You Must Remember This

It is dark in Rick's apartment. Black-leader dark, heavy and abstract, silent but for a faint hoarse crackle like a voiceless plaint and brief as sleep. Then Rick opens the door and the light from the hall scissors in like a bellboy to open up space, deposit surfaces (there is a figure in the room), harbinger event (it is Ilsa). Rick follows, too preoccupied to notice: His café is closed, people have been shot, he has troubles. But then, with a stroke, he lights a small lamp (such a glow! The shadows retreat, everything retreats: Where are the walls?), and there she is, facing him, holding open the drapery at the far window like the front of a nightgown, the light flickering upon her white but determined face like static. Rick pauses for a moment in astonishment. Ilsa lets the drapery and its implications drop, takes a step forward into the strangely fretted light, her eyes searching his.

"How did you get in?" he asks, though this is probably not the question on his mind.

"The stairs from the street."

This answer seems to please him. He knows how vulnerable he is; after all, it's the way he lives--his doors are open, his head is bare, his tuxedo jacket is snowy white--that's not important. What matters is that by (continued on page 290)You Must Remember This(continued from page 234) such a reply, a kind of destiny is being fulfilled. Sam has a song about it. "I told you this morning you'd come around," Rick says, curling his lips as if to advertise his appetite for punishment, "but this is a little ahead of schedule." She faces him squarely, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, a sash around her waist like a gun belt, something shiny in her tensed left hand. He raises both of his own, as if to show they are empty: "Well, won't you sit down?"

His offer, whether in mockery or no, releases her. Her shoulders dip in relief, her breasts, she sweeps forward (it is only a small purse she is carrying: a toothbrush, perhaps, cosmetics, her hotel key), her face softening: "Richard!" He starts back in alarm, hands moving to his hips. "I had to see you!"

She takes a deep breath, presses her lips together and, clutching her tiny purse with both hands, wheels about to pursue him: "Richard!" This has worked before, it works again; he turns to face her new approach: "We luffed each other once...." Her voice catches in her throat, tears come to her eyes. She is beautiful there in the slatted shadows, her hair loosening around her ears, eyes glittering, throat bare and vulnerable in the open V-neck of her ruffled blouse. She's a good dresser. Even that little purse she squeezes: so like the other one, so lovely, hidden away. She shakes her head slightly in wistful appeal: "If those days meant ... anything at all to you...."

"I wouldn't bring up Paris if I were you," he says stonily. "It's poor salesmanship."

She gasps (she didn't bring it up: Is he a madman?), tosses her head back: "Please! Please listen to me!" She closes her eyes, her lower lip pushed forward as though bruised. "If you knew what really happened; if you only knew the truth!"

He stands over this display, as impassive as a Moorish executioner (That's it! He's turning into one of these bloody Arabs, she thinks). "I wouldn't believe you, no matter what you told me," he says. In Ethiopia, after an attempt on the life of an Italian officer, he saw 1600 Ethiopians get rounded up one night and shot in reprisal. Many were friends of his--or clients, anyway. But somehow her deceit is worse. "You'd say anything now to get what you want." Again he turns his back on her, strides away.

He turns toward her but pulls up short, squints: She has drawn a revolver on him. So much for toothbrushes and hotel keys. "All right. I tried to reason with you. I tried effrything. Now I want those letters." Distantly, a melodic line suggests a fight for love and glory, an ironic case of do or die. "Get them for me."

"I don't have to." He touches his jacket. "I got 'em right here."

"Put them on the table."

He smiles and shakes his head. "No." Smoke curls up from the cigarette he is holding at his side, like the steam that enveloped the five-o'clock train to Marseilles. Her eyes fill with tears. Even as she presses on ("For the last time ...!"), she knows that no is final. There is, behind his ironic smile, a profound sadness, the fatalistic survivor's wistful acknowledgment that, in the end, the fundamental things apply. Time, going by, leaves nothing behind, not even moments like this. "If Victor Laszlo and the cause mean so much to you," he says, taunting her with her own uncertainties, "you won't stop at anything...."

He seems almost to recede. The cigarette disappears, the smoke. His sorrow gives way to something not unlike eagerness. "All right, I'll make it easier for you," he says and walks toward her. "Go ahead and shoot. You'll be doing me a favor."

She seems taken aback, her eyes damp, her lips swollen and parted. Light licks at her face. He gazes steadily at her from his superior moral position, smoke drifting up from his hand once more, his white tuxedo pressed against the revolver barrel. Her eyes close as the gun lowers, and she gasps his name: "Richard!" It is like an invocation. Or a profession of faith. "I tried to stay away," she sighs. She opens her eyes, peers up at him in abject surrender. A tear moves slowly down her cheek toward the corner of her mouth, like secret writing. "I thought I would neffer see you again ... that you were out off my life...." She blinks, cries out faintly--"Oh!"--and (he seems moved at last, his mask of disdain falling away like perspiration) turns away, her head wrenched to one side as though in pain.

Stricken with concern, or what looks like concern, he steps up behind her, clasping her breasts with both hands, nuzzling in her hair. "The day you left Paris ...!" she sobs, though she seems unsure of herself. One of his hands is already down between her legs, the other inside her blouse, pulling a breast out of its brassiere cup. "If you only knew ... what I...." He is moaning, licking at one ear, the hand between her legs nearly lifting her off the floor, his pelvis bumping at her buttocks. "Is this ... right?" she gasps.

"I--I don't know!" he groans, massaging her breast, the nipple between two fingers. "I can't think!"

"But ... you must think!" she cries, squirming her hips. Tears are streaming down her cheeks now. "For ... for...."

"What?" he gasps, tearing her blouse open, pulling on her breast as though to drag it over her shoulder where he might kiss it. Or eat it: He seems ravenous.

"I ... I can't remember!" she sobs. She reaches behind to jerk at his fly (what else is she to do, for the love of Jesus?), then rips away her sash, unfastens her skirt, her fingers trembling.

"Holy shit!" he wheezes, pushing his hand inside her girdle as her skirt falls. His cheeks, too, are wet with tears. "Ilsa!"

"Richard!"

They fall to the floor, grabbing and pulling at each other's clothing. He's trying to get her bra off, which is tangled up now with her blouse; she's struggling with his belt, yanking at his black pants, wrenching them open. Buttons fly, straps pop; there's the soft, unfocused rip of silk, the jingle of buckles and falling coins, grunts, gasps, whimpers of desire. He strips the tangled skein of underthings away (all these straps and stays--how does she get in and out of this crazy elastic?); she works his pants down past his bucking hips, fumbles with his shoes. "Your elbow!"

"Mmmff!"

"Ah!"

She pulls his pants and boxer shorts off, crawls round and (he strokes her shimmering buttocks, swept by the light from the airport tower, watching her full breasts sway above him; it's all happening so fast, he'd like to slow it down, repeat some of the better bits--that view of her rippling haunches on her hands and knees just now, for example: like a 22, his lucky number--but there's a great urgency on them, they can't wait) straddles him, easing him into her like a train being guided into a station. "I luff you, Richard!" she declares breathlessly, though she seems to be speaking, eyes squeezed shut and breasts heaving, not to him but to the ceiling, if there is one up there. His eyes, too, are closed now, his hands gripping her soft hips, pulling her down, his breath coming in short, anguished snorts, his face puffy and damp with tears. There is, as always, something deeply wounded and vulnerable about the expression on his battered face, framed there against his Persian carpet: Rick Blaine, a man annealed by loneliness and betrayal, but flawed--hopelessly, it seems--by hope itself. He is, in the tragic sense, a true revolutionary: His gaping mouth bespeaks this, the spittle in the corners of his lips, his eyes, open now and staring into some infinite distance not unlike the future, his knitted brow. He heaves upward, impaling her to the very core: "Oh, Gott!" she screams, her back arching, mouth agape as though to commence La Marseillaise.

Now, for a moment, they pause, feeling themselves thus conjoined, his organ luxuriating in the warm tub of her vagina, her enflamed womb closing around his pulsing penis like a mother embracing a lost child. "If you only knew ..." she seems to say, though perhaps she has said this before and only now it can be heard. He fondles her breasts; she rips his shirt open, strokes his chest, leans forward to kiss his lips, his nipples. This is not Victor inside her, with his long, thin rapier, all too rare in its embarrassed visits; this is not Yvonne, with her cunning professional muscles, her hollow airy hole. This is love in all its clammy mystery, the ultimate connection, the squishy rub of truth, flesh as a self-consuming message. This is necessity, as in woman needs man and man must have his mate. Even their identities seem to be dissolving; they have to whisper each other's names from time to time as though in recitative struggle against some ultimate enchantment from which there may be no return. Then, slowly, she begins to wriggle her hips above him, he to meet her gentle undulations with counterthrusts of his own. They hug each other close, panting, her breasts smashed against him, moving only from the waist down. She slides her thighs between his and squeezes his penis between them, as though to conceal it there, an underground member on the run, wounded but unbowed. He lifts his stockinged feet and plants them behind her knees as though in stirrups, her buttocks above pinching and opening, pinching and opening like a suction pump. And it is true about her vaunted radiance: She seems almost to glow from within, her flexing cheeks haloed in their own dazzling luster.

"It feels so good, Richard! In there.... I've been so--ah!--so lonely!"

"Yeah, me, too, kid. Ngh! Don't talk!"

She slips her thighs back over his and draws them up beside his waist like a child curling around her Teddy bear, knees against his ribs, her fanny gently bobbing on its pike like a mind caressing a cherished memory. He lies there passively for a moment, stretched out, eyes closed, accepting this warm rhythmical ablution as one might accept a nanny's teasing bath, a mother's care (a care, he's often said, denied him), in all its delicious innocence--or seemingly so: In fact, his whole body is faintly atremble, as though, with great difficulty, shedding the last of its pride and bitterness, its isolate neutrality. Then, slowly, his own hips begin to rock convulsively under hers, his knees to rise in involuntary surrender. She tongues his ear, her buttocks thumping more vigorously now, kisses his throat, his nose, his scarred lip, then rears up, arching her back, tossing her head back (her hair is looser now, wilder; a flush has crept into the distinctive pallor of her cheeks and throat, and what was before a fierce determination is now raw intensity, what vulnerability now a slack-jawed abandon), plunging him in more deeply than ever, his own buttocks bouncing up off the floor as though trying to take off like the next flight to Lisbon--"Gott in Himmel, this is fonn!" she cries. She reaches behind her back to clutch his testicles, he clasps her hand in both of his, his thighs spread, she falls forward, they roll over, he's pounding away now from above (he lacks her famous radiance; if anything, his buttocks seem to suck in light, drawing a nostalgic murkiness around them like night fog, signaling a fundamental distance between them, and an irresistible attraction), she's clawing at his back under the white jacket, at his hips, his thighs, her voracious nether mouth leaping up at him from below and sliding back, over and over, like a frantic greased-pole climber. Faster and faster they slap their bodies together, submitting to this fierce rhythm as though to simplify themselves, emitting grunts and whinnies and helpless little farts, no longer Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund but some nameless conjunction somewhere between them, time, space, being itself getting redefined by the rapidly narrowing focus of their incandescent passion; then, suddenly, Rick rears back, his face seeming to puff out like a gourd, Ilsa cries out and kicks upward, crossing her ankles over Rick's clenched buttocks; for a moment they seem almost to float, suspended, unloosed from the earth's gravity, and then--whumpf!--they hit the floor again, their bodies continuing to hammer together, though less regularly, plunging, twitching, prolonging this exclamatory dialog, drawing it out even as the intensity diminishes, even as it becomes more a declaration than a demand, more an inquiry than a declaration. Ilsa's feet uncross, slide slowly to the floor. "Fooff ... Gott!" They lie there, cheek to cheek, clutching each other tightly, gasping for breath, their thighs quivering with the last involuntary spasms, the echoey reverberations, deep in their loins, of pleasure's fading blasts.

"Jesus," Rick wheezes, "I've been saving that one for a goddamn year and a half!"

"It was the best fokk I ever have had," Ilsa replies with a tremulous sigh and kisses his ear, runs her fingers in his hair. He starts to roll off her, but she clasps him closely: "No ... wait!" A deeper, thicker pleasure, not so ecstatic yet somehow more moving, seems to well up from far inside her to embrace the swollen visitor snuggled moistly in her womb, once a familiar friend, a comrade loved and trusted, now almost a stranger, like one resurrected from the dead.

"Ah!" he gasps. God, it's almost like she's milking it! Then she lets go, surrounding him spongily with a kind of warm, wet, pulsating gratitude. "Ah...."

He lies there between Ilsa's damp, silky thighs, feeling his weight thicken, his mind soften and spread. His will drains away as if it were some kind of morbid affection, lethargy overtaking him like an invading army. Even his jaw goes slack, his fingers (three sprawl idly on a dark-tipped breast) limp. He wears his snowy-white tuxedo jacket still, his shiny black socks, which, together with the parentheses of Ilsa's white thighs, make his melancholy buttocks--beaten in childhood, lashed at sea, run lean in union skirmishes, sunburned in Ethiopia and shot at in Spain--look gloomier than ever, swarthy and self-pitying, agape now with a kind of heroic sadness. A violent tenderness. These buttocks are, it could be said, what the pose of isolation looks like at its best: proud, bitter, mournful and, as the prefect of police might have put it, tremendously attractive. Although his penis has slipped out of its vaginal pocket to lie limply like a fat little toe against her pursing lips, she clasps him close still, clinging to something she cannot quite define, something like a spacious dream of freedom, or a monastery garden, or the discovery of electricity. "Do you have a gramophone on, Richard?"

"What?" Her question has startled him. His haunches snap shut, his head rears up; snorting, he seems to be reaching for the letters of transit. "Ah ... no...." He relaxes again, letting his weight fall back, though sliding one thigh over hers now, stretching his arms out as though to un-kink them, turning his face away. His scrotum bulges up on her thigh like an emblem of his serenity and generosity, all too often concealed, much as an authentic decency might shine through a mask of cynicism and despair. He takes a deep breath. (A kiss is still a kiss is what the music is insinuating. A sigh....) "That's probably Sam...."

A faint, sad smile seems to be playing at the corners of her lips. "Say it once, Richard...."

"What?" She's smiling sweetly, but is that a tear in her eye?

"For old times' sake. Say it...."

"Ah." Yes, he'd forgotten. He's out of practice. He grunts, runs his hand down her damp cheek and behind her ear. "Here's lookin' at you, kid...."

She fits two cigarettes in her lips, lights them both (there's a bit of fumbling with the lighter; she's not very mechanical) and, gazing soulfully at Rick, passes him one of them. He grins. "Hey, where'd you learn that, kid?" She shrugs enigmatically.

"Is this how you, uh, imagined things turning out tonight?" he asks around the butt, smoke curling out of his nose like thought's reek. Her cheeks seem to pop alight like his Café Americain sign each time the airport beacon sweeps past, shifting slightly like a sequence of film frames. Time itself may be like that, he knows, not a ceaseless flow but a rapid series of electrical leaps across tiny gaps between discontinuous bits. It's what he likes to call his link-and-claw theory of time, though of course the theory is not his....

"It may not be perfect, Richard, but it is better than if I haff shot you, isn't it?"

"No, I meant...." Well, let it be. She's right; it beats eating a goddamn bullet. In fact, it beats anything he can imagine. He puts out his cigarette, tosses it aside, wraps his arms around her thighs and pulls her buttocks (he is still thinking about time as a pulsing sequence of film frames and not so much about the frames, their useless dated content, as about the gaps between: infinitesimally small when looked at two-dimensionally, yet in their third dimension as deep and mysterious as the cosmos) toward his face, pressing against them like a child trying to see through a foggy window. He kisses and nibbles at each cheek (and what if one were to slip between two of those frames, he wonders?), runs his tongue into (where would he be then?) her anus, kneading the flesh on her pubic knoll between his fingers all the while like little lumps of stiff taffy.

"Oh, Richard, I don't know what's right any longer." She lifts one thigh in front of his face as though to erase his dark imaginings. He strokes it, thinking, Well, what the hell; it probably doesn't amount to a hill of beans, anyway. "Do you think I can haff another drink now?"

"Sure, kid. Why not?" The cork pops, champagne spews out over the tabletop, some of it getting into the glasses. This seems to suggest somehow a revelation. Or another memory. The tune, as though released, rides up once more around them. "Gott, Richard," she sighs. "That music is getting on my nerfs!"

"Yeah, I know."

"Time. Is it going by? Like the song is saying?"

He looks up, startled. "That's funny; I was just--"

"What time do you haff, Richard?"

He sets the bottle down, glances at his empty wrist. "I dunno. My watch must have got torn off when we...."

"Mine is gone, too."

They stare at each other a moment, Rick scowling slightly in the old style, Ilsa's lips parted as though saying "story" or "glory."

"I would not haff come if I had known...." She releases her shoulders, picks up her ruffled blouse (the buttons are gone), pulls it on like a wrap. As the beacon wheels by, the room seems to expand with light, as though it were breathing. "Do you see my skirt? It was here, but--is it getting dark or something?"

"I mean, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the...." He pauses, looks up. "What did you say?"

"I said, is it--"

"Yeah, I know...."

He sees she is trembling, and a tear slides down her nose, or seems to, it's hard to tell. He feels like he's going blind. "Listen. Maybe if we started over...."

"I'm too tired, Richard...."

"No, I mean, go back to where you came in, see--the letters of transit and all that. Maybe we made some kinda mistake, I dunno, like when I put my hands on your jugs or something, and if--"

"A mistake? You think putting your hands on my yugs was a mistake?"

"Don't get offended, sweetheart, I only meant--"

"Maybe my bringing my yugs here tonight was a mistake! Maybe my not shooting the trigger was a mistake!"

"No, wait a minute! Maybe you're right! Maybe going back isn't the right idea...."

"Richard?"

"Instead, maybe we gotta think ahead...."

"Richard, it's a crazy world...."

"Now, what was I-- Right! You're telling a story, so, uh, I'll say...."

"But wherever you are...."

"And then-- Yeah, that's good. It's almost like I'm remembering this. You've stopped, see, but I want you to go on; I want you to keep spilling what's on your mind, I'm filling in all the blanks...."

"Whatever happens...."

"So I say: And then? C'mon, kid, can you hear me? Remember all those people downstairs! They're depending on us! Just think it--if you think it, you'll do it! And then?"

"I want you to know...."

"And then? Ilsa? Oh, shit; Ilsa? Where are you? And then?"

"I luff you...."

"And then? Ilsa? And then?"

"One of his hands is already down between her legs, the other pulling a breast out of its brassiere."