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Tropic of Cancer
because by now it had become a standing joke between them — «Listen, Bessie, what about a quick lay? Just one little lay… no.» And when this had passed off in the usual manner he would add, in the same tone: «Well, what about him? Why don’t you give him a lay?»
The whole point about Bessie was that she couldn’t, or just wouldn’t, regard herself as a lay. She talked about passion, as if it were a brand new word. She was passionate about things, even a little thing like a lay. She had to put her soul into it.
«I get passionate too sometimes,» Van Norden would say.
«Oh, you,» says Bessie. «You’re just a worn-out satyr. You don’t know the meaning of passion. When you get an erection you think you’re passionate.»
«All right, maybe it’s not passion… but you can’t get passionate without having an erection, that’s true isn’t it?»
All this about Bessie, and the other women whom he drags to his rooms day in and out, occupies my thoughts as we walk to the restaurant. I have adjusted myself so well to his monologues that without interrupting my own reveries I make whatever comment is required automatically, the moment I hear his voice die out. It is a duet, and like most duets moreover in that one listens attentively only for the signal which announces the advent of one’s own voice. As it is his night off, and as I have promised to keep him company, I have already dulled myself to his queries. I know that before the evening is over I shall be thoroughly exhausted; if I am lucky, that is, if I can worm a few francs out of him on some pretext or other, I will duck him the moment he goes to the toilet. But he knows my propensity for slipping away, and, instead of being insulted, he simply provides against the possibility by guarding his sous. If I ask him for money to buy cigarettes he insists on going with me to purchase them. He will not be left alone, not for a second. Even when he has succeeded in grabbing off a woman, even then he is terrified to be left alone with her. If it were possible he would have me sit in the room while he puts on the performance. It would be like asking me to wait while he took a shave.
On his night off Van Norden generally manages to have at least fifty francs in his pocket, a circumstance which does not prevent him from making a touch whenever he encounters a prospect. «Hello,» he says, «give me twenty francs… I need it.» He has a way of looking panic-stricken at the same time. And if he meets with a rebuff he becomes insulting. «Well, you can buy a drink at least.» And when he gets his drink he says more graciously — «Listen give me five francs then… give me two francs…» We go from bar to bar looking for a little excitement and always accumulating a few more francs.
At the Coupole we stumble into a drunk from the newspaper. One of the upstairs guys. There’s just been an accident at the office, he informs us. One of the proofreaders fell down the elevator shaft. Not expected to live.
At first Van Norden is shocked, deeply shocked. But when he learns that it was Peckover, the Englishman, he looks relieved. «The poor bastard,» he says, «he’s better off dead than alive. He just got his false teeth the other day too…»
The allusion to the false teeth moves the man upstairs to tears. He relates in a slobbery way a little incident connected with the accident. He is upset about it, more upset about this little incident than about the catastrophe itself. It seems that Peckover, when he hit the bottom of the shaft, regained consciousness before anyone could reach him. Despite the fact that his legs were broken and his ribs busted, he had managed to rise to all fours and grope about for his false teeth. In the ambulance he was crying out in his delirium for the teeth he had lost. The incident was pathetic and ludicrous at the same time. The guy from upstairs hardly knew whether to laugh or to weep as he related it. It was a delicate moment because with a drunk like that, one false move and he’d crash a bottle over your skull. He had never been particularly friendly with Peckover — as a matter of fact, he had scarcely ever set foot in the proofreading department: there was an invisible wall like between the guys upstairs and the guys down below. But now, since he had felt the touch of death, he wanted to display his comradeship. He wanted to weep, if possible, to show that he was a regular guy. And Joe and I, who knew Peckover well and who knew also that he wasn’t worth a good goddamn, even a few tears, we felt annoyed with this drunken sentimentality. We wanted to tell him so too, but with a guy like that you can’t afford to be honest; you have to buy a wreath and go to the funeral and pretend that you’re miserable. And you have to congratulate him too for the delicate obituary he’s written. He’ll be carrying his delicate little obituary around with him for months, praising the shit out of himself for the way he handled the situation. We felt all that, Joe and I. without saying a word to each other. We just stood there and listened with a murderous, silent contempt. And as soon as we could break away we did so; we left him there at the bar blubbering to himself over his Pernod.
Once out of his sight we began to laugh hysterically. The false teeth! No matter what we said about the poor devil, and we said some good things about him too, we always came back to the false teeth. There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem. It’s no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity — you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going. And since we didn’t have to put on a false front we could laugh about the incident to our heart’s content. We laughed all night about it, and in between times we vented our scorn and disgust for the guys upstairs, the fatheads who were trying to persuade themselves, no doubt, that Peckover was a fine fellow and that his death was a catastrophe. All sorts of funny recollections came to our minds — the semicolons that he overlooked and for which they bawled the piss out of him. They made his life miserable with their fucking little semicolons and the fractions which he always got wrong. They were even going to fire him once because he came to work with a boozy breath. They despised him because he always looked so miserable and because he had eczema and dandruff. He was just a nobody, as far as they were concerned, but, now that he was dead, they would all chip in lustily and buy him a huge wreath and they’d put his name in big type in the obituary column. Anything to throw a little reflection on themselves; they’d make him out to be a big shit if they could. But unfortunately, with Peckover, there was little they could invent about him. He was a zero, and even the fact that he was dead wouldn’t add a cipher to his name.
«There’s only one good aspect to it,» says Joe. «You may get his job. And if you have any luck, maybe you’ll fall down the elevator shaft and break your neck too. We’ll buy you a nice wreath, I promise you that.»

Toward dawn we’re sitting on the terrasse of the Dôme. We’ve forgotten about poor Peckover long ago. We’ve had a little excitement at the Bal Nègre and Joe’s mind has slipped back to the eternal preoccupation: cunt. It’s at this hour, when his night off is almost concluded, that his restlessness mounts to a fever pitch. He thinks of the women he passed up earlier in the evening and of the steady ones he might have had for the asking, if it weren’t that he was fed up with them. He is reminded inevitably of his Georgia cunt — she’s been hounding him lately, begging him to take her in, at least until she can find herself a job. «I don’t mind giving her a feed once in a while,» he says, «but I couldn’t take her on as a steady thing… she’d ruin it for my other cunts.» What gripes him most about her is that she doesn’t put on any flesh. «It’s like taking a skeleton to bed with you,» he says. «The other night I took her on — out of pity — and what do you think the crazy bitch had done to herself? She. had shaved it clean… not a speck of hair on it. Did you ever have a woman who shaved her twat? It’s repulsive, ain’t it? And it’s funny, too. Sort of mad like. It doesn’t look like a twat any more: it’s like a dead clam or something.» He describes to me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and searched for his flashlight. «I made her

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because by now it had become a standing joke between them - "Listen, Bessie, what about a quick lay? Just one little lay… no." And when this had passed off