In the Secret Parts of Fortune
by Kevin P. Keating

My two schoolfellows,
Whom I will trust as I will adders fanged.
— Hamlet, Act III, scene 4

i

I want from the very outset to establish the fact that it was Elsie, not I, who decided that Gonzago must die. On those nights when she let me visit her bed, Elsie chased the dog from the house, mainly because she couldn’t stomach the animal’s crude pantomime of our twice-monthly romps. It used to stare at us while we made love, panting to the irregular rhythm of the bedsprings, swabbing its own genitalia with a dripping, lolling tongue of magnificent reach and precision, growling and gnashing its teeth whenever I unleashed my ridiculous yowls of rapture into the pillow. Elsie became suspicious. Conspiracy was in the air. She believed the Great Dane was only playing the part of voyeur. Its true intention, she insisted, was to carefully observe everything that went on in the house while its master was away on business and to reenact it all for him upon his return.

I wondered, not without a little self-pity, how the simple perversions of a dirty old dog and the delusions of a half-mad woman, whose bookshelves were crammed with paperbacks on astrology and ESP and self-hypnosis, could continually thwart my modest ambitions — love and frustration, the sad little ritual of a middle-aged man — but by then I’d come to accept the fact that when great sums of money were at stake, paranoia was to be expected.

“Oh, just listen to that damned animal,” Elsie hissed. “He’s laughing at us.”

She sat up in bed and, despite my protestations, pulled the sheets over the surgically altered breasts that she’d received as an anniversary gift from — or for? — her husband and the warm treasure trove between her legs that I’d lovingly nicknamed Graymalkin. A positively criminal act, concealing those things from me. Her purpose on this earth was to remain forever naked. Nudity suited her, she was born for it. Sometimes I was amazed that she had borne a son, heir apparent to a vast fortune.

With a heavy sigh I climbed out of bed and, bare-assed, dong dangling, walked over to the window. Outside, Gonzago stopped barking and started to sniff around the backyard.

“They share this really weird form of telepathic communication,” Elsie whispered, her voice colored by panic. There was a small gap in her teeth that made her look like the Wife of Bath, so saucy and licentious. Soft indigo notes whistled from her lips, the lovely aria of a woman, still gorgeous at forty, afraid of being found out. “They each know what the other is thinking. I’m not exactly sure how it works but it’s horrifying. Gonzago gives me these dirty looks. And now I think Derek knows what’s been going on.”

One thing was certain: Gonzago’s telepathic powers didn’t work on Elsie, otherwise he would have had the good sense to dash into the woods behind the house, never to return. Maybe like me (indeed, like many males in general), Gonzago couldn’t understand the meaning of the heavy crepuscular clouds billowing from the long dormant volcano that was a woman’s soul, and certainly Elsie’s soul was more inscrutable than most; in fact, it was the only modest thing about her, veiled from top to bottom like an ashen faced novitiate in a nunnery — solemn, unsullied, impenetrable.

“I have an idea,” she said distantly, as though in a trance. “We’ll poison it. No one ever performs an autopsy on a dog.” She assumed the unflappable pose of a Buddhist monk deep in meditation, hands resting on her knees, palms facing up so the energy of the cosmos could filter through her fingertips and seep into the claustrophobic confines of her brain where her thoughts pulsed and blinked and flickered in an interminable Dark Age. I knew her capacities, her limitations. Love had not deluded me that much.

“Why don’t you take Gonzago to the vet?” I suggested, reaching for a cigarette on the nightstand, grateful for her insatiable oral fixation. “Have him put to sleep. Easy. Done and over with.”

“No, the dog must be buried in the backyard.”

“Just ask the vet for the remains after the job is done.”

“The vet won’t hand over the carcass. There’s a city ordinance. Owners can’t bury their pets in the backyard.”

“Cremation then. Give Derek a pretty urn when he gets back from Denmark. He can keep his beloved Gonzago in the study, on the mantel below the portrait of his son.”

“Cremation? Never. He’d consider it a sacrilege. I’ve seen elaborate funeral services for animals. Coffins, headstones, string quartets playing a dirge. He’ll even round up some goddamn priest to consecrate the grave. It’s all quite illegal of course but that’s what Derek would want for his best friend.”

I bristled. “Best friend…Well, I hardly think a priest would consent to something like that.”

“You’re wrong. Derek knows people. He has a lot of pull in this town. He gave one hundred thousand dollars to that Jesuit high school.”

Now Elsie was being deliberately cruel.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “Our alma mater.”

As boys, Derek and I sat through many lectures together, fire and brimstone exhortations on Cain and Abel, but while I succeeded at my studies, Derek proved a complete mediocrity, always struggling to earn a C average. To his credit, it didn’t take him long to overcome the greatest obstacle to an American’s sense of accomplishment--how to start off with absolutely nothing and quickly build an enviable fortune. By the time he was thirty he owned a sprawling estate in Avon with a pool and grotto, a tennis court and putting green, stables with horses that he showed at state fairs, impeccably groomed Danish Warmbloods that whinnied and kicked at my approach, as if sniffing out my betrayal and my dark purpose.

Here was a tiny fiefdom ruled by a petty dictator whose throne could so very easily be usurped, but with an almost uncanny prescience, Derek knew what his rival’s next move would be and how to outmaneuver him. I had nothing to fear. At forty Derek was still very much a child, a sensualist, blinded by the disease of egotism. He never suspected a thing, the fool, and every time he bragged about his peccadilloes in Denmark I relayed the information to Elsie, felt it was my duty to do so. I was the best man at their wedding after all, I was also the one who warned her not to sign the prenup, and over the years she’d offered occasional rewards for my loyalty to her.

Now, I watched as she crawled out of bed and sauntered over to the window. “Darling, just think of it,” she said, kissing my chest, my stomach, sinking slowly to her knees. “With Gonzago dead and cold in the ground we’ll finally know tranquility, spiritual release. La petite mort.”

I shuddered and groaned and, eager to pour forth an abundance of my love and adoration, found myself clutching the back of her head, wrapping her long hair in my fingers. The finish was inevitable, I grunted with the effort of it, but now Gonzago, sensing an opportunity to make more mischief, lifted his mud encrusted snout and howled at us with mad laughter. In a rage Elsie bit down hard, out of instinct I’m sure, and as I writhed on the floor, squealing like misfortunate Abelard de-cocked for his grievous sins, I resolved through my tears to take a swift and murderous course of action.

ii

If Derek had one weakness (he had many, naturally, but I’m not the sort to tells tales) it was that, in the process of amassing his great wealth, he’d grown bored of his wife. While in Europe, where he conducted his shady business transactions as the international distributor of fine leather goods under the name Jacobi Enterprises (gloves embroidered with gemstones were his specialty), he frequented exclusive bordellos and other high dollar dens of iniquity recommended by the smarmy black market racketeers who offered him reasonable prices on smuggled diamonds and sapphires, not to mention his choice of freshly deloused and desperate nymphets imported from developing countries.

Neglected and alone, Elsie turned to her husband’s best friend, a pathetic pencil pusher who for fifty weeks out of the year toiled away in a small windowless office near the airport, writing operating manuals for commercial vacuum cleaners imported from China, a man who in his spare time read and re-read Nabokov and Shakespeare and who’d become so utterly incapable of meeting single ladies — why? because he was just a little too soft in the middle, “portly” some might say, “slovenly” even — that he allowed himself to be seduced by the wrong woman.

I never understood what Elsie saw in me. Unlike Derek, I had neither the eye nor the income for shirts with French cuffs and silk ties from Hermes and handcrafted shoes from Bologna, Italy. He had his nails manicured once a week and his teeth whitened twice a year. From the looks of it he had his stiff curlicues and great swoops of hair sculpted by Rodin. His pompadour reminded me of the Gates of Hell. He teased me endlessly about the coffee stains on my sleeves, the crumbs at the corners of my mouth. He even had the audacity to ask me when I was going to slim down and join him on one of his excursions through Copenhagen’s red light district.

“It’s not Amsterdam, of course, but it’s adequate and clean enough,” he said. “The prostitutes aren’t very picky, but they do detest fat Americans.”

We sat in his study where we smoked cigars and sipped absinthe by the fire. “Ah, now that’s wormwood,” he said, gazing into his glass.

Above the mantle hung a portrait of his son, Derek, Jr., a handsome boy, a bit small for his age maybe, but well built, lean and muscular, his body language languid, stealthy, almost cat-like. He was quiet, contemplative, painfully shy, not at all athletic. He spent most of his time roaming around the garden, reading far too many books, studying birds and insects and flowers, carefully observing the behavior of his parents. Gonzago seemed to be his only friend. Since I was like an uncle to him, I always offered my counsel, and he confided in me that his ambition in life was to become a great playwright. His father was furious when I told him. A life of the mind was something he could not tolerate (“Reading and writing…why, he’s just like a little girl”) and so after a little negotiating with Elsie he had the boy shipped off to a boarding school for trust fund kids in the remote hills of Appalachia.

“It’s the finest boy’s academy in the Midwest,” Derek said. “Idyllic, you know. Clean mountain air, lots of physical activity. Just what the boy needs. Besides, I dislike having to play the role of father.”

“And with your son out of the way,” I said, “you’ll have plenty of time to pursue other…pastimes.”

Derek smiled. His soul was sheathed in barnacles. His eyes, black as long stretches of infinite space, sucked in and destroyed light like a singularity. He crushed out the nub of his cigar and raised his glass as though proposing a toast.

“Maybe it’s time I finally got rid of my starter wife, eh? I can only hope someone will take her off my hands.”

iii

Before sending me out into the night, Elsie consulted her dog-eared books of black magic and on a notepad in red ink scratched a cryptic formula: (CH3)3SiCN. Then she mixed several powders with a spoon and, after murmuring some mumbo jumbo over a small glass vial that glimmered in the candlelight, regarded me with as grave an expression as I’d ever seen from her.

“You know what to do, right?” Her voice trembled with anticipation. “A few drops will do the trick. The poison works quickly.”

That she kept poison on her nightstand didn’t surprise me much, and I dared not ask how she obtained it — beautiful women have their ways, I’m content to leave it at that — but I was a little concerned for my own safety. What if, prior to a night of passion, she accidentally mistook the poison for perfume? Should my rapacious lips taste the deadly distilment that she dabbed behind her ears and between her breasts and around Graymalkin’s soft coat, I would be sent on a one-way trip to the undiscovered country.

She kissed me for luck and as I padded across the backyard and searched for Gonzago, who must have been hiding behind one of the giant ghoul-faced topiaries that ringed the property like the gargoyles on the cornices of a cathedral, my bare toes sank slowly into a lumpy pile of shit dumped intentionally in a strategic spot near the door. I cried out in revulsion and despair, and when I heard Gonzago’s unmistakable laughter, an abrupt bark that sounded like a man coughing into a closed fist, I became more determined than ever to pour the poison down his throat.

From behind a tree I spied him scratching at the soft earth like some infernal gravedigger, not to uncover the bones of the luckless squirrels and rabbits he had brutally mangled then buried with the jittery backward glances of an assassin but to uncover the million subtle odors locked away in the soil, the fleshy green leaves transformed over the long winter into a brown soup that sent up fingers of steam into the evening cold, eons of carnage carefully concealed by the moribund bouquet of nature. I couldn’t quite comprehend the fact that one day I, too, would be a part of that corrupt odor, my lingering stench the last trace of an existence that failed to leave a more lasting mark on the world. The worms would have at me, my flesh would turn to mush. Ultimately, my bloated carcass might make a fine meal for a slobbering beast like Gonzago. For this reason I wanted to be interred in the deepest catacombs of a medieval monastery where despite the anonymity of my jumbled bones there might at leas be a small chance that my skull, polished smooth by the dripping limestone walls, would become a memento mori, a paperweight for the manuscripts of some literary genius who decides to smuggle it out of the tomb and place it on the corner of his desk.

Seeing an opportunity to finish off the dog once and for all, I crouched behind the tree, ready to lunge at him, but Gonzago sensing danger pricked up his ears and dashed back to the house where he disappeared through the door. In my haste, I must have left it ajar. Quickly scraping the ghastly crap from the bottom of my foot, I tiptoed into the foyer and whispered the mongrel’s cursed name. If he raced upstairs and leapt into bed with Elsie I was done for. To my relief, I found him in the study, panting before the arras that Derek had purchased for Elsie as a wedding engagement gift many years ago, a large ostentatious tapestry depicting a sorceress with meaty shanks sitting before a cauldron in a castle tower.

On the floor next to the leather armchair was a silver dog bowl. With a smile of triumph I poured the poison into the bowl--one, two, three drops--and watched Gonzago eagerly lap it up like a king drinking from his favorite chalice.

To celebrate my victory I went to the liquor cabinet and helped myself to a snifter of absinthe. With bottle in hand, I collapsed on the leather armchair and gazed dreamily at the dog.

“That’s right,” I said. “Drink deep before you depart.”

iv

How much time elapsed before Gonzago actually died I cannot say, he made no sound at all, no strangled howls of torment, but at some point in the night I set my glass down on the table beside the vial of poison and, when I turned around, saw him sprawled across the rug, motionless, tongue hanging from the corner of his mouth, eyes bulging from his skull. In that alien silence devoid of the dog’s wicked laughter, I clutched my head, rubbed my eyes, felt the absinthe cascade over the deep fissures of my brain.

“Dear Gonzago,” I choked. “I would never harm an animal, not intentionally at least.”

As a boy growing up in the small college town of Stratford, Ohio, I owned a one-eyed cat named Hecuba (my mother was a professor of mythology), and when the cat died (tractor trailer, rush hour) I barricaded myself in the basement of our Victorian house on the edge of campus and wept for hours among the stacks of moldering books and crates of neglected term papers. Maybe a good father-son talk would have straightened me out, given me some perspective on this little tragedy, but Dad was no longer in the picture, and Mother was so unnerved by my inconsolable blubbering that she insisted I receive professional help.

“Twelve-year old boys shouldn’t cry when the cat dies.” With her arms crossed and foot drumming against the cold white hospital tiles, she seemed prepared to bully the doctor into diagnosing me with a whole slew of disorders. “He’s not homosexual, is he?” To my ears the question sounded like a rhetorical one.

From the moment we walked into his office I could tell the doctor found Mother just as intimidating as I did and wanted to get rid of us as quickly as possible. “Perhaps,” he said, tugging nervously at the tip of his Vandyke beard, “he suffers from emotional dysregulation…as the result of low self-esteem?” The standard diagnosis for boys of that tender age, I’m sure, but Mother wasn’t satisfied. She wanted to hear the word “abnormal” and spent the better part of my emasculated pubescence shopping around for a doctor who was not too proud to use it.

Now, as I sat in the study, I turned to the portrait of Derek, Jr., gazed into his sensitive blue eyes, and wondered how the boy would take the news of his best friend’s demise. There was a distinct possibility that in his unbearable grief he might flee from that faraway boarding school, scale the fence in the middle of the night, hitchhike along those lonely Ohio roads, and arrive back here at Stratford only to dig up the corpse and rock it back and forth in his arms. “Why?” he would whisper, trying but unable to grasp the enormity of his loss. “Why? Why?”

To comfort him I would rub his shoulders and say, “Yes, dear boy, why indeed?”

Because asking why — why this course of action and not some other — well, those were the kinds of questions boys of his breeding often asked, boys who clung to the understanding that one day they would come into money and possessions. How they abhorred change, these trust fund kids, resisted it, had no intention of ever facing life’s rampant dangers, and when life veered radically from the formulaic script they’d carefully created for themselves they were always stunned, offended, vindictive even, never realizing that in this world nothing was permanent or predictable. Erosion took its toll on all things, revealed complex rows of strata and substrata below the mundane surface. Over the slow course of time the souls of these sheltered boys, petrified like fossils encased in layers of stone, were finally exposed, extracted, put on display for all to see.

Change was the one inescapable circumstance that united rich and poor alike, and Derek, Jr., bowing before the majesty of death for the first time, would soon discover that only by practicing the subtle arts of self-deception — romance, family, friendship — could he hope to insulate himself from the mindless cosmic constant that transformed us all into unidentifiable heaps of dust and bones.

v

Though I have never been a superstitious man and have always made a friend of reason and logic, I decided that it was probably best to bury Gonzago before joining Elsie in her warm bed and sating myself on love. To let him rot in the open air seemed an invitation to allow his dumb slobbering spirit to haunt my dreams, but as I dragged his stinking carcass across the yard I experienced a moment of startling clarity: the branches of elms and maples clattered above my head, the moon drifted behind a cloud, the crickets chirped and then quieted, in short the globe continued to spin in its usual manner. Nothing had changed. After finding a freshly planted bed of chrysanthemums in need of fertilizing, I grabbed a spade from the tool shed and went to work, digging a doghouse that would last Gonzago till doomsday. The earth was soft and warm. The worms were patiently waiting. I rolled the corpse into the pit, filled in the hole, and then, out of human decency, placed a flower at the head of the grave.

Exhausted and drunk, I threw down the spade and returned to the house. Before heading upstairs I paused in the study, taking one last look around. The bottle of absinthe and vial of poison were still on the table beside the armchair. My heart started to pound. In the darkness I could almost hear Derek’s voice, his raucous laughter, his condescending remarks about my weight. He was like a ghost about the place, and a strange feeling came over me then, one that has haunted me for quite some time now. I had the unmistakable sensation that I was not, and perhaps had never been, the protagonist of this play but merely a supporting player in a much larger drama, one who appeared briefly on stage to recite a few modest lines before retreating to the wings to wait for the spectacular, dazzling, grisly finish.

From the top of the stairs Elsie called my name and I jumped.

“Claude, darling, is everything alright?”

“Yes, Elsie, everything is fine.”

“Well, hurry up. I’m lonely.”

“Yes, yes, coming.”

In her voice I detected more than impatience and exasperation, things I’d come to expect from her, but an unspoken command to fulfill her dark desire, oh, but I was drunk, so very drunk, and without giving it a moment’s thought I poured three drops of poison into the bottle of absinthe, not enough to do any harm really, just enough to coarse through the sinister alleys of Derek’s soul and make him nauseous when he returned home from Denmark. Quietly, almost reverentially, I placed the bottle of absinthe in its proper place in the liquor cabinet, then in a voice solemn and clear spoke the little Latin I could still recall from my dark days as a schoolboy with the Jesuits.

“Consummatum est”…though in truth it was a consummation devoutly to be wished.