“Nobody disputes the fact that you were ‘exploring the possibilities,’ Mr. Peepgass, and just what those ‘possibilities’ were is what we’re gonna get to.”

  Oh God, the tawdriness! The tawdriness!

  Peepgass stared helplessly into the smirking mug of Morton Tennenbaum, Esq., who was seated directly across the table from him, and wondered how Sirja had ever found this odious specimen of the DeKalb County bar … here in an office in a shopping mall off Decatur Road between a gift shop and a sporting-goods store that seemed to sell nothing but sneakers and violently patterned outfits for non-athletes to exercise in … The front half of the dome of Lawyer Tennenbaum’s skull was completely bald, but halfway back there rose up a stand of blackish-gray hair so thick, so wiry, so unruly, it looked like incoming surf. The man seemed to have only two expressions: Indignation and Contempt. This one was Contempt.

  Next to him sat the Finnish femme natale herself, although Peepgass tried his best not to look at her. He could no longer associate the individual across from him, this woman, with the raging lust that had impelled him to invite her to the Grand Tatar Hotel in Helsinki that night and engage in a fervent round of footsie under the tablecloth. Her astonishingly full head of blond hair, which had once swept him away in veritable typhoons of lust, now just made him wonder how she managed to frizz it up like that. Her big blue eyes, which he had once looked into to explore the very depths of Nordic love, now struck him as bugged-out, possibly from a thyroid condition. And those breasts … those obscenely enormous jugs … Even now, even at this lawyers’ deposition in which she was trying to portray herself as an innocent working girl from up near the Arctic Circle seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by a rich American banker, she couldn’t resist displaying her huge hooters under a satiny white blouse open almost down to there … How could he have ever buried his very head in those two pillows? They were grotesque, as if God, careless at the end of a busy day, had hung Isolde’s headlights on some scrawny little 105-pound bag of bird bones. Oh, the tawdriness … the tawdriness … Peepgass’s own lawyer, Alexander (Sandy) Dickens, seated right next to him, didn’t elevate the level of these proceedings, either, despite the fact that he came from an old Downtown law firm, Tripp, Snayer & Billings, and charged $400 an hour. Too late it had dawned on Peepgass that Tripp, Snayer didn’t regard paternity suits as a very classy business and had fobbed off one of the firm’s dim bulbs on him. Dickens was an obese, florid, rumpled, fortyish redhead who sat hunched over with the heel of his hand dug into the side of his fat face. He made a noise when he breathed. At the head of the table sat a solemn, apoplectic-faced, middle-aged man with a carefully combed-back head of grayish-brown hair. He was a so-called court reporter, a stenographer who was recording the deposition on a spindly stenotype machine. His expression was a florid blank, but the fact that he was going to hear and preserve all this stuff verbatim … Oh, the tawdriness, the tawdriness, the tawdriness, the tawdriness … Completing the picture was the room itself, a windowless box in the back with a flush door, covered in a lurid imitation-wood grain, that hung a half-inch short of the floor, so that Peepgass and everybody else at the table could hear the whimperings and fitful cries of Master Pietari Päivärinta Peepgass, whom the plaintiff in this suit had parked outside with some secretary or other while she laid siege to the assets of Raymond Peepgass.

  Morton Tennenbaum’s incoming surf kept rolling in. “So as a representative of PlannersBanc, one of the largest banks in the Southeast, you decided to invite to your hotel a twenty-seven-year-old Finnish notions buyer as an art consultant. Is that your testimony?”

  “No,” said Peepgass, “what I said was—”

  “That wasn’t his testimony,” said Sandy Dickens. It came out bored and slurred, since he didn’t bother removing his face from the heel of his hand.

  “Never mind,” said Tennenbaum, “I withdraw the question. Is it true, Mr. Peepgass, that you asked Sirja to bring along some slides of her own work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you think PlannersBanc might want to promote Miz Sirja Tiramaki, someone you had never heard of before, someone who painted at home—you thought PlannersBanc might want to select the work of this young woman for its ‘art program’?”

  “No—”

  “Or did you just want her to come on up and show you her etchings?”

  “I’m gonna object to that,” said Lawyer Dickens, still talking into the heel of his hand.

  “You don’t have to,” said Morton Tennenbaum, looking at Peepgass with a sneer. “The question answers itself. All right. The two of you are having dinner at the Grand Tatar. Did you have anything to drink?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you have?”

  “We had a drink called a bamboo cocktail.”

  Sirja scrunched up the tiny Finnish features of her face and began scribbling furiously on a pad and passed a note to Morton Tennenbaum. She and Peepgass had reached the stage, well known to divorce lawyers, in which the principals no longer speak to each other but only to the lawyers, to whom they pass notes, notes, and more notes, endless notes, exposing the mendacity and evasions of their erstwhile loved ones.

  The Incoming Surf read the note and said, “Both of you had bamboo cocktails?”

  “Yes”—although after he said it, Peepgass wasn’t absolutely sure that was true.

  Morton Tennenbaum arched his eyebrows in an ironic way. “All right. And what made you think you might like to have that particular drink, a bamboo cocktail?”

  Peepgass paused. He could see where it was all headed, and he didn’t want to go there. The red-faced court reporter had his fingers poised over his little machine, ready to record and write out every last sordid detail. Peepgass didn’t want to get into any of this, but Sandy Dickens had said he had no choice. Peepgass looked at Dickens anyway, halfway hoping he might change his mind and come to life and say, “I object.”

  “You don’t have to look at your attorney,” said Tennenbaum. “He can’t tell you why you wanted that drink.”

  Finally Peepgass said, “Miss Tiramaki recommended it.” Tennenbaum, in his tawdry way, insisted on calling his client Sirja. Peepgass was damned if he would.

  Miss Tiramaki went into a real fury of note writing.

  “Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Peepgass, that you asked Sirja what this drink on the menu was, this ‘bamboo cocktail,’ and that she merely described to you a local rural superstition, in response to your question?”

  “No, as I recall—”

  “All right, let’s stick with your recollection. According to your recollection, what was it that this bamboo cocktail had to recommend it?”

  Defeated, Peepgass said tonelessly, “It was made with a fertilized egg yolk in it instead of a maraschino cherry, and it was supposed to … enhance sexual energy.”

  “It was supposed to enhance sexual energy. And why did you like that idea so much at that point?”

  “I didn’t like it or dislike it,” said Peepgass. “It was just a … a … a novelty, as far as I was concerned.”

  “It was just a novelty as far as you were concerned.” Witheringly. Peepgass felt completely whipped. This was only a deposition, not yet a trial, and already he couldn’t take it. What did it matter whether she had started it or he had started it? It was all utterly cheap, sordid, and tawdry, either way. A paternity suit! Forty-six years old, he was, and drowning in a smelly little sexual cesspool, while the clock ticked and the worst lawyer at Tripp, Snayer leeched $400 an hour out of the pathetic remains of his resources.

  The Incoming Surf wouldn’t let up. He forced him to relive that entire meal at the Grand Tatar. Was he, Peepgass, really testifying, under oath, that it was she who had rubbed his leg under the table with her foot? That it was she who had told him it was too noisy in the dining room and that they needed to go someplace quieter to talk about Finnish art and look at her slides? That it was she who had suggested his suite? Peepgass barely bothered defending himself. He was too demoralized. He braced for the knockout punches he now knew were inevitable.

  “All right,” said Lawyer Tennenbaum, “and so then you led Sirja over to your king-size bed and you made love. Is that correct?”

  “I didn’t lead her—” But then he gave up. “Yes,” he said with an air of infinite resignation and an empty stare. Made love. What an absurd and sleazy concoction of words! Made what love? He had had an overwhelming, fiery, juvenile itch in his groin, and she had been only too happy to offer the big American banker her pelvic saddle to relieve it, that was all … Oh God, the tawdriness, the tawdriness … Then the Incoming Surf asked, “Did you use a condom?”

  Did I use a condom? Aghast, utterly humiliated by the very asking of the question, Peepgass turned to Lawyer Dickens for protection. Shield me! Help me! It can’t go this far! But Lawyer Dickens sat there with his fat red head lolling on the heel of his hand and rolled his eyes toward him with a look that said, “I already told you you’d have to answer such questions.”

  “Yes,” said Peepgass with a doomed tone.

  “Where’d you get it, Mr. Peepgass?”

  “Get it?”

  “The condom.”

  “The condom? I—I don’t remember.” Although of course he did. Every single nervous moment he had spent in the pharmacy of the Grand Tatar, before Sirja had arrived, purchasing the condoms and praying that the clerk, with her boyishly short blond hair, wouldn’t recognize him as a guest in the hotel—every single red-faced microsecond of it was stored away in his memory bank.

  “You don’t remember? Well, let’s think about it a moment … and try. Do you carry condoms with you wherever you go, in case these … ‘possibilities’ present themselves? Or does the Grand Tatar Hotel leave them on the bedside tables? Or what? It shouldn’t be very hard to remember.”

  Peepgass was speechless. His mind churned. The Sandy Dickens scenario … When the subject of the condom had come up, Lawyer Dickens had never asked him where he got the condom. No, instead he opened up a certain … avenue … He never suggested, in so many words, that he make up a little fib … but if in fact Sirja had happened to have arrived at the hotel with her own supply of condoms—and many young women apparently went about these days so equipped—then it would put the affair in a light advantageous to the defense … Peepgass’s brain churned and churned and churned—but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Exactly why, he couldn’t have explained to himself. God knew, Sirja had undertaken that romp on the bed with a lasciviousness that any hooker would have to go some to top. So what difference would it make if he insisted that she had brought the condoms? Psychologically it was true, wasn’t it? Nevertheless, he couldn’t bring himself to head down that avenue.

  The doomed man: “I just don’t remember.”

  Furious scribbling by Sirja; but Lawyer Tennenbaum didn’t look at her note. Instead, he made a little motion with his hand that said, “Relax.”

  “All right, Mr. Peepgass, we’ll leave it at that. A condom … materialized. We don’t know how, but there it is. We have a condom, and the two of you are on your king-size bed in your hotel suite …”

  Oh, the tawdriness! The tawdriness! On and on it went, until finally Lawyer Tennenbaum had finished with Peepgass and it was time for Lawyer Dickens to depose Sirja. Dickens straightened up and came alive at this point and proceeded to prove that he could be as odious as his counterpart. Tennenbaum at least had two expressions: Indignation and Contempt. Dickens had but one: Scorn. He stared out of a pair of puffy slits for eyes in a way that made clear his scorn for the selective memory of the plaintiff. He breathed audibly from beneath his layers of fat. He sighed with disgust. He asked her whether or not she had ever before met a strange man on an airplane and then joined him for dinner at his hotel.

  “No,” said Sirja, her thyrotic eyes flashing, “I was never doing that. Why you are asking me such things?”

  That dry, high-pitched Scandinavian chirp of hers … Her English, which was never really wrong and yet always off … Back then, on that first night at the Grand Tatar and in the months that followed, he had found her accent and her eccentric syntax so exotic, so alluring … Just hearing it over the telephone had made him think of … white nights! Northern Lights! Hot little Finnish bodies popping out of the Arctic snows! … He could remember feeling all that, but he could no longer imagine why … Christ, there was nothing even remotely alluring about that voice. Quite the opposite; it was brittle, it was bird-like, it was supremely annoying … Imagine having to spend a lifetime in a house listening to that voice torturing proper English usage in tiny, maddening ways minute after minute, hour after hour, month after month …

  Now Dickens was leading her through that dinner at the Grand Tatar. She was the one who had suggested to Mr. Peepgass that she come see him in his hotel to brief him on Finnish art, wasn’t she … She was the one who had initiated the footsie under the table with Mr. Peepgass. Was that not the case? … She was the one who had suggested going to Mr. Peepgass’s suite, wasn’t that the simple truth of the matter?

  No, no, and no. “I was speaking very much at dinner concerning Finnish art, but Raymond was speaking always concerning where am I living and am I having a boyfriend and these very much personal things.” Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp. She didn’t look at him, not even once.

  And then Dickens steered her up to that accursed suite in the Grand Tatar. And then to the matter of … the condom.

  “Now, Miss Tiramaki, who provided the condom?”

  Startled: “Who?” Hotly: “Raymond!” Peepgass hated the way she insisted on still referring to him as Raymond. Under the circumstances, wouldn’t Mr. Peepgass suffice? “Certainly I was not providing a condom!”

  “We’re only trying to establish the facts here, Miss Tiramaki. That’s the purpose of a deposition. I realize these are personal matters, but the nature of your suit makes them germane. Do you understand what I’m saying? Now I want you to tell me—we have this condom. Right?—I want you to tell me who put it on Mr. Peepgass.”

  “What?” Sirja’s face turned crimson. Her eyes bugged out alarmingly. Peepgass cringed. He wanted to evaporate, escape into the fourth dimension. How could Dickens bring this up? Why had he, Peepgass, ever been so gauche and gross as to even tell him about it? How could he have been so pointlessly graphic as to mention, by way of showing that Sirja had been the lust commando, the sexual predator that evening—how could he have gone so far as to tell his lawyer how she had insisted on putting the condom on him herself, rolling it down with much stroking and kneading and squeezing and kissing—yes! kissing!—until he thought he was going to burst—

  Just then, from the other side of the door with the fake veneer, a series of convulsive little sobs. A baby was beginning to cry. Peepgass glanced at Sirja. She sat bolt upright. The sobs suddenly cut off, but you could tell it was merely the prolonged, heart-stopping gasp in which the child struggles desperately to catch its breath in order to explode with an all-out bawl. The moment was rigid with suspense. Even Tennenbaum and Dickens looked toward the door. Would the kid ever get his breath or not? Sirja rose from her chair, her mouth open, her eyes wide.

  “Pavvy! Pavvy!” she cried. Her face was contorted. She rushed toward the door. “Pavvy!”

  By the time she reached the door, the child had managed to fill his lungs with air, and the full-fledged explosion had begun, and the crisis was over. That didn’t stop Sirja, of course. Just like that, she was through the door, and you could hear her clearly:

  “Oh, Pavvy, Pavvy, Pavvy, Pavvy!” Followed by something in Finnish that sounded like “Ah dotey dotey dotey ahda hiya dotey.”

  No longer the Finnish phallus condomizer; now the Eternal Mother.

  Oh yes, the crisis was over, but from that moment on Peepgass realized his goose was cooked. He didn’t stand a chance. The satyr, the rut boar, was up against the Eternal Mother, and the satyr would never win that contest, not in any DeKalb County court, not in any court anywhere. Not only that, he would lose even if he won. If this pathetic little drama, oozing with cheap lechery, was ever played out in an open courtroom … Suppose somehow his children got a snootful of these details? Suppose Betty did? Suppose anybody did? The very thought made him want to shrivel up and die.

  The door was open, and the baby’s bawling filled the premises of Morton Tennenbaum, shopping-mall attorney-at-law. Every time Master Pietari Päivärinta Peepgass turned off the squall long enough to take a breath, you could hear Sirja cooing away. Pavvy Pavvy Pavvy. Pavvy, she called him. Well, that was better than Peepsy or Little Peepgass … She was cooing to him in Finnish, but this boy was going to be a Georgia boy, Pavvy Peepgass of DeKalb County, with a hell of a pair of lungs and, Fate being as perverse as she was, a Cracker accent, in which he would tell the world:

  “I exist! I’m real! I’m not just a bad joke on a foolish middle-aged man! I eat—every day! I grow—and just try to stop me! I occupy space on this earth—and I will be heard from! And you will know my name!”

  How could this have come about out of white nights and Northern Lights, on PlannersBanc’s cuff, in Helsinki, Finland? He wouldn’t have a cent left after it was all over. He’d be lucky if he had a job. As it was, he’d had to tell the most pathetic lie to account for his absence from the bank this morning …

  The thought of impending poverty caused him to look at his watch: 10:50 a.m. They’d been in here almost an hour. Four hundred dollars’ worth of Lawyer Dickens that meant, with the clock still ticking, ticking, ticking, even while the Eternal Mother coos over the FinnoCracker-in-Embryo, and they hadn’t even reached the end of night one in Helsinki …

  He needed a new life. He needed a ton of money. That, in turn, made him think of Charlie Croker—which gave him his first spark of hope this entire morning. He had somehow mustered up the courage yesterday to go out to PDK with Zale and the rest of them to confront Croker and “arrest” the G-5, to use Lawyer Thorgen’s term for it. Right in front of his guests, too! People the likes of Herbert Richman, Beauchamp Knox, and Lettie Withers! Oh, it was outrageous, but he had stood his ground—or at least he hadn’t fled, as an urgent little voice inside him had advised him to do. And it had worked. True, one of the engines had “blown,” rather mysteriously, as soon as they tried to move the ship. Nevertheless, the G-5 and Croker’s beloved N. C. Wyeth painting were now PlannersBanc’s. They had the big boffster’s attention. If the G-5 could go—then so could his beloved plantation. By the time they made their offer to spare him utter ruin and humiliation in return for his handing over his deeds in lieu of foreclosure, tough old Charlie Croker would be … tenderized.