THEY WERE lying in bed. He refused to explain why he had come for her, why he had dragged her home and not a word out of his trap. All he did was to mumble some gibberish—“men with colored shirts . . . athletes with bull necks”—gibberish . . . gibberish. Every once in a while he turned over and said, “The letter . . . the letter wouldn’t go down the toilet,” and then he’d fall back again on his broken phrases. She pretended to go to sleep, she even snored in her sleep, but still he kept on mumbling. “The letter . . . the letter that wouldn’t go down the toilet . . . strictly personal . . . sacred . . .” She snored harder now.
When he had stopped his mumbling and she felt quite sure that he was asleep she slipped out of bed and fumbled through his coat pockets. He was lying there peacefully with hands folded on his breast. She lit a match to make sure that his eyes were tightly closed. Then, on tiptoe, she made a beeline for the bathroom. “Fine!” murmured Tony Bring in his sleep. “Fine! Let them hide it again. Words that refuse to go down the toilet always bob up again.”
Her mind must have been at ease, because when she returned to bed she fell asleep at once. Her mind was always at ease after she had been to the bathroom. But this time it must have been quite a surprise to the little nun in her cell to have a special delivery handed her. Would she remember the handwriting of her pre-Romanoff period? “My Sodom and Gomorrah!” That was how it started. “You that toss green lips so lightly. Men with colored shirts, athletes with bull necks . . . lovers always parting at these heavy doors. The river has a current and dead rats float away quickly, but I am not a dead rat. There is a revolver but the bullets always stick. I did not succeed in committing suicide . . . but I love you, Hildred. I love you terribly.” (A terrible Platonic love, no doubt, coming from Sodom to Gomorrah.) “Hildred, you would be a rare delicate pervert (pardon!) if all this infernal chaos which surrounds you were removed. Please, don’t you see what you contain?” Since that time, of course, the delicate little pervert had probably looked into the jeweled casket of her soul and found what she contained. He thought of Minna, the Norwegian girl, with the frying pans hanging from her neck. How had she managed to pry open the lid of this satin-lined casket and what had she found? Were there skeletons inside as well as athletes with bull necks? And where was the husband amid all this incense and perfumery? Was he deposited there, too, along with the colored shirts and the bullets that always stuck?
She was lying close to him, relaxed, inert, her face turned to his in peaceful trance. Her breath was a little boozy. But she was beautiful . . . beautiful. Not a trace of evil, of lies, or drugs. Innocence. Sublime innocence. I love you, Hildred, I love you terribly. The miracle was that people didn’t prostrate themselves at her feet, in the street. Miracle that she was flesh and blood, and not a statue, a flower, or a precious stone. A rare, delicate pervert.. . . He looked at her brow, so smooth, so peaceful, so absolutely impenetrable. A bundle of mystery, even to herself. What lay behind that wall of flesh and bone? Could he ever hope to know what was going on there? Supposing, in a moment of deep contrition, she were to say—“I will tell you everything.” Even then he would never know. He would know only what she wanted him to know, nothing more.
So obsessed did he become by the thought of his helplessness that at last he closed his eyes and surrendered himself to a flight of fantastic, wanton cruelty. Like a cold, searching vivisectionist, he saw himself bending over her with scalpel, stripping away the flesh from the brain, sawing through the bone with steady hand to expose the soft, dull-gray convolutions, the delicate, palatable tangle of mystery which no one could unravel. A cold, mirthless laugh escaped him—the laugh that is heard only in solitude. The laugh which a dog might give vent to if he were trained to understand human jokes. He repeated to himself empty formulas from the joke books of the pundits. Everything in the universe they could explain, including God Almighty, but themselves no. They poked around in entrails, boiled invisible microbes, weighed the imponderable, extracted the juices of anger and jealousy, analyzed the composition of planets no bigger to the eye than a pinhead—but the most difficult thing for them to do was to admit that they knew nothing. Or, if they admitted it, their language was so complicated, so grandiloquent, that it was impossible to believe them. No one could say so much about nothing as the man who pretended to know nothing.
With this babble on his lips he fell into a profound slumber in which he dreamed that he was hanging by his feet from the roof of a freight car. He could see only the floor and the cages of the men beside him. The car was filled with cages, man-sized circular cages suspended from the ceiling. They were all hanging by the feet. When the train swerved the cages collided, made a faint, ringing noise. The conversation was upside down, too, or perhaps it was because they were all crazy that it seemed so. When they arrived in front of the asylum the cages were brought out one by one: they were marked FRAGILE. There they were, all neatly docketed and swinging by the legs. One labeled “phagomania” inquired if they were going to be fed this way, upside down, and the attendant replied, “Certainly, why not? If you can talk upside down you can eat upside down.” Whereupon the cages were placed in a circle and a beautiful white horse was led out. Strange thing about the horse was that it had a peacock’s tail. Stranger still was that it pranced about on its hind legs and spoke English to them. Going up to each cage, the horse would make a bow and ask, in perfect equine English—“Are you balanced or unbalanced?” Such a question! No one would respond to this nonsense. And so they were carried off, each and every one of them, and placed in a refrigerator to cool off. And no one could determine anymore whether he was balanced or unbalanced. It was chilly in the refrigerator and the cages swung like pendulums. Time passed. Ice-cold time. It was a different kind of time than they had ever experienced before. It was ice-cold time, without divisions and without arrest. A circular, prenatal time, without springs, or pulse, or flux. . . .
Part 6
1
THE END. All things come to an end where they begin again assuming a circle or a dog chasing its tail or eternity cognized which is incomprehensible and indefeasible. The end is a rabbit licking moonlight off the pavement, revolvers clicking automatically where the spine flattens into a bony globe. The end is the beginning of a circle before the periphery becomes paralyzed and coagulates into points which never existed and could not now exist were there no blackboards and what makes blackboards. The end is when every drawer has been ransacked and all that one needs can be put in a handkerchief or when you don’t need initials in your hat anymore and the size is an empty equation. The compass points four ways and you can travel horizontally or vertically because it is all illusion—tickets, depots, destination, mileage, speed. When you say good-bye that’s the end of it, a peculiar, unfinished end like a tapeworm feeding on itself. An end that comes to a lump in the throat or a sob, wheels grinding, soot, farms, faces, blank, blankness, faces, farms, memories, musk of memory, wheels grinding, bullets clicking, too late, everything too late, change, change your mind, stay, jump, go back, mist, farms, faces, blank, blankness.
He had no more than shut the door when she flew upstairs to the telephone. “He’s on his way . . . he’s coming . . . he’s going away. Yes, he wants to say good-bye. good-bye. I’m coming. I’ll be there in a little while, good-bye. good-bye.”
EYE TO eye, fire to fire. Blood-red ice and black perfume. Moon goddess and moon fire. The smoke of vanished kisses. Harp bleeding its green music, poppies floating in a cold sea. The roundness of the beginning, the end like a navel. Craters flowing with blood-red ice, hemispheres of warm milk, swan’s down and meat of olives.
The miracle was good-bye and that ends it. Farms, faces, wheels grinding. I love you terribly don’t you see what you contain? Black chunks of earth flying skyward you that toss green lips so lightly.
The remembrance of things was in her touch, incorruptible egg that precedes and endures, memory unsponged and glowing with a last light. The ripple of her loins secreted in blood,
her breasts tipped with melancholy, the drugged smoke and passion of her lies laced with scars and fangwhorl, dyke on dyke of bleeding harps, of kisses suffocated with poppies and melancholy, of youth run out, womb turned, strings snapping with death music, music of night written on sand and the sand spangled with star and wave illumining the scorpion’s nest.
A thousand years of melancholy lay between them and she had no answer to make. What was there to answer if life were a poem, the drug and incense of endless yesterdays and tomorrows. Under the table their knees touched. Under how many tables knees and hands, skeletons articulated with love, things that walk automatically and touch, pollen, roots digging down, fibers and vertebrae, green juices, the wind soughing and things crawling in the night making no sound. Stir and movement, wings folding, the prick of light without heat, worlds sighing inaudibly and bones whitening and dust coming to life.
His whole life was hanging by a thread. In her hand was a paper covered with words which she would read and rearrange in her mind. There was a physics and a chemistry of words; there was an electrolysis of language, thought raised to symbol, vested and divested, polarized by blood, anchored in instinct, veering with the moon its ebb and tide through the monotonous mad cycle of imagined flesh and life, prison-bar and window of sky, songburst and delirium. She would take them one by one, the intangible inner harmony of cathode and vortex and the sweet visible substance of molecular growth, she would take them and arrange them dynamically in script of living.
Either she would let him go or she would beg him to remain. Not enough to say—“Don’t go!” Not nearly enough. No, something tremendous would have to occur. She would have to get down on her knees and beg and implore. Once, before there was any thought of questions and answers, she had gotten down on her knees to him, in the street. She had called him her “god.” Since then other gods had come to life. The great god had given way to little gods. But there is only one god. It can never be otherwise since by virtue of definition god is god.
The time for tremendous things had passed. “Go for a little while—but come back to me!” Those were her very words. The life, then, had gone out of her. She was making herself a fulcrum and there was to be a stale, flat equilibrium, a simulacrum of living, passion reduced to geometry. Go for a little while. . . . She was standing in slime, her eyes wide open, and where she saw angels there were albatrosses. The sky still fluttered with wings but these were not angels that fell exhausted at her feet.
SUDDENLY VANYA sailed in—grazed in, rather. A ferryboat shoving into the slip sidewise. She was breathless, squeaking a little. The tide was running strong. There was the sound of wood splintering and the engine going reverse.
“He’s not really going, is he?” she demanded.
“Yes,” said Hildred, “but only for a little while.”
“No! I’ll go instead. I won’t let him go.”
She spoke excitedly, repeated herself, dropped into her strange Russian accent. Hildred, deadly calm, listened with eyes frozen; behind the mask terror turning to bile. Her mind turned over like a turbine.
The idea was so simple, so monstrously direct and brutal, that it numbed them. Up to this moment they had been hobbling along on crutches; suddenly they were commanded to throw them away. Not only that, but they were ordered to walk to the edge of the precipice and hurl themselves over. No warning, no preparation. Not even a drop of holy water to usher in the miracle, not a bone to touch, nor even the smell of a plague. Husband and wife sat there with knees touching: they faced each other like rival cities exhausted by centuries of strife. It was as if some horrible deception had been practiced on them, as if peace had been won without slaughter, as if nature herself had intervened, had opened the earth between them and nullified their antagonism. It was altogether unnatural and against all human instinct to walk away from a complicated flesh-and-blood problem like a mesmerist who leaves the stage with his subject poised in midair, stiff, cataleptic, ridiculously helpless. Tomorrow a whole continent might slip into the sea: it was not to say whether it was just or unjust. But if a woman, giving birth to a monster, should take it upon herself to dash the child’s brains out, that was another matter, that was a crime against nature, or against society, something whether just or unjust punishable by law. Society had so complicated the relations between men, had so enmeshed the individual with laws and creeds, with totems and taboos, that man had become something unnatural, something apart from nature, a phenomenon which nature herself had created, but which she no longer controlled.
HE WALKED down lower Broadway with Vanya and over the Brooklyn Bridge. She insisted on carrying his valise; gratefully she carried it, like a porter who is proud of the privilege to accompany a great explorer to his hotel, so proud, indeed, that he would feel insulted if offered a tip.
Hildred was to come home as soon as she was through.
They arrived at the house, the great explorer and his porter, and shoved the valise in a corner. Now what? Would the great explorer like some tea and jam, could she light his cigarette for him? She undid his shoes and helped him into a pair of warm house slippers, threw her bathrobe over him, and adjusted the lights. A thousand uninstructed delicacies. . . .
Hildred would return soon. She whispered to him, like a nurse saying “Shhhh! Mother will soon be here.” A crime to feed babies from the bottle. What a child needs is a mother’s breast. Modern mothers have no breasts, or else they strangle them. Nevertheless, a mother is a mother; a bottle can never take the place of a breast.
In the interim the baby amused the nurse by inventing fairy tales. . . .
Once there was a queen with golden hair and ebony buttocks. She came from the Tropic of Capricorn, which is below the equator. Her tongue was of quicksilver and she worshiped strange gods. They were of convenient size and weight, her gods; she collected them, when she wished to amuse herself, and hid them in a casket. Sometimes she wore them around her neck, like beads. Often, when she went for a stroll, she would say to herself—“There is still room in the casket for another god.” Whereupon, at the sound of a godlike tread, she would prostrate herself at the feet of a stranger and cry: “You are my god! I will worship you—always . . . always!” And because she was too impulsive to heed closely, she would discover on occasion that she had made a mistake, that she had given her devotion to a cow or a grampus.
“WHERE’S VANYA?” cried Hildred. She spoke in a strange voice, as if her diaphragm were afire, as if she were belching smoke. Though she looked everywhere—under the bathtub, under the toilet box, under the sink—there was no Vanya. But all her things were there, including the dirty wash that she had thoughtfully tucked under the bed. And the Count was there, lying in the comer like an old mandolin. And there were arms and legs lying about, and sleeves, and wigs that had been dipped in heliotrope. It was like a laboratory in which an experiment was going on—an unfinished experiment. A home that could combine all the elements of poem and laboratory—such a home leaves nothing to be desired except music and children. Of the two, music was perhaps the more difficult to lure. There was that old mandolin, the Count, to be sure, and there was the music box in the zenana which would tinkle melodiously as long as a pipe remained. And there was the blood-red harp which bled green notes, which when all the strings quivered gave forth a symphony of Sicilian moons. The children would come in due time. Vanya, in her drunken moments, feeling her bladder distended, would promise to bring forth a blond superman—though by all the laws of heredity genius rarely produced anything but mediocrities. Of all the dreams that invaded Hildred’s slumber this one of the wise, blond baby with the dash of septentrional vigor in its blood was the most bizarre and astonishing. It was born over and over again, always with a full set of teeth and a miraculous tongue. It lisped slightly, not because of any malformation, but out of sheer perversity. But this was nothing considering the marvels it uttered. They were not words which fell from its lips, but jewels spilling from a casket. Now and then, amid the cascade, bones dropp
ed—never very many, hardly enough, one would say, to make a good-sized skeleton. . . .
TOWARD MORNING the telephone rang. Hildred slipped into a kimono and ran upstairs. She spoke so softly that it was like a caress. He could scarcely hear her though he stood on tiptoes at the foot of the staircase. “I can’t . . . I can’t” was all he could make out.
“She’s terribly drunk,” said Hildred when she got back to bed. “I could hardly understand her.”
“Where is she, then?”
“I don’t know,” said Hildred.
“Well what did she want?”
“She wanted me to bring her home.”
“How could you fetch her if you don’t know where she is?”
“That’s just it.”
“That’s too bad!” said Tony Bring. “She’s going to the dogs.”
So heartily did Hildred laugh at this—and it was seldom she laughed at anything he said—that one of the veins in her neck blew up and remained inflated for days.
2
EVERYBODY KNEW who the nightingale of Lesbos was, but it was Vanya who discovered that she was the eightieth asteroid as well as a hummingbird with fiery tail. There were poems to the eightieth asteroid and to pigeons, those ditokous birds who lay only two eggs in a clutch. Like a purple heron Vanya was preening herself in the swamps and marshes of knowledge. She spoke of delphinoid cetaceans and golden groupers, of asymptotes and parabolas, of Sarvasti who was Science, of batrachians and lapiths. For three whole days she flooded their ears with a hemorrhage on white heartrot. This was a disease usually mentioned only by arboriculturists. Vanya appropriated it. There are diseases and diseases. But this disease had a fascination about it. It was brought on by a destructive species of fungus that attacked the heartwood of various broadleaf trees. Like the grampus, the fake tinder fungus was a killer, only instead of preying upon seals and marine life it attacked trees. A broadleaf tree was absolutely defenseless against the fake tinder fungus. Once the latter effected entrance to the heart of the tree it was all up; injecting bisulfide of carbon through the sawdust openings, or spraying the foliage with arsenate of lead, was of no avail. It was death from white heartrot!