394
SUS A N
SON lAS
"And when he's thirty? Do you realize what an old bag youl
be?"
" It
doesn't matter," said Miss Flatface. "Let me be, both of you,
I beg you. I've done my duty. I had my pleasures. Now I
want
to be."
Suddenly Mr. Obscenity's knickers looked wrinkled and almud
in the bright sunshine. His monocle seemed grotesquely affected.
And
no one, but no one, wears a hat in Southern California, least of
aD
on a sunny early morning. Miss Flatface began to laugh.
10.
Mter only a few more months of second marriage, Miss
Flat·
face, still in the flower of her womanhood, became mortally
ill.
It
began as ptomaine poisoning, contracted just over the border,
in
Tijuana. As she had approached the aged vendor's cart, and
even
while she was chewing the tacos, a food she had never particularly
liked, the spirits of Margaret Fuller and Errol Flynn screamed
warn·
ings in her ears. But she hadn't heard them. Ever responsive to
the
American spirit in its broader manifestations, she had never
been
particularly attuned to its more direct signals. Arthur, on the other
hand, who never heard voices, had settled for a Pepsi.
Two weeks after she took to their Castro Convertible, sustained
by the best medical care the seamen's union could provide, she
be–
came delirious. Eyeing the grieving man slumped in a chair
by
her
side, she cried, "Jim, I didn't know that you were here!" Then,
with
just the slightest touch of insincerity: "It was grand of you to come!"
But it was not Jim. It was still Arthur. Faithfully, he nursed
her through the endless hours of bedpans and cups of
COllSOIIUllC
and damp washcloths laid on her still far from prominent features.
And although he was the one romance in her life, Miss Flatface
bare–
ly acknowledged Arthur's care. In a lucid interval, between deliriums,
she called for a lawyer and dictated her will. Even here, Arthur
wasn't mentioned. Miss Flatface did not take into account
the
present at all. Her mind, as she approached death, was unexpectedly
preempted by effusions of a patriotic nature, and with thoughts
of
her former husband and children. In the end, we all return to our
beginnings.
