Robert Crews by Thomas Berger Page B

move vigorously as soon as he probed elsewhere. There were squirming beings in the thick of his scalp, in his facial and body hair, and in the farthest toes of his socks, none of which he could find when he went there. Little creatures strolled across his forehead and nose with the same impunity. They were gone before his hand reached them. He slapped himself violently, and whenever he did so, the other sounds of the night were instantly stilled. Could the entire world around him know, by this noise alone, that he alone was alien?
    Then the aggressors went too far. He was finally stung by a mosquito so voracious that it stayed at his blood till it was smashed dead there, and no sooner had it died than an entire flock, a cloud, of others descended on him. In a moment he was driven from the lean-to to look for the patch of clay, but though the night was dry enough, the moon was obscured and very little illumination was available. He had put out the fire with water, lest a spark ignite his nearby home while he slept. In the darkness he did not dare go far. He dipped some water from the pond and made ordinary mud from earth and smeared it on his exposed parts. He stuck his trouser ends in the socks and made sure the other garments were buttoned at throat and wrists.
    He returned to the lean-to and lay down again on the boughs, but as it dried the mud itched him and kept him from sleeping except in fits and starts, and when his stomach had recovered from the heaves he was hungrier than ever, though not for boiled minnows. He would have sold himself into slavery for a piece of bread—a loaf, a warm loaf, to be torn apart in great chunks, pushed into the mouth, and chewed. A character in a movie did that, but after only a gulp or two forgot about having starved for days, dropped the bread, and went about his business. This was not a French film or, like all the other characters, he would have taken food seriously. With French movies seen in America the subtitles permitted Crews to pretend he understood the dialogue, and everywhere in Paris he and his first wife stayed or ate or bought things, those who served them insisted on replying to Ardis in English, which was not charity but malice. His first wife was too proud to indicate as much to these tourist-spoiled functionaries, she being the sort who got satisfaction from reflecting that they surely did worse to others not fluent in the language, which in fact she was. As Crews was certainly not. But his own pride, though much feebler than hers, was such that he could not come clean on the matter, or in fact on much else. He was capable of admitting to himself that she was brighter than he, but could hardly do so to her, for she would use it against him. The real trouble was that she also had more money than he. They lived in Europe for a while. In the Tyrol, Ardis skied beautifully and he immediately broke his leg and spent the rest of the season at a tavern where expatriates spoke about the other foreign places they had tried and compared Davos with Cortina, St. Moritz with Kitzbühel, Rapallo with Dubrovnik, and Sardinia as opposed to certain little-known isles of Greece. Crews thought he might earn her approbation by mastering German, but of course he did not keep up with his lessons, and anyway Ardis said he spoke like he was chewing excrement. Her foul mouth was incongruous in such a precisely made person, physically incapable of gracelessness. She was a superb horsewoman and as a teenager could have been an Olympian in dressage, but as soon as she was seriously threatened by the possibility of an actual accomplishment, she fled elsewhere, as if in embarrassment with her near failure of taste. They had married young, so young for Crews that he still believed he might eventually do something with himself, like sell wine or high-performance cars. In those days he was relatively sober until nightfall and would even from time to time put in a few teetotaling days to clean out