smile plays on his lips. He seems to be toying, self-mockingly, with Fate itself, as indifferent toward Rick Blaine (never mind that he says—as he does now, turning away from her—that “I’m the only cause I’m interested in…”) as toward the rest of the world. It’s all shit, so who cares?

Ilsa is staring off into space, a space that a moment ago Rick filled. She seems to be thinking something out. The negotiations are going badly; perhaps it is this she is worried about. He has just refused her offer of “any price,” ignored her ultimatum (“You must giff me those letters!”), sneered at her husband’s heroism, and scoffed at the very cause that first brought them together in Paris. How could he do that? And now he has abruptly turned his back on her (does he think it was just sex? what has happened to him since then?) and walked away toward the balcony door, meaning, apparently, to turn her out. She takes a deep breath, presses her lips together, and, clutching her tiny purse with both hands, wheels about to pursue him: “Richard!” This has worked before, it works again: he turns to face her new approach: “We luffed each other once…” Her voice catches in her throat, tears come to her eyes. She is beautiful there in the slatted shadows, her hair loosening around her ears, eyes glittering, throat bare and vulnerable in the open V-neck of her ruffled blouse. She’s a good dresser. Even that little purse she squeezes: so like the other one, so lovely, hidden away. She shakes her head slightly in wistful appeal: “If those days meant…anything at all to you…”

“I wouldn’t bring up Paris if I were you,” he says stonily. “It’s poor salesmanship.”

She gasps (she didn’t bring it up: is he a madman?), tosses her head back: “Please! Please listen to me!” She closes her eyes, her lower lip pushed forward as though bruised. “If you knew what really happened, if you only knew the truth—!”

He stands over this display, impassive as a Moorish executioner (that’s it! he’s turning into one of these bloody Arabs, she thinks). “I wouldn’t believe you, no matter what you told me,” he says. In Ethiopia, after an attempt on the life of an Italian officer, he saw 1600 Ethiopians get rounded up one night and shot in reprisal. Many were friends of his. Or clients anyway. But somehow her deceit is worse. “You’d say anything now, to get what you want.” Again he turns his back on her, strides away.

She stares at him in shocked silence, as though all that had happened eighteen months ago in Paris were flashing suddenly before her eyes, now made ugly by some terrible revelation. An exaggerated gasp escapes her like the breaking of wind: his head snaps up and he turns sharply to the right. She chases him, dogging his heels. “You want to feel sorry for yourself, don’t you?” she cries and, surprised (he was just reaching for something on an ornamental table, the humidor perhaps), he turns back to her. “With so much at stake, all you can think off is your own feeling,” she rails. Her lips are drawn back, her breathing labored, her eyes watering in anger and frustration. “One woman has hurt you, and you take your reffenge on the rest off the world!” She is choking, she can hardly speak. Her accent seems to have got worse. “You’re a coward, und veakling, und—”

She gasps. What is she saying? He watches her, as though faintly amused. “No, Richard, I’m sorry!” Tears are flowing in earnest now: she’s gone too far! This is the expression on her face. She’s in a corner, struggling to get out. “I’m sorry, but—” She wipes the tears from her cheek, and calls once again on her husband, that great and courageous man whom they both admire, whom the whole world admires: “—you’re our last hope! If you don’t help us, Victor Laszlo will die in Casablanca!”

“What of it?” he says. He has been waiting for this opportunity. He plays with it now, stretching it out. He turns, reaches for a cigarette, his head haloed in the light from an arched doorway. “I’m gonna die in Casablanca. It’s a good spot for it.” This line is meant to be amusing, but Ilsa reacts with horror. Her eyes widen. She catches her breath, turns away. He lights up, pleased with himself, takes a practiced drag, blows smoke. “Now,” he says, turning toward her, “if you’ll—”

He pulls up short, squints: she has drawn a revolver on him. So much for toothbrushes and hotel keys. “All right. I tried to reason with you. I tried effrything. Now I want those letters.” Distantly, a melodic line suggests a fight for love and glory, an ironic case of do or die. “Get them for me.”

“I don’t have to.” He touches his jacket. “I got ‘em right here.”

“Put them on the table.”

He smiles and shakes his head. “No.” Smoke curls up from the cigarette he is holding at his side like the steam that enveloped the five o’clock train to Marseilles. Her eyes fill with tears. Even as she presses on (“For the last time…!”), she knows that “no” is final. There is, behind his ironic smile, a profound sadness, the fatalistic survivor’s wistful acknowledgment that, in the end, the fundamental things apply. Time, going by, leaves nothing behind, not even moments like this. “If Laszlo and the cause mean so much,” he says, taunting her with her own uncertainties, “you won’t stop at anything…”

He seems almost to recede. The cigarette disappears, the smoke. His sorrow gives way to something not unlike eagerness. “All right, I’ll make it easier for you,” he says, and walks toward her. “Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

She seems taken aback, her eyes damp, her lips swollen and parted. Light licks at her face. He gazes steadily at her from his superior moral position, smoke drifting up from his hand once more, his white tuxedo pressed against the revolver barrel. Her eyes close as the gun lowers, and she gasps his name: “Richard!” It is like an invocation. Or a profession of faith. “I tried to stay away,” she sighs. She opens her eyes, peers up at him in abject surrender. A tear moves slowly down her cheek toward the corner of her mouth like secret writing. “I thought I would neffer see you again…that you were out off my life…” She blinks, cries out faintly—“Oh!”—and (he seems moved at last, his mask of disdain falling away like perspiration) turns away, her head wrenched to one side as though in pain.

Stricken with sudden concern, or what looks like concern, he steps up behind her, clasping her breasts with both hands, nuzzling in her hair. “The day you left Paris…!” she sobs, though she seems unsure of herself. One of his hands is already down between her legs, the other inside her blouse, pulling a breast out of its brassiere cup. “If you only knew…what I…” He is moaning, licking at one ear, the hand between her legs nearly lifting her off the floor, his pelvis bumping at her buttocks. “Is this…right?” she gasps.

“I—I don’t know!” he groans, massaging her breast, the nipple between two fingers. “I can’t think!”

“But…you must think!” she cries, squirming her hips. Tears are streaming down her cheeks now. “For…for…”

“What?” he gasps, tearing her blouse open, pulling on her breast as though to drag it over her shoulder where he might kiss it. Or eat it: he seems ravenous suddenly.

“I…I can’t remember!” she sobs. She reaches behind to jerk at his fly (what else is she to do, for the love of Jesus?), then rips away her sash, unfastens her skirt, her fingers trembling.

“Holy shit!” he wheezes, pushing his hand inside her girdle as her skirt falls. His cheeks too are wet with tears. “Ilsa!”

“Richard!”

They fall to the floor, grabbing and pulling at each other’s clothing. He’s trying to get her bra off which is tangled up now with her blouse, she’s struggling with his belt, yanking at his black pants, wrenching them open. Buttons fly, straps pop, there’s the soft unfocused rip of silk, the jingle of buckles and falling coins, grunts, gasps, whimpers of desire. He strips the tangled skein of underthings away (all these straps and stays—how does she get in and out of this crazy elastic?); she works his pants down past his bucking hips, fumbles with his shoes. “Your elbow—!”

“Mmmff!”

“Ah—!’”

She pulls his pants and boxer shorts off, crawls round and (he strokes her shimmering buttocks, swept by the light from the airport tower, watching her full breasts sway above him: it’s all happening so fast, he’d like to slow it down, repeat some of the better bits—that view of her rippling haunches on her hands and knees just now, for example, like a 22, his lucky number—but there’s a great urgency on them, they can’t wait) straddles him, easing him into her like a train being guided into a station. “I luff you, Richard!” she declares breathlessly, though she seems to be speaking, eyes squeezed shut and breasts heaving, not to him but to the ceiling, if there is one up there. His eyes too are closed now, his hands gripping her soft hips, pulling her down, his breath coming in short anguished snorts, his face puffy and damp with tears. There is, as always, something deeply wounded and vulnerable about the expression on his battered face, framed there against his Persian carpet: Rick Blaine, a man annealed by loneliness and betrayal, but flawed—hopelessly, it seems—by hope itself. He is, in the tragic sense, a true revolutionary: his gaping mouth bespeaks this, the spittle in the corners of his lips, his eyes, open now and staring into some infinite distance not unlike the future, his knitted brow. He heaves upward, impaling her to the very core: “Oh, Gott!” she screams, her back arching, mouth agape as though to commence “La Marseillaise.”

Now, for a moment, they pause, feeling themselves thus conjoined, his organ luxuriating in the warm tub of her vagina, her enflamed womb closing around his pulsing penis like a mother embracing a lost child. “If you only knew…,” she seems to say, though perhaps she has said this before and only now it can be heard. He fondles her breasts; she rips his shirt open, strokes his chest, leans forward to kiss his lips, his nipples. This is not Victor inside her with his long thin rapier, all too rare in its embarrassed visits; this is not Yvonne with her cunning professional muscles, her hollow airy hole. This is love in all its clammy mystery, the ultimate connection, the squishy rub of truth, flesh as a self-consuming message. This is necessity, as in woman needs man, and man must have his mate. Even their identities seem to be dissolving; they have to whisper each other’s name from time to time as though in recitative struggle against some ultimate enchantment from which there might be no return. Then slowly she begins to wriggle her hips above him, he to meet her gentle undulations with counterthrusts of his own. They hug each other close, panting, her breasts smashed against him, moving only from the waist down. She slides her thighs between his and squeezes his penis between them, as though to conceal it there, an underground member on the run, wounded but unbowed. He lifts his stockinged feet and plants them behind her knees as though in stirrups, her buttocks above pinching and opening, pinching and opening like a suction pump. And it is true about her vaunted radiance: she seems almost to glow from within, her flexing cheeks haloed in their own dazzling luster.

“It feels so good, Richard! In there…I’ve been so—ah!—so lonely…!”

“Yeah, me too, kid. Ngh! Don’t talk.”

She slips her thighs back over his and draws them up beside his waist like a child curling around her teddybear, knees against his ribs, her fanny gently bobbing on its pike like a mind caressing a cherished memory. He lies there passively for a moment, stretched out, eyes closed, accepting this warm rhythmical ablution as one might accept a nanny’s teasing bath, a mother’s care (a care, he’s often said, denied him), in all its delicious innocence—or seemingly so: in fact, his whole body is faintly atremble, as though, with great difficulty, shedding the last of its pride and bitterness, its isolate neutrality. Then slowly his own hips begin to rock convulsively under hers, his knees to rise in involuntary surrender. She tongues his ear, her buttocks thumping more vigorously now, kisses his throat, his nose, his scarred lip, then rears up, arching her back, tossing her head back (her hair is looser now, wilder, a flush has crept into the distinctive pallor of her cheeks and throat, and what was before a fierce determination is now raw intensity, what vulnerability now a slack-jawed abandon), plunging him in more deeply than ever, his own buttocks bouncing up off the floor as though trying to take off like the next flight to Lisbon—“Gott in Himmel, this is fonn!” she cries. She reaches behind her back to clutch his testicles, he clasps her hand in both of his, his thighs spread, she falls forward, they roll over, he’s pounding away now from above (he lacks her famous radiance: if anything his buttocks seem to suck in light, drawing a nostalgic murkiness around them like night fog, signaling a fundamental distance between them, and an irresistible attraction), she’s clawing at his back under the white jacket, at his hips, his thighs, her voracious nether mouth leaping up at him from below and sliding back, over and over, like a frantic greased-pole climber. Faster and faster they slap their bodies together, submitting to this fierce rhythm as though to simplify themselves, emitting grunts and whinnies and helpless little farts, no longer Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, but some nameless conjunction somewhere between them, time, space, being itself getting redefined by the rapidly narrowing focus of their incandescent passion—then suddenly Rick rears back, his face seeming to puff out like a gourd, Ilsa cries out and kicks upward, crossing her ankles over Rick’s clenched buttocks, for a moment they seem almost to float, suspended, unloosed from the earth’s gravity, and then—whumpf!—they hit the floor again, their bodies continuing to hammer together, though less regularly, plunging, twitching, prolonging this exclamatory dialogue, drawing it out even as the intensity diminishes, even as it becomes more a declaration than a demand, more an inquiry than a declaration. Ilsa’s feet uncross, slide slowly to the floor. “Fooff…Gott!” They lie there, cheek to cheek, clutching each other tightly, gasping for breath, their thighs quivering with the last involuntary spasms, the echoey reverberations, deep in their loins, of pleasure’s fading blasts.

“Jesus,” Rick wheezes, “I’ve been saving that one for a goddamn year and a half…!”

“It was the best fokk I effer haff,” Ilsa replies with a tremulous sigh, and kisses his ear, runs her fingers in his hair. He starts to roll off her, but she clasps him closely: “No…wait…!” A deeper thicker pleasure, not so ecstatic, yet somehow more moving, seems to well up from far inside her to embrace the swollen visitor snuggled moistly in her womb, once a familiar friend, a comrade loved and trusted, now almost a stranger, like one resurrected from the dead.

“Ah—!” he gasps. God, it’s almost like she’s milking it! Then she lets go, surrounding him spongily with a kind of warm wet pulsating gratitude. “Ah…”

He lies there between Ilsa’s damp silky thighs, feeling his weight thicken, his mind soften and spread. His will drains away as if it were some kind of morbid affection, lethargy overtaking him like an invading army. Even his jaw goes slack, his fingers (three sprawl idly on a dark-tipped breast) limp. He wears his snowy white tuxedo jacket still, his shiny black socks, which, together with the parentheses of Ilsa’s white thighs, make his melancholy buttocks—beaten in childhood, lashed at sea, run lean in union skirmishes, sunburned in Ethiopia, and shot at in Spain—look gloomier than ever, swarthy and self-pitying, agape now with a kind of heroic sadness. A violent tenderness. These buttocks are, it could be said, what the pose of isolation looks like at its best: proud, bitter, mournful, and, as the prefect of police might have put it, tremendously attractive. Though his penis has slipped out of its vaginal pocket to lie limply like a fat little toe against her slowly pursing lips, she clasps him close still, clinging to something she cannot quite define, something like a spacious dream of freedom, or a monastery garden, or the discovery of electricity. “Do you have a gramophone on, Richard?”

“What—?!” Her question has startled him. His haunches snap shut, his head rears up, snorting, he seems to be reaching for the letters of transit. “Ah…no…” He relaxes again, letting his weight fall back, though sliding one thigh over hers now, stretching his arms out as though to unkink them, turning his face away. His scrotum bulges up on her thigh like an emblem of his inner serenity and generosity, all too often concealed, much as an authentic decency might shine through a mask of cynicism and despair. He takes a deep breath. (A kiss is just a kiss is what the music is insinuating. A sigh…) “That’s probably Sam…”

She sighs (…and so forth), gazing up at the ceiling above her, patterned with overlapping circles of light from the room’s lamps and swept periodically by the wheeling airport beacon, coming and going impatiently, yet reliably, like desire itself. “He hates me, I think.”

“Sam? No, he’s a pal. What I think, he thinks.”

“When we came into the bar last night, he started playing ‘Luff for Sale.’ Effryone turned and looked at me.”

“It wasn’t the song, sweetheart, it was the way you two were dressed. Nobody in Casablanca—”

“Then he tried to chase me away. He said I was bad luck to you.” She can still see the way he rolled his white eyes at her, like some kind of crazy voodoo zombie.

Richard grunts ambiguously. “Maybe you should stop calling him ‘boy.’”

Was that it? “But in all the moofies—” Well, a translation problem probably, a difficulty she has known often in her life. Language can sometimes be stiff as a board. Like what’s under her now. She loves Richard’s relaxed weight on her, the beat of his heart next to her breast, the soft lumpy pouch of his genitals squashed against her thigh, but the floor seems to be hardening under her like some kind of stern Calvinist rebuke and there is a disagreeable airy stickiness between her legs, now that he has slid away from there. “Do you haff a bidet, Richard?”

“Sure, kid.” He slides to one side with a lazy grunt, rolls over. He’s thinking vaguely about the pleasure he’s just had, what it’s likely to cost him (he doesn’t care), and wondering where he’ll find the strength to get up off his ass and go look for a cigarette. He stretches his shirttail down and wipes his crotch with it, nods back over the top of his head. “In there.”

She is sitting up, peering between her spread legs. “I am afraid we haff stained your nice carpet, Richard.”

“What of it? Put it down as a gesture to love. Want a drink?”

“Yes, that would be good.” She leans over and kisses him, her face still flushed and eyes damp, but smiling now, then stands and gathers up an armload of tangled clothing. “Do I smell something burning?”

“What—?!” He rears up. “My goddamn cigarette! I musta dropped it on the couch!” He crawls over, brushes at it: it’s gone out, but there’s a big hole there now, dark-edged like ringworm. “Shit.” He staggers to his feet, stumbles over to the humidor to light up a fresh smoke. Nothing’s ever free, he thinks, feeling a bit light-headed. “What’s your poison, kid?”

“I haff downstairs been drinking Cointreau,” she calls out over the running water in the next room. He pours himself a large whiskey, tosses it down neat (light, sliding by, catches his furrowed brow as he tips his head back: what is wrong?), pours another, finds a decanter of Grand Marnier. She won’t know the difference. In Paris she confused champagne with sparkling cider, ordered a Pommard thinking she was getting a rosé, drank gin because she couldn’t taste it. He fits the half-burned cigarette between his lips, tucks a spare over his ear, then carries the drinks into the bathroom. She sits, straddling the bidet, churning water up between her legs like the wake of a pleasure boat. The beacon doesn’t reach in here: it’s as though he’s stepped out of its line of sight, but that doesn’t make him feel easier (something is nagging at him, has been for some time now). He holds the drink to her mouth for her, and she sips, looking mischievously up at him, one wet hand braced momentarily on his hipbone. Even in Paris she seemed to think drinking was naughtier than sex. Which made her on occasion something of a souse. She tips her chin, and he sets her drink down on the sink. “I wish I didn’t luff you so much,” she says casually, licking her lips, and commences to work up a lather between her legs with a bar of soap.

“Listen, what did you mean,” he asks around the cigarette (this is it, or part of it: he glances back over his shoulder apprehensively, as though to find some answer to his question staring him in the face—or what, from the rear, is passing for his face), “when you said, ‘Is this right?’”

“When…?”

“A while ago, when I grabbed your, you know—”

“Oh, I don’t know, darling. Yust a strange feeling, I don’t exactly remember.” She spreads the suds up her smooth belly and down the insides of her thighs, runs the soap up under her behind. “Like things were happening too fast or something.”

He takes a contemplative drag on the cigarette, flips the butt into the toilet. “Yeah, that’s it.” Smoke curls out his nostrils like balloons of speech in a comic strip. “All this seems strange somehow. Like something that shouldn’t have—”

“Well, I am a married woman, Richard.”

“I don’t mean that.” But maybe he does mean that. She’s rinsing now, her breasts flopping gaily above her splashing, it’s hard to keep his mind on things. But he’s not only been pronging some other guy’s wife, this is the wife of Victor Laszlo of the International Underground, one of his goddamn heroes. One of the world’s. Does that matter? He shoves his free hand in a jacket pocket, having no other, tosses back the drink. “Anyway,” he wheezes, “from what you tell me, you were married already when we met in Paris, so that’s not—”

“Come here, Richard,” Ilsa interrupts with gentle but firm Teutonic insistence. Komm’ hier. His back straightens, his eyes narrow, and for a moment the old Rick Blaine returns, the lonely American warrior, incorruptible, melancholy, master of his own fate, beholden to no one—but then she reaches forward and, like destiny, takes a hand. “Don’t try to escape,” she murmurs, pulling him up to the bidet between her knees. “You will neffer succeed.”

She continues to hold him with one hand (he is growing there, stretching and filling in her hand with soft warm pulsations, and more than anything else that has happened to her since she came to Casablanca, more even than Sam’s song, it is this sensation that takes her back to their days in Paris: wherever they went, from the circus to the movies, from excursion boats to dancehalls, it swelled in her hand, just like this), while soaping him up with the other. “Why are you circumcised, Richard?” she asks, as the engorged head (when it flushes, it seems to flush blue) pushes out between her thumb and index finger. There was something he always said in Paris when it poked up at her like that. She peers wistfully at it, smiling to herself.

“My old man was a sawbones,” he says, and takes a deep breath. He sets his empty glass down, reaches for the spare fag. It seems to have vanished. “He thought it was hygienic.”

“Fictor still has his. Off course in Europe it is often important not to be mistaken for a Chew.” She takes up the fragrant bar of soap (black market, the best, Ferrari gets it for him) and buffs the shaft with it, then thumbs the head with her sudsy hands as though, gently, trying to uncap it. The first day he met her, she opened his pants and jerked him off in his top-down convertible right under the Arc de Triomphe, then, almost without transition, or so it seemed to him, blew him spectacularly in the Bois de Boulogne. He remembers every detail, or anyway the best parts. And it was never—ever—any better than that. Until tonight.

She rinses the soap away, pours the rest of the Grand Marnier (she thinks: Cointreau) over his gleaming organ like a sort of libation, working the excess around as though lightly basting it (he thinks: priming it). A faint sad smile seems to be playing at the corners of her lips. “Say it once, Richard…”

“What—?”

She’s smiling sweetly, but: is that a tear in her eye? “For old times’ sake. Say it…”

“Ah.” Yes, he’d forgotten. He’s out of practice. He grunts, runs his hand down her damp cheek and behind her ear. “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid…”

She puckers her lips and kisses the tip, smiling cross-eyed at it, then, opening her mouth wide, takes it in, all of it at once. “Oh, Christ!” he groans, feeling himself awash in the thick muscular foam of her saliva, “I’m crazy about you, baby!”

“Mmmm!” she moans. He has said that to her before, more than once no doubt (she wraps her arms around his hips under the jacket and hugs him close), but the time she is thinking about was at the cinema one afternoon in Paris. They had gone to see an American detective movie that was popular at the time, but there was a newsreel on before showing the Nazi conquests that month of Copenhagen, Oslo, Luxembourg, Amsterdam, and Brussels. “The Fall of Five Capitals,” it was called. And the scenes from Oslo, though brief, showing the Gestapo goose-stepping through the storied streets of her childhood filled her with such terror and nostalgia (something inside her was screaming, “Who am I?”), that she reached impulsively for Richard’s hand, grabbing what Victor calls “the old fellow” instead. She started to pull her hand back, but he held it there, and the next thing she knew she had her head in his lap, weeping and sucking as though at her dead mother’s breast, the terrible roar of the German blitzkrieg pounding in her ears, Richard kneading her nape as her father used to do before he died (and as Richard is doing now, his buttocks knotted up under her arms, his penis fluttering in her mouth like a frightened bird), the Frenchmen in the theater shouting out obscenities, her own heart pounding like cannon fire. “God! I’m crazy about you, baby!” Richard whinnied as he came (now, as his knees buckle against hers and her mouth fills with the shockingly familiar unfamiliarity of his spurting seed, it is just a desperate “Oh fuck! Don’t let go…!”), and when she sat up, teary-eyed and drooling and gasping for breath (it is not all that easy to breathe now, as he clasps her face close to his hairy belly, whimpering gratefully, his body sagging, her mouth filling), what she saw on the screen were happy Germans, celebrating their victories, taking springtime strolls through overflowing flower and vegetable markets, going to the theater to see translations of Shakespeare, snapping photographs of their children. “Oh Gott,” she sniffled then (now she swallows, sucks and swallows, as though to draw out from this almost impalpable essence some vast structure of recollection), “it’s too much!” Whereupon the man behind them leaned over and said: “Then try mine, mademoiselle. As you can see, it is not so grand as your Nazi friend’s, but here in France, we grow men not pricks!” Richard’s French was terrible, but it was good enough to understand “your Nazi friend”: he hadn’t even put his penis back in his pants (now it slides greasily past her chin, flops down her chest, his buttocks in her hugging arms going soft as butter, like a delicious half-grasped memory losing its clear outlines, melting into mere sensation), but just leapt up and took a swing at the Frenchman. With that, the cinema broke into an uproar with everybody calling everyone else a fascist or a whore. They were thrown out of the theater of course, the police put Richard on their blacklist as an exhibitionist, and they never did get to see the detective movie. Ah well, they could laugh about it then…

He sits now on the front lip of the bidet, his knees knuckled under hers, shirttails in the water, his cheek fallen on her broad shoulder, arms loosely around her, feeling wonderfully unwound, mellow as an old tune (which is still there somewhere, moonlight and love songs, same old story—maybe it’s coming up through the pipes), needing only a smoke to make things perfect. The one he stuck over his ear is floating in the scummy pool beneath them, he sees. Ilsa idly splashes his drooping organ as though christening it. Only one answer, she once said, peeling off that lovely satin gown of hers like a French letter, will take care of all our questions, and she was right. As always. He’s the one who’s made a balls-up of things with his complicated moral poses and insufferable pride—a diseased romantic, Louis once called him, and he didn’t know the half of it. She’s the only realist in town; he’s got to start paying attention. Even now she’s making sense: “My rump is getting dumb, Richard. Dry me off and let’s go back in the other room.”

But when he tries to stand, his knees feel like toothpaste, and he has to sit again. Right back in the bidet, as it turns out, dipping his ass like doughnuts in tea. She smiles understandingly, drapes a bath towel around her shoulders, pokes through the medicine cabinet until she finds a jar of Yvonne’s cold cream, then takes him by the elbow. “Come on, Richard. You can do it, yust lean on me.” Which reminds him (his mind at least is still working, more or less) of a night in Spain, halfway up (or down) Suicide Hill in the Jarama valley, a night he thought was to be his last, when he said that to someone, or someone said it to him. God, what if he’d got it shot off there? And missed this? An expression compounded of hope and anguish, skepticism and awe, crosses his weary face (thirty-eight at Christmas, if Strasser is right—oh mother of God, it is going by!), picked up by the wheeling airport beacon. She removes his dripping jacket, his shirt as well, and towels his behind before letting him collapse onto the couch, then crosses to the ornamental table for a cigarette from the humidor. She wears the towel like a cape, her haunches under it glittering as though se-quined. She is, as always, a kind of walking light show, no less spectacular from the front as she turns back now toward the sofa, the nubbly texture of the towel contrasting subtly with the soft glow of her throat and breast, the sleek wet gleam of her belly.

She fits two cigarettes in her lips, lights them both (there’s a bit of fumbling with the lighter, she’s not very mechanical), and gazing soulfully down at Rick, passes him one of them. He grins. “Hey, where’d you learn that, kid?” She shrugs enigmatically, hands him the towel, and steps up between his knees. As he rubs her breasts, her belly, her thighs with the towel, the cigarette dangling in his lips, she gazes around at the chalky rough-plastered walls of his apartment, the Moorish furniture with its filigrees and inlaid patterns, the little bits of erotic art (there is a statue of a camel on the sideboard that looks like a man’s wet penis on legs, and a strange nude statuette that might be a boy, or a girl, or something in between), the alabaster lamps and potted plants, those slatted wooden blinds, so exotic to her Northern eyes: he has style, she thinks, rubbing cold cream into her neck and shoulder with her free hand, he always did have.

She lifts one leg for him to dry and then the other, gasping inwardly (outwardly, she chokes and wheezes, having inhaled the cigarette by mistake: he stubs out his own with a sympathetic grin, takes what is left of hers) when he rubs the towel briskly between them, then she turns and bends over, bracing herself on the coffee table. Rick, the towel in his hands, pauses a moment, gazing thoughtfully through the drifting cigarette haze at these luminous buttocks, finding something almost otherworldly about them, like archways to heaven or an image of eternity. Has he seen them like this earlier tonight? Maybe, he can’t remember. Certainly now he’s able to savor the sight, no longer crazed by rut. They are, quite literally, a dream come true: he has whacked off to their memory so often during the last year and a half that it almost feels more appropriate to touch himself than this present manifestation. As he reaches toward them with the towel, he seems to be crossing some strange threshold, as though passing from one medium into another. He senses the supple buoyancy of them bouncing back against his hand as he wipes them, yet, though flesh, they remain somehow immaterial, untouchable even when touched, objects whose very presence is a kind of absence. If Rick Blaine were to believe in angels, Ilsa’s transcendent bottom is what they would look like.

“Is this how you, uh, imagined things turning out tonight?” he asks around the butt, smoke curling out his nose like thought’s reek. Her cheeks seem to pop alight like his Café Américain sign each time the airport beacon sweeps past, shifting slightly like a sequence of film frames. Time itself may be like that, he knows: not a ceaseless flow, but a rapid series of electrical leaps across tiny gaps between discontinuous bits. It’s what he likes to call his link-and-claw theory of time, though of course the theory is not his…

“Well, it may not be perfect, Richard, but it is better than if I haff shot you, isn’t it?”

“No, I meant…” Well, let it be. She’s right, it beats eating a goddamn bullet. In fact it beats anything he can imagine. He douses his cigarette in the wet towel, tosses it aside, wraps his arms around her thighs and pulls her buttocks (he is still thinking about time as a pulsing sequence of film frames, and not so much about the frames, their useless dated content, as the gaps between: infinitesimally small when looked at two-dimensionally, yet in their third dimension as deep and mysterious as the cosmos) toward his face, pressing against them like a child trying to see through a foggy window. He kisses and nibbles at each fresh-washed cheek (and what if one were to slip between two of those frames? he wonders—), runs his tongue into (—where would he be then?) her anus, kneading the flesh on her pubic knoll between his fingers all the while like little lumps of stiff taffy. She raises one knee up onto the cushions, then the other, lowering her elbows to the floor (oh! she thinks as the blood rushes in two directions at once, spreading into her head and sex as though filling empty frames, her heart the gap between: what a strange dizzying dream time is!), thus lifting to his contemplative scrutiny what looks like a clinging sea anemone between her thighs, a thick woolly pod, a cloven chinchilla, open purse, split fruit. But it is not the appearance of it that moves him (except to the invention of these fanciful catalogues), it is the smell. It is this which catapults him suddenly and wholly back to Paris, a Paris he’d lost until this moment (she is not in Paris, she is in some vast dimensionless region she associates with childhood, a nighttime glow in her midsummer room, featherbedding between her legs) but now has back again. Now and for all time. As he runs his tongue up and down the spongy groove, pinching the lips tenderly between his tongue and stiff upper lip (an old war wound), feeling it engorge, pulsate, almost pucker up to kiss him back, he seems to see—as though it were fading in on the blank screen of her gently rolling bottom—that night at her apartment in Paris when she first asked him to “Kiss me, Richard, here. My other mouth wants to luff you, too…” He’d never done that before. He had been all over the world, had fought in wars, battled cops, been jailed and tortured, hid out in whorehouses, parachuted out of airplanes, had eaten and drunk just about everything, had been blown off the decks of ships, killed more men than he’d like to count, and had banged every kind and color of woman on earth, but he had never tasted one of these things before. Other women had sucked him off, of course, before Ilsa nearly caused him to wreck his car that day in the Bois de Boulogne, but he had always thought of that as a service due him, something he’d paid for in effect—he was the man, after all. But reciprocation, sucking back—well, that always struck him as vaguely queer, something guys, manly guys anyway, didn’t do. That night, though, he’d had a lot of champagne and he was—this was the simple truth, and it was an experience as exotic to Rick Blaine as the taste of a cunt—madly in love. He had been an unhappy misfit all his life, at best a romantic drifter, at worst and in the eyes of most a sleazy gunrunner and chicken-shit mercenary (though God knows he’d hoped for more), a whoremonger and brawler and miserable gutter drunk: nothing like Ilsa Lund had ever happened to him, and he could hardly believe it was happening to him that night. His immediate reaction—he admits this, sucking greedily at it now (she is galloping her father’s horse through the woods of the north, canopy-dark and sunlight-blinding at the same time, pushing the beast beneath her, racing toward what she believed to be God’s truth, flushing through her from the saddle up as eternity might when the saints were called), while watching himself, on the cinescreen of her billowing behind, kneel to it that first time like an atheist falling squeamishly into conversion—was not instant rapture. No, like olives, home brew, and Arab cooking, it took a little getting used to. But she taught him how to stroke the vulva with his tongue, where to find the nun’s cap (“my little sister,” she called it, which struck him as odd) and how to draw it out, how to use his fingers, nose, chin, even his hair and ears, and the more he practiced for her sake, the more he liked it for his own, her pleasure (he could see it: it bloomed right under his nose, filling his grimy life with colors he’d never even thought of before!) augmenting his, until he found his appetite for it almost insatiable. God, the boys on the block back in New York would laugh their asses off to see how far he’d fallen! And though he has tried others since, it is still the only one he really likes. Yvonne’s is terrible, bitter and pomaded (she seems to sense this, gets no pleasure from it at all, often turns fidgety and mean when he goes down on her, even had a kind of biting, scratching fit once: “Don’ you lak to fuck?” she’d screamed), which is the main reason he’s lost interest in her. That and her hairy legs.

His screen is shrinking (her knees have climbed to his shoulders, scrunching her hips into little bumps and bringing her shoulderblades into view, down near the floor, where she is gasping and whimpering and sucking the carpet), but his vision of the past is expanding, as though her pumping cheeks were a chubby bellows, opening and closing, opening and closing, inflating his memories. Indeed, he no longer needs a screen for them, for it is not this or that conquest that he recalls now, this or that event, not what she wore or what she said, what he said, but something more profound than that, something experienced in the way that a blind man sees or an amputee touches. Texture returns to him, ambience, impressions of radiance, of coalescence, the foamy taste of the ineffable on his tongue, the downy nap of timeless-ness, the tooth of now. All this he finds in Ilsa’s juicy bouncing cunt—and more: love’s pungent illusions of consubstantiation and infinitude (oh, he knows what he lost that day in the rain in the Gare de Lyon!), the bittersweet fall into actuality, space’s secret folds wherein one might lose one’s ego, one’s desperate sense of isolation, Paris, rediscovered here as pure aura, effervescent and allusive, La Belle Aurore as immanence’s theater, sacred showplace—

Oh hell, he thinks as Ilsa’s pounding hips drive him to his back on the couch, her thighs slapping against his ears (as she rises, her blood in riptide against her mounting excitement, the airport beacon touching her in its passing like bursts of inspiration, she thinks: childhood is a place apart, needing the adult world to exist at all: without Victor there could be no Rick!—and then she cannot think at all), La Belle Aurore! She broke his goddamn heart at La Belle Aurore. “Kiss me,” she said, holding herself with both hands as though to keep the pain from spilling out down there, “one last time,” and he did, for her, Henri didn’t care, merde alors, the Germans were coming anyway, and the other patrons thought it was just part of the entertainment; only Sam was offended and went off to the john till it was over. And then she left him. Forever. Or anyway until she turned up here a night ago with Laszlo. God, he remembers everything about that day in the Belle Aurore, what she was wearing, what the Germans were wearing, what Henri was wearing. It was not an easy day to forget. The Germans were at the very edge of the city, they were bombing the bejesus out of the place and everything was literally falling down around their ears (she’s smothering him now with her bucking arse, her scissoring thighs: he heaves her over onto her back and pushes his arms between her thighs to spread them); they’d had to crawl over rubble and dead bodies, push through barricades, just to reach the damned café. No chance to get out by car, he was lucky there was enough left in his “F.Y. Fund” to buy them all train tickets. And then the betrayal: “I can’ find her, Mr. Richard. She’s checked outa de hotel. But dis note come jus’ after you lef’!” Oh shit, even now it makes him cry. “I cannot go with you or ever see you again.” In perfect Palmer Method handwriting, as though to exult in her power over him. He kicked poor Sam’s ass up and down that train all the way to Marseilles, convinced it was somehow his fault. Even a hex maybe, that day he could have believed anything. Now, with her hips bouncing frantically up against his mouth, her bush grown to an astonishing size, the lips out and flapping like flags, the trench between them awash in a fragrant ooze like oily air, he lifts his head and asks: “Why weren’t you honest with me? Why did you keep your marriage a secret?”

“Oh Gott, Richard! Not now—!”

She’s right, it doesn’t seem the right moment for it, but then nothing has seemed right since she turned up in this godforsaken town: it’s almost as though two completely different places, two completely different times, are being forced to mesh, to intersect where no intersection is possible, causing a kind of warp in the universe. In his own private universe anyway. He gazes down on this lost love, this faithless wife, this trusting child, her own hands between her legs now, her hips still jerking out of control (“Please, Richard!” she is begging softly through clenched teeth, tears in her eyes), thinking: It’s still a story without an ending. But more than that: the beginning and middle bits aren’t all there either. Her face is drained as though all the blood has rushed away to other parts, but her throat between the heaving white breasts is almost literally alight with its vivid blush. He touches it, strokes the soft bubbles to either side, watching the dark little nipples rise like patriots—and suddenly the answer to all his questions seems (yet another one, that is—answers, in the end, are easy) to suggest itself. “Listen kid, would it be all right if I—?”

“Oh yes! yes!—but hurry!”

He finds the cold cream (at last! he is so slow!), lathers it on, and slips into her cleavage, his knees over her shoulders like a yoke. She guides his head back into that tropical explosion between her legs, then clasps her arms around his hips, already beginning to thump at her chest like a resuscitator, popping little gasps from her throat. She tries to concentrate on his bouncing buttocks, but they communicate to her such a touching blend of cynicism and honesty, weariness and generosity, that they nearly break her heart, making her more light-headed than ever. The dark little hole between them bobs like a lonely survivor in a tragically divided world. It is he! “Oh Gott!” she whimpers. And she! The tension between her legs is almost unbearable. “I can’t fight it anymore!” Everything starts to come apart. She feels herself falling as though through some rift in the universe (she cannot wait for him, and anyway, where she is going he cannot follow), out of time and matter into some wondrous radiance, the wheeling beacon flashing across her stricken vision now like intermittent star bursts, the music swelling, everything swelling, her eyes bursting, ears popping, teeth ringing in their sockets—“Oh Richard! Oh fokk! I luff you so much!”

He plunges his face deep into Ilsa’s ambrosial pudding, lapping at its sweet sweat, feeling her loins snap and convulse violently around him, knowing that with a little inducement she can spasm like this for minutes on end, and meanwhile pumping away between her breasts now like a madman, no longer obliged to hold back, seeking purely his own pleasure. This pleasure is tempered only by (and maybe enhanced by as well) his pity for her husband, that heroic sonuvabitch. God, Victor Laszlo is almost a father figure to him, really. And while Laszlo is off at the underground meeting in the Caverne du Roi, no doubt getting his saintly ass shot to shit, here he is—Rick Blaine, the Yankee smart aleck and general jerk-off—safely closeted off in his rooms over the town saloon, tit-fucking the hero’s wife, his callous nose up her own royal grotto like an advance scout for a squad of storm troopers. It’s not fair, goddamn it, he thinks, and laughs at this even as he comes, squirting jism down her sleek belly and under his own, his head locked in her clamped thighs, her arms hugging him tightly as though to squeeze the juices out.

He is lying, completely still, his face between Ilsa’s flaccid thighs, knees over her shoulders, arms around her lower body, which sprawls loosely now beneath him. He can feel her hands resting lightly on his hips, her warm breath against his leg. He doesn’t remember when they stopped moving. Maybe he’s been sleeping. Has he dreamt it all? No, he shifts slightly and feels the spill of semen, pooled gummily between their conjoined navels. His movement wakes Ilsa: she snorts faintly, sighs, kisses the inside of his leg, strokes one buttock idly. “That soap smells nice,” she murmurs. “I bet effry girl in Casablanca wishes to haff a bath here.”

“Yeah, well, I run it as a kind of public service,” he grunts, chewing the words around a strand or two of pubic hair. He’s always told Louis—and anyone else who wanted to know—that he sticks his neck out for nobody. But in the end, shit, he thinks, I stick it out for everybody. “I’m basically a civic-minded guy.”

Cynic-minded, more like, she thinks, but keeps the thought to herself. She cannot risk offending him, not just now. She is still returning from wherever it is orgasm has taken her, and it has been an experience so profound and powerful, yet so remote from its immediate cause—his muscular tongue at the other end of this morosely puckered hole in front of her nose—that it has left her feeling very insecure, unsure of who or what she is, or even where. She knows of course that her role as the well-dressed wife of a courageous underground leader is just pretense, that beneath this charade she is certainly someone—or something—else. Richard’s lover, for example. Or a little orphan girl who lost her mother, father, and adoptive aunt, all before she’d even started menstruating—that’s who she often is, or feels like she is, especially at moments like this. But if her life as Victor Laszlo’s wife is not real, are these others any more so? Is she one person, several—or no one at all? What was that thought she’d had about childhood? She lies there, hugging Richard’s hairy cheeks (are they Richard’s? are they cheeks?), her pale face framed by his spraddled legs, trying to puzzle it all out. Since the moment she arrived in Casablanca, she and Richard have been trying to tell each other stories, not very funny stories, as Richard has remarked, but maybe not very true ones either. Maybe memory itself is a kind of trick, something that turns illusion into reality and makes the real world vanish before everyone’s eyes like magic. One can certainly sink away there and miss everything, she knows. Hasn’t Victor, the wise one, often warned her of that? But Victor is a hero. Maybe the real world is too much for most people. Maybe making up stories is a way to keep them all from going insane. A tear forms in the corner of one eye. She blinks (and what are these unlikely configurations called “Paris” and “Casablanca,” where in all the universe is she, and what is “where”?), and the tear trickles into the hollow between cheekbone and nose, then bends its course toward the middle of her cheek. There is a line in their song (yes, it is still there, tinkling away somewhere like mice in the walls: is someone trying to drive her crazy?) that goes, “This day and age we’re living in gives cause for apprehension,/With speed and new invention and things like third dimension…” She always thought that was a stupid mistake of the lyricist, but now she is not so sure. For the real mystery—she sees this now, or feels it rather—is not the fourth dimension as she’d always supposed (the tear stops halfway down her cheek, begins to fade), or the third either for that matter…but the first.

“You never finished answering my question…”

There is a pause. Perhaps she is daydreaming. “What question, Richard?”

“A while ago. In the bathroom…” He, too, has been mulling over recent events, wondering not only about the events themselves (wondrous in their own right, of course: he’s not enjoyed multiple orgasms like this since he hauled his broken-down blacklisted ass out of Paris a year and a half ago, and that’s just for starters), but also about their “recentness”: When did they really happen? Is “happen” the right word, or were they more like fleeting conjunctions with the Absolute, that other Other, boundless and immutable as number? And, if so, what now is “when”? How much time has elapsed, for example, since he opened the door and found her in this room? Has any time elapsed? “I asked you what you meant when you said, ‘Is this right?’”

“Oh, Richard, I don’t know what’s right any longer.” She lifts one thigh in front of his face, as though to erase his dark imaginings. He strokes it, thinking: well, what the hell, it probably doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, anyway. “Do you think I can haff another drink now?”

“Sure, kid. Why not.” He sits up beside her, shakes the butt out of the damp towel, wipes his belly off, hands the towel to her. “More of the same?”

“Champagne would be nice, if it is possible. It always makes me think of Paris…and you…”

“You got it, sweetheart.” He pushes himself to his feet and thumps across the room, pausing at the humidor to light up a fresh smoke. “If there’s any left. Your old man’s been going through my stock like Vichy water.” Not for the first time, he has the impression of being watched. Laszlo? Who knows, maybe the underground meeting was just a ruse; it certainly seemed like a dumb thing to do on the face of it, especially with Strasser in town. There’s a bottle of champagne in his icebox, okay, but no ice. He touches the bottle: not cold, but cool enough. It occurs to him the sonuvabitch might be out on the balcony right now, taking it all in, he and all his goddamn underground. Europeans can be pretty screwy, especially these rich stiffs with titles. As he carries the champagne and glasses over to the coffee table, the cigarette like a dart between his lips, his bare ass feels suddenly both hot and chilly at the same time. “Does your husband ever get violent?” he asks around the smoke and snaps the metal clamp off the champagne bottle, takes a grip on the cork.

“No. He has killed some people, but he is not fiolent.” She is rubbing her tummy off, smiling thoughtfully. The light from the airport beacon, wheeling past, picks up a varnishlike glaze still between her breasts, a tooth’s wet twinkle in her open mouth, an unwonted shine on her nose. The cork pops, champagne spews out over the table top, some of it getting into the glasses. This seems to suggest somehow a revelation. Or another memory. The tune, as though released, rides up once more around them. “Gott, Richard,” she sighs, pushing irritably to her feet. “That music is getting on my nerfs!”

“Yeah, I know.” It’s almost as bad in its way as the German blitzkrieg hammering in around their romance in Paris—sometimes it seemed to get right between their embraces. Gave him a goddamn headache. Now the music is doing much the same thing, even trying to tell them when to kiss and when not to. He can stand it, though, he thinks, tucking the cigarette back in his lips, if she can. He picks up the two champagne glasses, offers her one. “Forget it, kid. Drown it out with this.” He raises his glass. “Uh, here’s lookin’—”

She gulps it down absently, not waiting for his toast. “And that light from the airport,” she goes on, batting at it as it passes as though to shoo it away. “How can you effer sleep here?”

“No one’s supposed to sleep well in Casablanca,” he replies with a worldly grimace. It’s his best expression, he knows, but she isn’t paying any attention. He stubs out the cigarette, refills her glass, blowing a melancholy whiff of smoke over it. “Hey, kid here’s—”

“No, wait!” she insists, her ear cocked. “Is it?”

“Is what?” Ah well, forget the fancy stuff. He drinks off the champagne in his glass, reaches down for a refill.

“Time. Is it going by? Like the song is saying?”

He looks up, startled. “That’s funny, I was just—!”

“What time do you haff, Richard?”

He sets the bottle down, glances at his empty wrist. “I dunno. My watch must have got torn off when we…”

“Mine is gone, too.”

They stare at each other a moment, Rick scowling slightly in the old style, Ilsa’s lips parted as though saying “story,” or “glory.” Then the airport beacon sweeps past like a prompter, and Rick, blinking, says: “Wait a minute—there’s a clock down in the bar!” He strides purposefully over to the door in his stocking feet, pausing there a moment, one hand on the knob, to take a deep breath. “I’ll be right back,” he announces, then opens the door and (she seems about to call out to him) steps out on the landing. He steps right back in again. He pushes the door closed, leans against it, his face ashen. “They’re all down there,” he says.

“What? Who’s down there?”

“Karl, Sam, Abdul, that Norwegian—”

“Fictor?!”

“Yes, everybody! Strasser, those goddamn Bulgarians, Sasha, Louis—”

“Yffonne?”

Why the hell did she ask about Yvonne? “I said everybody! They’re just standing down there! Like they’re waiting for something! But…for what?!” He can’t seem to stop his goddamn voice from squeaking. He wants to remain cool and ironically detached, cynical even, because he knows it’s expected of him, not least of all by himself, but he’s still shaken by what he’s seen down in the bar. Of course it might help if he had his pants on. At least he’d have some pockets to shove his hands into. For some reason, Ilsa is staring at his crotch, as though the real horror of it all were to be found there. Or maybe she’s trying to see through to the silent crowd below. “It’s, I dunno, like the place has sprung a goddamn leak or something!”

She crosses her hands to her shoulders, pinching her elbows in, hugging her breasts. She seems to have gone flat-footed, her feet splayed, her bottom, lost somewhat in the slatted shadows, drooping, her spine bent. “A leak?” she asks meaninglessly in her soft Scandinavian accent. She looks like a swimmer out of water in chilled air. Richard, slumping against the far door, stares at her as though at a total stranger. Or perhaps a mirror. He seems older somehow, tired, his chest sunken and belly out, legs bowed, his genitals shriveled up between them like dried fruit. It is not a beautiful sight. Of course Richard is not a beautiful man. He is short and bad-tempered and rather smashed up. Victor calls him riffraff. He says Richard makes him feel greasy. And it is true, there is something common about him. Around Victor she always feels crisp and white, but around Richard like a sweating pig. So how did she get mixed up with him, in the first place? Well, she was lonely, she had nothing, not even hope, and he seemed so happy when she took hold of his penis. As Victor has often said, each of us has a destiny, for good or for evil, and her destiny was Richard. Now that destiny seems confirmed—or sealed—by all those people downstairs. “They are not waiting for anything,” she says, as the realization comes to her. It is over.

Richard grunts in reply. He probably hasn’t heard her. She feels a terrible sense of loss. He shuffles in his black socks over to the humidor. “Shit, even the fags are gone,” he mutters gloomily. “Why’d you have to come to Casablanca anyway, goddamn it; there are other places…” The airport beacon, sliding by, picks up an expression of intense concentration on his haggard face. She knows he is trying to understand what cannot be understood, to resolve what has no resolution. Americans are like that. In Paris he was always wondering how it was they kept getting from one place to another so quickly. “It’s like everything is all speeded up,” he would gasp, reaching deliriously between her legs as her apartment welled up around them. Now he is probably wondering why there seems to be no place to go and why time suddenly is just about all they have. He is an innocent man, after all; this is probably his first affair.

“I would not haff come if I haff known…” She releases her shoulders, picks up her ruffled blouse (the buttons are gone), pulls it on like a wrap. As the beacon wheels by, the room seems to expand with light as though it were breathing. “Do you see my skirt? It was here, but—is it getting dark or something?”

“I mean, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the—!” He pauses, looks up. “What did you say?”

“I said, is it—?”

“Yeah, I know…”

They gaze about uneasily. “It seems like effry time that light goes past…”

“Yeah…” He stares at her, slumped there at the foot of the couch, working her garter belt like rosary beads, looking like somebody had just pulled her plug. “The world will always welcome lovers,” the music is suggesting, not so much in mockery as in sorrow. He’s thinking of all those people downstairs, so hushed, so motionless: it’s almost how he feels inside. Like something dying. Or something dead revealed. Oh shit. Has this happened before? Ilsa seems almost wraithlike in the pale staticky light, as though she were wearing her own ghost on her skin. And which is it he’s been in love with? he wonders. He sees she is trembling, and a tear slides down the side of her nose, or seems to, it’s hard to tell. He feels like he’s going blind. “Listen. Maybe if we started over…”

“I’m too tired, Richard…”

“No, I mean, go back to where you came in, see—the letters of transit and all that. Maybe we made some kinda mistake, I dunno, like when I put my hands on your jugs or something, and if—”

“A mistake? You think putting your hands on my yugs was a mistake—?”

“Don’t get offended, sweetheart. I only meant—”

“Maybe my bringing my yugs here tonight was a mistake! Maybe my not shooting the trigger was a mistake!”

“Come on, don’t get your tail in an uproar, goddamn it! I’m just trying to—”

“Oh, what a fool I was to fall…to fall…”

“Jesus, Ilsa, are you crying…? Ilsa…?” He sighs irritably. He is never going to understand women. Her head is bowed as though in resignation: one has seen her like this often when Laszlo is near. She seems to be staring at the empty buttonholes in her blouse. Maybe she’s stupider than he thought. When the dimming light swings past, tears glint in the corners of her eyes, little points of light in the gathering shadows on her face. “Hey, dry up, kid! All I want you to do is go over there by the curtains where you were when I—”

“Can I tell you a…story, Richard?”

“Not now, Ilsa! Christ! The light’s almost gone and—”

“Anyway, it wouldn’t work.”

“What?”

“Trying to do it all again. It wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be the same. I won’t even haff my girdle on.”

“That doesn’t matter. Who’s gonna know? Come on, we can at least—”

“No, Richard. It is impossible. You are different, I am different. You haff cold cream on your penis—”

“But—!”

“My makeup is gone, there are stains on the carpet. And I would need the pistol—how could we effer find it in the dark? No, it’s useless, Richard. Belief me. Time goes by.”

“But maybe that’s just it…”

“Or what about your tsigarette? Eh? Can you imagine going through that without your tsigarette? Richard? I am laughing! Where are you, Richard…?”

“Take it easy, I’m over here. By the balcony. Just lemme think.”

“Efen the airport light has stopped.”

“Yeah. I can’t see a fucking thing out there.”

“Well, you always said you wanted a wow finish…Maybe…”

“What?”

“What did you say?”

“I said, maybe this is…you know, what we always wanted…Like a dream come true…”

“Speak up, kid. It’s getting hard to hear you.”

“I said, when we are fokking—”

“Nah, that won’t do any good, sweetheart, I know that now. We gotta get back into the goddamn world somehow. If we don’t, we’ll regret it. Maybe not today—”

“What? We’ll forget it?”

“No, I said—”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Forget what, Richard?”

“I said I think I shoulda gone fishing with Sam when I had the chance.”

“I can’t seem to hear you…”

“No, wait a minute! Maybe you’re right! Maybe going back isn’t the right idea…”

“Richard…?”

“Instead, maybe we gotta think ahead…”

“Richard, I am afraid…”

“Yeah, like you could sit there on the couch, see, we’ve been fucking, that’s all right, who cares, now we’re having some champagne—”

“I think I am already forgetting…”

“And you can tell me that story you’ve been wanting to tell—are you listening? A good story, that may do it—anything that moves! And meanwhile, lemme think, I’ll, let’s see, I’ll sit down—no, I’ll sort of lean here in the doorway and—oof!—shit! I think they moved it!”

“Richard…?”

“Who the hell rearranged the—ungh!—goddamn geography?”

“Richard, it’s a crazy world…”

“Ah, here! this feels like it. Something like it. Now what was I—? Right! You’re telling a story, so, uh, I’ll say…”

“But wherever you are…”

“And then—? Yeah, that’s good. It’s almost like I’m remembering this. You’ve stopped, see, but I want you to go on, I want you to keep spilling what’s on your mind, I’m filling in all the blanks…”

“…whatever happens…”

“So I say: And then—.^?C’mon, kid, can you hear me? Remember all those people downstairs! They’re depending on us! Just think it: if you think it, you’ll do it! And then—?”

“…I want you to know…”

“And then…? Oh shit, Ilsa…? Where are you? And then…?”

“…I luff you…”

“And then…? Ilsa…? And then…?”