I was studying him as I must have studied my grandfather, dead forever, in his upstairs bedroom thirty years ago. The stubble on my grandpa’s pale waxen skin, the eyelids that threatened to crack and fix me with the angry glare that had frozen Grandma like a snow queen in the parlor for a lifetime, all, all of it as clean and clear as this moment with Lenin’s necrologist/cosmetician seated across from me like a jumping jack, mouse-nibbling his fruit salad.
“Are you,” he asked, politely, “looking for the stitch marks over my ears?”
“No, no!”
“Yes, yes!” he replied, amused. “Everyone looks! So!” He leaned forward, turning his head to left and right, skinning his hairline and then his temples.
“Lord,” I said, “what fine work.”
“No. Perfect!”
For the thin lines were mere shadows, and if there were fleabite stitch scars, they had long since healed.
“Did you—?” I said.
“Operate on myself ? Cut out my own appendix? Perhaps I am like that woman who fled Shangri-La and shriveled into a Mongol prune!”
Groc laughed, and I was fascinated with his laughter. There was no minute when he was not merry. It was as though if he ever stopped laughing he would gasp and die. Always the happy bark, the fixed grin.
“Yes?” he asked, seeing that I was studying his teeth, his lips.
“What’s there so funny to laugh at,” I said, “always?”
“Everything! Did you ever see a film with Conrad Veidt—?”
“The Man Who Laughs?”
That stopped Groc in mid-dust. “Impossible! You lie!”
“My ma was nuts for films. After school, she’d pick me up from first, second, third grade to go see Pickford, Chaney, Chaplin. And … Conrad Veidt! The gypsies sliced his mouth so it could never stop smiling all the rest of his life, and he falls in love with a blind girl who can’t see the awful smile and he is unfaithful to her but, scorned by a princess, crawls back to his blind girl, weeping, to be comforted by her unseeing hands. And you sit in your aisle seat in the dark at the Elite Cinema and weep. The End.”
“My God!” exclaimed Groc, and almost not laughing. “What a dazzling child you are. Yes!” He grinned. “I am that Veidt character, but I was not carved into smiles by gypsies. Suicides, murders, assassinations did it. When you are locked in a mass grave with ten thousand corpses and fight upward for air in nausea,
shot to death but not dead. I have never touched meat since, for it smells of the lime pit, the carcass, and the unburied slaughter. So,” he gestured, “fruit. Salads. Bread, fresh butter, and wine. And, along the way, I sewed on this smile. I fight the true world with a false mouth. In the face of death, why not these teeth, the lascivious tongue, and the laugh? Anyway, I am responsible for you!”
“Me?”
“I told Manny Leiber to hire Roy, your tyrannosaurus buddy. And I said we needed someone who wrote as well as Roy dreamed. Voilà! You!”
“Thanks,” I said, slowly.
Groc preened over his food, glad that I was staring at his chin, his mouth, his brow.
“You could make a fortune—” I said.
“I already do.” He cut a slice of pineapple. “The studio pays me excessively. Their stars are always booze-wrinkling their faces, or smashing their heads through car windows. Maximus Films lives in fear that I might depart. Nonsense! I will stay. And grow younger, each year, as I cut and stitch, and stitch again, until my skin is so tight that when I smile my eyes pop! So!” He demonstrated. “For I can never go back. Lenin chased me out of Russia.”
“A dead man chased you?”
Fritz Wong leaned forward, listening, mightily pleased.
“Groc,” he said, gently, “explain. Lenin with new roses in his cheeks. Lenin with brand-new teeth, a smile under the mouth. Lenin with new eyeballs, crystal, under the lids. Lenin with his mole gone and his goatee trimmed. Lenin, Lenin. Tell.”
“Very simply,” said Groc, “Lenin was to be a miraculous saint, immortal in his crystal tomb.
“But Groc? Who was he? Did Groc rouge Lenin’s smile, clear his complexion? No! Lenin, even in death, improved himself ! So? Kill Groc!
“So Groc ran! And Groc today is where? Falling upward … with you.”