Little Casino

The true ciphers at last

SHE TOLD HIM THAT HIS FATHER WAS THE greatest driver in the country, if not the world, and that LaSalles and Packards, DeSotos and Chryslers, Buicks and Cadillacs and Hudson Terraplanes had been designed and built especially for his pleasure; that he had suggested the wooden-spoked wheels for the Moon roadster and sold the specifications for another famous if overrated car to Herr Porsche, who then claimed it for his own; that dances had been created for him by Nijinsky, Ted Shawn, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and Loie Fuller, that ballrooms had been named for him and luncheon dances under swirling colored lights suggested and popularized by him. The classic Savile Row suit? Designed by him. The Windsor knot? First tied by him and generously credited to the Duke, who, in actual fact, being something, he’d winked, of “a dim bulb,” couldn’t even tie his shoes. The silk scarf employed as a belt was one of his improvisatory whims. He had started all the major Hollywood studios, with Jack and Adolph and Harry and Louis as his assistants, but tired of their puerile minds, their lack of adventurous spirit, and their worship of the box office. She said that he’d opened a restaurant with Rudolph Valentino as a partner; that he’d been the first to wear a midnight-blue tuxedo; that before his arrival in Miami Beach, Lincoln and Collins Avenues had been not much more than skid rows; that he’d created whipped cream and the cheeseburger; that he’d not only bought, refurbished, and opened the Cotton Club, but that he’d booked into it Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Chick Webb, Sy Oliver, Benny Moten, Jay McShann, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Lunceford, Cab Calloway, and Andy Kirk and his Twelve Clouds of Joy; that he’d collaborated with Flo Ziegfeld on all the Follies, but grew restive at the successful but banal formula, and that, incidentally, he’d made love to each and every one of the famed Ziegfeld Girls; that he’d also had affairs with Pola Negri, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Mae Marsh, Vilma Banky, Paulette Goddard, Claudette Colbert, Dorothy Day, Lydia E. Pinkham, and Castoria Fletcher, all this before, of course, he’d met her; that he’d bought a Chinese restaurant, the Jade Mountain, with cash, because she liked the egg foo yung there, a dish, by the way, that he’d created of necessity on a chicken farm in the Gobi; that he’d almost managed to save Bix Beiderbecke from drinking himself to death, but was too busy advising the Army Air Corps on the design of a low-altitude fighter that eventually became the P-51 Mustang; that he’d caught the biggest sailfish, tuna, swordfish, and blue marlin that had ever been caught off the Florida Keys; that he’d advised James Joyce to drop the possessive apostrophe in the title of his last work; that he’d suggested to Scott Fitzgerald that he read the work of the virtually unknown Ernest Hemingway. He invented the pneumatic scaling tool and devised a method of cleaning double-bottomed boilers that would save workers’ sanity; he consistently bid lowest on re-rigging jobs for the Navy and just as consistently did excellent work; he could shovel snow for hours and then dance all night; make a marinara sauce and a bolognese sauce and a white-clam sauce that were miracles of superb flavor and subtle balance; he could teach anybody to drive and had, as a matter of fact, given the great Nuvolari some invaluable tips. She remarked that it was well known that he was a descendant of an aristocratic Italian family, descended from the Emperor Galerius, whose roots were deep in Sicily; that he was a remarkably attentive, adoring, dutiful yet strict father; that he had renamed Yellow Hook, Bay Ridge, for which the Brooklyn Borough President gave him the key to the borough and the Order of Chevalier of Kings County Arts and Letters; that he’d been the one to first spot George Herriman’s genius; that he’d suggested to Magritte that the title of a simple painting should be “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” rather than the painter’s “Une pipe”; that he could sing like Russ Columbo, only with greater range and better breath control; that he met regularly with Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Erik Satie, Alban Berg, and Arnold Schoenberg to discuss what he called “serial music” and “atonal music”; that he wrote the first lengthy critique of the new medium of television, calling it “the coming boon — or curse — of the century.” He had unofficially broken the world records for the giant slalom, the butterfly, the 100-meter dash, and the pole vault; he advised his close friends to buy up all the cheap land in and around a small, virtually abandoned one-time mining town in Colorado: Aspen; and he was the writer or co-writer of speeches given by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Father Divine, Al Smith, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, Huey Long, Eddie Cantor, Father Coughlin, Eugene V. Debs, and General Douglas MacArthur, the latter’s remarks those famous words delivered on the occasion of his being awarded his ninth Good Conduct Medal; he had, uncannily, predicted the popular musical expression that came to be called rock and roll. His heart had stopped beating for forty-seven minutes when his mother died, and he remarked, upon regaining life-functions, that “the other side” looked “like an enchanted Elizabeth Street”; he wrote all the jokes and comedy routines for W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and the Marx Brothers; he was, perhaps, proudest of the humble sausage recipe that he gave, gratis, to Nathan Handwerker; and she said, too, that he was a lying, cheating, unfaithful, deceitful, and miserably cruel and thoughtless and selfish son of a fucking bitch bastard who should suffer and suffer for years and years and then die in agony and all alone and burn screaming in the torments of hell forever and ever and ever, may God forgive me! That’s what she told him.

This is, without a doubt, faintly absurd, but one may read it with Beckett in mind, who remarks that one may “puzzle over it endlessly without the least risk. For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker. It is then that the true division begins, of twenty-two by seven, for example, and the pages fill with the true ciphers at last.”

Samuel Beckett, it may be recalled, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. So were many, many other people.

This woman, vexed and exasperated by life, is, in effect, saying, “I won’t cry anymore, and I wish you were here,” or “I wish you were here, but I won’t cry anymore.”

“Maybe, I mean just maybe, she’s really saying, ‘Come to the Mardi Gras!’”

Oh, for Christ’s sweet sake, don’t be so literary.

Speaking of literary, a list of selected, judiciously selected, Nobel Prize laureates in Literature, might be thought of as “the true ciphers at last.”