When he opened his eyes Hildred was bending over him with a towel in her hands. She looked so sad and gentle. There were tears in her eyes. “What is it?” he asked, and then he saw that there was blood on the towel.
At breakfast he told them what had happened. They looked at him unbelievingly. “What the devil!” he said. “What do you think happened, then?” It was queer the way they regarded him. Hildred looked glum, ravaged. Vanya had put on her Barrymore smile.
“Do you think I tried to pull the Dutch act?”
Vanya was still smiling. “You tried, all right,” her smile seemed to say, “but you didn’t have the guts.”
He looked down at his plate. There were no tragedies anymore, there were only disappointments. He was failing them. He was not a romantic, as Vanya used to say. A man who didn’t get himself killed when he had everything to die for was a disappointment. A man like that would go on living even if you stuck his feet in the grass plot. He would go on living because he hadn’t brains enough to die. It didn’t require guts so much as imagination. He was living an amputated life. His imagination had been removed. And without imagination a man could live forever, even though he be a man no longer, even though he have no arms nor legs—as long as there were pieces left that you could sew together and throw in a wheelchair.
5
THE PLACE looks like a toy shop that has just been sacked. Arms and legs lying around, monsters in velour jackets, Neros with green wigs sprawled out on the floor like drunken sailors. Overproduction. Unemployment. All hands out hunting for grub, for cigarettes, firewood. Hildred, sadly discouraged, goes to the cinema frequently and sits in the dark to collect her thoughts. No telling what time they’ll come these days. But midnight is sure to find them in the cafeteria on Sheridan Square, the same old joint where Willie Hyslop and his gang used to congregate, where they still meet, to be sure, but not with the enthusiasm and frequency as of yore. So it’s here at Lorber’s that Vanya and Hildred come after midnight to shake someone down for a little chicken feed. The same old gang—Toots and Ebba, Iliad and her mother, bull-dykers, pimps, poets, painters and painters’ whores. . . . Amy, too, drops in once in a while, usually with a shanty on her eye, a gift from that connoisseur of anatomies Homer Reed, him who isn’t content with an ordinary bun on, but must needs stretch it out for a year at a time. And then there’s Jake. . . . Every few minutes someone pops in to ask where Jake is. And if Jake’s there, everything’s Jake, as they say.
Who’s Jake? Well, Jake is a locksmith—but then that doesn’t tell us a thing about him, about his temperament, his great heart, his roguish ways. A Maecenas, would be better . . . a Maecenas with a small m. He’s a bit of an artist, too, this Jake the Maecenas. That is to say, he keeps a studio hard by—a studio equipped with everything an artist would require. Which means a velvet jacket as well. When he has need of a model—there are always plenty to be had at Lorber’s—Jake picks up the check, pays for it, and there you are. Besides being acknowledged an artist he is also considered a good meal ticket. Since it is always the same thing he paints—perhaps painting is too dignified a term for the daubs he makes—Jake economizes by using the same canvas over and over. Vanya, who never had any scruples about posing in the nude, is one of the models Jake knows by heart.
There are other philanthropists to be encountered here also. There is a sea captain and his first mate, for example, and a wizened old fellow with a sea-green beard who used to chop tickets in the subway; there is a chess player named Roberto and a chiropractor who, among other things, has mastered the art of jujitsu. And there is Leslie, the pimply-faced gawk, who has a crush on Vanya and is now driving a taxi. Already quite a nucleus of potential benefactors. It is only a question of keeping them apart, of playing one against the other. The ticket-chopper, for instance, would willingly mortgage his property to help the little ladies along, but he insists that the raven-haired Roberto be gotten out of the way. A droll sort, this venerable ticket-chopper. Writes the most touching letters, in a medieval script. Signed Ludwig. Poor Ludwig’s letters are passed around from table to table amid gales of laughter, even while the poor fish is present, perhaps at the very moment when he is reaching down into his long jeans to peel off a five-spot.
Now and then, just to prove that they really have a domicile fixe, one of the knight-errants is invited over to the “morgue.” If it is a question of laying in supplies, Jake is a good man to corral. Scarcely does he remove his hat when Vanya suddenly recalls that there is no food in the house. A moment of mock embarrassment, perplexity. Then Jake, innocently: “Why didn’t you tell me you were hungry at the restaurant?” But they weren’t hungry then. “Well, let’s go out and buy some food. We’ll eat here, eh?” Fine. Nothing finer. And forthwith they take Jake by the hand and lead him to an expensive delicatessen store where one can purchase caviar, pâté de foie gras, Maxwell House coffee, black pumpernickel, and other delicatesses. They return with enough provisions to last a week. Jake may even reflect thus aloud.
After he has been fed, and treated to one of his own cigars, Hildred is sure to complain that it is getting stuffy. She will go to the window and, after opening it slightly, pull the shade halfway. And lo and behold, a moment later the bell rings. And there, standing at the door, is their old friend Tony Bring. Why what are you doing at this hour? He was just passing, to be sure, and seeing the light in the window he thought he’d say hello. Though, truth to tell, saying hello was quite an effort for him—the muscles of his face almost paralyzed from the cold. Just passing by, he was. No mention of the two hundred and seventy-three times he had “passed by” before the shade was raised. . . .
But when the sea captain and his first mate are invited over Tony Bring exhibits an unexpected stubbornness. It isn’t the cold any longer that he objects to, because he has change enough to sit in an armchair at Bickford’s. It’s just stubbornness. Or was it, perhaps, that he didn’t quite trust these bluff, honest, seafaring fellows? At any rate, he refuses to be budged. Insists on locking himself in Vanya’s room. . . .
AND SO, while the gourmandizing went on, he lay in the dark listening to the water gurgling while he tried to piece together the fragments of conversation which drifted to his ears. At times it actually appeared to him that there was no conversation going on at all, but it was explained afterward that these lapses were given over to a silent scrutiny of Vanya’s poems. That he should have dared to breathe such nasty insinuations, however, called for some acidulous comments. It was Hildred who declared that a sailor could be as much of a gentleman as the next fellow, perhaps more of a one.
But shortly after this visit, with the usual contradictoriness which attaches itself to human events, the two of them came home in a grand huff. It was after an evening at the theater with the gallant tars.
“What do you think those bastards tried to do?” It was Hildred who exploded thus, no sooner than she had opened the door.
In that enfeebled state to which his imagination had been reduced Tony Bring confessed that he hadn’t the slightest idea what could have happened.
“They tried to kiss us—can you imagine that? We were in the cab, talking about”—she turned to Vanya—“what was it we were discussing again?”
And Vanya, with a sickly grin, responded: “You were trying to explain what sadism meant.”
“Yes, that’s it—sadism. . . . I’m trying to knock it into their thick skulls when all of a sudden I feel an arm creeping around my neck. It was that dirty old fool, the captain. He said I had to give him just one little kiss. . . .”
She paused a moment to observe the reaction the “little kiss” would provoke, but as Tony Bring betrayed not even a mild astonishment, she added with a fury a little too ardent—“I gave him a good crack in the jaw!”
Vanya couldn’t refrain from tittering. That seemed to incense Hildred even more than the insulting behavior of the gentlemen in the taxicab.
“What’s the matter with you?” she cried.
; “Oh, nothing,” said Vanya, and turned her face away.
“And that’s all there was to it?” said Tony Bring. He couldn’t understand why the fuss about it. He looked at Vanya—her face was slipping.
“I don’t see what you’re laughing for,” Hildred exclaimed angrily. “Didn’t I slap his face? Didn’t I? And you . . . what did you do?”
A scene was precipitated during which the word slut was bandied back and forth. He listened to them in amazement. Hildred calling her dear sick genius, her princess, a slut! Finally Vanya retreated to her room, slammed the door in Hildred’s face, and locked herself in. After a time they heard her sobbing.
“For God’s sake, go in there and quiet her,” said Tony Bring. “I can’t stand that noise . . . you’d think she was having her throat cut.”
But Hildred wouldn’t move. There were some things, she let it be known, that were unforgivable.
What things? he asked himself. What was the meaning of all this? Just a little kiss . . . ? That couldn’t be it. What really happened? His imagination was running wild. It would all leak out in due time, but. . . . Meanwhile he could hear Vanya sobbing, sobbing as if her heart would break. And then, just when it seemed impossible to endure another moment, the sobbing ceased, and there was a long, sinister silence. Maybe she’ll do something desperate, he thought to himself, and his mind ran on like a clock—police, court, headlines, cemetery, suicide, despair, ennui, frustration. If she’d only do it! Do it, you bastard! He was startled by a blood-curdling yell quickly followed by a din and clatter as if shoes were being thrown around. Hildred sprang to her feet and, rushing to Vanya’s door, pounded away with her two fists. “Vanya . . . Vanya dear, open the door. Please, Vanya . . . I want to speak to you. . . .” There was a moment of intense silence and then a volley of curses. “Vanya . . . Vanya! I’m sorry. . . . Forgive me! Please, Vanya . . . please open the door!”
They heard her thrashing about, stumbling against the furniture, back and forth, back and forth, like a maniac. Then her queer, mad voice caroling away like a drunken angel, an angel with a Russian accent, an angel with a Victrola in her gizzard and the spring running down, sliding through all the registers of the human voice, running down, down, like rain falling into the sewers. . . .
Tony Bring’s disappointment was violent and bitter. Fireworks—that’s all it amounted to. In the morning she’d be clamoring for strawberries and cream. He worked himself up to such a pitch of fury that he was almost on the point of ripping his own guts out. If only the door hadn’t been locked! If he could have been in there with her and handed her the bread knife when she was bellowing like a stuck pig! He felt humiliated.
HE WAS standing on the threshold of Vanya’s room with a broom in his hand. Somehow, every time he visited this wing of the morgue he was seized with an insane desire to lay about with shovel and pitchfork, to clean out the manure and stomp down a fresh bed of straw. “Here lives a horse,” he growled. “A horse that is not a horse but an acrobat evacuating poetry. An animal that steeps itself in the mire of its own dung. A frisky brute that adds pictures to the wall with each whisk of its tail. Not a horse, either, but a sea cow with a yellow tail, a lazy, herbivorous beast that poisons itself with tobacco. With its wet, cumbersome fins it sprawls over the desk under the toilet box and sucks inspiration from the gurgle of the drains. . . .”
Everything about the place smelled of decay, of depravity. It was here in this foul, moist den that she wrestled with the demons of her dreams, or rolled off the cot when the walls heaved and bulged. Here, when she got drunk, that she curled up like a fetus and lapped up the ashes of her cigarettes. Here that her friends came and, standing on the cot in their dirty shoes, expounded their moth-eaten theories of art, or pinned bloomers on her fleshy nudes, or added a missing nose or a foot. A dirty womb of a place, spewing darkness and poison, slippery and lurid as the opalescent mucus of Michelet.
Broom in hand he went from room to room. A dungeon! A stinking oubliette! Living with these two was like living with a double-headed monster. He lit a candle and held it to the walls, moved about from one image to another. Sword swallowers, nymphs with varicose veins, dryads and hamadryads sucking the moon, dime museums, skeletons with crazy hats, fountains that bled like gems, Leda and the swan, vegetables that spoke. . .
A pale light trickled in as he drew aside the heavy burlap curtains. It was day outside! The day! One day after another, dribbling away in confusion, marked neither by beginning nor end. Like the tides following after the moon they rolled up, one upon another, now swelling to a flood of furious activity, now dropping to a stagnant ebb. And it was in this drift that one was said to live. On the surface of this ceaseless drift forms arose, brilliant and energized; for an infinitesimal fraction of time life imparted to them a flash and poise; in the glitter of their passing something like a somber significance attached to them. But like a meteor sweeping through cold space they were gone; like dead sea life, inert, extinct, they dropped below the molten surface, through the deep gloom of terrifying depths, and deposited their skeletons on the floor of the universe. In violence and chaos, with futility and despair, rising from inchoate blackness and slime only to fall again.
He juggled the candle back and forth. Like a fiery tongue the flame licked the walls, staining a delicate arm with veins, making torsos dance and muscles quiver. Spots of color leaped out at him; they were like the evil traits that one surprises on the face of a friend in sleep.
6
IT WAS toward midnight when he ascended the steps that led to the little balcony of Paul & Joe’s. It was a Sunday night. The balcony was jammed with sailors parading arm in arm with handsome young faggots who lisped and rolled their eyes deliriously. In the hallway, packed like a subway train at rush hour, women were embracing one another, whites and blacks promiscuously. The air reeked with perfumes. The place was in an uproar. He made his way to the basement, where, almost in the center of the room, sat Hildred surrounded by a clump of wasted-looking females among whom were Toots and Ebba, and Iliad and her mother. They were drooped over the tables in slovenly attitudes, all of them talking at once, none of them concerned apparently with the riot going on. They look wilted, he said to himself, as he walked up to the table and patted Hildred on the shoulder.
She looked up at him dumbfounded.
“I’d like to have a word with you,” he said. At once the babble ceased.
Excusing herself, Hildred rose and went to the dressing room, followed by Vanya, who glared at him vengefully. He took a seat beside a fat Norwegian girl with whom Hildred had been talking. She seemed to be the only one who did not resent his intrusion. Despite the sleepy expression in her eyes she betrayed an uncommonly alert mind, an almost insolent directness. At the same time there was something ridiculous about her—her big, flabby breasts hung beneath her stiff shirt like frying pans. She inquired if he had known Hildred and Vanya very long. The conversation was interrupted. Two bristling Lesbians at opposite ends of the room suddenly jumped to their feet and began singing to each other, the one in a deep baritone, the other in a falsetto poisoned with drink. The performance was no sooner concluded than a young Viking got up and with the voice of an angel warbled “My Little Gray Home in the West.” Then a sailor rose and sang a smutty song, whereupon the Norwegian girl asked very bluntly and coldly how long Hildred had been taking dope. He looked at her in amazement. Then Toots and Ebba broke in. They couldn’t understand, they said, why Vanya permitted a person like Hildred to tyrannize over her. Anyone could see that Hildred was empty. It was Vanya who had all the personality, the brains. Iliad’s mother put in a word too. She had no use for Hildred. She was suspicious of her, though what she was suspicious of she didn’t make clear. Ebba said that Hildred was a fake through and through. She wasn’t really interested in Vanya—she was just using her. If anyone asked her opinion, what Hildred wanted was a man. “You mean to say . . . ?” exclaimed Iliad’s mother, but she stopped suddenly when she saw the look on her dau
ghter’s face. Here Minna, the Norwegian girl, came to life again. There was a sly twinkle in her eye, a malicious twinkle that had been hidden by the film of scum which seemed to gather in her eyes at will. “For all you know,” she said, “Hildred may be married. If she’s not married, she’s in love with someone . . . some man. Vanya’s not the only string to her fiddle.” This was greeted with a burst of laughter followed by uncontrollable mirth when Iliad attempted to say that Hildred was a very sweet person, that she had never been anything but a good friend to her, and so on.