How long was he going to keep me on tenterhooks? I wondered. And what form would it take, this abrupt deliverance? I could see Mara coining to meet me at the station. We'd start a new life together, righto! What sort of life I didn't dare think. Maybe Kronski would raise another three hundred dollars. And those millionaires she talked about, they ought to be good for something. I began thinking in thousands—a thousand for her old man, a thousand for travelling expenses, a thousand to tide us over for a few months. Once in Texas, or some God-forsaken place like that, I'd have more confidence. I'd stop off at newspaper offices with her—she always made a good impression—and I'd ask permission to write a little sketch. I'd walk in on business men and show them how to write their ads. In hotel lobbies I'd be sure to meet up with a friendly soul, some one who would give me a break. The country was so big, so many lonely people, so many generous souls ready to give, if only they met the right individual. I would be sincere and forthright. Say we get to Mississippi, some old ramshackle hotel. A man walks up to me out of the darkness and asks me how I feel. A guy just aching for a little chat. I'd introduce him to Mara. We'd saunter out arm in arm and stroll about in the moonlight, the trees strangled with lianas, the magnolias rotting on the floor of the earth, the air humid, sultry, making things rot—and men too. To him I'd be a fresh breeze from the North. I'd be honest, sincere, almost humble. Would put my cards on the table immediately. There you are, man, there's the situation. I love this place. I want to stay here all my life. That would scare him off a little, because you don't start talking that way to a Southerner straight off. What's Your game? Then I'd speak up again, soft and distant, like a clarinet with a wet sponge plugging the bell. I'd give him a little melody out of the cold North, a sort of chill factory whistle on a frosty morning. Mister man, I don't like the cold. No sir! I want to do some honest work,. anything to keep alive. Can I talk straight? You won't think I'm cracked, will you? It's lonely up there in the North. Yes sir, we go blue with fright and loneliness. Live in little rooms, eat with knives and forks, carry watches, liver pills, bread crumbs, sausages. Don't know where we're at up there, honest, Mister. We're frightened to death we'll say something, something real. Don't sleep.... not really. Thrash around all night praying for the world to end. We don't believe in anything: we hate everybody, we poison one another. Everything so tight and solid, everything riveted with cruel hot irons. Don't make a thing with our hands. Sell. Buy and sell. Buy and sell, that's all, Mister....
I could visualize the old gentleman distinctly as he stood under a droopy tree mopping his feverish brow. He wouldn't run away from me, like others had. I wouldn't let him! I'd hold him spellbound—the whole night long, if I felt like it. Make him give us a cool wing in the big house near the bayou. The darkie would appear with a tray, serving mint juleps. We would be adopted. «This is your home, son; stay as long as you like.» No desire to play tricks on a man like that. No, if a man treated me that way I'd be faithful to him, to the bitter end....
It was all so real I felt I had to tell Mara about it right away. I went to the kitchen and began a letter. «Dear Mara—All our problems are solved....» I went on as though it were all clear and definitive. Mara looked different to me now. I saw myself standing under the big trees talking to her in a way that surprised me. We were walking arm in arm through the thick growths, conversing like human beings. There was a big yellow moon out and the dogs were yapping at our heels. It seemed to me we were married and the blood ran deep and still between us. She would be craving a pair of swans for the little lake in back of the house. No money talk, no Neon lights, no chop suey. How wonderful just to breathe naturally, to never hurry, never get anywhere, never do anything important— except live! She thought so too. She had changed, Mara. Her body had grown fuller, heavier; she moved slowly, talked calmly, became silent for long periods, all so real and natural like. Should she wander off by herself I felt certain she would come back unchanged, smelling sweeter, moving more sure-footedly...
«Do you get it, Mara? Do you see how it will be?» There I was, putting it all down so honestly, almost weeping with the sheer wonder of it, when I heard Maude paddling slip-slop through the hall. I gathered the sheets together and folded them. I put my fist over them and waited for her to say something.
«Who are you writing to?» she asked—just as direct and sure as that.
«To some one I know,» I answered calmly.
«A woman, I suppose?»
«Yes, a woman. A girl, to be more exact.» I said it heavily, solemnly, still thick with the trance, the image of her under the big trees, the two swans floating aimlessly on the unruffled lake. If you want to know, I thought to myself, I will tell you. I don't see why I should lie any more. I don't hate you, as I once did. I wish you could love as I do —it would make it so much easier. I don't want to hurt you. I just want you to let me be.
«You're in love with her. You don't need to answer—I know it's so.»
«Yes, that's true—I am in love. I found some one I really love.»
«Maybe you'll treat her better than you did me.»
«I hope so,» I said, still calm, still hoping she'd hear me through to the end. «We never really loved each other, Maude, that's the truth, isn't it?»
«You never had any respect for me—as a human being,» she replied. «You insult me in front of your friends; you run around with other women; you don't even show any interest in your child.»
«Maude. I wish just for once that you wouldn't talk that way. I wish we could talk about it without bitterness.»
«You can—because you're happy. You've found a new toy.»
«It isn't that, Maude. Listen, supposing all the things you say are true—what difference does it make now? Supposing we were on a boat and it was sinking...»
«I don't see why we have to suppose things. You're going to take up with some one else and I'm going to be left with all the drudgery, all the responsibilities.»
«I know,» I said, looking at her with genuine tenderness. «I want you to try to forgive me for that—can you? What good would it do to stay? We wouldn't ever learn to love each other. Can't we part friends? I don't mean to leave you in the lurch. I'm going to try to do my share—I mean it.»
«That's easy to say. You're always promising things you can't fulfill. You'll forget us the moment you walk out of this house. I know you. I can't afford to be generous with you. You deceived me bitterly, from the very beginning. You've been selfish, utterly selfish. I never thought it possible for a human being to become so cruel, so callous, so thoroughly inhuman. Why, I hardly recognize you now. It's the first time you've acted like a...»
«Maude, it's cruel what I'm going to say, but I have to say it. I want you to understand something. Maybe I had to go through this with you in order to learn how to treat a woman. It isn't altogether my fault—fate had something to do with it too. You see, the moment I set eyes on her I knew...»
«Where did you meet her?» said Maude, her feminine curiosity suddenly getting the better of her.
«In a dance hall. She's a taxi girl. Sounds bad, I know. But if you saw her...»
«I don't want to see her. I don't want to hear anything more about her. I just wondered.» She gave me a quick pitying look. «And you think she's the woman who will make you happy?»
«You call her a woman—she's not, she's just a young girl.»
«So much the worse. Oh. what a fool you are!»
«Maude, it's not like you think, not at all. You mustn't judge, really. How can you pretend to know? And in any case I don't care. I've made up my mind.»
At this she hung her head. She looked indescribably sad and weary, like a human wreck hanging from a meat hook. I looked down at the floor, unable to bear the sight of her face.
We sat like that a full few minutes, neither of us daring to look up. I heard a sniffle and as I looked up I saw her face quivering with pain. She put her rams forward on the table and, weeping and sobbing, she flung her head down, pressing her face against the table. I had watched her weep many times but this was the most ghastly, unresisting sort of surrender. It unnerved me. I stood over her and put my hand on her shoulder. I tried to say something but the words stuck in my throat. Not knowing what to do I rubbed my hand over her hair, caressed it sadly, and distantly too, as thought it were the head of a strange, wounded animal I had come upon in the dark.
«Come, come,» I managed to gurgle, «this won't do any good.»
Her sobs redoubled. I knew I had said the wrong thing. I couldn't help myself. No matter what she were to do—even if she were to kill herself—I couldn't change the situation. I had expected tears. I had also half expected to do this very thing— stroke her hair as she wept and say the wrong thing. My mind was on the goal. Is she would get through with it and go to bed I could sit down and finish the letter. I could add a postscript about cauterizing the wound. I could say with honest joy and Sorrow mixed—«It's over.»
That's what was going on in my mind as I stroked her hair. I was never further from her. While I felt the quivering gasps of her body I also felt pleasure at thinking how serene she would be a week hence when I had gone. «You will be feeling like a new woman,» I thought to myself. «And now you are going through all this anguish—it's right and natural, of course, and I don't blame you for it— only get done with it!» I must have given her a shake to punctuate the thought, for at that instant she suddenly sat erect and, looking at me with wild, hopeless, tear-stained eyes, she flung her arms around me and pulled me to her in a frantic, maudlin embrace. «You won't leave me yet, will you?» she sobbed, kissing me with salty, hungry lips. «Put your arms around me, please. Hold me tight. God, I feel so lost!» She was kissing me with a passion I had never felt in her before. She was putting body and soul into it—and all the sorrow that stood between us. I slid my hands under her arms-pits and raised her gently to her feet. We were as close as lovers could be, swaying as only the human animal can sway when he is given utterly to another. Her kimono slipped pone and she was naked underneath. I slid my hand down the small of her back, over her plump buttocks, wedged my fingers deep into the big crack, pressing her against me, chewing her lips, biting her ear lobes, her neck, licking her eyes, the roots of her hair. She got limp and heavy, closing her eyes, closing her mind. She sagged as though she were going to drop to the floor. I caught her up and carried her through the hall, up the flight of stairs, threw her on the bed. I fell over her, as if stupefied, and let her rip my things off. I lay on my back like a dead man, the only thing alive being my prick. I felt her mouth closing over it and the sock on my left foot slowly slipping off. I ran my fingers through her long hair, slid them round under her breast, moulded her bread basket which was soft and rubbery like. She was making some sort of wheeling motion in the dark. Her legs came down over my shoulders and her crotch was up against my lips. I slid her ass over my head, like you'd raise a pail of milk to slake a lazy thirst, and I drank and chewed and guzzled like a buzzard. She was so deep in heat that her teeth were clamped dangerously around the head of my cock. In that frantic, teary passion she had worked herself up to I had a fear that she might sink her teeth in deep, bite the end of it clean off. I had to tickle her to make her relax her jaws. It was fast, clean work after that—no tears, no love business, no promise me this and that. Put me on the fucking block and fuck! that's what she was asking for. I went at it with cold-blooded fury. This might be the very last fuck. Already she was a stranger to me. We were committing adultery, the passionate, incestuous kind which the Bible loves to talk about. Abraham went into Sarah or Leander and he knew her. (Strange italicizations in the English Bible.) But the way those horny old patriarchs tackled their young and old wives, sisters, cows and sheep, was very knowing. They must have gone in head first, with all the cunning and skill of aged lechers. I felt like Isaac fornicating with a rabbit in the temple. She was a white rabbit with long ears. She had Easter eggs inside her and she would drop them one by one in a basket. I took a long think inside her, studying every crevice, every slit and tear, every soft, round bump that had swollen to the size of a shrivelled oyster. She moved over and took a rest, reading it like Braille (New York Point) with her inquisitive fingers. She crouched on all fours bike a she animal, quivering and whinnying with undisguised pleasure. Not a human word out of her, not a sign that she knew any language except this block-and-tackle-subgum-one-ton-blow-the-whistle sort. The gentleman from Mississippi had completely faded out; he had slipped back into the swampy limbo which forms the permanent floor of the continents. One swan remained, an octaroon with ruby duck lips fastened to a pale blue head. Soon we'd be in clover, the blow-off, with plums and apricots falling from the sky. The last push, the drag of choked, white-hot ashes, and then two logs lying side by side waiting for the axe. Fine finish. Royal flush. I knew her and she knew me. Spring will come again and Summer and Winter. She will sway in somebody else's arms, go into a blind fuck, whinny, blow off, do the crouch and sag—but not with me. I've done my duty, given her the last rites. I closed my eyes and played dead to the world. Yes, we would learn to live a new life, Mara and I. I must get up early and hide the letter in my coat pocket. It's strange sometimes how you wind up affairs. You always think you're going to put the last word in the ledger with a broad flourish; you never think of the automaton who closes the account while you sleep. It's all the strictest kind of double-entry. It gives you the creeps, it's all so nicely calculated.
The axe is falling. Last ruminations. Honeymoon Express and all aboard: Memphis, Chattanooga, Nashville, Chickamauga. Past snowy fields of cotton... alligators yawning in the mud... the last apricot is rotting on the lawn... the moon is full, the ditch is deep, the earth is black, black, black.
VOLUME TWO
5
The next morning it was like after a storm— breakfast as usual, a touch for carfare, a dash for the subway, a promise to take her to the movies after dinner. For her it was probably just a bad dream which she would do her best to forget during the course of the day. For me it was a step towards deliverance. No mention of the subject was ever made again. But it was there all the time and it made things easier between us. What she thought I don't know, but what I thought was very clear and definite. Every time I assented to one of her requests or demands I said to myself: «Fine, is that all you want of me? I'll do anything you like except give you the illusion that I am going to live the rest of my life with you.»
She was inclined now to be more lenient with herself when it came to satisfying her bestial nature. I often wondered what she told herself in making excuses to herself for these extra-nuptial, pre- or post-morganatic bouts. Certainly she put her heart and soul into them. She was a better fucker now than in the early days when she used to put a pillow under her ass and try to kiss the ceiling. She was fucking with desperation, I guess. Fuck for fuck's sake and the devil take the hindmost.
A week had passed and I hadn't seen Mara. Maude had asked me to take her to a theatre in New York, a theatre just opposite the dance hall. I sat throughout the performance thinking of Mara so close and yet so far away. I thought of her so insistently and unremittingly that as we were leaving the theatre I gave voice to an impulse which I was powerless to quelch. «How would you like to go up there?» I said, pointing to the dance hall, «and meet her?» It was a cruel thing to say and I felt sorry for her the moment it left my mouth. She looked at me, Maude, as if I had struck her with my fist. I apologized at once and, taking her by the arm, I led her quickly away in the opposite direction, saying as I did so— «It was just an idea. I didn't mean to hurt you. I thought you might be curious, that's all.» She made no answer. I made no further efforts to smooth the thing over. In the subway she slipped her arm in mine and let it rest there, as if to say—«I understand, you were just tactless and thoughtless, as usual.» On the way home we stopped off at her favorite ice cream parlor and there, over a plate of French ice cream which she doted on, she unlimbered sufficiently to eke out a thin conversation about domestic trifles, a sign that she had dismissed the incident from her mind. The French ice cream, which she regarded as a luxury, combined with the opening of a fresh wound, had the effect of making her amorous. Instead of undressing upstairs in the bed-room, as she did ordinarily, she went to the bathroom which adjoined the kitchen and, leaving the door open, she took off her things one by one, leisurely, studiedly, almost like a strip-teaser, calling me in finally as she was combing out her hair to show me a blue mark on her thigh. She was standing there naked except for her shoes and stockings, her hair flowing luxuriantly down her back.
I examined the mark carefully, as I knew she wanted me to, touching her lightly here and there to see if there were any other tender spots which she might have overlooked; at the same time I kept up a running fire of solicitous queries in a calm, matter of fact voice which enabled her to prime herself for a cold-blooded fuck without admitting to herself that that was what she was doing. If I said to her, as I did, in the calm, dull, professional voice of the M.D.—«I think you'd better lie on the table in the kitchen where I can examine you better»—she would do so without the least coaxing, spreading her legs wide apart and letting me insert a finger without a qualm, because now by this time she remembered that since a fall which she had had some time ago there was a little bump inside her, at least so she thought; it worried her, this bump; perhaps if I would put my finger in ever so gently she could track it down, and so on and so forth. Nor did it appear to disturb her in the least when I suggested that she lie there a moment, on the table, while I removed my clothes because it was getting too warm for me in the kitchen, next to the red hot stove, and so on and so forth. And so I removed my things, all but my socks and shoes, and with an erection fit to break a plate I stepped blandly forth and resumed operations. Or rather, I in turn had now become aware of things past, such as bumps, bruises, spots, warts, birthmarks et cetera, and would she kindly give me the once over while we were at it, and then we would go to bed because it was getting late and I didn't want to tire her out.
Strangely enough she wasn't tired at all, she confessed, getting down from the table and solicitously squeezing my cock and then my balls and then the root of my cock, all with such firm, discreet and delicate manipulations that I almost gave her a squirt in the eye. After that she was curious to see how much taller I was than she, so first we stood back to back and then front to front; even then, when it was jumping between her legs like a firecracker, she pretended to be thinking of feet and inches, saying that she ought to take her shoes off because her heels were high, and so on and so forth. And so I made her sit down on the kitchen chair and slowly I pulled off her shoes and stockings, and she, as I politely rendered her service, thoughtfully stroked my cock, which was difficult to do being in the position she was, but I graciously abetted her strategy by moving in closer and hoisting her legs up in the air at a right angle; then, without any more ado I lifted her up by the hind quarters, shoved it in to the hilt and carried her into the next room where I tumbled her on to the couch, sank it in again and went at it with sound and fury, she doing the same and begging me in the most candid, non-professional, non-casual language to hold it, to make it last, to keep it in forever, and then as an after-thought to wait a minute while she slipped out and turned over, raising herself on her knees, her head sunk low, her ass wriggling frantically, her thick gurgling voice saying in the English language openly and admittedly to herself for her own ears to hear and to recognize: «Get it in all the way... please, please do... I'm horny.»
Yes, on occasion she could trot out a word like that, a vulgar word that would have made her curl up with horror and indignation if she were in her right senses, but now after the little pleasantries, after the vaginal exploration by finger, after the weight lifting and measuring contest, after the comparison of bruises, marks, bumps and what not, after the delicately casual manipulation of prick and scrotum, after the delicious French ice cream and the thoughtless faux pas outside the theatre, to say nothing of all that had transpired in her imagination since the cruel avowal a few nights ago, a word like «horny» was just the right and proper word to indicate the temperature of the Bessemer steel furnace which she had made of her inflamed cunt. It was the signal to give her the works and spare nothing. It meant something like this:—«No matter what I was this afternoon or yesterday, no matter what I think I am or how I detest you, no matter what you do with that thing to-morrow or the day after, now I want it and I want everything that goes with it: I wish it were bigger and fatter and longer and juicier: I wish you would break it off and leave it in there: I don't care how many women you've fucked, I want you to fuck me, fuck my cunt, fuck my ass off, fuck and fuck and fuck. I'm horny, do you hear? I'm so horny I could bite it off. Shove it in all the way, harder, harder, break your big prick off and leave it in there. I'm horny, I tell you...»
Usually after these bouts I awoke depressed. Looking at her with her clothes on and that grim, tight, caustic, everyday expression about her mouth, studying her at the breakfast table, indifferently, not having anything else to look at, I wondered sometimes why I didn't take her for a walk some evening and just push her off the end of a pier. I began to look forward like a drowning man to that solution which Stanley had promised and of which as yet there was not the least feign. To cap it all I had written a letter to Mara saying that we had to find a way out soon or I would commit suicide. It must have been a maudlin letter because when she telephoned me she said it was imperative to see me immediately. This shortly after lunch on one of those hectic days when everything seemed to go wrong. The office was jammed with applicants and even if I had had five tongues and five pairs of arms and twenty-five telephones instead of three at my elbow, I could never have hired as many applicants as were needed to fill the sudden and inexplicable vacuum which had come about overnight. I tried to put Mara off until the evening but she would not be put off. I agreed to meet her for a few minutes at an address which she gave me, the apartment of a friend of hers, she said, where we would be undisturbed. It was in the Village.
I left a mob of applicants hanging at the rail, promising Hymie who was frantically telephoning for «waybills» that I'd be back in a few minutes. I jumped into a cab at the corner and got out in front of a doll's house with a miniature garden in front. Mara came to the door in a light mauve dress under which she was nude. She flung her arms around me and kissed me passionately.
«A wonderful little nest, this,» I said, holding her off to take a better look at the place.
«Yes, isn't it?» she said. «It belongs to Carruthers. He lives down the street with his wife; this is just a little den which he uses now and then. I sleep here sometimes when it's too late to go home».
I said nothing. I turned to look at the books—the walls were solidly lined with them. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mara snatch something from the wall—seemed like a sheet of wrapping paper.
«What's that?» I said, not really curious but pretending to be.
«It's nothing,» she answered. «Just a sketch of his which he asked me to destroy.»
«Let's see it!»
«You don't want to look at it—it's worthless»—and she started to crumple it up.
«Let's see it anyway,» I said, grasping her arm and snatching the paper from her hand. I opened it up and saw to my amazement that it was a caricature of myself with a dagger through the heart.
«I told you he was jealous,» she said. «It doesn't mean anything—he was drunk when he did it. He's, been drinking a great deal lately. I have to watch him like a hawk. He's just a big child, you know. You mustn't think he hates you—he acts that way with everybody who shows the least sign of interest in me.»
«He's married, you said. What's the matter—doesn't he get along with his wife?»
«She's an invalid,» said Mara, almost solemnly.
«In a wheel chair?»
«No-o-o, not exactly,» she replied, a faint irrepressible smile suffusing her lips. «Oh, why talk about that now? What differences does it make? You know I'm not in love with him. I told you once that he had been very kind to me; now it's my turn to look after him—he needs some one to steady him.»
«So you sleep here now and then—while he stays with his invalid wife, is that it?»
«He sleeps here too sometimes: there are two cots, if you notice. Oh, please,» she begged, «don't let's talk about him. There's nothing for you to worry about, can't you see, can't you believe me?» She came close to me, put her arms around me. Without ado I lifted her up and carried her over to the couch. I pulled her dress up and, opening wide her legs, I slipped my tongue into her crack. In a moment she had me over her. When she had gotten my cock out she took her two hands and opened her cunt for me to slip it in. Almost at once she had an orgasm, then another, and another. She got up and washed herself quickly. As soon as she had finished I followed suit. When I came out of the bathroom she was lying on the couch with a cigarette to her lips. I sat there a few minutes with my hand between her legs, talking quietly to her.
«I've got to get back to the office,» I said, «and we haven't had a chance to talk.»
«Don't go yet,» she begged, sitting upright and putting her hand affectionately over my prick. I put my arm around her and kissed her long and passionately. She had her fingers in my fly again and was reaching for my prick when suddenly we heard some one fumbling at the door knob.
«It's him,» she said, jumping quickly to her feet and making for the door. «Stay where you are, it's all right,» she threw out quickly as she glided forward to meet him. I hadn't time to button my fly. I stood up and casually straightened it out as she flew into his arms with some silly joyous exclamation.
«I've got a visitor,» she said. «I asked him to come. He's leaving in a few minutes.»
«Hello,» he said, coming forward to greet me with hand out and an amiable smile on his lips. He showed no unusual surprise. In fact, he seemed much more affable than he did the night I first met him at the dance hall.
«You don't have to go this instant, do you?» said he, undoing a bundle which he had brought with him. «You might have a little drink first, won't you? Which do you prefer—Scotch or Rye?»
Before I could say yes or no Mara had slipped out to get some ice. I stood with my back partially turned to him as he busied himself with the bottles and, pretending to be interested in a book on the shelf before me, I stealthily buttoned my fly.
«I hope you don't mind the looks of the place,» he said. «This is just a little retreat, a hide-out, where I can meet Mara and her little friends. She looks cute in that dress, don't you think?»
«Yes,» I said, «it is rather attractive.»
«Nothing much there,» he said, nodding towards the book shelves. «The good ones are all over at the house.»
«Seems like quite a fine collection,» I said, glad to be able to divert the conversation to this ground.
«You're a writer, I understand—or so Mara tells me.
«Not really,» I replied. «I'd like to be. You're probably one yourself, aren't you?»
He laughed. «Oh,» he said deprecatingly, as he measured out the drinks, «we all begin that way, I guess. I've scribbled a few things in my time—poems mostly. I don't seem to be able to do anything any more, except drink.»
Mara returned with the ice. «Come here,» he said, putting the ice on the table and throwing an arm around her waist, «you haven't kissed me yet.» She held her head up and cooly received the slobbery kiss which he planted on her lips.
«I couldn't stand it at the office any longer,» he said, squirting the fizz water into the glasses. «I don't know why I go to the damned place—there's nothing for me to do except look important and sign my name to silly papers.» He took a long swallow. Then, motioning to me to take a seat, he flung himself into the big Morris chair. «Ah, that's better,» he grunted, like a tired business man, though obviously he hadn't done a stroke of work. He beckoned to Mara. «Sit here a minute,» he said, patting the arm of the chair. «I want to talk to you. I've got good news for you.»
It was a highly interesting scene to witness after what had taken place just a few minutes ago. I wondered for a moment whether he were putting on an act for my benefit. He tried to pull her head down to give her another slobbery kiss but she resisted, saying—«Oh come, you're acting silly. Put that drink down, please. You'll be drunk in a moment and then there'll be no talking to you.»
She put her arm over his shoulder and ran her fingers through his hair.
«You see what a tyrant she is,» he said, turning to me. «God help the poor sap who marries her! Here I rush home to give her a piece of good news and...»
«Well, what is it?» Mara interrupted. «Why don't you come out with it?»
«Give me a chance and I'll tell you,» said Carruthers, patting her rump affectionately. «By the way,» turning to me, «won't you pour yourself another drink? Pour me one too—that is, if you can get her permission. I have nothing to say around here. I'm just a general nuisance.»
This sort of banter and cross-fire promised to continue indefinitely. I had made up my mind that it was too late to go back to the office—the afternoon was shot. The second drink had put me in the mood to stay and see it through. Mara wasn't drinking, I noticed. I felt that she wanted me to leave. The good news got sidetracked, then forgotten. Or perhaps he had told her on the sly—he seemed to have dismissed the subject too abruptly. Perhaps while she was begging him to spill the news she had pinched his arm warningly. (Yes, what is the good news? And that pinch telling him not to dare blurt it out in front of me.) I was all at sea. I sat on the other couch and discreetly turned up the cover to see if there were any sheets on it. There weren't. Later I would hear the truth about the matter. We had a long way to go yet.
Carruthers was indeed a drunkard—a pleasant, sociable one too. One of those who drink and sober up at intervals. One of those who never think of food. One of those who have an uncanny memory, who observe everything with an eagle's eye and yet seem to be unconscious, sunk, dead to the world. «Where's that drawing of mine?» he asked suddenly, out of the blue, looking steadily at the spot on the wall where it had been hung.
«I took it down,» said Mara.
«So I see,» he snarled, but not too disagreeably. «I wanted to show it to your friend here.»
«He's already seen it,» said Mara.
«Oh, he has? Well then, it's all right. Then we're not concealing anything from him, are we? I don't want him to have any illusions about me. You know that if I can't have you I won't let anybody else have you, isn't that so? Otherwise everything's fine. Oh, by the way, I saw your friend Valerie yesterday. She wants to move in here—just for a week or two. I told her I'd have to speak to you about it—you're running the place.»
«It's your place,» said Mara testily, «you can do as you please. Only, if she comes in I move out. I have a place of my own to live in; I only come here to look after you, to prevent you from drinking yourself to death.»
«It's funny,» he said, turning to me, «how those two girls detest each other. On my word, Valerie is an adorable creature. She hasn't an ounce of brains, it's true, but then that's no great drawback; she has everything else a man wants. You know, I kept her for a year or more; we got along splendidly too— until this one came along,» and he nodded his head in Mara's direction. «Between you and me I think she's jealous of Valerie. You should meet her—you will if you stick around long enough. I have a hunch she's going to drop in before the day's over.»
Mara laughed in a way I had never heard her laugh before. It was a mean, ugly laugh. «That nit-wit,» she said scornfully, «why she can't even look at a man without getting into trouble. She's a walking abortion...»
«You mean your friend Florrie,» said Carruthers with a stupid fixed grin.
«I wish you'd leave her name out of this,» said Mara angrily.
«You've met Florrie, haven't you?» asked Carruthers, ignoring the remark. «Did you ever see a more lascivious little bitch than that? And Mara is trying to make a lady of her...» He burst out laughing. «It's strange, the trollops she picks up. Roberta —that was another wild one for you. Always had to ride around in limousines. Had a floating kidney, she said, but what it really was... well, between ourselves, she was just a lazy bum. But Mara had to take her under her wing, after I kicked her out, and nurse her. Really, Mara, for an intelligent girl, as you pretend you are, you do behave like a fool sometimes. Unless»—and he looked up at the ceiling meditatively—«there's something else to it. You never know»—still gazing at the ceiling—«what makes two women stick together. Birds of a feather flock together, that's the old saying. Still, it's strange. I know Valerie, I know Florrie, I know this one, I know them all'—and yet, if you were to press me, I don't know anything about them, not a thing. It's another generation than the one I was brought up with; they're like another species of animal. To begin with, they have no moral sense, none of them. They refuse to be house-broken; it's like living in a menagerie. You come home and find a stranger lying in your bed—and you excuse yourself for intruding. Or they'll ask you for money in order to take a boy friend to a hotel for the night. And if they get into trouble you have to find a doctor for them. It's exciting but some times it's a damned nuisance too. It would be easier to keep rabbits, what?»
«That's the way he talks when he's drunk,» said Mara, trying to laugh it off. «Go on, tell him some more about us. I'm sure he enjoys it.»
I wasn't so sure that he was drunk. He was one of those men who talk loosely drunk or sober, who say even more fantastic things, in fact, when they are sober. Embittered, disillusioned men, usually, who act as if nothing could surprise them any more; at bottom however, thoroughly sentimental, soaking their bruised emotional system in alcohol in order not to burst into tears at some unexpected moment. Women find them particularly charming because they never make any demands, never show any real jealousy, though outwardly they may go through all the motions. Often, as with Carruthers, they are saddled with crippled, thwarted wives, creatures whom out of weakness (which they call pity or loyalty) they allow themselves to be burdened with for life. To judge from his talk, Carruthers had no difficulty in finding attractive young women to share his love-nest. Sometimes there were two or three living with him at the same time. He probably had to make a show of jealousy, of possessiveness, in order not to be made an utter fool of. As for his wife, as I found out later, she was an invalid only to this extent—that her hymen was still intact. For years Carruthers had endured it like a martyr. But suddenly, when he realized that he was getting on in years, he had begun tearing around like a college boy. And then he had taken to drink. Why? Had he found that he was already too old to satisfy a healthy young girl? Had he suddenly regretted his years of abstinence? Mara, who had vouchsafed this information, was of course purposely vague and clinical about the subject. She did admit, however, that she had often slept with him on the same couch, leaving me to infer that obviously he never dreamed of molesting her. And then in the next breath adding that of course the other girls were only too pleased to sleep with him; the implication was, of course, that he only «molested» those who liked to be molested. That there was any particular reason why Mara should not want to be molested I couldn't see. Or was I supposed to think that he wouldn't molest a girl who had his welfare so much at heart? We had quite a ticklish wrangle about it as I was taking leave of her. It had been a crazy day and night. I had gotten tight and had fallen asleep on the floor. This was before dinner, and the reason for it was that I was famished. According to Mara, Carruthers had grown quite incensed over my conduct; she had had quite a time dissuading him from breaking a bottle over my head. In order to mollify him she had lain down with him on the couch for a while. She didn't say whether he had tried to «molest» her or not. Anyway he had only taken a cat nap; when he awoke he was hungry, wanted to eat right away. During his sleep he had forgotten that he had a visitor; seeing me lying oil the floor sound asleep he had become angry again. Then they had gone out together and had a good meal; on the way home she had induced him to buy a few sandwiches for me and some coffee. I remembered the sandwiches and the coffee—it was like an interlude during a blackout. Carruthers had forgotten about me with Valerie's arrival. That I remembered too, though dimly. I remembered seeing a beautiful young girl enter and fling her arms about Carruthers. I remembered being handed a drink and falling back again into a torpor. And then? Well then, as Mara explained it, there had been a little tiff between herself and Valerie. And Carruthers had gotten blind drunk, had staggered out into the street and disappeared.
«But you were sitting on his lap when I woke up!» I said.
Yes, that was so, she admitted, but only after she had been out searching for him, wandering all through the Village, and finally picking him up on the steps of a church and bringing him home in a taxi.
«You must certainly think a lot of him to go to all that trouble.»
She didn't deny it. She was tired of going all over that ground again with me.
So that was how the evening had passed. And Valerie? Valerie had left in a huff, after smashing an expensive vase. And what was that bread knife doing alongside me, I wanted to know. That? Oh, that was some more of Carruthers' tomfoolery. Pretending that he was going to cut my heart out. She hadn't even bothered to take the knife out of his hand. He was harmless, Carruthers. Wouldn't hurt a fly. Just the same, I thought to myself, it would have been wiser to wake me up. What else had happened, I wondered. Christ only knows what went on during the blackout. If she could let me put the blocks to her, knowing that Carruthers was apt to walk in at any moment, surely, she could let him «molest» her a few minutes (if only to pacify him), seeing that I was in a deep trance and would never be any the wiser.
However, it was now four in the morning and Carruthers was sound asleep on the couch. We were standing in a doorway on Sixth Avenue trying to come to some understanding. I was insisting that she let me take her home; she was trying to make me understand that it was too late.
«But I've taken you home before at an even later hour.» I was determined not to let her return to Carruthers' den.
«You don't understand,» she pleaded. «I haven't been home for several weeks. All my things are there.»
«Then you're living with him. Why didn't you say that in the first place?»
«I'm not living with him. I'm only staying there temporarily until I find a place to live. I'm not going back home any more. I had a bad quarrel with my mother. I walked out. Told them I'd never come back again.»
«And your father—what did he say?»
«He wasn't there when it happened. I know he must be heart-broken, but I couldn't stand it any longer.»
«I'm sorry,» I said, «if that's how it is. I suppose you're broke too. Let me walk you back—you must be fagged out.»
We started walking through the empty streets. She stopped suddenly and threw her arms around me. «You trust me, don't you?» she said, looking at me with tears in her eyes.
«Of course I do. But I wish you would find another place to stay. I can always dig up the price of a room. Why don't you let me help you?»
«Oh, I won't be needing any help now,» she said brightly. «Why, I almost forgot to tell you the good news! Yes, I'm going away for a few weeks—to the country. Carruthers is sending me to his cabin up in the North woods. The three of us are going— Florrie, Hannah Bell and myself. It'll be a real vacation. Maybe you can join us? You'll try, won't you? Aren't you glad?» She stopped to give me a kiss. «You see, he's not a bad sort,» she added. «He's not coming up himself. He wants to give us a treat. Now if he were in love with me, as you seem to think, wouldn't he want to go up there with me alone? He doesn't like you, that I admit. He's afraid of you—you're too serious. After all, you've got to expect him to have some feelings. If his wife were dead he'd undoubtedly ask me to marry him—not because he's in love with me but because he wants to protect me. Do you see now?»
«No,» I said, «I don't see. But it's all right. You certainly need a vacation; I hope you'll enjoy yourself there. As for Carruthers, no matter what you say about him, I don't like him and I don't trust him. And I'm not at all sure that he's acting from such generous motives as you describe. I hope he croaks, that's all, and if I could give him a drop of poison I'd do it—without a qualm.»
«I'm going to write you every day,» she said, as we stood at the door saying farewell.
«Mara, listen,» I said, drawing her close to me and murmuring the words in her ear. «I had a lot to tell you today and it's all gone up in smoke.» «I know, I know,» she said feverishly. «Maybe things will change when you're gone,» I continued. «Something's got to happen soon—we can't go on this way forever.»
«That's what I'm thinking too,» she said softly, snuggling against me affectionately. «I hate this life. I want to think it out when I'm up there and alone. I don't know how I ever got into this mess.»
«Good,» I said, «maybe we'll get somewhere then. You'll write, that's a promise?»
«Of course I will... every day,» she said, as she turned to go.
I stood there a moment after she had turned in, wondering whether I was a fool to let her go, wondering if it wouldn't be better to drag her out and just smash a way through, wife or no wife, job or no job. I walked off, still debating it in my mind, but my feet dragging me towards home.
6
Well, she was off to the North woods. Just arrived, in fact. Those two pole cats had accompanied her and everything was just ducky. There , were two wonderful backwoodsmen who looked after them, cooked their meals, showed them how to shoot the rapids, played the guitar and the harmonica for them on the back porch at night when the stars came out, and so on—all crammed on the back of a picture postcard showing the wonderful pine cones which drop from the pine trees up in Maine.
I immediately went round to Carruthers' den to see if he were still in town. He was, there all right and quite surprised, and not any too pleased, to see me. I pretended that I had come to borrow a book which had caught my fancy the other evening. He informed me dryly that he had given up the practice of lending out books long ago. He was thoroughly sober and obviously determined to freeze me out as quickly as possible. I noticed, as I was taking leave, that he had tacked up the picture of me with the dagger through the heart. He noticed that I had noticed it but made no reference to it.
I felt somewhat humiliated but vastly relieved just the same. For once she had told me the truth! I was so overjoyed that I rushed to the public library, buying a pad and an envelope on the way, and sat there till closing time writing her a huge letter. I told her to telegraph me—couldn't wait to receive word by mail. After mailing the letter I wrote out a long telegram and dispatched it to her. Two days later, not having heard from her, I sent another telegram, a longer one, and after I had dispatched it I sat down in the lobby of the Mc Alpin Hotel and wrote her an even more voluminous letter than the first one. The next day I received a short letter, warm, affectionate, almost childish. No mention of the first telegram. That made me quite frantic. Perhaps she had given me a phoney address. But why would she do that? Anyway, better telegraph again! Demand full address and nearest telephone. Had she received the second telegram and both letters? «Keep a sharp lookout for mail and future telegrams. Write often. Telegraph when possible. Advise when returning. I love you. I'm mad about you. The Cabinet Minister speaking.»
The «Cabinet Minister» must have done the trick. Soon there came a telegram for Glahn the Hunter, followed by a letter signed Victoria. God was looking over her shoulder as she wrote. She had seen a deer and she had followed it through the woods and had lost her way. The backwoodsmen had found her and carried her home. They were wonderfully simple fellows, and Hannah and Florrie had fallen in love with them. That is, they went canoeing with them and sometimes slept in the woods with them all night. She was coming back in a week or ten days. She couldn't bear staying away from me longer than that. Then this: «I am coming back to you, I want to be your wife.» Just as simple as that, the way she put it. I thought it marvelous. I loved her all the more for being so direct, so simple, so frank and honest. I wrote her three letters in a row, moving from place to place, as I shuffled about in a delirium of ecstasy.
On fever hooks waiting for her return. She had said she'd be back Friday night. Would telephone me at Ulric's studio soon as she hit town. Friday night came and I sat there until two in the morning waiting for her phone call. Ulric, always skeptical, said maybe she meant the following Friday. I went home thoroughly dejected but certain I would hear from her in the morning. Next day I telephoned Ulric several times to inquire if he had had any word from her. He was bored, thoroughly disinterested, almost a little ashamed of me, I felt. At noon, as I was leaving the office, I ran into MacGregor and his wife sporting a new car. We hadn't seen each other for months. He insisted on my having lunch with them. I tried to get out of it but couldn't. «What's the matter with you,» he said, «you're not yourself. A woman again, I suppose. Jesus, when will you ever learn to take care of yourself?»
During the lunch he informed me that they had decided to take a ride out on Long Island, perhaps spend the night there somewhere. Why couldn't I come along? I said I had made a date with Ulric. «That's all right,» he said, «bring your friend Ulric along. I haven't much use for him, but if it'll make you any happier, sure we'll pick up, why not?» I tried to tell him that Ulric might not be so eager to join us. He wouldn't listen. «Hell' come,» he said, «you leave that to me. We'll go out to Montauk Point or Shelter Island and just lie around and take it easy—it'll do you good. As for that Jane you're worrying about, why forget it! If she likes you she'll come round by herself. Treat 'em rough, that's what I always say, eh Tess?» and with that he gave his wife a dig in the ribs that knocked the breath out of her.
Tess Molloy was what you'd call a good-natured Irish slob. She was about the homeliest woman I've ever seen, broad in the beam, pock-marked, her hair scant and stringy (she was getting bald), but jolly and indolent, always ready to fight at the drop of the hat. MacGregor had married her for purely practical reasons. They had never pretended to be in love with one another. There was scarcely even an animal affection between them since, as he had readily explained to me shortly after their marriage, sex didn't mean a thing to her. She didn't mind being diddled now and then, but she got no pleasure from it. «Are you through?» she would ask every now and then. If he took too long a time over it she would ask him to fetch her a drink or bring her something to eat. «I got so damned sore at her once that I brought her the newspaper to read. 'Now go ahead and read,' I says to her, 'and see that you don't miss the comic strip!'»
I thought we'd have a hard time persuading Ulric to come along. He had only met MacGregor a few times and each time he had shaken his head as though to say—«It beats me!» To my surprise Ulric greeted MacGregor quite cordially. He had just been promised a fat check for a new can of beans he was to do next week and he was in a mood to lay off work for a while. He had just been out to get himself a few bottles of liquor. There had been no phone call from Mara, of course. There wouldn't be any, not for a week or two, thought Ulric. Have a drink!
MacGregor was impressed by a magazine cover that Ulric had just finished. It was a picture of a man with a golf bag just setting out for the greens. MacGregor found it extremely life-like. «I didn't know you were that good,» he said with his customary tactlessness. «What do you get for a job like that, if I may ask?» Ulric told him. His respect deepened. Meanwhile his wife had spied a water color which she liked. «Did you do that?» she asked. Ulric nodded. «I'd like to buy it,» she said. «How much do you want for it?» Ulric said he would be glad to give it to her when it was finished. «It's not finished yet, you mean?» she screamed. «It looks finished to me. I don't care, I'll take it anyway, just as it is. Will you take twenty dollars for it?»
«Now listen, you fathead,» said MacGregor, giving her a playful ox-like poke on the jaw which knocked the glass out of her hand, «the man says it ain't finished yet; what do you want to do, make a liar out of him?»
«I'm not saying it's finished,» she said, «and I didn't call him a liar. I like it just as it is and I want to buy it.»
«Well, buy it then, by Jesus, and get done with it!»
«No, really, I couldn't let you take it in that condition,» said Ulric. «Besides, it's not good enough to sell—it's just a sketch.»
«That doesn't matter,» said Tess Molloy, «I want it. I'll give you thirty dollars for it.»
«You just said twenty a minute ago,» put in MacGregor. «What's the matter with you, are you nuts? Didn't you ever buy a picture before? Listen, Ulric, you'd better let her have it or else we'll never get started. I'd like to do a little fishing before the day's over, what do you say? Of course this bird»—indicating me with his thumb—«doesn't like fishing; he wants to sit and mope, dream about love, study the sky and that kind of crap. Come on, let's get going. Yeah, that's right, take a bottle along—we might want a swig of it before we get there.»
Tess took the water color from the wall and left a twenty dollar bill on the desk.
«Better take it with you,» warned MacGregor. «No telling who may break in while we're gone.»
After we had gone a block or so it occurred to me s that I ought to have left a note for Mara on the doorbell. «Oh, fuck that idea!» said MacGregor. «Give her something to worry about—they like that. Eh Toots?» and again he poked his wife in the ribs.
«If you poke me again like that,» said she, «I'll wrap this bottle around your neck. I mean it too.»
«She means it.» he said, glancing back at us with a bright nickel-plated sort of smile. «You can't prod her too much, can you Toots? Yep, she's got a good disposition—otherwise she'd never have stood me as long as she has, ain't that right, kid?»
«Oh, shut up! Look where you're driving. We don't want this car smashed up like the other one.»
«We don't?» he yelled. «Jesus, I like that. And who, may I ask, ran into the milk truck on the Hempstead Turnpike in broad daylight?»
«Oh, forget it!»
They kept it up like that until way past Jamaica. Suddenly he quit pestering and nagging her and, looking though the mirror, he began talking to us about his conception of art and life. It was all right, he thought, to go in for that sort of thing—meaning pictures and all that humbug—provided one had the talent for it. A good artist was worth his money, that was his opinion. The proof was that he got it, if you noticed. Anybody who was any good always got recognition, that's what he wanted to say. Wasn't that so? Ulric said he thought so too. Not always, of course, but generally speaking. Of course, there were fellows like Gauguin, MacGregor went on, and Christ knows they were good artists, but then there was some strange quirk in them, something antisocial, if you wanted to call it that, which prevented them from being recognized immediately. You couldn't blame the public for that, could you? Some people were born unlucky, that's how he saw it. Now take himself, for instance. He wasn't an artist, to be sure, but then he wasn't a dud either. In his way he was as good as the next fellow, maybe just a little bit better. And yet, just to prove how uncertain everything could be, nothing he had put his hand to had turned out right. Sometimes a little shyster had gotten the better of him. And why? Because he, MacGregor, wouldn't stoop to doing certain things. There are things you just don't do, he insisted. No sir! and he banged the wheel emphatically. But that's the way they play the game, and they get away with it too. But not forever! Ah no!
«Now you take Maxfield Parrish,» he continued. «I suppose he doesn't count, but just the same he gives 'em what they want. While a guy like Gauguin has to struggle for a crust of bread—and even when he's dead they spit in his eye. It's a queer game, art. I suppose it's like everything else—you do it because you like it, that's about the size of it, what? Now you take that bastard sitting alongside of you—yeah you!» he said, grinning at me through the mirror— «he thinks we ought to support him, nurse him along until he writes his masterpiece. He never thinks that he might look for a job meanwhile. Oh no, he wouldn't soil his lily-white hands that way. He's an artist. Well, maybe he is, for all I know. But he's got to prove it first, am I right? Did anybody support me because I thought I was a lawyer? It's all right to have dreams—we all like to dream—but somebody has to pay the rent.»
We had just passed a duck farm. «Now that's what I'd like,» said MacGregor. «I'd like nothing better than to settle down and raise ducks. Why don't I? Because I've got sense enough to know that I don't know anything about ducks. You can't just dream them up—you've got to raise them! Now Henry there, if he took it into his head to raise ducks, he'd just move out here and dream about it. First he'd ask me to lend him some money, of course. He's got that much sense, I must admit. He knows that you have to buy them before you can raise them. So, when he wants something, say a duck now, he just blandly says 'Give me some money, I want to buy a duck!' Now that's what I call impractical. That's dreaming.... How did I get my money? Did I pick it off a bush? When I tell him to get out and hustle for it he gets sore. He thinks I'm against him. Is that right—or am I slandering you?» and he gave me another nickel-plated grin through the mirror. «It's O.K.,» I said. «Don't take it to heart.» «Take it to heart? Do you hear that? Jesus, if you think I lay awake nights worrying about you, you're sadly mistaken. I'm trying to set you right, that's all. I'm trying to put a little sense into your thick head. Of course I know you don't want to raise ducks, but you must admit you do get some crazy notions now and then. Jesus, I hope you don't forget the time you tried to sell me a Jewish Encyclopaedia. Imagine, he wanted me to sign for a set so that he could get his commission, and then I was to return it after a while—just like that. I was to give them some cock-and-bull story which he had trumped up on the spur of the moment. That's the sort of genius he has for business. And me a lawyer! Can you see me signing my name to a phoney proposition like that? No, by Jesus, I'd have more respect for him if he had told me he wanted to raise ducks. I can understand a guy wanting to raise ducks. But to try and palm off a Jewish Encyclopaedia on your best friend—that's raw, to say nothing of it being illegal and untenable. That's another thing—he thinks the law is all rot. I don't believe in it,' he says, as if his believing or not believing made any difference. And as soon as he's in trouble he comes hot-footing it to me. 'Do something,' he says, 'you know how to handle these things.' It's just a game to him. He could live without law, so he thinks, but I'll be damned if he isn't in trouble all the time. And of course, as to paying me for my trouble, or just for the time I put in on him, that never enters his bean. I should do those little things for him out of friendship. You see what I mean?»
Nobody said anything.
We drove along in silence for a while. We passed more duck farms. I asked myself how long it would take to go crazy if one bought a duck and settled down on Long Island with it. Walt Whitman was born here somewhere. I no sooner thought of his name than, like buying the duck, I wanted to visit his birthplace.
«What about visiting Walt Whitman's birthplace?» I said aloud.
«What?» yelled MacGregor.
«Walt Whitman!» I yelled. «He was born somewhere on Long Island. Let's go there.»
«Do you know where?» shouted MacGregor.
«No, but we could ask some one.»
«Oh, the hell with that! I thought you knew where. These people out here wouldn't know who Walt Whitman was. I wouldn't have known myself only you talk about him so goddamn much. He was a bit queer, wasn't he? Didn't you tell me he was in love with a bus driver? Or was he a nigger lover? I can't remember any more.»
«Maybe it was both,» said Ulric, uncorking the bottle.
We were passing through a town. «Jesus, but I seem to know this place!» said MacGregor. «Where in hell are we?» He pulled up to the curb and hailed a pedestrian. «Hey, what's the name of this burg?» The man told him. «Can you beat that?» he said. «I thought I recognized the dump. Jesus, what a beautiful dose of clap I got here once! I wonder if I could find the house. I'd just like to drive by and see if that cute little bitch is sitting on the verandah. God, the prettiest little trick you ever laid eyes on—a little angel, you'd say. And could she fuck! One of those excitable little bitches, always in heat—you know, always throwing it up to you, rubbing it in your face. I drove out here in a pouring rain to keep a date with her. Everything just fine. Her husband was away on a trip and she was just itching for a piece of tail.... I'm trying to think now where I picked her up. I know this, that I had a hell of a time persuading her to let me visit her. Well, anyway, I had a wonderful time—never got out of bed for two days. Never got up to wash even—that was the trouble. Jesus, I swear if you saw that face alongside of you on the pillow you'd think you were getting the Virgin Mary. She could come about nine times without stopping. And then she'd say—'Do it again, once more... I feel depraved' That was a funny one, eh? I don't think she knew what the word meant. Anyway, a few days later it began to itch and then it got red and swollen. I couldn't believe I was getting the clap. I thought maybe a flea had bitten me. Then the pus began to run. Boy, fleas don't make pus. Well, I went round to the family doctor. That's a beauty,' he said, where did you get it?' I told him. 'Better have a blood test,' he said, 'it might be syphilis.'»
«That's enough of that,» groaned Tess. «Can't you talk about something pleasant for a change?»
«Well,» says MacGregor, in answer to that, «you've got to admit I've been pretty clean since I know you, right?'»
«You better had,» she answered, «or it wouldn't be healthy for you.»
«She's always afraid I'm going to bring her a present,» said MacGregor, grinning through the mirror again. «Listen Toots, everybody gets a dose some time or other. You can be thankful I got it before I met you—isn't that right, Ulric?»
«Oh yeah?» snapped Tess. Another long wrangle might have ensued had we not come to a hamlet which MacGregor thought would be a good stopping place. He had an idea he would like to go crabbing. Besides, there was a road house nearby which served good food, if he remembered rightly. He bundled us all out. «Want to take a leak? Come on!» We left Tess standing at the roadside like a torn umbrella and went indoors to empty our bladders. He got us both by the arm. «Confidentially,» he said, «we ought to stick around here for the evening. There's a fast crowd comes here; if you'd like to dance and have a drink or two, why this is the place. I won't tell her we're staying just yet— might get the wind up. We'll go down to the beach first and loll around. When you get hungry just say so and then I'll suddenly remember the road house —get me?»
We strolled down to the beach. It was almost deserted. MacGregor bought a pocketful of cigars, lit one, took off his shoes and socks and waded around in the water smoking a fat cigar. «It's great, isn't it?» he said. «You've got to be a kid once in a while.» He made his wife take her shoes and stockings off. She waddled into the water like a hairy duck Ulric sprawled out on the sand and took a nap. I lay there watching MacGregor and his wife at their clumsy antics. I wondered if Mara had arrived and what she would think when she found I was not there. I wanted to get back as quick as possible. I didn't give a fuck about the road house and the fast ponies who came there to dance. I had a feeling that she was back, that she was sitting on Ulric's doorstep waiting for me. I wanted to get married again, that's what I wanted. What had ever induced me to come out here to this God-forsaken place? I hated Long Island, always had. MacGregor and his ducks! The thought of it drove me mad. If I were to own a duck I would call it MacGregor, tie it to a lamp post and shoot it with a 48 calibre revolver. I'd shoot it until it was dead and then pole-axe it. His ducks! Fuck a duck! I said to myself. Fuck everything!
We went to the roadhouse just the same. If I had thought to demur I forgot it. I had reached a state of indifference born of despair. I let myself drift with the current. And, as always happens when you relent and allow yourself to be borne along by the clashing wills of others, something occurred which we didn't bargain for.
We had finished eating and we were having a third or fourth drink; the place was cosily filled, everybody was in a good mood. Suddenly, at a table nearby, a young man rose to his feet with a glass in hand and addressed the house. He wasn't drunk, he was just in a pleasant state of euphoria, as Dr. Kronski would put it. He was explaining quietly and easily that he had taken the liberty of calling attention to himself and his wife, to whom he raised his glass, because it was the first anniversary of their wedding, and because they felt so good about it that they wanted everybody to know it and to share their happiness. He said he didn't want to bore us by making a speech, that he had never made a speech in his life, and that he wasn't trying to make a speech now, but he just had to let everybody know how good he felt and how good his wife felt, that maybe he'd never feel this way again all his life. He said he was just a nobody, that he worked for a living and didn't make much money (nobody did any more), but he knew one thing and that was that he was happy, and he was happy because he had found the woman he loved, and he still loved her just as much as ever, though they were now married a whole year. (He smiled.) He said he wasn't ashamed to admit it before the whole world. He said he couldn't help telling us all about it, even if it bored us, because when you're very happy you want others to share you happiness. He said he thought it wonderful that there could be such happiness when there were so many things wrong with the world, but that perhaps there would be more happiness if people confessed their happiness to one another instead of waiting to confide in one another only when they were sorrowful and sad. He said he wanted to see everybody looking happy, that even if we were all strangers one to another, we were united this evening with him and his wife and if we would share their great joy with them it would make them still happier.
He was so completely carried away by this idea that everybody should participate in their joy that he went on talking for twenty minutes or more, roaming from one thing to another like a man sitting at the piano and improvising. He hadn't a doubt in the world that we were all his friends, that we would listen to him in peace until he had had his say. Nothing he said sounded ridiculous, however sentimental his words may have been. He was utterly sincere, utterly genuine, and utterly possessed by the realization that to be happy is the greatest boon on earth. It wasn't courage which had made him get up and address us, for obviously the thought of getting to his feet and delivering a long extemporaneous speech was as much of a surprise to him as it was to us. He was for the moment, and without knowing it, of course, on the way to becoming an Evangelist, that curious phenomenon of American life which has never been adequately explained. The men who have been touched by a vision, by an unknown voice, by an irresistible inner prompting—and there have been thousands upon thousands of them in our country—what must have been the sense of isolation in which they dwelled, and for how long, to suddenly rise up, as if out of a deep trance, and create for themselves a new identity, a new image of the world, a new God, a new heaven? We are accustomed to think of ourselves as a great democratic body, linked by common ties of blood and language, united indissolubly by all the modes of communication which the ingenuity of man can possibly devise; we wear the same clothes, eat the same diet, read the same newspapers, alike in everything but name, weight and number; we are the most collectivized people in the world, barring certain primitive peoples whom we consider backward in their development. And yet— yet despite all the outward evidences of being close-knit, inter-related, neighborly, good-humored, helpful, sympathetic, almost brotherly, we are a lonely people, a morbid, crazed herd thrashing about in zealous frenzy, trying to forget that we are not what we think we are, not really united, not really devoted to one another, not really listening, not really anything, just digits shuffled about by some unseen hand in a calculation which doesn't concern us. Suddenly now and then some one comes awake, comes undone, as it were, from the meaningless glue in which we are stuck— the rigmarole which we call the everyday life and which is not life but a trance-like suspension above the great stream of life—and this person who, because he no longer subscribes to the general pattern seems to us quite mad, finds himself invested with strange and almost terrifying powers, finds that he can wean countless thousands from the fold, cut them loose from their moorings, stand them on their heads, fill them with joy, or madness, make them forsake, their own kith and kin, renounce their calling, change their character, their physiognomy, their very soul. And what is the nature of this overpowering seduction, this madness, this «temporary derangement,» as we love to call it? What else if not the hope of finding joy and peace? Every Evangelist uses a different language but they are all talking about the same thing. (To stop seeking, to stop struggling, to stop climbing on top of one another, to stop thrashing about in the pursuit of vain and vacillating goals.) In the twinkle of an eye it comes, the great secret which arrests the outer motion, which tranquilizes the spirit, which equilibrates, which brings serenity and 'poise, and illumines the visage with a steady, quiet flame that never dies. In their efforts to communicate the secret they become a nuisance to us, true. We shun them because we feel that they look upon us condescendingly; we can't bear to think that we are not the equal of any one, however superior he may seem to be. But we are not equals; we are mostly inferior, vastly inferior, inferior particularly to those who are quiet and contained, who are simple in their ways, and unshakeable in their beliefs. We resent what is steady and anchored, what is impervious to our blandishments, our logic, our collectivized cud of principles, our antiquated forms of allegiance.
A little more happiness, I thought to myself as I listened to him, and he'd become what is called a dangerous man. Dangerous, because to be permanently happy would be to set the world on fire. To make the world laugh is one thing; to make it happy is quite another. Nobody has ever succeeded in doing it. The great figures, those who have influenced the world for good or evil, have always been tragic figures. Even St. Francis of Assisi was a tormented being. And the Buddha, with his obsession to eliminate suffering, well he was not precisely a happy man. He was beyond that, if you like: he was serene, and when he died, so it is related, his whole body glowed as if the very marrow were afire.
And yet, as an experiment, as a preliminary (if you like) to that more wondrous state to which the holy men attain, it seems to me that it would be worth the attempt to make the whole world happy. I know that the very word (happiness) has come to have an odious ring, in America particularly; it sounds witless and shitless; it has an empty ring; it is the ideal of the weak and the infirm. It is a word borrowed from the Anglo-Saxons, and distorted by us into something altogether senseless. One is ashamed to use it seriously. But there is no good reason why it should be thus. Happiness is as legitimate as sorrow, and everybody, except those emancipated souls who in their wisdom have found something better, or bigger, desires to be happy and would, if he could (if he only knew how!), sacrifice everything to attain it.
I liked the young man's speech, inane as it might appear on close scrutiny. Everybody liked it. Everybody liked him and his wife. Everybody felt better, more communicative, more relaxed, more liberated. It was as if he had given us all a shot in the arm. People spoke to one another across the tables, or got up and shook hands, or clapped one another on the back. Yes, if you happened to be a very serious person, concerned with the fate of the world, dedicated to some high purpose (such as improving the conditions of the working classes or lowering the rate of illiteracy among the native born), perhaps this little incident would seem to have assumed a thoroughly exaggerated importance. An open, universal display of unfeigned happiness gives some people an uncomfortable feeling; there are some people who prefer to be happy privately, who consider a public demonstration of their joy immodest or slightly obscene. Or perhaps they are simply so locked up in themselves that they can't understand communion or communication. At any rate, there were no such tender souls among us; it was an average crowd made up of ordinary people, ordinary people who owned cars, that is to say. Some of them were downright rich and some were not so rich, but none of them were starving, none of them were epileptic, none of them were Mohammedan or Negroid or just plain white trash. They were ordinary, in the ordinary sense of the word. They were like millions of other American people, that is to say, without distinction, without airs, without any great purpose. Suddenly, when he had finished, they seemed to realize that they were all just like one another, no better no worse, and throwing off the petty restraints which kept them segregated in little groups, they rose indistinctively and began mingling with one another. Soon the drinks began to flow and they were singing, and then they began to dance, and they danced differently than they would have before; some got up and danced who hadn't shaken a leg for years, some danced with their own wives; some danced alone, giddy, intoxicated with their own grace and freedom; some sang as they danced; some just beamed good-naturedly at every one whose glance they happened to encounter. It was astonishing what an effect a simple, open declaration of joy could bring about. His words were nothing in themselves, just plain ordinary words which any one could summon at a moment's notice. MacGregor, always skeptical, always striving to detect the flaw, was of the opinion that he was really a very clever young fellow, perhaps a theatrical figure, and that he had been deliberately simple, deliberately naif, in order to create an effect. Still, he couldn't deny that the speech had put him in a good mood. He simply wanted to let us know that he wasn't being taken in so easily. It made him feel better, so he pretended, to know that he hadn't been duped, even if he had enjoyed the performance thoroughly. I felt sorry for him if what he said were true. Nobody can feel better than the man who is completely taken in. To be intelligent may be a boon, but to be completely trusting, gullible to the point of idiocy, to surrender without reservation, is one of the supreme joys of life.
Well, we all felt so good that we decided to go back to town and not stay overnight as we had planned. We sang at the top of our lungs all the way in. Even Tess sang, off-key it's true, but lustily and without restraint. MacGregor had never heard her sing before; she had always been like a reindeer, as far as the vocal apparatus was concerned. Her speech was limited, restricted to coarse grunts, punctuated by groans of approval or disapproval. I had the queer presentiment that, in the throes of this extraordinary expansiveness, she might take it into her head to burst out singing (later on) instead of making the usual request for a glass of water or an apple or a ham sandwich. I could visualize the expression on MacGregor's face, were she to absent-mindedly pull off a stunt like that. His look would register incredible amazement («What next, b'Jesus?» but at the same time it would suggest—«Go on, keep it up, try a falsetto for a change!» He liked people to do unheard of things. He liked to be able to think that there were certain vile, almost incredible things people could do that he had never imagined. He liked to think that there was nothing too vile, too scabrous, too ignominious for the human being to perpetrate on or against his fellow-man.
He boasted of having an open mind, a mind receptive to any alleged form of stupidity, cruelty, treachery or perversity. He went on the assumption that every one was at heart a mean, callous, selfish, bastardly son of a bitch, a fact which was proven by the miraculously limited number of cases which came to public attention through the law-courts. If every one could be spied on, trailed, hounded, surveilled, cross-examined, nailed down, forced to confess, why in his honest opinion, we would all be in jail. And the most notorious offenders, to take his word for it, were the judges, the ministers of state, the public wardens, the members of the clergy, the educators, the charitable workers. As for his own profession, he had met one or two in his life who were scrupulously honest, whose word could be depended on; the rest, which included practically the whole profession, were lower than the lowest criminals, the scum of the earth, the shittiest dregs of humanity that ever stood on two legs. No, he wasn't being taken in by any horse shit these birds handed out for general consumption. He didn't know why he was honest and truthful himself; it certainly didn't pay. He was just made that way, he guessed. Besides, he had other foibles, and here he would add up all the faults which he had, or admitted he had, or imagined he had, and a formidable list it made, so that when he had finished one was tempted to ask why he bothered to retain the other two virtues of truthfulness and honesty. «So you're still thinking about her?» he popped suddenly, turning his head slightly and twisting the words out of the corner of his mouth. «Well, I feel sorry for you. I suppose nothing will do but to marry her. You certainly are a glutton for punishment. And what will you live on—have you thought of that? You know you're not going to keep this job very much longer—they must be wise to you by this time. It's a wonder to me they didn't fire you long ago. It certainly is a record for you— how long is it now, three years? I can remember when three days was a long time. Of course if she's the right kind of girl you won't have to worry about keeping a job—she'll keep you. That would be ideal, wouldn't it? Then you could write those masterpieces you're always promising us. I think, by Jesus, that's why you're so eager to get rid of your wife: she's on to you, she keeps your nose to the grind-stone. God, how it must gripe you to get up every morning and go to work! How do you do it, will you tell me? You used to be too damned lazy to get up for a meal.. Listen, Ulric, I've seen that bastard stay in bed for three days hand-running. Nothing the matter with him—just couldn't bear the thought of facing the world. Love sick, sometimes. Or just suicidal. That's something he used to like —to threaten us with suicide. (He looked at me through the mirror.) «You forget those days, don't you?» Now he wants to live... I don't know why... nothing's changed... everything's just as lousy as ever. Now he talks of giving something to the world —a masterpiece, no less. He couldn't just give us an ordinary book that would sell. Oh no, not him! It's got to be unique, something unheard of. Well, I'm waiting. I don't say you won't do it, and I don't say you will. I'm just waiting. Meanwhile the rest of us have to go on making a living. We can't take a lifetime trying to turn out a masterpiece.» (He paused for breath.) «You know, sometimes I feel as though I'd like to turn out a book myself—just to prove to this guy that you don't have to make a monkey of yourself to do a trick like that. I think if I wanted to I could do a book in six months —on the side, without neglecting my practice. I don't say that it would be a prize-winner. I never boasted of being an artist. What gets me about this bird is that he's so damned sure he's an artist. He's certain that he's infinitely superior to a Hergesheimer, let's say, or a Dreiser—and yet he hasn't a damned thing to show for it. He wants us to take: it on faith. He gets ruffled if you ask him to show you something tangible like a manuscript. Can you picture me trying to impress a judge with the fact that I'm a capable lawyer without having even taken a degree? I know that you can't wave a diploma in front of some one's eyes to prove that you're a writer, but just the same you could wave a manuscript, couldn't you? He says lie's written several books already—well then, where are they? Has anybody ever seen them?»
Here Ulric interrupted to put in a word for me. I was sitting back in my soft seat chuckling. I enjoyed these tirades of MacGregor's.
«Well, all right,» said MacGregor, «if you say you've seen a manuscript I'll take your word for it. He never shows me anything, the bastard. I suppose he hasn't any respect for my judgment. All I know is, to listen to him talk you'd think he was a genius. Mention any author—nobody suits him. Even Anatole France is no good. He must be aiming pretty high if he's going to make these birds take a back seat. To my way of thinking, a man like Joseph Conrad is not only an artist but a master. He thinks Conrad is over-rated. Melville, he tells me, is infinitely superior. And then, by Jesus, do you know what he admits to me one day? That he never read Melville! But that doesn't make any difference, he says. How are you going to reason with a guy like that? I haven't read Melville either, but I'm damned if I'll believe that he's better than Conrad—not till I've read him anyway.»
«Well,» said Ulric, «maybe he's not so crazy at that. Lots of people who've never seen a Giotto are fairly certain that he's better than Maxfield Parrish, for example.»
«That's different,» said MacGregor. «There's no question about the value of Giotto's work, nor of Conrad's either. Melville, from what I can gather, is pretty much of a dark horse. This generation may find him superior to Conrad, but then again he may fade out like a comet in a hundred or two hundred years. He was almost extinct when they rediscovered him recently.»
«And what makes you think that Conrad's fame won't fade in a hundred or two hundred years?» said Ulric.
«Because there's nothing dubious about it. It rests on solid achievement. He's universally liked, translated into dozens of languages already. The same is true of Jack London or O'Henry, decidedly inferior writers but decidedly lasting, if I know what I'm talking about. Quality isn't everything. Popularity is just as important as quality. As far as staying power goes, the writer who pleases the greatest number—assuming he has some quality and isn't just a hack—is certain of outlasting the higher, purer type of writer. Most everybody can read Conrad; not everybody can read Melville. And when you come to a unique case, such as Lewis Carroll, why I'll wager that, as far as English-speaking peoples go, he'll outlast Shakespeare...»
He went on after a moment's reflection: «Now painting is a little different, to my way of thinking. It takes more to appreciate a good painting than to appreciate a good book. People seem to think that because they know how to read and write they can tell a good book from a bad one. Even writers, good writers, I mean, aren't in agreement about what is good and what is bad. Neither are painters about paintings, for that matter. And yet I have the notion that in general painters are more in accord about the merits or lack of merit in the work of well-known painters than writers are with respect to writing. Only a half-assed painter would deny the value of Cezanne's work, for instance. But take the case of Dickens or of Henry James, and see what astounding differences of opinion there are among capable writers and critics as to their respective merits. If there were a writer to-day as bizarre in his realm as Picasso is in his you'd soon see what I'm driving at. Even if they don't like his work, most people who know anything about art agree that Picasso is a great genius. Now take Joyce, who's fairly eccentric as a writer, has he gained anything like the prestige of Picasso? Except for a scholarly few, except for the snobs who try to keep up with everything, his reputation, such as it is to-day, stands largely on the fact that he's a freak. His genius is admitted, I agree, but it's tainted, so to speak. Picasso commands respect, even if he isn't always understood. But Joyce is something of a butt; his fame increases precisely because he can't be generally understood. He's accepted as a freak, a phenomenon, like the Cardiff giant... And another thing, while I'm at it—no matter how daring the painter of genius may be, he's far more quickly assimilated than a writer of the same calibre. At the most, it takes thirty or forty years for a revolutionary painter to be accepted; it takes a writer centuries sometimes. To come back to Melville—what I meant was this: it took him sixty or seventy years, say, to make the grade. We don't know yet whether he'll stick it out; he may fall into the discard in another two or three generations. He's holding on by his teeth and only in spots, as it were. Conrad's dug in with toes and fingers; he's got roots already, everywhere; that's something you can't easily wave aside. As to whether he deserved it, that's another thing. I think if the truth were known, we'd find that lots of men were killed off or forgotten who deserved to be kept alive. It's hard to prove, I know, but I feel that there's some truth in what I say. You have only to look around you in every day life to observe the same thing happening everywhere. I know myself, in my own field, dozens of men who deserve to be on the Supreme Court bench; they lost out, they're finished, but what does it prove? Does it prove that they wouldn't have been better than the old fluffs whom we've got sitting on the bench now? There can only be one President of the United States elected every four years; does it mean that the man who happened to get elected (usually unfairly) is better than the ones who were defeated or than thousands of unknown men who never even dreamed of running for office? No, it seems to me that more often than not the ones who get the place of honor turn out to have been the least deserving. The deserving ones often take a back seat, either out of modesty or out of self-respect. Lincoln never wanted to become President of the United States; it was forced on him. He was practically rail-roaded in, by Christ. Fortunately he turned out to be the right man—but it could just as well have been otherwise. He wasn't chosen because he was the right man. Quite the contrary. Well shit, I'm getting off the track. I don't know what the hell started me off...»
He stopped just long enough to light a fresh cigar, then went on again.
«There's just one more thing I'd like to say. I know now what started me off. It's this—I feel sorry for the guy who's born a writer. That's why I razz this bird so much; I try to discourage him because I know what he's up against. If he's really any good he's cooked. A painter can knock out a half dozen paintings in a year—so I'm told. But a writer—why sometimes it takes him ten years to do a book, and if it's good, as I say, it takes another ten years to find a publisher for it, and after that you've got to allow at least fifteen to twenty years before it's recognized by the public. It's almost a lifetime—for one book, mind you. How's he going to live meanwhile? Well, he lives like a dog usually. A panhandler leads a royal life by comparison. Nobody would undertake such a career if he knew what lay in store for him. To me the whole thing is cock-eyed. I say flatly that it's not worth it. Art was never meant to be produced this way. The point is that art is a luxury nowadays.; I could get along without ever reading a book or looking at a painting. We've got too many other things—we don't need books and paintings. Music yes—music we'll always need. Not good music necessarily—but music. Nobody writes good music anymore anyway... The way I see it, the world is going to the dogs. You don't need much intelligence to get along, as things go. In fact, the less intelligence you have the better off you are. We've got it so arranged now that things are brought to you on a platter. All you need to know is how to do one little thing passably well; you join a union, you do as little work as possible, and you get pensioned off when you come of age. If you had any aesthetic leanings you wouldn't be able to go through the stupid routine year in and year out. Art makes you restless, dissatisfied. Our industrial system can't afford to let that happen—so they offer you soothing little substitutes to make you forget that you're a human being. Soon there won't be any art at all, I tell you. You'll have to pay people to go to a museum or listen to a concert. I don't say it'll go on like that forever. No, just when they've got it down pat, everything running smooth as a whistle, nobody squawking any more, nobody restless or dissatisfied, the thing'll collapse. Man wasn't intended to be a machine. The funny thing about all these Utopian systems of government is that they're always promising to make man free—but first they try to make him run like an eight-day clock. They ask the individual to become a slave in order to establish freedom for mankind. It's rum logic. I don't say that the present system is any better. As a matter of fact, it would be difficult to imagine anything worse than what we've got now. But I know it's not going to be improved by giving up what little rights we now have. I don't think we want more rights—I think we want larger ideas. Jesus, when I see what lawyers and judges are trying to preserve it makes me puke. The law hasn't any relation to human needs; it's a racket carried on by a syndicate of parasites. Just take up a law-book and read a passage (anywhere) aloud. It sounds insane, if you're in your right senses. It is insane, by God, I know it! But Jesus, if I begin to question the law I've got to question other things too. I'd go off my nut if I looked at things with a clear eye. You can't do it—not if you want to keep in step. You've got to squint as you go along; you've got to pretend that it makes sense; you've got to let people suppose that you know what you're doing. But nobody knows what he's doing! We don't get up in the morning and think what we're about. No sir! We get up in a fog and shuffle through a dark tunnel with a hang-over. We play the game. We know it's a dirty lousy fake but we can't help it— there's no choice. We're born into a certain set-up, we're conditioned to it: we can tinker with it a little here and there, like you would with a leaky boat, but there's no making it over, there's no time for it, you've got to get to port, or you imagine you have to. We'll never get there, of course. The boat'll go down first, take my word for it... Now if I were Henry here, if I felt as sure as he does that I was an artist, do you think I'd bother to prove it to the world? Not me! I wouldn't put a line down on paper; I'd just think my thoughts, dream my dreams, and let it go at that. I'd take any kind of job, anything that would keep me alive, and I'd say to the world: «Fuck you, Jack, you're not putting anything over on me! You ain't making me starve to prove that I'm an artist. No siree—I know what I know and nobody can tell me different.» I'd just worm my way through life, doing just as little as possible and enjoying myself just as much as possible. If I had good, rich, juicy ideas I'd enjoy them all to myself. I wouldn't try to ram them down people throats. I'd act dumb most of the time. I'd be a yes man, a rubber stamp. I'd let them walk over me if they wanted to. Just so long as I knew in my heart and soul that I really was somebody. I'd retire right in the midst of life; I wouldn't wait till I was old and decrepit, until they had first hammered the shit out of me and then salved me with the Nobel Prize... I know this sounds a bit cock-eyed. I know that ideas have to be given form and substance. But I'm talking about knowing and being rather than doing. After all, you only become something in order to be it—there wouldn't be any fun in just becoming all the time, would there? Well, supposing you say to yourself—the hell with becoming an artist, I know I am one, I'll just be it—what then? What does it mean, to be an artist? Does it mean that you have to write books or make pictures? That's secondary, I take it—that's the mere evidence of the fact that you are one.... Supposing, Henry, you had written the greatest book ever written and you lost the manuscript just after you had completed it? And supposing nobody knew that you had been writing this great book, not even your closest friend? In that case you'd be just where I am who haven't put a stroke on paper, wouldn't you? If we were both to die suddenly, at that point, the world would never know that either of us was an artist. I would have had a good time of it and you would have wasted your whole life.»
At this point Ulric couldn't stand it any longer. «It's just the contrary,» he protested. «An artist doesn't enjoy life by evading his task. You're the one who would be wasting his life. Art isn't a solo performance; it's a symphony in the dark with millions of participants and millions of listeners. The enjoyment of a beautiful thought is nothing to the joy of giving it expression—permanent expression. In fact, it's almost a sheer impossibility to refrain from giving expression to a great thought. We're only instruments of a greater power. We're creators by permission, by grace, as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world. To keep one's beautiful ideas to oneself would be like being a virtuoso and sitting in an orchestra with hands folded. You couldn't do it! As for that illustration you gave, of an author losing his life's work in manuscript, why I'd compare such a person to a wonderful musician who had been playing with the orchestra all the time, only in another room, where nobody heard him. But that wouldn't make him any the less a participant, nor would it rob him of the pleasure to be hand in following the orchestra leader or hearing the music which his instrument gave forth. The greatest mistake you make is in thinking that enjoyment is something unearned, that if you know you can play the fiddle, well it's just the same as playing it. It's so silly that I don't know why I bother to discuss it. As for the reward, you're always confusing recognition with reward. They're two different things. Even if you don't get paid for what you do, you at least have the satisfaction of doing. It's a pity that we lay such emphasis on being paid for our labors—it really isn't necessary, and nobody knows it better than the artist. The reason why he has such a miserable time of it is because he elects to do his work gratuitously. He forgets, as you say, that he has to live. But that's really a blessing. It's much better to be preoccupied with wonderful ideas than with the next meal, or the rent, or a pair of new shoes. Of course when you get to the point where you must eat, and you haven't anything to eat, then to eat becomes an obsession. But the difference between an artist and the ordinary individual is that when the artist does get a meal he immediately falls back into his own limitless world, and while he's in that world he's a king, whereas your ordinary duffer is just a filling station with nothing in between but dust and smoke. And even supposing you're not an ordinary chap, but a wealthy individual, one who can indulge his tastes, his whims, his appetites: do you suppose for one minute that a millionaire enjoys food or wine or women like a hungry artist does? To enjoy anything you have to make yourself ready to receive it; it implies a certain control, discipline, chastity, I might even say. Above all, it implies desire, and desire is something you have to nourish by right living. I'm speaking now as if I were an artist, and I'm not really, I'm just a commercial illustrator, but I do know enough about it to say that I envy the man who has the courage to be an artist—I envy him because I know that he's infinitely richer than any other kind of human being. He's richer because he spends himself, because he gives himself all the time, and not just labor or money or gifts. You couldn't possibly be an artist, in the first place, because you lack faith. You couldn't possibly have beautiful ideas because you kill them off in advance. You deny what it takes to make beauty, which is love, love of life itself, love of life for its own sake. You see the flaw, the worm, in everything. An artist, even when he detects a flaw, makes it into something flawless, if I may put it that way. He doesn't try to pretend that a worm is a flower or an angel, but he incorporates the worm into something bigger. He knows that the world isn't full or worms, even if he sees a million or a billion of them. You see a tiny worm and you say—«Look, see how rotten everything is!» You can't see beyond the worm... Well, excuse me, I didn't mean to put it so caustically or so personally. But I hope you see what I'm driving at....»
«That's quite all right,» said MacGregor briskly and cheerily. «It's good to have the other fellow's opinion once in a while. Maybe you're right. Maybe I am unduly pessimistic. But that's how I'm built. I think I'd be a lot happier if I could see it your way—but I can't. Besides, I must confess I've really never met a good artist. It would be a pleasure to talk to one some time.»
«Well,» said Ulric, «you've been talking to one all your life without knowing it. How are you going to recognize a good artist when you meet one if you can't recognize one in your friend here?»
«I'm glad you said that,» piped MacGregor. «And now that you've pushed me to the ropes I'll admit I do think he's an artist. I've always thought so. As for listening to him, well I do that too, and quite seriously. But then I also have my doubts. You see, if I listened to him long enough he'd undermine me. I know he's right, but it's like I told you before —if you want to get along, if you want to live, you just can't permit yourself such thoughts. Sure he's right! I'd change places with him any day, the lucky dog. What have I got for all my struggles? I'm a lawyer. So what? I might just as well be a piece of shit. Sure, you bet I'd like to change places. Only I'm not an artist, as you said. I guess the trouble with me is that I can't swallow the fact that I'm just another nobody...»
7
Back in town I found a note on Ulric's bell, from Mara. She had arrived shortly after we left. Had been sitting on the steps waiting for me, waiting for hours, if I were to believe her words. A postscript informed me that she was off to Rockaway with her two friends. I was to call her there as soon as I could.
I arrived at dusk and found her waiting for me at the station; she was in a bathing suit over which she had thrown a mackintosh. Florrie and Hannah were sleeping it off again at the hotel; Hannah had lost her beautiful new set of false teeth and was in a state of nervous prostration. Florrie, she said, was going back to the woods again; she had fallen hard for Bill, one of the backwoodsmen. But first she had to have an abortion performed. It was nothing—not for Florrie anyway. The only thing that bothered her was that she seemed to grow larger down there with each abortion; soon she wouldn't be able to take on anything but niggers.
She led me to another hotel where we were to pass the night together. We sat talking awhile in the lugubrious dining room over a glass of beer. She looked queer in that mackintosh—like a person who's been driven out of the house by fire in the middle of the night. We were itching to get to bed but in order not to arouse suspicion we had to pretend to be in no great hurry. I had lost all sense of place: it seemed as if we had made a rendezvous in a dark room by the Atlantic Ocean in the wake of an exodus. Two or three other couples slipped in noiselessly, sipped their drinks, and chatted furtively in subdued whispers. A man walked through with a bloody meat cleaver, holding a decapitated chicken by the legs; the blood dripped on to the floor, leaving a zigzag trail—like the passage of a drunken whore who is menstruating freely.
Finally we were shown to a cell at the end of a long corridor. It was like the terminus of a bad dream, or the missing half of a Chirico painting. The corridor formed the axis of two wholly unrelated worlds; if you were to go left instead of right you might never find your way back again. We undressed and fell on the iron cot in a sexual sweat. We went at it like a pair of wrestlers who have been left to untangle themselves in an empty arena after the lights are out and the crowd dispersed. Mara was struggling frantically to bring on an orgasm. She had somehow become detached from her sexual apparatus; it was night and she was lost in the dark; her movements were those of a dreamer desperately struggling to re-enter the body which had begun the act of surrender. I got up to wash myself, to cool it off with a little cold water. There was no sink in the room. In the yellow light of an almost extinct bulb I saw myself in a cracked mirror; I had the expression of a Jack the Ripper looking for a straw hat in a pisspot. Mara lay prone on the bed, panting and sweating; she had the appearance of a battered odalisque made of jagged pieces of mica. I slipped into my trousers and staggered through the funnel-like corridor in search of the wash-room. A bald-headed man, stripped to the waist, stood before a marble basin washing his trunk and arm-pits. I waited patiently until he had finished. He snorted like a walrus in performing his ablutions; when he had done he opened a can of talcum powder and sprinkled it generously over his torso which was creased and caked like an elephant's hide.
When I returned I found Mara smoking a cigarette and playing with herself. She was burning up with desire. We went at it again, trying it dog-fashion this time, but still it was no go. The room began to heave and bulge, the walls were sweating, the mattress which was made of straw was almost touching the floor. The performance began to take on all the aspects and proportions of a bad dream. From the end of the corridor came the broken wheeze of an asthmatic; it sounded like the tail end of a gale whizzing through a corrugated rat hole.
Just as she was about to come we heard some one ' fumbling at the door. I slid off her and poked my head out. It was a drunk trying to find his room. A few minutes later, when I went to the wash-room to give my cock another cool spritz-bath, he was still looking for his room. The transoms were all open and from them come a stertorous cacophony which resembled the Epiphany of John the locust-eater. When I returned to resume the ordeal my cock felt as if it were made of old rubber bands. I had absolutely no more feeling at that end; it was like pushing a piece of stiff suet down a drain-pipe. What's more, there wasn't another charge left in the battery; it anything was to happen now it would be in the nature of gall and leathery worms or a, drop of pus in a solution of thin pot cheese. What surprised me was that it continued to stand up like a hammer; it had lost all the appearance of a sexual implement; it looked disgustingly like a cheap gadget from the five and ten cent store, like a bright-colored piece of fishing tackle minus the bait. And on this bright and slippery gadget Mara twisted like an eel. She wasn't any longer a woman in heat, she wasn't even a woman; she was just a mass of undefinable contours wriggling and squirming like a piece of fresh bait seen upside down through a convex mirror in a rough sea.
I had long ceased to be interested in her contortions; except for the part of me that was in her I was as cool as a cucumber and remote as the dog star. It was like a long distance death message concerning some one whom you had forgotten long ago. All I was waiting for was to feel that incredibly aborted explosion of wet stars which drop back to the floor of the womb like dead snails.
Towards dawn, Eastern Standard Time, I saw by that frozen condensed milk expression about the jaw that it was happening. Her face went through all the metamorphoses of early uterine life, only in reverse. With the last dying spark it collapsed like a punctured bag, the eyes and nostrils smoking like toasted acorns in a slightly wrinkled lake of pale skin. I fell off her and dove straight into a coma which ended towards evening with a knock on the door and fresh towels. I looked out the window and saw a collection of tar-covered roofs spotted here and there with doves of taupe. From the ocean front came the boom of surf followed by a frying pan symphony of exasperated sheet metal cooling off in a drizzle at 139 degrees Centigrade. The hotel was droning and purring like a fat and moribund swamp fly in the solitude of a pine forest. Along the axis of the corridor there had been a further sag and recess during the interim. The Grade A world to the left was all sealed and boarded, like those colossal bath houses along the boardwalk which, in the off season, curl up on themselves and expire in gasps through endless chinks and slats. The other nameless world to the right had already been chewed off by a triphammer, the work doubtless of some maniac who had endeavored to justify his existence as a day laborer. Underfoot it was slimy and slippery, as if an army of zippered seals had been weaving it back and forth to the wash-room all day long. Here and there an open door revealed the presence of grotesquely plastic water nymphs who had managed to squeeze their mammiferous trundles of avoirdupois into sylph-like fish nets made of spun glass and ribbons of wet clay. The last roses of Summer were fading away into goiterous udders with arms and legs. Soon the epidemic would be over and the ocean would resume its air of gelatinous grandeur, of mucilaginous dignity, of sullen and spiteful solitude.
We stretched ourselves out in the hollow of a suppurating sand dune next to a bed of waving stink weed on the lee side of a macadamized road over which the emissaries of progress and enlightenment were rolling along with that familiar and soothing clatter which accompanies the smooth locomotion of spitting and farting contraptions of tin woven together by steel knitting needles. The sun was setting in the West as usual, not in splendor and radiance however but in disgust, like a gorgeous omelette engulfed by clouds of snot and phlegm. It was the ideal setting for love, such as the drug stores sell or rent between the covers of a handy pocket edition. I took off my shoes and leisurely deposited my big toe in the first notch of Mara's crotch. Her head was pointed south, mine north; we pillowed them on folded hands, our bodies relaxed and floating effortlessly in the magnetic drift, like two enormous twigs suspended on the surface of a gasoline lake. A visitor from the Renaissance, coming upon us unexpectedly, might well have assumed that we had become dislodged from a painting depicting the violent end of the mangy retinue of a sybaritic Doge. We were lying at the edge of a world in ruins, the composition being a rather precipitate study of perspective and foreshortening in which our prostrated figures served as a picaresque detail.
The conversation was thoroughly desultory, spluttering out with a dull thud like a bullet encountering muscle and sinew. We weren't talking, we were simply parking our sexual implements in the free parking void of anthropoid chewing gum machines on the edge of a gasoline oasis. Night would fall poetically over the scene, like a shot of ptomaine poison wrapped in a rotten tomato. Hannah would find her false teeth behind the mechanical piano; Florrie would appropriate a rusty can-opener with which to start the blood flowing.
The wet sand clung to our bodies with the tenacity of fresh-laid wall-paper. From the factories and hospitals nearby came the ingratiating aroma of exhausted chemicals, of hair soaked in pipi, of useless organs plucked out alive and left to rot slowly through an eternity in sealed vessels labelled with great care and veneration. A brief twilight sleep in the arms of Morpheus the Danubian dachshund.
When I got back to town Maude inquired in her polite fish-like way if I had had a pleasant holiday. She remarked that I looked rather haggard. She added that she was thinking of taking a little vacation herself; she had received an invitation from an old convent friend to pass a few days at her home in the country. I thought it an excellent idea.
Two days later I accompanied her and the child to the station. She asked me if I wouldn't care to ride part of the way with them. I saw no reason why I shouldn't. Besides I thought maybe she had something of importance to tell me. I boarded the train and rode some distance into the country, talking about things, of no consequence and wondering all the time when she would come out with it. Nothing happened. I finally got off the train and waved good-bye. «Say good-bye to daddy,» she urged the child. «You won't see him again for several weeks.» Bye bye! Bye bye! I waved good-naturedly, like any suburban papa seeing his wife and child off. Several weeks, she had said. That would be excellent. I walked up and down the platform waiting for the train and pondering on all the things I would do in her absence. Mara would be delighted. It would be like having a private honeymoon: we could do a million wonderful things in a stretch of several weeks.
The following day I awoke with a frightful earache. I telephoned Mara and urged her to meet me at the doctor's office. The doctor was one of the wife's demonic friends. He had almost murdered the child once with his mediaeval instruments of torture. Now it was my turn. I left Mara to sit it out on a bench near the entrance to the park.
The doctor seemed delighted to see me; engaging me in a pseudo-literary discussion, he put his instruments up to boil. Then he tested out an electrically run glass cage which looked like a transparent ticker but which was actually some devilish sort of inhuman blood-sucking contraption which he intended to try out as a parting fillip.
So many doctors had tinkered with my ear that I was quite a veteran by this time. Each fresh irruption meant that the dead bone was drawing closer and closer to the brain. Finally there would be a grand conjunction, the mastoid would become like a wild mustang, there would be a concert of silver saws and silver mallets, and I would be shipped home with my face twisted to one side like a haemo-plagic rhapsodist.
«You don't hear any more with that ear, of course?» said he, plunging a hot wire into the very core of my skull without a word of warning.
«No, not at all,» I answered, almost sliding off the seat with pain.
«Now this is going to hurt a bit,» said he, manipulating a diabolical-looking fish-hook.
It went on like that, each operation a little more painful than the last, until I was so beside myself with pain that I wanted to kick him in the guts. Still there remained the electrical cage: that was to irrigate the canals, extract the last iota of pus, and send me out into the street rearing like a bronco.
«It's a nasty business,» he said, lighting a cigarette in order to give me a breathing spell. «I wouldn't want to go through with it myself. If it get any worse you'd better let me operate on you.»
I settled down for the irrigation. He inserted the nozzle and turned on the switch. It felt as though he were irrigating my brain with a solution of prussic acid. The pus was coming out and with it a thin stream of blood. The pain was excruciating.
«Does it really hurt as much as that?» he exclaimed seeing that I had become white as a sheet.
«It hurts worse than that,» I said. «If you don't stop soon I'll smash it. I'd rather have triple mastoids and look like a demented frog.»
He pulled the nozzle out and with it the lining of my ear, of my cerebellum, of one kidney and the marrow of my coccyx.
«A fine job,» said I. «When do I come again?»
He thought it best to come to-morrow—just to see how it was progressing.
Mara had a fright when she saw me. She wanted to take me home at once and nurse me. I was so used up I couldn't stand having anyone near me. Hurriedly I said good-bye. «Meet me to-morrow!»
I staggered home like a drunk and fell on the couch, into a deep drugged sleep. When I awoke it was dawning. I felt excellent. I got up and went for a stroll through the park. The swans were coming to life: their mastoids were non-existent.
When pain lets up life seems grand, even without money or friends or high ambitions. Just to breathe easily, to walk without a sudden spasm or twitch. Swans are very beautiful then. Trees too. Even automobiles. Life moves along on roller skates; the earth is pregnant and constantly churning up new magnetic fields of space. See how the wind bends the tiny blades of grass! Each little blade is sentient; everything responds. If the earth itself were in pain we could do nothing about it. The planets never have an ear-ache; they are immune, though bearing within them untold pain and suffering.
For once I was at the office ahead of time. I worked like a Trojan without feeling the slightest fatigue. At the appointed time I met Mara. She would sit again on the park bench, in the same spot.
This time the doctor merely took a look at the ear, picked away a fresh scab, swabbed it with a soothing ointment, and plugged it up. «Looks fine,» he mumbled, «come back in a week.»
We were in good spirits, Mara and I. We had dinner in a road house and with it some Chianti. It was a balmy evening, just made for a stroll over the downs. After a time we lay down in the grass and gazed up at the stars. «Do you think she'll really stay away several weeks?» asked Mara.
It seemed too good to be true.
«Maybe she'll never come back,» I said. «Maybe that's what she wanted to tell me when she asked me to ride part of the way with her. Maybe she lost her nerve at the last minute.»
Mara didn't think she was the sort to make a sacrifice like that. It didn't matter anyway. For a while we could be happy, could forget that she existed.
«I wish we could get away from this country altogether,» said Mara. «I wish we could go to some other country, somewhere where nobody knows us.»
I agreed that that would be ideal. «We'll do it eventually,» I said. «There isn't a soul here whom I care about. My whole life has been meaningless— until you came along.»
«Let's go and row in the lake,» said Mara suddenly. We got up and sauntered over to the boats. Too late, the boats were all padlocked. We started strolling aimlessly along a path by the water; soon we came to a little rest house built out over the water. It was deserted. I sat down on the rough bench and Mara seated herself on my lap. She had on the stiff dotted Swiss dress which I liked so much. Underneath it not a stitch. She got off my lap a moment and lifting her dress she straddled me. We had a wonderful close-knit fuck. When it was over we sat for a while without unhitching, just silently chewing one another's lips and ears.
Then we got up and, at the edge of the lake, we washed ourselves with our handkerchiefs. I was just drying my cock with the tail of my shirt when Mara suddenly grasped my arm and pointed to something moving behind a bush. All I could see was a gleam of something bright. I quickly buttoned up my pants and taking Mara by the arm we regained the gravel path and started slowly walking in the opposite direction.
«It was a cop, I'm sure,» said Mara. «They do that, the dirty perverts. They're always hiding in the bushes spying on people.»
In a moment, sure enough, we heard the heavy tread of a thick-witted Mick.
«Just a minute, you two,» he said, «where do you think you're going?»
«What do you mean?» said, I pretending to be annoyed. «We're taking a walk, can't you see?»
«It's about time you took a walk,» he said. I've a good mind to walk you back to the station with me. What do you think this is—a stud farm?»
I pretended I didn't know what he was talking about. Being a Mick, that enraged him.
«None of your lip,» said he. «Better get that dame out of here before I run you in.»
«She's my wife.»
«So.... your wife, is it? Well now, ain't that nice? Just doing a little billing and cooing, eh? Washing your private parts in public too—I'll be damned if I ever saw the likes of it. Now don't be in too great a hurry. You're guilty of a grave offense, me lad, and if this is your wife she's in for it too.»
«Look here, you don't mean to say....»
«What's your name?» he demanded cutting me short, and making to reach for his little note book.
I told him.
«And where do you live?»
I told him.
«And her name?»
«The same as mine—she's my wife, I told you.» . «So you did,» he said, with a dirty leer. «All right. Now then, what do you do for a living? Are you working?»
I pulled out my wallet and showed him the Cosmodemonic pass which I always carried and which entitled me to ride free of charge on all subway, elevated and street car lines of the city of Greater New York. He scratched his head at this and tilted his cap back on his head. «So you're the employment manager, are you? That's a pretty responsible position for a young man like you.» Heavy pause. «I suppose you'd like to keep your job a little longer, wouldn't you?»
Suddenly I had visions of seeing my name plastered in headlines over the morning papers. A fine story the reporters could make of it if they wanted to. It was time to do something.
«Look here, Officer,» says I, «let's talk the thing over quietly. «I live nearby—why don't you walk over to the house with me? Maybe my wife and I were a little reckless—we're not married very long. We shouldn't have carried on like that in a public place, but it was dark and there was nobody around....»
«Well, there might be a way of fixing it,» says he. «You don't want to lose your job, do you?»
«No, I don't,» says I, wondering at the same time how much I had in my pocket and whether he would sneeze at it or not.
Mara was fumbling in her bag.
«Now don't be in such a hurry, lady. You know you can't bribe an officer of the law. By the way, what church do you go to, if I'm not too inquisitive?»
I answered quickly, giving the name of the Catholic church on our corner.
«Then you're one of Father O'Malley's boys! Well, why didn't you tell me that in the first place? Shure, you wouldn't want to disgrace the parish now, would you?»
I told him it would kill me were Father O'Malley to hear of it.
«And you were married in Father O'Malley's church?»
«Yes, fath... I mean Officer. We were married last April.»
I was trying to count the bills in my pocket without extracting them. It seemed as if there were only three or four bucks. I was wondering how much Mara might have. The cop had started walking and we fell in with him. Presently he stopped short. He pointed ahead with his club. And with his club in the air and his head slightly averted, he began a slow monologue about a coming novena to Our Lady of the Flying Buttress or something of the sort, saying as he held out his left hand that the shortest way out of the park was straight ahead and mind you, be on your good behavior and so forth.
Mara and I hastily stuffed a few bills in his hand and, thanking him for his kindness, we lit out like a bolt.
«I think you'd better come home with me,» I said. «If it wasn't enough we gave him he may be coming to pay us a visit. I don't trust these dirty bastards.... Father O'Malley, shit!»
We hurried home and locked ourselves in. Mara was still trembling. I dug up a little port wine which was hidden away in a cupboard.
«The thing to happen now,» I said, as I downed a glassful, «is for Maude to come back and surprise us.»
«She wouldn't do that, would she?»
«Christ only knows what she might do.»
«I think we'd better sleep down here,» said Mara. «I wouldn't like to sleep in her bed.»
We finished the wine and got undressed. Mara came out of the bathroom in Maude's silk kimono. It gave me a start to see her in Maude's outfit. «I'm your wife, am I not?» she said, putting her arms around me. It gave me a thrill to hear her say that. She walked about the room examining the things.
«Where do you write?» she asked. «At that little table?»
I nodded.
«You ought to have a big table and a room of your own. How can you write here?»
«I have a big desk upstairs.»»
«Where? In the bed room?»
«No, in the parlor. It's wonderfully lugubrious up there—would you like to see it?»
«No,» she said quickly, «I'd rather not go up there. I'll always think of you as sitting here in this corner by the window.... Is this where you wrote me all those letters?»
«No,» I said, «I wrote you from the kitchen,»
«Show me,» she said. «Show me just where you sat. I want to see how you looked.»
I took her by the hand and led her back to the kitchen. I sat down and pretended I was writing her a letter. She bent over me and putting her lips to the table she kissed the spot encircled by my arms.
«I never dreamt I would see your home,» she said. «It's strange to see the place which is to have such an effect upon your life. It's a holy place. I wish we could take this table with us and this chair—everything—even the stove. I wish we could move the whole room and build it into our own home. It belongs to us, this room.»
We went to bed on the divan in the basement. It was a warm night and we went to sleep in the raw. About seven in the morning, as we lay entwined in each other's arms, the rolling doors were violently pushed open and there stood my darling wife, the landlord who lived upstairs, and his daughter. In flagrant delectation we were caught. I sprang out of bed stark naked. Holding a towel which was on the chair beside the couch I flung it around me and waited for the verdict. Maude motioned to her witness to step in and take a look at Mara who was lying there holding a sheet over her bosom.
«I'll ask you to please get this woman out of here as quickly as possible,» said Maude, and with that she turned on her heel and went upstairs with her witnesses.
Had she been sleeping upstairs in our own bed all night? If so, why had she waited until morning?
«Take it easy, Mara. The goose is cooked now. We may as well stay and have breakfast.»
I dressed hurriedly and ran out to get some bacon and eggs.
«God, I don't see how you can take it so calmly,» she said, sitting at the table with a cigarette to her lips, watching me prepare the breakfast. «Haven't you any feelings?»
«Sure I have. My feeling is that everything has worked out splendidly. Fm free, do you realize that?»
What are you going to do now?»
«I'm going to work, for one thing. This evening I'll go to Ulric's place—you might meet me there. I have an idea my friend Stanley is behind all this. We'll see.»
At the office I sent a telegram to Stanley to meet; me at Ulric's that evening. During the day I had a telephone call from Maude suggesting that I find myself a room. She said she would get the divorce as soon as possible. No comments upon the situation, just a pure business-like statement. I was to let her know when I wished to call for my things.
Ulric took it rather gravely. It meant a change of life and all changes were serious to him. Mara on the other hand was thoroughly in possession of herself and already looking forward to the new life. It remained to see how Stanley would take it. Presently the bell rang and there he was, sinister-looking as usual and drunk as a pope. I hadn't seen him that way for years. He had decided that it was an event of the first importance and that it should be celebrated. As far as getting any details from him was concerned it was absolutely impossible. «I told you I'd fix it for you,» he said. «You walked into it like a fly into a web. I had it figured out to a T. I didn't ask you any questions, did I? I knew just what you'd do.»
He took a swig from a flask which he was carrying in his inside coat pocket. He didn't even bother to remove his hat. I could see him now as he must have looked when at Fort Oglethorpe. He was the sort of fellow I would have given a wide berth, seeing him in that state.
The telephone rang. It was Dr. Kronski asking for Mister Miller. «Congratulations!» he shouted. «I'm coming over there to see you in a few minutes. I have something to tell you.»
«By the way,» I said, «do you know anybody who has an extra room to let?»
«That's just what I was going to talk to you about. I've got a place all picked out for you—up in the Bronx. It's a friend of mine—he's a doctor. You can have a whole wing of the house to yourself. Why don't you take Mara with you? You'll like it there. He's got a billiard room on the ground floor, and a good library, and....» «Is he Jewish?» I asked.
«Is he? He's a Zionist, an anarchist, a Talmudist and an abortionist. A damned fine chap—and if you're in need of help he'll give you his shirt. I was just around to your house—that's how I found out. Your wife seems to be tickled to death. She'll live pretty comfortably on the alimony you'll have to pay her.»
I told Mara what he had said. We decided to have a look at the place immediately. Stanley had disappeared. Ulric thought he might have gone to the bathroom.
I went to the bathroom and knocked. No answer. I pushed the door open. Stanley was lying in the tub fully dressed, his hat over his eye, the empty bottle in his hand. I left him lying there.
«He's gone, I guess,» I shouted to Ulric as we sailed out.
VOLUME THREE
8
The Bronx! We had been promised a whole wing of the house—a turkey wing, with feathers and goose pimples thrown in. Kronski's idea of a haven.
It was a suicidal period which began with cockroaches and hot pastrami sandwiches and ended a la Newberg in a cubby-hole on Riverside Drive where Mrs. Kronski the Second began her thankless task of illustrating a vast cycloramic appendix to the insanities.
It was under Kronski's influence that Mara decided to change her name again—from Mara to Mona. There were other, more significant changes which also had their origin here in the purlieus of the Bronx.
We had come in the night to Dr. Onirifick's hideout. A light snow had fallen and the colored panes of glass in the front door were covered with a mantle of pure white. It was just the sort of place I had imagined Kronski would select for our «honeymoon». Even the cockroaches, which began scurrying up and down the walls as soon as we turned on the lights, seemed familiar—and ordained. The billiard table which stood in a corner of the room was at first disconcerting, but when Dr. Onirifick's little boy casually opened his fly and began to make pipi against the leg of the table everything seemed quite as it should be.
The front door opened directly on to our room which was equipped with a billiard table, as I say, a large brass bedstead with eiderdown quilts, a writing desk, a grand piano, a hobby horse, a fire place, a cracked mirror covered with fly-specks, two cuspidors and a settee. There were in all no less than eight windows in our room. Two of them had shades which could be pulled down about two-thirds of the way; the others were absolutely bare and festooned with cobwebs. It was very jolly. No one ever rang the bell or knocked first; every one walked in unannounced and found his way about as best he could. It was «a room with a view» both inside and out.
Here we began our life together. A most auspicious debut! The only thing lacking was a sink in which we could urinate to the sound of running water. A harp might have come in handy, too, especially on those droll occasions when the members of Dr. Onirifick's family, tired of sitting in the laundry downstairs, would waddle up to our room like auks and penguins and watch us in complete silence as we ate or bathed or made love or combed the lice out of one another's hair. What language they spoke we never knew. They were as mute as the reindeer and nothing could frighten or astound them, not even the sight of a mangy foetus.
Dr. Onirifick was always very busy. Children's diseases was his specialty, but the only children we ever noticed during our stay were embryonic ones which he chopped into fine pieces and threw down the drains. He had three children of his own. They were all three super-normal, and on this account were allowed to behave as they pleased. The youngest, about five years of age and already a wizard at algebra, was definitely on his way to becoming a pyromaniac as well as a super-mathematician. Twice he had set fire to the house. His latest exploit revealed a more ingenious turn of mind: it was to set fire to a perambulator containing a tender infant and then push the perambulator downhill towards a congested traffic lane.
Yes, a jolly place to begin life anew. There was Ghompal, an ex-messenger whom Kronski had salvaged from the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company when that institution began to weed out its non-Caucasian employees. Ghompal, being of Dravidian stock and dark as sin, had been one of the first to get the gate. He was a tender soul, extremely modest, humble, loyal and self-sacrificing—almost painfully so. Dr. Onirifick cheerfully made a place for him in his vast household—as a glorified chimney-sweep. Where Ghompal ate and slept was a mystery. He moved about noiselessly in the performance of his duties, effacing himself, when he deemed it necessary, with the celerity of a ghost. Kronski prided himself on having rescued in the person of this outcast a scholar of the first water. «He's writing a history of the world,» he told us impressively. He omitted mentioning that, in addition to his duties as secretary, nurse, chamber-maid, dish-washer and errand boy, Ghompal also stoked the furnace, hauled the ashes, shoveled the snow, papered the walls and painted the spare rooms.
Nobody attempted to wrestle with the problem of roaches. There were millions of them hidden away beneath the mouldings, the woodwork, the wall-paper. One had only to turn on the light and they streamed out in double, triple file, column after column, from walls, ceiling, floor, crannies, crevices—veritable armies of them parading, deploying, maneuvering, as if obeying the commands of some unseen super-roach of a drill-master. At first it was disgusting, then nauseating, and finally, as with the other strange, disturbing phenomena which distinguished Dr. Onirifick's household, their presence among us was accepted by all and sundry as inevitable.
The piano was completely out of tune. Kronski's wife, a timid, mouse-like creature whose mouth seemed to be curled in a perpetual deprecatory smile, used to sit and practice the scales on this instrument, oblivious apparently of the hideous dissonances which her nimble fingers produced. To hear her play the Barcarolle, for example, was excruciating. She seemed not to hear the sour notes, the jangled chords; she played with an expression of utter serenity, her soul enrapt, her senses numbed and bewitched. It was a venomous composure which deceived no one, not even herself, for the moment her fingers ceased wandering she became what in truth she was—a petty, mean, spiteful, malevolent little bitch.
It was curious to see the way in which Kronski pretended to have found a jewel in this second wife. It would have been pathetic, not to say tragic, were he not such a ridiculous figure. He cavorted about her like a porpoise attempting to be elfish. Her digs and barbs served only to galvanize the ponderous, awkward figure in which was hidden a hyper-sensitive soul. He writhed and twisted like a wounded dolphin, the saliva dripping from his mouth, the sweat pouring from his brow and flooding his all too liquid eyes. It was a horrible charade he gave us on these occasions; though one pitied him one had to laugh, to laugh until the tears came to one's eyes.
If Curley were around he would turn on Curley savagely, in the very midst of his antics, and vent his spleen. He had a loathing for Curley that was inexplicable. Whether it was envy or jealousy which provoked these uncontrollable rages, whatever it was, Kronski would, in these moments, act like a man possessed. Like a huge cat, he would circle around poor Curley, taunting him, baiting him, stinging him with rebukes, slanders, insults, until he was actually foaming at the mouth.
«Why don't you do something, say something?» he would sneer. «Put up your dukes! Give me a crack, why don't you? You're yeller, aren't you? You're just a worm, a cad, a stooge.»
Curley would leer at him with a contemptuous smile, saying not a word, but poised and ready to strike should Kronski lose all control.
Nobody understood why these ugly scenes took place. Ghompal especially. He had evidently never witnessed such situations in his native land. They left him pained, wounded, shocked. Kronski felt this keenly, loathing himself even more than he loathed Curley. The more he fell in Gomphal's estimation the harder he strove to ingratiate himself with the Hindu.
«There's a really fine soul,» he would say to us. «I would do anything for Ghompal—anything.»
There were lots of things he might have done to alleviate the latter's burdens, but Kronski gave the impression that when the time came he would do something magnificent. Until then nothing less would satisfy him. He hated to see any one lend Ghompal a helping hand. «Trying to salve your conscience, eh?» he would snarl. «Why don't you put your arms around him and kiss him? Afraid of contamination, is that it?»
Once, just to make him uncomfortable, I did exactly that. I walked up to Ghompal and, putting my arms around him, I kissed him on the brow. Kronski looked at us shamefacedly. Every one knew that Ghompal had syphilis.
There was Dr. Onirifick himself, of course, a presence which made itself felt throughout the house, rather than a human being. What went on in that office of his on the second floor? None of us really knew. Kronski, in his elaborate, melodramatic way, gave crude imaginative pictures of abortion and seduction, bloody jig-saw puzzles which only a monster could put together. On the few occasions when we met, Dr. Onirifick impressed me as being nothing more than a mild, good-hearted man with a smattering of learning and a deep interest in music. Only for a few minutes did I see him lose his poise, and that altogether justifiable. I had been reading a book by Hilaire Belloc dealing with the persecution of the Jew throughout the centuries. It was like waving a red flag in front of him to even mention the book and I immediately regretted the blunder. In diabolical fashion Kronski tried to widen the breach. «Why are we harboring this snake in the grass?» he seemed to say, arching his eyebrows and twitching and squirming in his customary way. Dr. Onirifick, however, passed it off by treating me as if I were merely another gullible idiot who had fallen for the arch casuistry of a diseased Catholic mind.
«He was upset to-night,» Kronski volunteered after the doctor had retired. «You see, he's after that twelve-year old niece of his and his wife is on to him. She's threatening to turn him over to the district attorney if he doesn't stop running after the girl. She's jealous as the devil and I don't blame her. Besides, she hates to think of the abortions that are pulled off every day, right under her nose, polluting her home, as it were. She swears there's something wrong with him. There's something wrong with her too, if you notice. If you ask me, I think she's afraid he'll cut her open some night. She looks at his hands all the time, as if he always came to her fresh from a murder.»
He paused a moment to let these observations sink in. «There's something else preying on her mind,» he resumed. «The daughter is growing up... she'll be a young woman before long. Well, with a husband like that you can see what's bothering her. It's not just the idea of incest—horrible enough—but the further thought, that... that he'll come to her some night with bloody hands... the hands that murdered the life in her own daughter's womb... Complicated, what? But not impossible. Not with that guy! such a fine fellow. A sensitive, delicate chap, really. She's right. And what makes it worse is that he's Almost Christ-like. You can't talk to him about the sex mania because he won't admit a word you say. He pretends to be absolutely innocent. But he's in deep. Some day the police will come and take him away—there'll be a hell of a stink, you'll see...»
That Dr. Onirifick had made it possible for Kronski to pursue his medical studies I knew. And that Kronski had to find some extraordinary way of paying Dr. Onirifick back I was also aware of. Nothing would suit him better than to have his friend disintegrate completely. Then Kronski would come to the rescue in magnificent fashion. He would do something wholly unexpected, something no man had ever done for another. That was how his mind worked. Meanwhile, by spreading rumors, by' slandering and maligning his friend, by undermining him, he was only hastening a downfall which was inevitable. He was positively itching to get to work on his friend, to rehabilitate him, to repay him superabundantly for the kindness he had shown him in putting him through college. He would pull the house down about his friend's ears in order to rescue him from the ruins. A curious attitude. A sort of perverted Galahad. A meddler. A super-meddler. Always doing his damndest to make things go from bad to worse so that at the last ditch he, Kronski, might step in and magically transform the situation. Even so, it was not gratitude he desired but recognition, recognition of superior powers, recognition of his uniqueness.
While he was still an interne I used to visit him occasionally at the hospital where he was serving his time. We used to play billiards with the other internes. I only visited the hospital when I was in a desperate mood, when I wanted a meal or the loan of a few dollars. I hated the atmosphere of the place; I loathed his associates, their manners, their conversation, their very aims even. The great healing art meant nothing to them; they were looking for a snug berth, that was all. Most of. them had as little flair for medicine as a politician has for statesmanship. They didn't even have that fundamental prerequisite of the healer—the love of human kind. They were callous, heartless, utterly self-centered, utterly disinterested in anything but their own advancement. They were worse boors than the butchers in the slaughter-house.
Kronski was thoroughly at home in this environment. He knew more than the others, could out-talk them, out-smart them, out-shout them. He was a better billiard player, a better crap-shooter, a better chess player, a better everything. He knew it all and he loved to spew it forth, parade up and down in his own vomit.
Naturally he was heartily detested. Of a gregarious nature he managed, despite his obnoxious traits, to keep himself surrounded by his kind. Had he been obliged to live alone he would have fallen apart. He knew that he was not wanted: nobody ever sought him out except to ask a favor of him. Alone, the realization of his plight must have caused him bitter moments. It was difficult to know how he really appraised himself because in the presence of others he was all gusto, merriment, bluster, bravado, grandeur and grandiloquence. He behaved as though he were rehearsing a part before an invisible mirror. How he loved himself! Yes, and what loathing there was behind that facade, that amour-propre! «I smell bad!» that's what he must have said to himself every night when alone in his room. «But I'll do something magnificent yet... just watch!»
At intervals there came moods of dejection. He was a pitiful object then—something quite inhuman, something not of the animal world but of the vegetable kingdom. He would plop himself down somewhere and let himself rot. In this condition tumors sprouted from him, as from some gigantic mouldy potato left to perish in the dark. Nothing could stir him from his lethargy. Wherever he was put he would stay, inert, brooding incessantly, as though the world were coming to an end.
As far as one could make out he had no personal problems. He was a monster who had emerged from the vegetable kingdom without passing through the animal stage. His body, almost insentient, was invested with a mind which ruled him like a tyrant. His emotional life was a mush which he ladled out like a drunken Cossak. There was something almost anthropophagous about his tenderness; he demanded not the promptings and stirrings of the heart but the heart itself, and with it, if possible, the gizzard, the liver, the pancreas and other tender, edible portions of the human organism. In his exalted moments he seemed not only eager to devour the object of his tenderness but to invite the other to devour him also. His mouth would wreath itself in a veritable mandibular ecstasy; he would work himself up until the very soul of him came forth hi a spongy ectoplasmic substance. It was a horrible state of affection, terrifying because it knew no bounds. It was a depersonalized glut or slop, a hangover from some archaic condition of ecstasy—the residual memory of crabs and snakes, of their prolonged copulations in the protoplasmic slime of ages long forgotten.
And now, in Cockroach Hall, as we called it, there was preparing itself a delicious sexual omelette which we were all to savour, each in his own particular way. There was something intestinal about the atmosphere of the establishment, for it was an establishment more than a home. It was the clinic of love, so to speak, where embryos sprouted like weeds and, like weeds, were pulled up by the roots or chopped down with the scythe.
How the employment manager of the great Cosmo-demonic Telegraph Company had ever allowed himself to be ensnared and trapped in this blood-soaked den of sex surpasses understanding. The moment I got off the train at the elevated station and started descending the stairs into the heart of the Bronx I became a different person. It was a walk of a few blocks to Dr. Onirifick's establishment, just sufficient to disorient me, to give me time to slip into the role of the sensitive genius, the romantic poet, the happy mystic who had found his true love and who was ready to die for her.
There was a frightful discordance between this new inner state of being and the physical atmosphere of the neighborhood through which I had to plunge each night. Everywhere the grim, monotonous walls loomed up; behind them lived families whose whole life centered about a job. Industrious, patient, ambitious slaves whose one aim was emancipation. In the interim putting up with anything; oblivious of discomfort, immune to ugliness. Heroic little souls whose very obsession to liberate themselves from the thralldom of work served only to magnify the squalor and the misery of their lives.
What proof had I that poverty could bear another face? Only the dim, fuzzy memory of my childhood in the 14th Ward, Brooklyn. The memory of a child who had been sheltered, who had been given every opportunity, who had known nothing but joy and freedom—until he was ten years of age.
Why had I made that blunder in talking to Dr. Onirifick? I had not intended to talk about the Jews that evening—I had intended to talk about The Path to Rome. That was the book of Belloc's which had really set me on fire. A sensitive man, a scholar, a man for whom the history of Europe was a living memory, he had decided to walk from Paris to Rome with nothing but a knapsack and a stout walking stick. And he did. En route, all those things happened which always happen en route. It was my first understanding of the difference between process and goal, my first awareness of the truth that the goal of life is the living of it. How I envied Hilaire Belloc his adventure! Even to this day I can see in the corner of his pages the little pencil sketches he made of walls and spires, of turrets and bastions. I have only to think of the title of his book and I am sitting in the fields again, or standing on a quaint medieval bridge, or snoozing beside a quiet canal in the heart of France. I never dreamed that it would be possible for me to see that land, to walk through those fields, stand on those same bridges, follow those same canals. That could never happen to me! I was doomed.
When I think now of the ruse by which I was liberated, when I think that I was released from this prison because the one I loved wanted to get rid of me, what a sad, baffled, mystifying smile comes over my features. How confused and intricate everything is! We are grateful to those who stab us in the back; we run away from those who would help us; we congratulate ourselves on our good luck, never dreaming that our good luck may be a quagmire from which it will be impossible to extricate ourselves. We run forward with head turned; we rush blindly into the trap. We never escape, except into a cul de sac.
I am walking through the Bronx, five or six blocks, just time and space enough to twist myself into a corkscrew. Mona will be there waiting for me. She will embrace me warmly, as if we had never embraced before. We will have only a couple of hours together and then she will leave—to go to the dance hall where she still works as a taxi girl. I will be sound asleep when she returns at three or four in the morning. She will pout and fret if I don't awaken, if I don't throw my arms around her passionately and tell her I love her. She has so much to tell me each night and there is no time to tell it. Mornings, when I leave, she is sound asleep. We come and go like railroad trains. This is the beginning of our life together.
I love her, heart and soul. She is everything to me. And yet she is nothing like the women I dreamed of, like those ideal creatures whom I worshipped as a boy. She corresponds to nothing I had conceived out of my own depths. She is a totally new image, something foreign, something which Fate whirled across my path from some unknown sphere. As I look at her, as I get to love her morsel by morsel, I find that the totality of her escapes me. My love adds up like a sum, but she, the one I am seeking with desperate, hungry love, escapes like an elixir. She is completely mine, almost slavishly so, but I do not possess her. It is I who am possessed. I am possessed by a love such as was never offered me before—an engulfing love, a total love, a love of my very toe-nails and the dirt beneath them— and yet my hands are forever fluttering, forever grasping and clutching, seizing nothing.
Coming home one evening, I observed out of the corner of my eye of those soft, sensuous creatures of the ghetto who seem to emerge from the pages of the Old Testament. She was one of the Jewesses whose name must be Ruth or Esther. Or perhaps Miriam.
Miriam, yes! That was the name I was searching for. Why was that name so wonderful to me? How could such a simple appellation evoke such powerful emotions? I kept asking myself this question.
Miriam is the name of names. If I could mould all women into the perfect ideal, if I could give this ideal all the qualities I seek in woman, her name would be Miriam.
I had forgotten completely the lovely creature who inspired these reflections. I was on the track of something, and as my pace quickened, as my heart thumped more madly, I suddenly recalled the face, the voice, the figure, the gestures of the Miriam I knew as a boy of twelve. Miriam Painter, she called herself. Only fifteen or sixteen, but full-blown, radiantly alive, flagrant as a flower and—untouchable. She was not a Jewess, nor did she even remotely suggest the memory of those legendary creatures of the Old Testament. (Or perhaps I had not then read the Old Testament.) She was the young woman with long chestnut hair, with frank, open eyes and rather generous mouth who greeted me cordially whenever we met on the street. Always at ease, always giving herself, always radiant with health and good nature; withal wise, sympathetic, full of understanding. With her it was unnecessary to make awkward overtures: she always came towards me beaming with this secret inner joy, always welling over. She swallowed me up and carried me along; she enfolded me like a mother, warmed me like a mistress, dispatched me like a fairy. I never had an impure thought about her: never desired her, never craved for a caress. I loved her so deeply, so completely, that each time I met her it was like being born again. All I demanded was that she should remain alive, be of this earth, be somewhere, anywhere, in this world, and never die. I hoped for nothing, I wanted nothing of her. Her mere existence was all-sufficing. Yes, I used to run into the house, hide myself away, and thank God aloud for having sent Miriam to this earth of ours. What a miracle! And what a blessed thing to love like this! I don't know how long this went on. I haven't the slightest idea whether she was aware of my adoration or not. What matter? I was in love, with love. To love! To surrender absolutely, to prostrate oneself before the divine image, to die a thousand imaginary deaths, to annihilate every trace of self, to find the whole universe embodied and enshrined in the living image of another! Adolescent, we say. Rot! This is the germ of the future life, the seed which we hide away, which we bury deep within us, which we smother and stifle and do our utmost to destroy as we advance from one experience to another and flutter and flounder and lose our way.
By the time I meet the second ideal—Una Gifford —I am already diseased. Only fifteen years of age and the canker is gnawing at my vitals. How explain it? Miriam had dropped out of my life, not dramatically, but quietly, unostentatiously. She simply disappeared, was seen no more. I didn't even realize what it meant. I didn't think about it. People came and went; objects appeared and disappeared. I was in the flux, like the others, and it was all natural even if inexplicable. I was beginning to read, to read too much. I was turning inward, closing in on myself, as flowers close up in the night.
Una Gifford brings nothing but pain and anguish. I want her, I need her, I can't live without her. She says neither Yes or No, for the simple reason that I have not the courage to put the question to her. I will be sixteen shortly and we are both still in school—we are only going to graduate next year. How can a girl your own age, to whom you only nod or stare at, be the woman without whom life is impossible? How can you dream of marriage before you have crossed the threshold of life? But if I had eloped with Una Gifford then, at the age of fifteen, if I had married her and had ten children by her, it would have been right, dead right. What matter if I became something utterly different, if I sank down to the bottom rung? What matter if it meant premature old age? I had a need for her which was never answered, and that need was like a wound which grew and grew until it became a gaping hole. As life went on, as that desperate need grew more intense, I dragged everything into the hole and murdered it.
I was not aware, when I first knew Mona, how much she needed me. Nor did I realize how great a transformation she had made of her life, her habits, her background, her antecedents, in order to offer me that ideal image of herself which she all too quickly suspected that I had created. She had changed everything—her name, her birthplace, her mother, her upbringing, her friends, her tastes, even her desires. It was characteristic of her that she should want to change my name too, which she did. I was now Val, the diminutive of Valentine which I had always been ashamed of—it seemed like a sissy's name—but now that it issued from her lips it sounded like the name which suited me. Nobody else called me Val, though they heard Mona repeat it endlessly. To my friends I was what I always had been; they were not hypnotized by a mere change of name.
Of transformations.... I remember vividly the first night we passed at Dr. Onirifick's place. We had taken a shower together, shuddering at the sight of the myriads of roaches which infested the bathroom. We got into bed beneath the eiderdown quilt. We had had an ecstatic fuck in this strange public room filled with bizarre objects. We were drawn very-close together that night. I had separated from my wife and she had separated from her parents. We hardly knew why we had accepted to live in this outlandish house; in our proper senses neither of us would have dreamed of choosing such a setting. But we were not in our right senses. We were feverish to begin a new life, and we felt guilty, both of us, for the crimes we had committed in order to embark on the great adventure. Mona felt it more than I, in the beginning. She felt that she had been responsible for the break. It was the child which I had left behind, not my wife, whom she felt sorry for. It preyed on her mind. With it was the fear, no doubt, that I would wake up one day and realize that I had made a mistake. She struggled to make herself indispensable, to love me with such devotion, such complete self-sacrifice, that the past would be annihilated. She didn't do it deliberately. She wasn't even aware of what she was doing. But she clung to me desperately, so desperately that when I think of it now the tears come to my eyes. Because it was unnecessary: I needed her even more than she needed me.
And so, as we were falling off to sleep that night, as she rolled over to turn her back on me, the cover slipped off and I became aware, from the animal-like crouch she had assumed, of the massive quality of her back. I ran my two hands over her flesh, caressed her back as one would caress the flanks of a lioness. It was curious that I had never been aware of her superb back. We had slept together many times and we had fallen asleep in all sorts of postures, but I had noticed nothing. Now, in this huge bed which seemed to float in the wan light of the big room, her back became engraved in my memory. I had no definite thoughts about it—just vague pleasure sensations of the strength and the vitality that was in her. One who could support the world on her back! I didn't formulate anything so definite as that, but it was there, the thought, in some vague, obscure region of my consciousness. In my finger-tips more likely.
Under the shower I had teased her about her tummy, which was growing rather generous, and I realized at once that she was extremely sensitive about her figure. But I was not critical of her opulent flesh—I was delighted to discover it. It carried a promise, I thought. And then, under my very eyes, this body which had been so generously endowed began to shrink. The inner torture was beginning to take its toll. At the same time the fire that was in her began to burn more brightly. Her flesh was consumed by the passion that ravaged her. Her strong, columnar neck, the part of her body which I most admired, grew slenderer and slenderer, until the head seemed like a giant peony swaying on its fragile stem.
«You're not ill?» I would ask, alarmed by this swift transformation.
«Of course not!» she would say. «I'm reducing.» «But you're carrying it too far, Mona.» «I was like this as a girl,» she would answer. «It's natural for me to be thin.»
«But I don't want you to grow thin. I don't want you to change. Look at your neck—do you want to have a scrawny neck?»
«My neck isn't scrawny,» she would say, jumping up to look at herself in the mirror.
«I didn't say it was, Mona... but it may get that way if you keep on in this reckless fashion.»
«Please Val, don't talk about it. You don't understand...»
«Mona, don't talk that way. I'm not criticizing you. I only want to protect you.»
«You don't like me this way... is that it?» «Mona, I like you any way. I love you. I adore you. But please be reasonable. I'm afraid you're going to fade away, evaporate in thin air. I don't want you to get ill...»
«Don't be silly, Val. I never felt better in my life.»
«By the way,» she added, «are you going to see the little one this Saturday?» She would never mention either my wife or the child by name. Also, she preferred to think that I was visiting only the child on these weekly expeditions to Brooklyn.
I said I thought I would go... why, was there any reason not to?
«No, no!» she said, jerking her head strangely and turning away to look for something in the bureau drawer.
I stood behind her, as she was leaning over, and clasped my arms around her waist.
«Mona, tell me something... Does it hurt you very much when I go over there? Tell me honestly. Because if it does, I'll stop going. It has to come to an end some day anyway.»
«You know I don't want you to stop. Have I ever said anything against it?»
«No-o-o,» I said, lowering my head and gazing intently at the carpet. «No-o-o, you never say anything. But sometimes I wish you would...»
«Why do you say that?» she cried sharply. She looked almost indignant. «Haven't you a right to gee your own daughter? I would do it, if I were in your place.» She paused a moment and then, unable to control herself, she blurted out: «I would never have left her if she had been mine. I wouldn't have given her up, not for anything!»
«Mona! What are you saying. What does this mean?»
«Just that. I don't know how you can do it. I'm not worth such a sacrifice. Nobody is.»
«Let's drop it,» I said. «We're going to say things we don't mean. I tell you, I don't regret anything. It was no sacrifice, understand that. I wanted you and I got you. I'm happy. I could forget everybody if it were necessary. You're the whole world to me, and you know it.»
I seized her and pulled her to me. A tear rolled down her cheek.
«Listen, Val, I don't ask you to give up anything, but...»
«But what?»
«Couldn't you meet me once in a while at night when I quit work?»
«At two in the morning?»
«I know... it is an ungodly hour.... but I feel terribly lonely when I leave the dance hall. Especially after dancing with all those men, all those stupid, horrible creatures who mean nothing to me. I come home and you're asleep. What have I got?»
«Don't say that, please. Yes, of course I'll meet you—now and then.»
«Couldn't you take a nap after dinner and...»
«Sure I could. Why didn't you tell me sooner? It was selfish of me not to think of that.»
«You're not selfish, Val.»
«I am too... Listen, supposing I ride down with you this evening? I'll come back, take a snooze, and meet you at closing time.»
«You're sure it won't be too tiring?»
«No, Mona, it'll be wonderful.»
On the way home, however, I began to realize what it would mean to arrange my hours thus. At two o'clock we would catch a bite somewhere. An hour's ride on the elevated. In bed Mona would chat a while before going to sleep. It would be almost five o'clock by that time and by seven I would have to be up again ready for work.
I got into the habit of changing my clothes every evening, in preparation for the rendezvous at the dance hall. Not that I went every evening—no, but I went as often as possible. Changing into old clothes—a khaki shirt, a pair of moccasins, sporting one of the canes which Mona had filched from Carruthers—my romantic self asserted itself. I led two lives: one at the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company and another with Mona. Sometimes Florrie joined us at the restaurant. She had found a new lover, a German doctor who, from all accounts, must have possessed an enormous tool. He was the only man who could satisfy her, that she made clear. This frail-looking creature with a typical Irish mug, the Broadway type par excellence, who would have suspected that between her legs there was a gash big enough to hide a sledge hammer—or that she liked women as well as men? She liked anything that had to do with sex. The gash was now rooted in her mind. It kept spreading and spreading until there was no room, in mind or gash, for anything but a superhuman prick.
One evening, after I had taken Mona to work, I started wandering through the side streets. I thought perhaps I would go to a cinema and meet Mona after the performance. As I passed a doorway I heard someone call my name. I turned round and in the hallway, as though hiding from some one, stood Florrie and Hannah Bell. We went across the street to have a drink. The girls acted nervous and fidgety. They said they would have to leave in a few minutes—they were just having a drink to be sociable. I had never been alone with them before and they were uneasy, as if afraid of revealing things I ought not to know. Quite innocently I took Florrie's hand which was lying in her lap and squeezed it, to reassure her—of what I don't know. To my amazement she squeezed it warmly and then, bending forward as if to say something confidential to Hannah, she unloosed her grip and fumbled in my fly. A that moment a man walked in whom they greeted effusively. I was introduced as a friend. Monahan was the man's name. «He's a detective,» said Florrie, giving me a melting look. The man had hardly taken a seat when Florrie jumped up and seizing Hannah's arm whisked her out of the place. At the door she waved good-bye. They ran across the street, in the direction of the doorway where they had been hiding.
«A strange way to act,» said Monahan. «What'll you have?» he asked, calling the waiter over. I ordered another whisky and looked at him blankly. I didn't relish the idea of being left with a detective on my hands. Monahan however was in a different frame of mind; he seemed happy to have found some one to talk to. Observing the cane and the sloppy attire he at once came to the conclusion that I was an artist of some sort.
«You're dressed like an artist» (meaning a painter) «but you're not an artist. Your hands are too delicate.» He seized my hands and examined them quickly. «You're not a musician either,» he added. «Well, there's only one thing left—you're a writer!»
I nodded, half amused, half irritated. He was the type of Irishman whose directness antagonizes me. I could foresee the inevitable challenging Why? Why not? How come? What do you mean? As always, I began by being bland and indulgent. I agreed with him. But he didn't want me to agree with him—he wanted to argue.
I had hardly said a word and yet in the space of a few minutes he was insulting me and at the same time telling me how much he liked me.
«You're just the sort of chap I wanted to meet,» he said, ordering more drinks. «You know more than I do, but you won't talk. I'm not good enough for you, I'm a low-brow. That's where you're wrong! Maybe I know a lot of things you don't suspect. Maybe I can tell you a few things. Why don't you ask me something?»
What was I to say? There wasn't anything I wanted to know—from him, at least. I wanted to get up and go—without offending him. I didn't want to be jerked back into my seat by that long hairy arm and be slobbered over and grilled and argued with and insulted. Besides, I was feeling a little woozy. I was thinking of Florrie and how strangely she had behaved—and I could still feel her hand fumbling in my fly.
«You don't seem to be all there,» he said. «I thought writers were quick on the trigger, always there with the bright repartee. What's the matter— don't you want to be sociable? Maybe you don't like my mug? Listens—and he laid his heavy hand on my arm—«get this straight... I'm your friend, see! I want to have a talk with you. You're going to tell me things... all the things I don't know. You're going to wise me up. Maybe I won't get it all at once, but I'm going to listen. We're not going to leave here until we get this settled, see what I mean?» With this he gave me one of those strange Irish smiles, a melange of warmth, sincerity, perplexity and violence. It meant that he was going to get what he wanted out of me or lay me out flat. For some inexplicable reason he was convinced that I had something which he sorely needed, some clue to the riddle of life, which, even if he couldn't grasp it entirely, would serve him in good stead.
By this time I was almost in a panic. It was precisely the sort of situation that I am incapable of dealing with. I could have murdered the bastard in cold blood.
A mental uppercut, that's what he wanted of me. He was tired of beating the piss out of the other fellow—he wanted some one to go to work on him.
I decided to go at it directly, to deflate him with one piercing lunge and then trust to my wits.
«You want me to talk frankly, is that it?» I gave him an ingenuous smile.
«Sure, sure,» he retorted. «Fire away! I can take it.»
«Well, to begin with,» says I, still offering the bland, reassuring smile, «you're just a louse and you know it. You're afraid of something, what it is I don't know yet, but we'll get to it. With me you pretend that you're a low-brow, a nobody, but to yourself you pretend that you're smart, a big shot, a tough guy. You're not afraid of a thing, are you? That's all shit and you know it. You're full of fear. You say you can take it. Take what? A sock in the jaw? Of course you can, with a cement mug like yours. But can you stand the truth?»
He gave me a hard, glittery smile. His face, violently flushed, indicated that he was doing his-utmost to control himself. He wanted to say «Yes, go on!» but the words choked him. He just nodded and turned on the electric smile.
«You've beaten up many a rat with your bare hands, haven't you? Somebody held the guy down and you went at him until he screamed blue murder. You wrung a confession out of him and then you dusted yourself off and poured a few drinks down your throat. He was a rat and he deserved what he got. But you're a bigger rat, and that's what's eating you up. You like to hurt people. You probably pulled the wings off flies when you were a kid. Somebody hurt you once and you can't forget it.» (I could feel him wince at this.) «You go to church regularly and you confess, but you don't tell the truth. You tell half-truths. You never tell the Father what a lousy stinking son of a bitch you really are. You tell him about your little sins. You never tell him what pleasure you get beating up defenceless guys who never did you any harm. And of course you always put a generous donation in the box. Hush money! As if that could quiet your conscience! Everybody says what a swell guy you are—except the poor bastards whom you track down and beat the piss out of. You tell yourself that it's your job, you have to be that way or else... It's hard for you to figure out just what else you could do if you ever lost your job, isn't that so? What assets have you? What do you know? What are you good for? Sure,. you might make a street-cleaner or a garbage collector, though I doubt that you have the guts for it. But you don't know anything useful, do you? You don't read, you don't associate with any but your own kind. Your sole interest is politics. Very important, politics! Never know when you may need a friend. Might murder the wrong guy some day, and then what? Why, then you'd want somebody to lie for you, somebody who'd go to the bat for you—some low-down worm like yourself who hasn't a shred of manhood or a spark or decency in him. And in return you'd do him a good turn some day—I mean you'd bump some one off some time, if he asked you to.»
I paused for just a second.
«If you really want to know what I think, I'd say you've murdered a dozen innocent guys already. I'd say that you've got a wad in your pocket that would choke a horse. I'd say that you've got something on your conscience—and you came here to drown it. I'd say that you know why those girls got up suddenly and ran across the street. I'd say that if we knew all about you you might be eligible for the electric chair...»
Completely out of breath, I stopped and mechanically rubbed my jaw, as if surprised to find it still intact. Monahan, unable to hold himself in any longer, burst out with an alarming guffaw.
«You're crazy,» he said, «crazy as a bedbug, but I like you. Go on, talk some more. Say the worst you know—I want to hear it.» And with that he called the waiter over and ordered another round. «You're right about one thing,» he added, «I have got a wad in my pocket. Want to see it?» He fished out a roll of greenbacks, flipped them under my nose, like a cardsharper. «Go on now, give it to me...!»
The sight of the money derailed me. My one thought was how to separate him from some of his ill-gained boodle.
«It was a bit crazy, all that stuff I just handed you,» I began, adopting another tone. «I'm surprised you didn't haul off and crack me. My nerves are on edge, I guess...»
«Don't have to tell me,» said Monahan.
I adopted a still more conciliatory tone. «Let me tell you something about myself,» I continued in an even voice, and in a few brief strokes I outlined my position in the Cosmodemonic skating rink, my relationship with O'Rourke, the company detective, my ambition to be a writer, my visits to the psychopathic ward, and so on. Just enough to let him know that I was not a dreamer. The mention of O'Rourke's name impressed him. O'Rourke's brother (as I well knew) was Monahan's boss and he stood in awe of him.
«And you pal around with O'Rourke?»
«He's a great friend of mine,» said I. «A man I respect. He's almost a father to me. I learned something about human nature from him. O'Rourke's a big man doing a small job. He belongs somewhere else, where I don't know. However, he seems satisfied to be where he is, though he's working himself to death. What galls me is that he isn't appreciated.»
I went on in this vein, extolling O'Rourke's virtues, indicating none too subtly the comparison between O'Rourke's methods and those of the ordinary flat-foot.
My words were producing the effect intended. Monahan was visibly wilting, softening like a sponge.
«You've got me wrong,» he finally burst out. «I've got as big a heart as the next guy, only I don't show it. You can't go around exposing yourself—not on this job. We ain't all like O'Rourke, I'll grant you, but we're human, b'Jesus! You're an idealist, that's what's the matter with you. You want perfection...» He gave me a strange look, mumbled to himself. Then he continued in a clear, calm voice: «The more you talk the more I like you. You've got something I once had. I was ashamed of it then... you know, afraid of being a sissy or something. Life hasn't spoiled you—that's what I like about you. You know what it's like and yet it doesn't make you sour or mean. You said some pretty nasty things a while back, and to tell you the truth, I was going to take a swing at you. Why didn't I? Because you weren't talking to me: you were aiming at all the guys like me who got off the track somewhere. You sound personal, but you ain't. You're talking to the world all the time. You should have been a preacher, do you realize that? You and O'Rourke, you're a good team. I mean it. We guys have a job to do and we don't get any fun out of it; you guys work for the pleasure of it. And what's more... well, never mind... Look, give me your hand...» He reached for my free hand and grasped it in a vice. «You see», (I winced as he applied the pressure) «I could squeeze your hand to a pulp. I wouldn't have to make a pass at you. I could just sit like this, talking to you, looking straight at you, and crush your hand to a pulp. That's the strength I have.»
He relaxed his grip and I withdrew my hand quickly. It felt numb, paralyzed.
«There's nothing to that, you see,» he went on. «That's dumb brute strength; you've got another kind of strength which I lack. You could make mince meat of me with that tongue of yours. You've got a brain.» He looked away, as if absent-minded. «How is your hand?» he said, dreamy-like. «I didn't hurt you, did I?»
I felt it with my other hand. It was limp and useless.
«It's all right, I guess.»
He looked me through and through, then laughingly he burst out: «I'm hungry. Let's eat something.»
We went downstairs and inspected the kitchen first. He wanted me to see how clean everything was: went about picking up carving knives and cleavers, holding them up to the light for me to examine and admire.
«I had to chop a guy down with one of these once.» He brandished a cleaver. «Split him in two, clean as a whistle.»
Taking my arm affectionately he led me back upstairs. «Henry,» says he, «we're going to be pals. You're going to tell me more about yourself—and you're going to let me help you. You've got a wife—very beautiful too.» I gave an involuntary jerk. He tightened his grip on my arm and led me to the table.
«Henry, let's talk straight for a change. I know a thing or two, even if I don't look it.» Pause. «Get your wife out of that joint!»
I was just about to say «What joint?» when he resumed: «A guy can get mixed up in all sorts of things and come out clean—sometimes. But a woman's different. You don't like to see her working there, with those dizzy fluffs, do you? Find out what's keeping her there. Don't get sore now... I'm not trying to hurt your feelings. I don't know anything about your wife—that is, any more than I've heard...»
«She's not my wife,» I blurted out.
«Well, whatever she is to you,» he said smoothly, as if that were quite an unimportant detail, «get her out of that joint! I'm telling you like a friend. I know what I'm talking about.»
I began to put two and two together, rapidly, fitfully. My mind shifted back to Florrie and Hannah, to their sudden exit. Was there going to be a raid, a shake-up—or a shake-down? Was he trying to warn me?
He must have divined what was going on in my head, for the next thing out of his mouth was this: «If she has to have a job let me try to find her something. She could do something else, couldn't she? An attractive girl like her...»
«Let's drop it,» I said, «and thanks for the tip.»
For a while we ate in silence. Then, apropos of nothing, Monahan took out the fat wad of greenbacks and peeled off two fifty dollar bills. He placed them beside my plate. «Take them,» he said «and put 'em in your pocket. Let her try the theatre, why don't you?» He lowered his head to shovel a forkful of spaghetti into his mouth. I picked up the bills and quietly shoved them into my trousers pocket.
As soon as I could free myself I set off to meet Mona in front of the dance hall. I was in a strange mood.
My head was spinning a bit as I rolled merrily along towards Broadway. I was determined to be cheerful, though something told me I had reason to be otherwise. The meal and the few parting shots that Monahan had succeeded in driving home had sobered me up somewhat. I felt large and luxuriant, in a mood to enjoy my own thoughts. Euphoric, as Kronski would say. To me that always meant being happy for no reason. Just being happy, knowing you're happy, and staying happy no matter what any one says or does. It wasn't alcoholic joy; the whiskies may have precipitated the mood, but nothing more. It wasn't some underneath self that was cropping out—it was rather an overhead self, if I might put it that way. With each step I took the fumes of the liquor evaporated; my mind was growing almost frighteningly clear.
As I passed a theatre a glancing look at a billboard brought back a familiar face. I knew who it was, the name and everything, and I was astonished but—well, to put it truthfully, I was so much more astonished by what was going on inside me that I hadn't time or room to be astonished by something that had happened to some one else. I would come back to her later, when the euphoria had passed away. And just as I was promising myself that, who did I run into head on but my old friend Bill Woodruff.
Hello hello, how are you, yes fine, long time since . I saw you, what are you doing, how's the wife, see you again some time, yes I'm in a hurry, sure I'll come up, so long, good-bye... it went like that, rat-a-tat-tat. Two solid bodies colliding in space at the wrong time, rubbing surfaces together, exchanging souvenirs, plugging in wrong numbers, promising and re-promising, forgetting, parting, remembering again... hurried, mechanical, meaningless, and what the hell does it all add up to?
After ten years he looked just the same, Woodruff. I wanted to take a look at myself in the mirror— quick. Ten years! And he wanted all the news in a nut-shell. Dumb bastard! A sentimentalist. Ten years. I ran back through the years, down a long twisted funnel of a corridor with distorted mirrors on either side. I got right to that spot in time and space where I had Woodruff fixed in my mind the way I would always see him, even in the next world. He was pinned there, as if he were a winged specimen under the microscope. That was where he revolved helplessly on his axis. And that's where she comes in—the one whose picture flashed through my brain as I passed the theatre. She was the one he was crazy about, the girl he couldn't live without, and everybody had to help him woo her, even his mother and father, even his cluck of a Prussian brother-in-law whose guts he hated.
Ida Verlaine. Born to fit the name. She was just exactly the way her name sounded—pretty, vain, theatrical, faithless, spoiled, pampered, petted. Beautiful as a Dresden doll, only she had raven tresses and a Javanese slant to her soul. If she had a soul at all! Lived entirely in the body, in her senses, her desires—and she directed the show, the body show, with her tyrannical little will which poor Woodruff translated as some monumental force of character.
Ida, Ida.... He used to chew our ears off about her. She was delicate in a perverse way, like one of Cranach's nudes. The body very fair, the hair very black, the soul tilted backwards, like a stone becoming dislodged from its Egyptian setting. They had disgraceful scenes during the courtship; Woodruff would often leave her in tears. The next day he would send her orchids or a beautiful lavellier or a gigantic box of chocolates. Ida swallowed everything, like a pythoness. She was heartless and insatiable.
Eventually he prevailed on her to marry him. He must have bribed her, for it was obvious that she despised him. He built a beautiful little love nest which was far beyond his means, bought her the clothes and other things she craved, took her to the theatre several nights a week, stuffed her with sweets, sat by her side and held her hand when she was having her menstrual pains, consulted a specialist if she had a cough, and in general played the fond, doting husband.
The more he did for her the less she cared for him. She was a monster from head to toe. Little by little it leaked out that she was frigid. None of us believed it of course, except Woodruff. He was to have the same experience later, with his second wife, and if he had lived long enough he would have had it with the third and fourth wives. With Ida his infatuation was so great that, if she had lost her legs, I don't think it would have altered his affection in the least—in fact, he would only have loved her the more.
For all his faults Woodruff was keen on friendship. There were at least six of us whom he had taken to his bosom and whom he trusted implicitly.
I was one of them—his oldest friend, as a matter of fact. I had the privilege of walking in and out of his home at will; I could eat, sleep, bathe, shave there. I was one of the family.
From the very beginning I disliked Ida, not because of her behavior towards Woodruff, but instinctively.
Ida in turn was uneasy in my presence. She didn't quite know what to make of me. I never criticized her nor did I ever flatter her; I acted as though she were the wife of my friend, and nothing more. She wasn't satisfied with such an attitude, naturally. She wanted to bring me under her spell, make me walk the tight-rope, as she had done with Woodruff and her other suitors. Oddly enough, I was never more immune to a woman's charms. I just didn't give a fuck for her, as a person, though I often wondered what she might be like as a piece of fuck, so to speak.
I wondered about it in a detached way, but somehow it got across to her, got under her skin.
Sometimes, after passing the night at their home, she would complain aloud that she didn't want to be left alone with me. Woodruff would be standing at the door, ready to go to work, and she pretending to be worried. I'd be lying in bed waiting for her to bring me my breakfast. And Woodruff saying to her: «Don't talk that way, Ida. He's not going to harm you—I'd trust him with my life.»
Sometimes I'd burst out laughing and yell: «Don't worry, Ida, I'm not going to rape you. I'm impotent.»
«You impotent?» she'd scream with pretended hysteria. «You're not impotent. You're a lecher.»
«Bring him his breakfast!» Woodruff would say, and off to work he'd go.
She hated the thought of waiting on me in bed. She didn't do it for her husband and she couldn't see why she should do it for me. To take breakfast in bed was something I never did, except at Woodruff's place. I did it expressly to annoy and humiliate her.
«Why don't you get up and come to the table?» she would say.
«I can't—I've got an erection.»
«Oh, stop talking about that thing. Can't you think of anything but sex?»
Her words implied that sex was horrible, nasty, simply odious to her, but her manner indicated quite the opposite. She was a lascivious bitch, frigid only because she had the heart of a whore. If I ran my hand up her leg when she put the tray on my lap she would say: «Are you satisfied? Take a good feel while you're at it. I wish Bill could see you, see what a loyal friend he has.»
«Why don't you tell him?» says I one day.
«He wouldn't believe me, the simp. He'd think I was trying to make him jealous.»
I would ask her to prepare the bath for me. She would pretend to demur but she would do it just the same. One day, while I was seated in the tub soaping myself, I noticed that she had forgotten the towels. «Ida,» I called, «bring me some towels!» She walked into the bathroom and handed me them. She had on a silk bathrobe and a pair of silk hose. As she stooped over the tub to put the towels on the rack her bathrobe slid open. I slid to my knees and buried my head in her muff. It happened so quickly that she didn't have time to rebel, or even to pretend to rebel. In a moment I had her in the tub, stockings and all. I slipped the bathrobe off and threw it on the floor. I left the stockings on—it made her more lascivious looking, more the Cranach type. I lay back and pulled her on top of me. She was just like a bitch in heat, biting me all over, panting, gasping, wriggling like a worm on the hook. As we were drying ourselves she bent over and began nibbling at my prick. I sat on the edge of the tub and she kneeled at my feet gobbling it. After a while I made her stand up, bend over; then I let her have it from the rear. She had a small juicy cunt which fitted me like a glove. I bit the nape of her neck, the lobes of her ears, the sensitive spot on her shoulder, and as I pulled away I left the mark of my teeth on her beautiful white ass. Not a word spoken. When we had finished she went to her room and began dressing. I heard her humming softly to herself. I was quite amazed that she was capable of expressing her tenderness that way.
From that day on she only waited for Woodruff to go in order to throw herself on me.
«Aren't you afraid he might come back unexpectedly and find you in bed with me?» I asked once.
«He wouldn't believe his eyes. He'd think we were fooling.»
«He wouldn't think we were fooling if he felt this,» and I gave her a jolt that made her gasp.
«God, if he only knew how to take me! He's too eager. He takes it out like a broomstick and shoves it in before I've had a chance to feel anything. I just lie there and let him work it off—it's over in a jiffy. But with you I get hot before you even touch me. It's because you don't care, I suppose. You don't really like me, do you?»
«I like this,» said I, giving her a stiff jab. «I like your cunt, Ida... it's the best thing about you.»
«You dog,» she said. «I ought to hate you for that.»
«Why don't you hate me, then?»
«Oh, don't talk about it,» she murmured cuddling closer and working herself up to a lather. «Just keep it there and hold me tight. Here, bite my breast... not too hard... there, that's it.» She reached for my hands and pressed my fingers into her crack.
«Go on, do it, do it!» she muttered, her eyes rolling, her breath coming short.
A little later, at lunch: «Do you have to run off now? Can't you stay a little longer?»
«You want another crack at it, is that it?»
«Can't you put it more delicately? God, if Bill ever heard you say that!»
I got up and pushed her chair back. I took her leg and swung it over the arm of the chair.
«You never wear any undies, do you? You're a slut, do you know it?»
I pulled her dress up and made her sit that way while I finished my coffee.
«Play with it a bit while I finish this.»
«You're filthy,» she said, but she did as I told her.
«Take your two fingers and open it up. I like the color of it. It's like coral inside. Just like your ears. You say he's got a terrific wang, Bill. I don't know how he ever gets it in there.» With this I reached for a candle on the dresser at my side and I handed it to her.
«Let's see if you can get it in all the way.»
She spread the other leg over the other arm of the chair and began to work it in. She was looking at herself intently, her lips parted as if on the verge of an orgasm. She began to move back and forth, then rolled her ass around. I pushed her chair back farther, got down on my knees, and watched.
«You can make me do anything, you dirty devil.»
«You like it, don't you?»
She was on the point of coming off. I pulled the candle out and slipped three fingers inside her twat.
«Is it big enough for you?» She pulled my head close and bit my lips.
I stood up and unbuttoned my fly. In a jiffy she had it out and in her mouth. Gobble, gobble, like a hungry buzzard. I came in her mouth.
«God,» she said, choking and sputtering, «I never did that before.» She ran to the bathroom, as if she had swallowed poison.
I went inside and flung myself on the bed. I lit a cigarette and waited for her to join me. I knew it was going to be a long drawn-out affair.
She came back in the silk bathrobe, nothing underneath. «Take your things off,» she said, pulling back the covers and diving in. We lay there fondling each other, her cunt sopping wet.
«You smell wonderful,» I said. «What did you do?»
She pulled my hand away and put it to my nostrils.
«Not bad,» I said, «what is it?»
«Guess!»
She got up impulsively, went to the bathroom and came back with a small bottle of perfume. She spilt some into her hand and rubbed my genitals with it; then she sprinkled a few drops on the pubic hairs. It stung like fire. I grabbed the bottle and soused her with it all over, from head to foot. Then I began licking her arm-pits, chewed the hair over her cunt, and slid my tongue like a snake down the curve of her thighs. She bobbed up and down as if she were having convulsions. It went on like this until I had such an erection that even after I shot a wad into her it stayed up like a hammer. That excited her terribly. She wanted to try all sorts of positions and she did. 'She had several orgasms in succession and almost fainted in the process. I laid her on a small table and when she was on 'the verge of exploding I picked her up and walked around the room with her; then I took it out and made her walk on her hands, holding her by the thighs, letting it slip out now and then to excite her still more.
Her lips were chewed to a frazzle and she was full of marks, some green, some blue. I had a strange taste in my mouth, of fish glue and Chanel 976 Ѕ. My cock looked like a bruised rubber hose; it hung between my legs, extended an inch or two beyond its normal length and swollen beyond recognition. When I got to the street I felt weak in the knees. I went to the drug store and swallowed a couple of malted milks. A royal bit of fucking, thought I to myself, wondering how I'd act when I met Woodruff again.
Things happened to Woodruff in quick succession. First of all he lost his job at the bank. Then Ida ran off with one of his best friends. When he discovered that she had been sleeping with the fellow for a year before she ran off, he grew so despondent that he went on a bat which lasted for a year. After that he was knocked down by a car and his brain trepanned. Then his sister went crazy, setting fire to the house and burning her own children alive.
He couldn't understand why these things should happen to him, Bill Woodruff, who had never done anybody any harm.
Now and then I would run into him on Broadway and we would have a little chat standing on a street corner. He never gave any hint that he suspected me of having tinkered with his beloved Ida. He spoke of her bitterly now, as a thankless slut who had never showed a spark of feeling. But it was evident he still loved her. However, he had taken up with another girl, a manicurist, not so attractive as Ida, but loyal and trustworthy, as he put it. «I want you to meet her some time,» said he. I promised I would—some time. And then, as I was parting from him, I said: «What did become of Ida, do you know?»
«She's on the stage,» he said. «Where she belongs, I guess. They must have taken her on her looks— she never had any talent that I could see.»
Ida Verlaine. I was still thinking of her and of those free and easy days in the past as I took up my post at the entrance to the dance hall. I had a few minutes to kill. I had forgotten about the money in my pocket. I was still riveted to the past. Wondered whether I would stop by the theatre one day and have a look at Ida from the third row front-Or go up to her dressing room and have a little tete-a-tete while she made up. I wondered if her body were still as white as ever. Her black hair was long then and hung over her shoulders. She really was a bewitching piece of cunt. Pure cunt, that's what she was. And Woodruff so bewildered by it all, so innocent, so worshipful. I remember his saying once that he used to kiss her ass every night, to show her what a devoted slave he was. It's a wonder she didn't pee on him ever. He deserved that, the imbecile!
And then I thought of something which made me laugh. Men always think that to own a big cock is one of life's greatest boons. They think you have only to shake it at a woman and she's yours. Well, if anybody had a big cock it was Bill Woodruff. It was a veritable horse cock. I remember the first time I saw it—I could scarcely believe my eyes. Ida should have been his slave, if all that stuff about big cocks be true. It impressed her all right all right, but the wrong way. She was scared stiff. It froze her up. And the more he pushed and plugged, the smaller she grew. He might just as well have fucked her between the teats, or in the arm-pits. She would have enjoyed that more, no doubt about it. Woodruff never had such ideas, though. He would have thought them degrading. You can't ask the woman you idolize to let you fuck her between the teats. How he got his nookie I never inquired. But that ass-licking ritual made me smile. It's tough to be crazy about a woman and then find that nature has played you a mean trick.
Ida Verlaine. I had a hunch I'd be looking her up soon. It wouldn't be the same smooth-fitting cunt any more, no use kidding oneself. By this time it had been well reamed, if I knew Ida. Still, if there was any juice left, if her ass had that smooth, slippery feel, it would be worth having another go at it.
I began to have an erection thinking about her.
I waited around for a half hour or more, but no sign of Mona. I decided to go upstairs and inquire. Learned that she had gone home early—with a sick headache.
9
It was only the next evening, after dinner, that I found out why she had left the dance hall early. She had received a message from home and had rushed out to see her parents. I didn't press her to talk, knowing how secretive she was about this other life. For some reason, however, she was anxious to get it off her chest. As usual, she circled about with mysterious swoops. It was difficult to make head or tail of her story. All I could gather was that they were in distress—and by «they» she meant the whole family, including her three brothers, and her sister-in-law.
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