NEW DEPTHS

 Of course it was all carried off with a coolness that would preserve my relationship with Marcie.  The wine was filling me with a tact that in other circumstances might have been unachievable.
 Presently we rose and strolled into the gaming room, a smallish place with card tables, roulette wheels, a motif of green felt.  Green felt on the drink trays.  The croupiers were women in green evening dresses and in niches above the tables women in green evening dresses stood surveying the action.
 Lord Michael had Marcie's arm.  "Fellow over there's an aristocrat," he said.  "One of our own."
 Gambling is not something that calls to me.  All that concentrating--please!  For a few dollars?
 The others went to the tables and I indulged in the fine anxiety of beauty-watching.  It was like being in church; you look behind you, check out the girls in the choir.  Good-looking, the ones in green, but they wouldn't hold one's gaze.  I went through my chips playing blackjack with one and went and stood at the bar.
 Haze came and got a drink and stood there holding it like he wanted to Talk To Me.  I could only assume he was going to apologize.
 "I'm dying," he said.
 I stood there looking at him.  I mean what does one say?  "You mean you're actually--" I gestured vaguely.
 He took a swallow of his scotch. "Yah."
 I nodded and waited for a moment.  "What of?"
 "I'd rather not discuss it."
 I was cast upon my thoughts.  Dying.  It's not something that much preoccupies me but of course this held up the mirror.  What happens if I die?  What happens to me?  Do I graduate to some Afterward where they wear black veils and have mirrors for faces?
 I don't like to give it too much attention.  You're not here to think about that, you're here to live--to get lost, to take yourself too seriously, that's part of it.  I mean I do occasionally glance at the sky and ask for an explanation.  In times of extreme stress I may throw myself to my knees and weep.  But mainly I like God best when he minds his own business and I'm sure he feels the same about me.  Just salt the eggs and get on with it, sort of thing.  Time enough for God later.  Probably me anyway.
 Which is OK philosophically and everything but here was Haze actually using the D word.  Crawling to his miserable end.  It called forth my profounder sympathies.
 "Waddaya got," I said, "cancer?"
 He allowed his gaze to rest on me.  "You have the intelligence of a dog," he said.
 "I'm doing my best.  Why are you telling me this?"
 "You will understand that I must leave behind me some legacy for my granddaughter.  I don't mean understand with your mind, I mean understand with your heart.  Oh, get lost."
 "You mean untold wealth isn't enough?"  I was close to tears.  It was a happiness I myself had never known.
 "No," he said, with the air of one who has found his way to something higher, "it's not."
 I nodded the nod of the baffled.  "What is?" I smiled.
 "A title," he said.  "A landed estate.  A ladyship."
 I followed his glance to Marcie and Lord Michael, cheerfully losing money at the wheel, leaning together over the table, laughing, his hand on her shoulder.  So.  Haze wasn't here to buy a house, in the brick-and-mortar sense, he was here to marry Marcie to Michael.  Marcie and Michael, it had a certain music.
 When you're not the provider in the family your job is to make your woman feel beautiful.  And as I watched them stack their chips together on the same number it occurred to me that this fop with the unenviable hairstyle was doing my job.
 Maybe my tact hadn't been that subtle.  Maybe they hadn't even been watching us!
 Well, I was watching them.  And it looked very much like Michael did have a, not a style exactly but a kind of a way.  Light-hearted and so forth.  Frivolous.  When you're in pain you compare yourself.
 I looked at Haze for confirmation.  "Egg zactly," he said.  "He'll wrap her up while you're still picking the underwear out of your crack."

 I MEET THE GHOST

 So people are really shit.
 As far as I was concerned the evening was over but the others wanted to go to Annabel's and boogie.
 "Why don't you lot come along?" said Michael, not really looking at us.  He and Marcie sat in the front seat with Lady McGeorge.  I sat with Dr. Lu and Haze.  He smiled at me.  Everything's provisional and then you die, his look said.  I abandoned my intention of committing bawdry with Dr. Lu whose legs were nevertheless in my face.
 At Annabel's I sat and drank while Marcie and Michael danced.  Haze did more or less of a highland fling with Dr. Lu.  The waiter put a cylinder of wine down and it just disappeared, I don't know how it happened.  Beside me Lady McGeorge said "I should think you'd want to dance, Mr. Tucker.  You seem such an able man."
 I squinted at her.  I was so drunk I looked like a stroke victim.  Around us sat various members of the Condom Generation.  It was like one of those soft-core porn movies where everybody's got lots of haircut but nobody really looks that good.  You can tell the women who have titles: they're the ones smoking and chewing gum at the same time. "This glass smells like false teeth," I said.
 Holding Marcie by the hand the Lord came over and shouted "Want to go to Tramp's?" over the music.
 "No," I said but we went.
 I don't remember what happened.
 When I woke up I was alone in bed and in the kind of pain you never thought possible but have to admit you recognize.  A corpse jolted to life by stripped wires.  I swear on my c.v. my head would not turn.  At such moments the body assumes its aspect as a contraption.
 And I was alone, alone, alone.
 I did my best to go back to sleep but the bladder, the laxative effect of the drink.  I got up and went out to sit on the hole.  The usual room was occupied.  One had to remember there were other guests now, though the house was vast, I don't know why the fuck they had to use our bathroom.
 After a while I found something.  Water closets, they call them, and this one was of a size.  It had three walls.  I was sitting in there with knees and forehead perforce pressed to the door, feeling the approach of the blessed event when the child made itself known.  A creak of the floorboards inches beyond the membrane of the door; a silence.  The child likes to come around and bother me when I am at stool.  I tilted my torso just that bit to the right that brought my eye to the keyhole.  The child's eye stared back at me.
 "I'm having a little poop," I said.
 "The ghost is upstairs."
 "Well, why don't you go and play with it?"
 "It's really there."
 I didn't care.  I just wanted to drop and go back to bed.  Lie there and be thrown around by my feelings.
 "I want to rest now," I said, dropping my forehead back against the door.  A shrine bruised by countless foreheads.  A wailing wall.
 "Are you smarter than me?"
 "I don't know," I said.  "I have my own sky.  Yours may be higher than mine, how would I know?"
 The child screamed.  It was a sound so high and loud it suggested those prankish sailors who touched off canons under the noses of island natives visiting their ship.  The noise was so intense they didn't flinch, didn't quite hear it.  Then it lowered in register and became Reality.  Then it stopped.
 I sat there.  "Why did you do that?" I said.
 "That's how scared I am."
 I flushed as a matter of form, tied my robe and thrust my discomposed features into the hall.  The child was holding the cat.
 "Want to pet him?" it said.
 I followed them, stumbling through the hospital zone that is life, up a large number of stairs.  They simply didn't end.  These houses are squashed in at the sides but they shoot up several floors to make up for it.  The landings were glass-walled and gave onto a green from a vertiginous height.
 "Isn't there an elevator?" I said.  An insufficiency of sleep is like walking around under a low ceiling.
 We ran out of carpeted stairs and were onto bare wood when the child halted us with a raised hand.  I stood there waiting.  It glanced back at me impatiently and pointed at a door.  So I looked at the door.
 And there, in the crack at the bottom, were the shadows of someone pacing back and forth.  No sound.  Just the pacing.
 I looked at the child.  The child looked at me.
 "Hello?" I called.
 The pacing stopped.  The feet were spread as if someone were staring at us with his hands on his hips.
 I looked at the child.  "Throw the cat at the door," I said.
 The child gave the cat a little toss and it landed on its feet with its back up.  It prowled a step or two, peered underneath and then yowed and scampered down past us.
 The child looked at me.  "I dare you," it whispered.
 I looked at the door.  Then I took a tentative step onto the landing.  "Hello?" I said.
 "Come in," said a voice I'd never heard.
 I looked at the child.  "I wood-dent do that, Toby."
 I crept up to the door, opened it and looked in, and there was the guy.  From the fantasy.  Had his hands on his hips.
 The child brushed past me and pushed the door open wide.  It looked around the room.  "Where is it?"
 The guy smiled at me.  "My, my," he said, "we have such nice legs!"
 The child went to the window to see what could have made the shadows under the door.  Trees?  We were too high.  Wind chimes?  A curtain in the breeze?
 "You've got a nice tight butt for a guy your age.  You shouln't let yourself go."
 The child turned to me.  "Maybe it was rats!"
 The guy walked around me, looking me over.  "Do you know what I'd give to have a body like that?  Do you know what I'd give to have anything in the way of flesh and blood?"
 "Or clouds," the child said.
 I was face to face with my homosexual self and the child couldn't see it.  My mind was gone.  It was the stress of last night, I couldn't handle all the issues.  Marcie.  Lord Michael.  The end of a way of life.  Brokeness.  The whole thing made too large a claim on my experience.
 "Toby?" said the child.
 I looked at it; at the guy.
 At it.  "No ghosts," I said.
 It affected a minimal and I suppose decorous embarrassment.  "I guess not."
 "Why don't you go downstairs," I said.  "I'm going to rest up here for a few minutes."
 "You OK, Toby?"
 "Yah," I said.  "Yah."
 "Toby?" said the guy.  "Oh, that's precious!"
 The child went out.  He went over and closed the door.
 See what I mean?  I now had 1) the physical fact that the door was closed, 2) the self-evident, if anything could be so described at this point, fact that I hadn't closed it and 3) the presence of an otherwise invisible guy.  I shook the dust off a chair and sat down on it.
 "So what's your name?" I said.
 "Oberon," he said.  "King of the fairies."
 "So what is this, am I having a breakdown?"
 "No!  I'm really here!"
 "Why are you really here?"
 "I don't know!  I've been here since 17 something.  I died and I just, I don't know, couldn't go anywhere.  I called out people's names and no one came.  I'm stuck!"
 "How did you die?"
 "Of grief."
 "Of what?"
 "I died of grief.  For my wife.  I don't know, maybe it was something else, we didn't have blood tests then, but it felt like grief."
 "Your wife died?"
 He sat down and nodded sadly.  "I killed her."
 I nodded.  "Why."
 "It was an accident, really.  At first.  She was bored with me.  I married her to please my family.  She married me for the title.  I liked her, as a sort of girlfriend, but then she caught me wearing her clothes and noised it all over the neighborhood.  She'd sit at the dinner table yawning at me.  One day I threw a grape into her mouth and she choked to death."
 I watched him.  "Bitch deserved it," I said.
 "And as she was choking I sort of, well, I tossed in a few more.  She was down on her knees clutching her throat and I was lobbing these grapes in.  They rattled in her gullet like vitamin pills.  I call for her all the time but she never comes.  She hasn't forgiven me."
 "May take a while."
 "Judge me!" he said.  He opened his shirt and rushed forward.  "Love me!  Kiss my nipples!  Judge me!"
 "Am I having a fantasy about killing Marcie?"
 He sat down again.  "You know what your trouble is, sweetheart?  Guilt.  You think you're such a fancypants but you feel guilty about being a kept man!  You should learn that the nature of the transaction doesn't matter, it's the being together!  No matter how humiliating the contortion.  I learned it.  I wish you'd loosen up.  I've seen some of your fantasies, you know.  Sometimes I come and watch you sleeping."
 "Don't do that."
 "I need you!  I need love!  I need something!"
 "So you're me.  You're my narcissistic fagotty inner self."
 "If you go around seeing everything as a projection of you that is narcissistic.  I'm me, asshole!"
 "Is that how they talked in the eighteenth century?"
 "One tries to keep abreast."
 "I'm talking to myself.  I am afraid."
 "Listen, blowbroth, I am here, OK?  I'm here, therefore I am.  The moral self rises out of and hovers over everything and is confused, n'est-ce pas?  Behold!  There is the body, and there is the going beyond.  I am the going beyond.  I'm so far at the end of myself that there's no self left.  Or something."
 "You are my unacknowledged homosexuality."
 "Animal fat, there is nothing unacknowledged about your homosexuality, OK?  Don't be such a kink in the dink!"
 A car went by below and a flash of radio music thumped me back into now.  "You're a dream."
 "And you are a pantaloon!  The separation of dream and reality is just not reality, now I suggest you take that thing off so we can commit a little lickery."
 "But you can do things."
 "Touch or pass through at will.  I can promise you some very interesting sensations.  We can do it together!  Mm!"
 "I'm afraid I'm just not in the mood," I said, staring at nothing.
 He sat there sulking with his chin on his fist.  "Don't try to figure it out, it's just mind chasing its tail.  Body chasing its, I don't know.  We accept life on any terms, why not this?"
 His remarks went by me like weather.  "I have to go and rest now."
 "But you utter angel, rest here!"
 "No no.  My life is falling apart.  You got me at a bad moment."
 "No no yourself!  She doesn't love him!  And he certainly doesn't love her!  That ditzburger?"
 "I'm afraid I can't allow you to speak of Marcie that way."
 "What I'm saying is that Michael wants the money."
 "What do you mean?  He's rich!"
 "Oh, yah?  The tax people are going to take this house any minute.  All they've got is the country house, and Aunt Lindsay owns that.  I think of her as my aunt though she's really my whatever.  She tried to join the convent but they wouldn't have her so she keeps the house cold to produce the conditions of the convent.  Very vague, very vague.  May live forever.  In which case they don't get the country house."
 I leaned forward and stared at this thought.
 "Tobias, darling, I mention these things so you'll know how real I am.  Do let's touch each other."

 SHOOTING OUT FOR SOME SHOOTING

 Well, I mean, once I saw the light on the thing I felt New Assurance and might in fact have allowed myself to be fondled, but I now became so preoccupied with planning a move that I couldn't really, how shall I say, yield myself.
 He tried everything--he actually offered to kill Haze for me if I'd sleep with him, as the saying is, but when it comes to actual sleep one doesn't like to have a murder on one's conscience to jerk the head aside from.  Besides, Haze would be dead soon anyway.  Things were looking up!
 Of course there was whatever-his-name-was.  The scene had more or less dried up for him.
 "What about other ghosts?" I said.
 "I can't find any!"
 "So you don't just go to heaven or something?"
 "You mean hell?" he said, and I let it go.  Not really my department.  I told him to shove it up his parallel universe and went down to finish evacuating my own.
 Indeed, when I had again retired to closet I lay down a burden so oppresive that I felt a renewal of bliss approximate to the levity of the colon.  A fresh dewey mousse au kaka.  I had, I felt, passed through my dark night of the soul.  The tide of joy was rising.
 It didn't even occur to me that I was going around talking to apparitions.  I had the goods on Michael.  Question now was how to flick him off.
 I napped, if I may say so, merrily, after which I dressed, opting for a rather clever Burberry jacket, mossy brown shot with green and blue.  Kind of thing you can pick up there.  I chose from among my dress teeshirts and sat around more or less shelling peanuts.  Reclining on cushions.  Call it my indominable spirit.
 Presently I heard voices in the hall.  Marcie and Michael.  He was walking her, as it were, home.
 "You're so charming!" she said.  Her tone was of awe and gratitude.
 "It's only fair."
 "Why?"
 "Because I'm so charmed," he said suavely.
 That smile of hers makes you feel blessed, like seeing dolphins, unless someone else is getting it.  I opened the door and startled them into guilt.
 "Ah," he said, looking at me.  It wasn't a nice-to-see-you ah.  More like an oh-it's-you ah.
 "Hi, Toby!" she said with forced enthusiasm.
 "You got up early," I told her.
 "I was with Lord Michael," she explained.
 "Showing her round!" he beamed.  "She's awfully gung-ho, as you Americans say."
 "Oh, is that an Americanism?  You do keep track of things.  Busy busy busy!"
 He pinched the material of my jacket.  "One never wears brown in the city, old thing."
 I must have bared my teeth or something because Marcie said, "But that's OK 'cause we're going to the country anyway, OK Toby?" real quick.
 I looked at her.  "The country?"  For me outdoor life is a sidewalk cafe.
 "Spot of shooting!" said the Lord.  "Down at the old family seat.  Suit your clothes a little better."
 "And Andrea will like it!" added Marcie, wide-eyed with rectitude.
 "Actually we were wondering if you wouldn't mind following us with her.  You can come with Dr. Lu, you'll like that.  Last night you were all over her like a rash."
 I allowed my eyes to settle on his while Marcie squeezed past into the room.
 "See you downstairs," he called after her and I watched him till he went away.
 Then I went in and slammed the door.  She was busy packing.  "He looks like he was born with his clothes on."
 "Just because you don't like him!"
 "He's a fortune-hunter!  All he wants is your money!"
 "Yah, not like you."
 "He's an opportunist!"
 "You don't know your ass!"
 "I don't spend as much time looking at it as you do."
 She slammed a pair of riding pants into her suitcase.
 "I guess now you're looking at somebody else's."
 She whammed the case closed and glared at me.
 And that's how things stood as we set out on our journey to the English countryside.  My whole being, as it were, rose up against it.  There was some attempt to normalize relations as we stood by the cars--Michael's two-seater Aston Martin and the Rolls.  "Toby," said Marcie, "do you have to go to the bathroom before we go?"
 "No," I said.
 "Are you sure?"
 "Yes," I said.  Christ.
 That she had placed herself in a false position would have to be adequeate vengeance for the moment.
 Actually I was glad of a chance to inspect the country house and not have to drive down myself.  Everything's on the wrong side of the road there and if you make a mistake they carry you away under a siren.
 Soon we were whooshing along the A-1 or whatever, I never look, the Aston Martin out of sight in front of us.  The child sat up front with Lady McGeorge, I in the back with Dr. Lu.
 "So," I said, "is the Lord crazy?"
 "Sorry?"
 "He sees ghosts.  You're supposed to be telling him if he's crazy."
 "I don't know," she said cooly.  "What does crazy mean?"
 She didn't look at me.  I had overflirted her and then withdrawn my attentions.  She was probably the only person here who would talk to me.  No, there was Lady McGeorge.  And the child.  I was all right.
 "I feel guilty when I look at your legs," I said.
 "Oh?  Want to tell me why?"
 "There's too much pleasure in it."
 She looked at me for a moment.  "Each of our emotions excludes the others.  Aggression, tenderness, euphoria--every bodily state is a kind of going astray.  A forgetting.  You drown in it.  You become it."
 "I suppose that must be true," I said.  "Never thought about it."  Still haven't.
 "Am I sounding like a psychiatrist?"
 "Exalted by your possession of a key to things, you mean?  Sensitiver than thou?"
 "Toby," the child turned around and said, "do we turn here?"
 "No," I said.  I had no idea whether we turned there or not but I like saying no to the child.
 "Are you able to distinguish between your sexual and your violent fantasies?" Dr. Lu said.
 "The sexual ones are the ones I plan to act on."
 "That's evasive."
 "It's the least I can do for myself."
 "You haven't formed an adequate concept of reality.  I don't know yet why."
 "Reality" I said, "is the hair around the sexual orifice.  Gets in your teeth."
 "Toby," said the child, "do we go down this street?"
 "No," I said, and to Dr. Lu, "One fits so many descriptions.  The self is congruent with all the various determinisms.  Don't insist on understanding."
 "Do we go down this one?" said the child.
 Before long we did in fact go down one and, after some veering along narrow roads past damp fields we rolled up before the big house.  It stood over a broad landscape with sheep on the slopes and checkerboard farm country in the distance.  Kind of thing you get on TV with flute music.  A sharp smell as of breath over bad gums greeted us as we got out of the car: manure.  An anxiety overcame me that I might be recruited to pitch hay or something.  I don't like to lift anything I can't eat.
 "Do you ride?" said Lady McGeorge.
 "I'm allergic," I said.
 An elderly woman approached us--tall, stooped.  "Awnty Lindsay," said Lady McGeorge, touching her cheek to cheek.  "I'd have sounded the hooter but I didn't know if you'd hear."
 The house inside was freezing.  She led us through a hall past tall portraits of ancestors and there, in tight silks holding a plumed hat, was the ghost!  The man, I mean, that the ghost had been.  "Who's this?" I said.
 The others stopped and looked up at him.  "He used to be the Lord here," said Aunty Lindsay.
 He looked luminous, it gave me the creeps.  A painted man standing on a painted floor.  Somebody.  He existed.
 So at least I wasn't crazy.  Not that it was much comfort.  I mean which would you rather be, crazy or haunted?
 "What was his name?" I said.
 "Oliphant," said Aunty.
 I smiled.  Oliphant.  What a fuck-ass name.  But of course there you are.
 Aunty turned and led us on, weighed down by the world's sins.
 In the kitchen she made us tea, what else.  It was the only room she seemed to live in and doubled as an animal shelter, that was part of the nun-manquee thing.  There were cats all over the place, a dog old and arthritic enough to have acquired philosophy and a budgy that fluttered around and kept the cats' heads tilted up.
 I held the strainer over my cup as she poured.  "Just balance it there, Mr. Tucker," she said, "it's used to it."
 "Ah," I said.
 "Do you like cats?"
 "They make good pate," I said, but she wasn't listening.
 One of them sneezed on my ankle.  I put my head under the table and looked at it.  "Fuck off," I whispered, and it ran its claws down my pants.  The child leaned under there and watched.  "I want to do something bad to the kitty," I said.
 "Don't, Toby!"
 While I was in this position the bird landed on my back and climbed to my shoulder as I sat up, the claws, little injections.
 "Do you ride, Mr. Tucker?"
 "I'm allergic."
 "Perhaps you could take Oscar for a walk."  She indicated the dog.  "He needs supporting at the trees, if you would be so good."
 I looked at her for a moment, unable quite to follow.  "OK," I said.
 "Don't throw any sticks for him further than a few feet," she said.
 Lady McGeorge absently picked skin from her lips and caressed them with a fingertip.  A cat scratched furiously at an ear, and was calm. The bird crapped on my arm.
 "Sure," I said.

 MORE BITTER THAN DEATH IS WOMAN.--PROVERBS

 I got up and held the door open for the dog for some little time while it waddled out.
 Outside I was overtaken by Dr. Lu, eagerly likewise escaping.  "I suppose there'll be scrabble in the evening," she said.
 There was a wood nearby and for the dog's benefit we strolled toward it, though he didn't seem intent on much.
 "Are you in love with Michael?" I said.
 "Why do you ask that?"
 "Say the first thing that comes into your mind."
 "Do you think he's good-looking?"
 "I guess.  But not attractive."
 "You'd rather sit under the apple tree with a handsomer man?"
 "I think you can sense whether someone's attractive without necessarily getting an erection."
 "In your case I'd say that's the rule."
 "What is that, some kind of therapy?"
 "I must first identify the neurosis.  Your ardor last night was followed by an alarming neutrality.  What sort of problems do you have in bed?"
 The dog had rolled onto its back and was pissing at the sky, a not incomprehensible sentiment, and so contagious was his liberality that, excusing myself to Dr. Lu, I stepped behind a tree and took aim myself.  It is my habit when doing so in the open air to drop my pants and gain release if only for a moment from the clutch of the underwear.  With the rear protected by the coat tails it is a luxury that can be enjoyed in comparative modesty and I was thus bathing my equipment in the breeze when I heard an "Ouch!" from Dr. Lu, and then a slap.  I peered around the tree at her as she pulled up her already tiny skirt and massaged her buttock.  "Ow!" she complained, and seemed ready to weep.  "A horse fly bit me!"
 The horse fly is so called because it's about the size of a horse and can put a welt on you that will alter your shape.  She hopped around rubbing the area, her face contorted.
 "The sting is in there!  What if I'm allergic?"
 I came out hitching my clothes, decorum no longer the
first concern.
 "I might need a shot!" she cried, and lay on the grass to show me the place.  "Can you suck it out?"
 I looked at her.  "Suck it out?"
 "The sting."
 "The sting?"
 "Suck the God-damn sting out before you have to rush me to a hospital!"
 I got down on my knees and, guided by her fingers, probed the area.  It was at mid-cheek, just where the flesh is softest.  The swelling hadn't set in yet.  "Here?" I said.
 "Hurry!"
 So I put my mouth on the place and, you know, sucked.  Gave it what rescussitation I could manage.  When I drew back to look there was a pink swelling there.
 "Harder!" she said.  "Please!"
 I kept at it, face-down and at right angles to the face-down Dr. Lu, her panties at mid-thigh, and it was in this posture that Marcie and Michael walked in on us.  The dog didn't even bark.
 "Good Lord!  I suppose we'd better leave them alone!" he said.
 I lifted my head.  "Well, help!" I said.  "She's been bitten!"
 Dr. Lu reached back and forced my face to the bruise.  "Please!" she said.  "Don't stop!"
 "I'm transbugrified!" said Michael.  "Bewitched, buggered and bewildered, what?"
 "Boy, Toby!" Marcie said.
 I raised myself, my own flies in disarray, and whipped my arm down in frustration.  "Marcie! Don't you understand anything?"
 "Oh, yah, sure!"  She turned and strode away.  She was in riding clothes I now noticed.  So much better for striding away in.
 Michael lingered a moment suppressing his smile and then went off after her.
 I knelt there and watched him.
 Dr. Lu curled up and rubbed her behind.
 "Nice timing," I told her.
 "Did you get the sting out?
 "No.  You may die."
 The trouble was, English lords are supposed to be broke.  They're supposed to need money.  I had nothing to expose.
 Nothing period.
 Dr. Lu got up.  "I'd better go put something on this," she said.  "You don't have any diseases, do you?"
 "Sorry?"
 "You put your mouth on an open wound."
 "Oh.  Not as far as I know."
 There must be some protection against the unbearable pour of chance.  There must be some kind of something!  I could not imagine what it was.  I had been thrust into the world to probe for it, to discover it, to guy myself to it for very life and I couldn't figure out what it was.

 THIS MOUNTAIN MORE

 Dr. Lu disappeared toward the house.
 I got up and, adjusting my clothing, made my way out of the wood lot, the dog limping at my side.  As I emerged I saw in the distance a group of people--Marcie and Michael, Haze in tweeds, Aunty Lindsay, Lady McGeorge and the child.  They were talking to a midget in riding breeches and a horse was standing nearby.
 I went over.  To avoid them would be merely to solidify my exile.  What had I left to lose?
 There was something familiar about the woman--I could see now that the it was a woman--but my feelers were trained on the hostility rays from Marcie and Haze.  Indeed, what murmurs of conversation there were died as I drew up.
 "This," said Haze to the short person, "is Mr. Tucker."  The formality in his voice stood in for pleasure.  There was no attempt to introduce her to me and when I looked at her inquiringly I saw that it was the Queen.  Just rode over or something.
 I felt like taking my hands out of my pockets but my hands weren't in my pockets, so I smiled at her.  "Hi," I said.
 Everyone looked at me.  Faux pas were in the air even if this wasn't perhaps clearly one.
 She ignored my remark and said to Marcie, "You could do no end of good here.  The estate is in miserable repair and the tax laws are crippling."  She stroked the child's head.
 Haze beamed.  "We'll manage fine, Your, uh--"
 We waited, but he didn't seem to know what to call the Queen.  Your Majesty sounded a bit Hollywood.
 But she ignored this too and there was more very quiet, very hesitant talk about horses and stables and blood lines.  Those of us who didn't participate stood by as official witnesses.
 Of course horses weren't the subject at all.  She had dropped by to bless the arrangement between Marcie and Lord Michael, and her tone to them was congratulatory, maternal, welcome-to-the-clubish.
 I don't know, I just gave up.  Stood there with my hands behind my back, a flicker of unconcerned smile my mask and comment, when suddenly I felt a buzzing.  Felt rather than heard, though it shortly became faintly audible.  It was in my pants and had the tone and weight of an electric razor.
 A horse fly.  In raising my harness I had apparently trapped a fly in there and anticipating a sting on my, how shall I say, person at any moment I began frantically to jerk my hips and take what evasive action I could.  This brought the fly into contact with various of my sensitive areas, working my pelvis back and forth involuntarily.
 I thrust my hand in there and groped madly with only the intention to protect my privates--I did not wish to grab the fly--but it took refuge up high at the back and I was bent double and in to the shoulder while the Queen tried not to watch.  I stood there like a grotesque straining to parry the thing and caught my fingers on the waistband of my tangas, opening a way for it into the baggy-seat area of my underwear.  I hauled my arm out as fast as I could pry it loose, leaping into the air with attempts to avoid the fly and, tearing open my belt and buttons--why did I have buttons?--I yanked my pants to my knees and ripped my shorts down, twisting in my efforts till my behind was pointed at the Q., my coat tails, I am reliably informed, parting like curtains.
 Well.
 The fly flew away.  No one else saw it or suspected its presence.
 Panting with exertion and relief, unsure whether to show Her Majesty heads or tails, I pulled my stuff up.  The briefs, the pants.  A silence accompanied me as I buttoned, buckled.
 Around me, faces.
 "Do you have an entry in the Derby this year, Mr. Harding?" said the Queen.
 "Oh, yes!  Never miss!"
 "Perhaps I might visit your stable."
 And after a little more of this Michael helped her onto her horse and she trotted away.
 They looked at me.
 "Oscar, you're all wet!" said Aunty Lindsay, and to me, "Didn't you hold him up?"
 "He was too busy poking Dr. Lu," said Michael.  "We almost fell over them!  I felt an absolute Charlie!"
 "She was stung by a fly," I said.  "I was sucking the sting out."
 "Toby, dear, really," said Lady McGeorge.
 "You can ask her," I told Marcie.
 She looked at me.  Her eyes were incapable of total disbelief.
 "Oh, I'm sure she'll corroborate you, old man," said Michael.
 

Will You Please Fuck Off Part 1

Will You Please Fuck Off Part 2

Will You Please Fuck Off Part 3