Buddwing

17

As the limousine headed downtown once more, Buddwing discovered a few things about the three good men and true who had come to his assistance in the third-floor apartment.

The thickset Irishman, as it turned out, was an Off-Broadway character actor named Sean Murphy. He confessed immediately that he had been scared to death of the three hoods in the apartment, but that his acting experience had seen him through his fear, since he had once played the part of Alan Squier in a summer stock production of The Petrified Forest, and therefore knew all about handling people like Duke Mantee.

“Summer stock is not life,” the thin man with the rimless spectacles informed him. “I happen to be a lawyer. That’s why I was certain none of the men in that game were ready to commit homicide.”

“How could you tell?” Murphy asked.

“Homicide would have endangered their livelihood, which is gambling. Homicide is a felony. Gambling is only a misdemeanor.”

“What’s a misdemeanor... uh... I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

“Harris, Roger Harris. A misdemeanor is something like spitting on the sidewalk.”

“Were we guilty of a misdemeanor?” Buddwing asked. “By being in the game?”

“Certainly,” Harris said. “That’s the trouble with the world today. The laws are so unrealistic.”

“The trouble with the world today,” Murphy said, “is that not enough quality shows are being done on Broadway. The actor must look to Off-Broadway if he wants to do anything serious. And then, in order to supplement his meager income, he’s forced to break the law by entering illegal crap games, which are misdemeanors, as you just said. He has to go all the way up to Harlem to find a game which, if he’s caught in it, will—”

“Think of all the poor colored kids up in Harlem,” Grace said, “who never even get to see a Broadway show.”

Hank smiled benignly and said, “That’s right. The trouble with the world today is that not enough colored kids get to see Broadway shows.”

“Who’d want to see a Broadway show?” the unshaven young man asked. “All you pay for there is the privilege of watching another man’s neurosis, usually homosexual in nature, and usually badly expressed.”

“You sound like a writer,” Murphy said.

“I am,” the young man answered.

“What’s your name?”

“Mike. My point is that even if—”

“Listen,” the driver of the car said suddenly, “the Off-Broadway shows aren’t too good, either.”

“Why don’t you tend to your driving?” Murphy said, somewhat testily.

“I’m trying to, but look at this traffic, will you? If you want to know the real trouble with the world today, the real trouble is the condition of our streets and highways. Our speed has outgrown our technology. Man is embarked on a supersonic voyage to nowhere.”

“You can say that again,” Grace said. “How can anyone possibly have any sort of image prolongation when he’s constantly threatened with nuclear annihilation?”

“Well, that isn’t exactly what I meant, ma’am,” the driver said.

“Look at our milk supply,” Grace said, ignoring him. “Do you know how much strontium 90 is in our milk supply right this minute?”

“Whose milk supply?” Hank asked. “The world’s, or yours personally?”

“That’s right, switch it to tits,” Grace said. “What do you care about the thousands of unborn freaks?”

“Honey, I was born a freak,” Hank said.

“The trouble with the world today,” Harris said, “is the long delay in getting civil rights cases to trial. I’ve had a case on the docket for close to five years now. Involves the rape of a white girl by a Negro, present company excluded, of course. He certainly had every provocation.”

“She asked him in to chop up the chifferobe, correct?” Mike asked.

“No, she came to his apartment naked with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a daisy in the other.”

“She was only trying to find her own chemin,” Mike said.

“In addition,” the driver said, “all this traffic is polluting the air with poisonous gases.”

“That’s no worse than polluting the Broadway air with the stench of garbage,” Murphy said.

“Or making Le Pavilion too expensive for poor colored kids,” Grace said.

“The thing I’d like to know,” Hank said, “is why there are no colored mannequins in the store windows of America.”

“I marched in protest,” Grace said. “All the way from Sutton Place to City Hall.”

“When was this?” Murphy asked.

“Oh, twelve years ago, I guess.”

“Why did you march?”

“I was pregnant at the time. My doctor said walking was very good for me. A hell of a lot he knew.”

“I wrote a letter to Commissioner Barnes,” the driver said over his shoulder. “I told him that unless we solve our traffic problems, this city will become hopelessly obsolete. Our technology has outgrown our speed, that’s the trouble with the world today.”

“I attended a meeting of Actor’s Equity,” Murphy said. “I told them that the struggle in the world today is to enlarge our Off-Broadway theaters beyond that arbitrary two-hundred-and-ninety-nine-seat limit. That’s the trouble.”

“Would anyone like to play Who’s Jewish?” Grace asked.

“The Black Muslims are a threat,” Hank said. “The trouble with the world today is lunatic-fringe groups. I went to a rally in Harlem. I told them there is no difference between white men and black men except the color of our skins.”

“We all drink the same contaminated milk, don’t we?” Grace asked. “Wouldn’t anyone like to play Who’s Jewish?”

“...Pinter and Ionesco as compared to Williams and Inge...”

“...General Sessions, Part II. Well how is anyone expected to...”

“...changed it to a one-way street overnight. When I got to the corner...”

“I wanted to be a respected and successful writer,” Mike said to Buddwing. “That’s why I spent all that time studying the respected and successful writers. After all, there must be something that causes the critics to go wild over a book, don’t you think? A book has to hit some kind of nerve, isn’t that right? I mean, after all, there must have been something that prompted Gilbert Millstein to call On the Road ‘an authentic work of art,’ don’t you think?”

“Gilbert who?” Buddwing asked.

“Or The New Yorker to say By Love Possessed was a masterpiece, don’t you think?”

“I should hope so,” Buddwing said.

“Reviewers,” Mike said, and shook his head. “That’s what’s wrong with the world today. Reviewers. They all deny the writer the one luxury to which he is automatically entitled.”

“And what’s that?”

“The right to fail. Take that away from him, and you also rob him of the courage to dare. In this country, if a man writes a bad book, the reviewers behave as though they’ve caught him exposing his genitals on a crowded subway car.”

“That’s only a misdemeanor,” Harris said.

“Well, I happen to believe that even writing a bad book is important.”

“Certainly,” Harris agreed. “I was merely pointing out that it isn’t necessarily a felony.”

“Book reviewers are all frustrated Negroes, anyway,” Hank said.

“Writers are all frustrated actors,” Murphy said.

“Lawyers are all frustrated chauffeurs,” the driver said.

“The entire world is frustrated,” Grace said. “Nobody’ll get off anybody else’s back.”

“I’ll tell you,” Hank said. “I don’t want you to get off my back. All I want to do is marry your daughter.”

“If you mean that,” Mike said, “you could marry my daughter tomorrow. If I had one.”

“Of course I mean it,” Hank said. “You want to know what equal rights means to me? Equal rights means I’m a man, just like you. And if I’m a man, then I don’t want no other man telling me who I can or can’t marry. Any Negro goes around shouting for equal rights and then claims he don’t want to marry your daughter, or his daughter, or anybody’s daughter, why, he’s just somebody who’s asking for manhood and saying he don’t want it at the same time.”

“I agree with you,” Harris said. “This is all a matter of sex.”

“Sex, my ass,” Hank said. “This is all a matter of identity.”

“I think Harry Belafonte is very sexy,” Grace said.

“Fifty years ago, you wouldn’t have.”

“I think Floyd Patterson is very sexy, too.”

“You’re talking about two nice, safe, gentle Negroes who are acceptable because they’re clean and handsome and fit into what the white man thinks a Negro should be, which is a white man. The day you think Sonny Liston is sexy, that’s the day the Negro in America has finally made it. I’ll tell you something very funny about this whole civil rights megillah—”

“Would anyone like to play Who’s Jewish?” Grace asked.

“Robert Mitchum is Jewish,” Murphy said.

“The funny thing about this entire knotty problem,” Hank went on, “is that most white men can picture themselves in bed with a colored girl very easy, but they just can’t seem to reverse it and picture a blonde in bed with a black man. And that’s where identity comes into the picture, and that’s why I do want to marry your daughter. Why do you think I want to go to school with you? Why do you think I want to vote? Because I want the same power that you have. I’m not asking to be a citizen — hell, I’m a citizen already, second-class or not. I’m asking to be a powerful citizen, I’m asking for the right to make five hundred thousand dollars, and have a black Caddy, and a blonde on my arm if I want one, and my name in the goddamn newspaper, and a minimum of three flunkeys to tell me how great I am every day of the week. I want the right to be whoever I want to be, that’s all.”

“Come on,” Grace said, “let’s play Who’s Jewish.”

“Anne Bancroft is Jewish,” Murphy said.

“Judge Learned Hand is Jewish,” Harris said.

“John Updike isn’t,” Mike said.

“What the hell am I?” Buddwing asked suddenly, and they all turned toward him.

“What?” the driver said.

“Nothing,” Buddwing answered. “Never mind.”

He crouched in the corner of the limousine, suddenly very confused. There was laughter everywhere around him now as name after name was suggested — he’s Jewish, she isn’t — and then Hank began telling the joke about the man who went to Heaven and looked at God — “Well, to begin with, she’s colored” — and they all laughed again, and then the driver told them a racy story about a celebrity he had driven only last week, and they all listened knowledgeably, and then Mike gave his own capsule review of Last Year at Marienbad. “Are you listening?” he asked. “Here’s the review: Last last year year at Marien, bad bad bad,” and they all laughed again. It seemed to him that Grace’s legs were crossed too dangerously, and her skirt pulled too high. It seemed to him that the talk was too fast and too glib, that no one was really saying a damn thing about what was really wrong with the world, but was concerned instead only with what was wrong with his particular corner of the world.

It seemed to him he had heard all the jokes and opinions before, had shared the gossip. It seemed to him he had played every game ever invented. It seemed to him he had seen the crossed legs and exposed knees of a million women, had peered into the low-cut tops of all the gowns in the universe. He had been driven in this same expensive automobile listening to the same talk from the same articulate people for the better part of his life, and none of it made a damn bit of difference. He still didn’t know who he was.

“Have you got that money?” he asked Grace suddenly.

“Yes, I’ve got it.”

“It doesn’t help a damn bit,” he said under his breath. “None of it does,” and was glad that no one heard him. The car was racing down a comparatively empty stretch of Lexington Avenue, preparatory to turning west and heading for the penny arcade where the newspaper headline would be waiting. He knew the headline would not help, either. Edward Voegler had been headlined earlier today, but how had that helped the poor frightened lunatic hiding somewhere in the bushes of the world? He listened to Grace’s brittle laughter, and he remembered the time so long ago when they had tumbled out of bed to drink their coffee and to start a spontaneous game that they had played automatically and apathetically a thousand times since. He stole a sideward glance at her and wondered how this chic and highly lacquered, slightly drunk and provocative blonde sitting beside him in a Cadillac sedan had ever possibly evolved from the simple girl who had tried to study Greek Mythology in the park outside N.Y.U. He looked at Hank and wondered if Hank knew what that headline back at the penny arcade would say when they picked it up. NOBODY MAKES IT! that’s what it would say, don’t you know that, Hank? Fight your battle for civil rights, become the man you want to be, get your five hundred grand and your black Cadillac and your blonde, if that’s who you want, and then add them all up, and Hank, my friend, you’ll find that you’re only starting, that somewhere along the line while you were fighting so goddamn hard for all the things you thought you needed, you lost the very thing that mattered most to you.

He was suddenly seized with an urgent desire to get out of this car and away from these chattering people. It can’t all be gone, he thought, it can’t be too late, I’ve got to get back.

“Driver,” he said, “stop the car. I’m getting out.”

“What do you mean, you’re getting out?” Grace said.

“We’re all going to Oyster Bay, man,” Hank said.

“I’m going back,” Buddwing said.

“Back where?” Grace asked.

“Back,” he answered. “Stop the goddamn car!”

The driver pulled the car to the curb. Buddwing got out quickly and was walking away from it when he heard Grace’s voice behind him.

“Hey, you,” she said.

He turned. “What do you want?”

“You can’t go back,” she said.

Someone in the car laughed, and Buddwing turned away and began running. Behind him, he heard Mike shouting, “Didn’t you ever read Thomas Wolfe?” and then they all burst into laughter again, and the car gunned away from the curb, while he continued running down Lexington Avenue, turning left on the corner and heading for Third. The secret, he thought, was to find those two people who had spilled coffee on the table and rolled onto the floor laughing. The secret, he thought, was to find the person he had been this afternoon, the person clean and new who had met a virgin girl in an autumn park. He quickened his step. Third Avenue was deserted, save for a few late strollers; he supposed it was close to one o’clock in the morning. He felt again the way he had felt on Central Park South just after he had come out of the Plaza, when the world was empty and the birds trilled their high and heady music to his ears. He began running down the sidewalk. He saw the apartment building in the middle of the next block, and he grinned and ran faster. He was about to enter the building when he stopped on the front step and looked up at the numerals over the door, and realized all at once that he did not know Grace’s address.

Wait a minute, he thought. It was

Wait a minute, it began with a nine, I think.

Just hold it a minute.

Well, look, the numbers here all begin with a thirteen, so it couldn’t have been a goddamn nine, did you ever look up at the numbers when you went into the building?

Well, wait, it was near a liquor store, wasn’t it? Wasn’t there a liquor store a few blocks away? Jesus, how many liquor stores are there on Third Avenue, or was it a liquor store at all? Yes, of course it was, but wasn’t there a bakery downstairs? Or a stationery store? Wait, it could have been a petshop or a saloon, it could have been a pizzeria, it could have been

Look, Grace don’t do

The numbers here all begin with a thirteen — was it thirteen nine something? No, it

Just hold on a minute, will you, because the address is on the tip of my tongue, who are you kidding, you never knew the address! Grace, the world is on the tip of my tongue, we can beat this whole damn system, I’ll remember in a minute, please don’t do anything stupid. He was suddenly overcome with a wave of panic so great that he leaned against the side of the building and closed his eyes and stood there limply with his heart pounding and his knees trembling, and it was then that his head began to throb and he knew that he was in for another migraine.

At first, he did not want to open his eyes. He did not want to open them and find that his vision had blurred again, not now when he was so close to making a new start, not now when he knew that everything would work out all right if only he could get back to Grace. But instead, he opened his eyes at once. There was no time to waste. The thing to do was to find her building immediately before his vision began to blur. It had to be somewhere along here, didn’t it? He was in the damn apartment not three hours ago, it couldn’t have simply vanished!

He walked rapidly up the avenue, his head throbbing, waiting for his vision to blur at any moment. He knew he was on the right side of the avenue, but he saw nothing that looked even vaguely familiar to him. He was certain he had come too far uptown, and then certain he had not come far enough uptown, and then certain he was walking in the wrong direction. He began wondering if she lived on Third Avenue at all, and not possibly Lexington or Madison. Then, as he walked, he felt a slowly dawning hope when he realized that all he had to do was look her up in the phone book — Grace MacCauley, that was her name; all he had to do was look her up and find her address that way. He almost walked into an open candy store and then he remembered that she was Jewish. How could a Jewish girl be named Grace MacCauley? How could Harry Truman be Jewish? Hadn’t they said he was Jewish? How could Floyd Patterson be colored and white at the same time? Why wasn’t Beethoven a deaf composer instead of a kid who wanted to go to Pratt Institute and who died on Tarawa? How can he be a face on the roof of Il Duomo? How can God be a crazy old man who followed me from N.Y.U.? Isn’t anyone what he seems to be? Doesn’t anyone have an identity? How can I know who I am if I don’t know who anyone else is?

Grace, for crying out loud, this is a hell of a time to cop out on me. Where are you? Listen, I’ll start yelling in a minute, Grace, I swear to God! I’ll yell Grace MacCauley at the top of my lungs and wake up the whole damn neighborhood. She’s not Grace MacCauley, he thought, she hasn’t been Grace MacCauley for a long long time. You stupid jackass, she isn’t Grace at all, don’t you know that? Not Grace MacCauley and not Grace anything. She is a Jewish social worker you picked up on Broadway. She sent you down for booze because some of her friends are coming over. What time is it now? Are they still there? Come on, Grace, cut this out! Now, where’s that damn apartment of yours?

In desperation, he began looking up at the lighted windows in the faces of the buildings. He saw a thousand window slits peering back at him intently, he saw a girl in one of the windows turning down a bed, he saw a man in another stroking a dog’s head — Dan, he thought. Dan MacCauley, of course. Why, that’s his name, of course. He’s her brother, isn’t he, so his name must be Dan MacCauley, so all I have to do is call him up and ask him where Grace

No. No, we don’t want to do that, do we? No, he wouldn’t cooperate. He wouldn’t give me the address even if he knew it. No, I don’t want to call him. Besides, he isn’t what he seems to be, either. Nobody is. He’s not a man, he’s not someone who’ll help you when you need it, he’s a dogman trained to leap at your throat, he’s no different from any of the tigers, how’d a louse like him ever get a sweet kid like Grace for a sister? Hey, Grace, yoo-hoo, where are you? Yoo-hoo, Arthur, here I am, he thought, and suddenly he looked up at the windows lining Third Avenue and felt the same painful isolation he had known on the dock watching the disembarking passengers. It seemed to him that life pulsed in each of those warm amber rectangles, the woman who sat up there leaning on her windowsill with curlers in her hair, the man sitting by the window reading his newspaper, the girl taking off her blouse and then belatedly coming to the shade to pull it down. No! he thought, don’t pull down the shade, don’t cut me off! I want to come back! I want to be among the living!

His vision blurred then.

What had earlier been a thousand amber slits now became two thousand, all denying him entrance, all refusing to recognize him. He ran down the avenue searching each window, shaking his head. It seemed to him that shade after shade went down, life after life was suddenly snuffed out until the avenue was a wall of glowing blind rectangles. He darted into the doorway near the bakery only because it seemed to be a haven from this suddenly hostile wall of glowing blinded eyes. There were garbage cans stacked for the night on the ground floor behind the staircase. He sat on one of them, breathing harshly, not knowing where he would go next, his head pounding. The hallway, the staircase, the feeble naked light bulb all blurred out of focus in the excruciating pain of his headache. He reached into his watch pocket and took out the remaining gelatin capsule, and then put it on his tongue, and tried to force it down without any water. He choked on the capsule, and spat it out, and then sat helplessly on the garbage can while he continued to cough, certain he would retch. The coughing spell passed. The pain in his head, aggravated by the coughing, was unbearable. He tried to focus on the ejected gelatin capsule, which lay on the floor not three feet from the garbage can, but he saw only a blurred amoebalike smear on the asphalt tile of the vestibule. He closed his eyes. The yellow light flickered in the darkness of his skull.

He did not know how long he sat on the garbage can with his eyes closed. When he opened them again, his vision was still blurred, but the panic was gone and he was able to appraise the hallway calmly between the rising and falling waves of pain that attacked his temple. The hallway seemed familiar. The mailboxes outside, the naked hanging light bulb — wasn’t this the hallway he had

He rose slowly to his feet. Through his blurred vision, he tried to overlay this hallway onto the hallway he remembered, the one Grace had led him into earlier tonight. Wasn’t that the same wallpaper? Hadn’t there been a stain just there? And that tear in the carpet on the stair tread, wasn’t that there before? Cautiously, he put his hand on the banister and began climbing. He could not remember which floor she lived on, but he knew it was high up in the building, certainly the third floor, or perhaps even higher. He could hear the sounds of life again. They came from behind closed doors, muffled, but definitely the sounds of life. He stopped in the third-floor corridor and looked at the closed doorways all around him. There were four apartments on the floor. He could hear a television set going in one of them. In another, there was the sound of someone coughing. He knocked on the nearest door.

A woman’s voice said, “Who is it?”

Don’t ask me that, he thought. For Christ’s sake, above all, do not ask me that. “Grace?” he asked. “Is that you, Grace?”

“There ain’t no Grace here, mister,” the voice said.

He knocked on the door adjacent to it. He waited while he heard footsteps approaching the door, and then the door opened, and an old woman in a nightgown peered into the hallway. He mumbled his apologies and knocked on the next door, and the next, and both doors opened almost simultaneously, and two strange faces looked out at him, and he turned away apologetically and gripped the banister and ran up to the fourth floor. He knocked on all the doors in rapid succession, running from one to the other without waiting for a response, and then standing in the middle of the hallway while the doors opened everywhere around him. Let me in, he thought, let me back in, and he looked at the strange faces in the hallway, and then seized the banister and climbed the steps two at a time to the fifth floor. If I reach the roof without finding her, he thought, I will jump off into the street. A door opened on a little boy in a bathrobe, another on a tall man in his undershirt, a third on a woman with cold cream on her face. He knocked on the last door in the hallway and leaned against the jamb. When the door opened, he did not look up at first. And then he raised his eyes, and she was standing there.

She was wearing flannel pajamas and her hair was loose around her face, and there were tear stains on her cheeks, and her age showed in the lines around her eyes and her mouth, in the sag of her breasts and the slight protrusion of her belly beneath the pajama bottoms. But his vision was blurred, and he saw two Graces standing side by side in the open doorway, and one of them had long blond hair and bright youthful eyes, and he smiled at her and said, “Grace, I almost lost you. Oh God, I almost lost you.”

“You did,” she answered.

“Wh—”

“The party’s over,” she said, and slammed the door in his face.