* * * *
It was a big place. Erick hadn’t thought it would be crowded but it was. Mostly with old people. They were filing in fast, like a sluggish stream wallowing up a dry bed.
They moved in with the aging assemblage. Men in tuxedoes and painful expressions on their faces telling everyone to go upstairs. They went down a side aisle regardless and found four seats together. They squeezed in past bony kneecaps giving their beg your pardons and slumped down.
“I think we got in the old folks home by mistake,” whispered Leo. He smiled thinly. If you don’t like it, get the hell out, his mind said to her. He saw Lynn looking around with a look of half-disguised amusement.
“Pretty sharp haah, Lynn,” he said.
Lynn smiled weakly.
“Haah, Lynn?”
“Quiet,” said Lynn.
Erick looked around. In front of him were two women who could have been nothing but school teachers. The place was a veritable hotbed of school teachers. He could almost smell them, a faint odor of starchy clothes and chalk and drying away.
The two in front of Erick were old maids. That they were shone from the unwrinkled and sexless features. In the botanical hats they wore over their greying hair. One of them, a skinny one, didn’t laugh. She trembled herself as though shaking a bug off her shoulders. The other one was acting out what happened in class that day.
Erick looked around at the theatre, feeling a sense of crowding and of noise. Hearing a hundred voices billowing like ocean spume, rising waves of sound. Seeing the walls rising sheer and parabolic into the high arched ceiling spaced with glittering circles of light. Seeing a chandelier encrusted with geometric china, shining like a crystalline moon. Deep-cut scrollwork on the walls. A stout harp, chipped with brittle age, leaned upon by round-bellied urchins leering down in narcissistic detachment at the squash of the assembly. Curves, elliptic plaster turns, sweeping falls of paint-thick walls with periodic announcements in sober-glassed red: EXIT. Tiers of side boxes dipping from the second balcony and ending at last, a hovering pinnacle of plush and tarnished brass, above the orchestra. And down again to the floor, the long segments of living ellipses that formed the rows of seats.
“Sure is old,” Leo said.
“What?” he asked.
“I said it sure is old.” Louder. The old women in front of them stopped speaking a moment as if she’d insulted their collective chastities. Erick couldn’t help smiling. It relaxed him.
As they spoke of various things; what he’d been doing, what she’d been doing, he heard the crackly voices of old folks all around. And felt out of place. Where were the young people, he thought, the vital people, the people who could change old things? Why did the old ones crowd themselves into one place and never have the young with them? Were they so apart?
He shook his head once.
The young were not here, never would be. They were out, by Christ, he thought, downing a fifth and jazzing up their old flames in a beat up rod on some lonesome country road. Or socking it in hard to the strains of some hirsute and dying combination that plied its ungodly wares in some neon dungeon on the edge of obscurity. Or in movies munching popcorn and holding hands and fumbling for brassieres. Or in darkened living rooms making the springs squeak. Was that the only way?
He looked at Leo. She was looking at him.
“Welcome back, Erick,” she said.
He smiled a little. “I drift,” he said, “I drift away.” She put her hand on his and said, “Welcome back,” again. Her hand was like a claw, he thought, not in appearance so much as in the way she drew the fingers in and sort of scratched his flesh without bruising it. They looked at each other and he noted her breast fall once sharply and her lips tremble momentarily.
“Club people,” Lynn said.
“An unnatural tribe of underdeveloped people who thrive on forced enthusiasms,” Erick defined.
“That’s it,” Lynn nodded. Then he looked around. “Time to start,” he said.
As if responding to his command, the lights flickered and went down. In the darkness Leo’s hand gripped out at Erick’s and she leaned over toward him. Her hand was hot. It caressed his. He felt something stir in his body.
An aging man, white crowned and portly, stalked out of the wings. He strode casually to the podium. There was a murmur of interest from wrinkled lips. Aha, Erick thought, this is nothing new I see. These are the old troupers, smug in their knowledge. This is their club. This is their lodge, their sewing circle, their political ward.
“Oh, God,” he muttered.
“What’s the matter?” Leo whispered.
He leaned over. “I think that the …” he stopped as he realized that she was writhing her head just a trifle as his breath touched her ear. He felt a lump rise into his throat and turned back front quickly as if he had come across something embarrassing not to be looked at.
All the old people murmured now. There was an expectant rustle. What in hell is the man going to do, the thought occurred to Erick, take the wing?
“And how are you?” said the man.
Giggles. Old women half swooning and clutching for their lace collars. Old men cackling deep in the hollow recesses of their bony chests. Raw bloody amusement, Erick thought.
The old man went on. The four of them were like strangers there, Erick thought. He began to imagine that they were the New Ones, the usurpers. The others would smell them out. They would rise up in arms and eject them, sever their heads from their bodies and poke them on the ends of their black umbrellas. They would burn them up in a fire of old snuff and asafetida bags.
The man spoke. Proudly. All was pride there that evening. All was grandiose and knowing. We are the ones, all the old people seemed to halloo from their beaming faces.
One hundred and twenty years of continuous seasons, said the man with a husky, patriotic ring in his voice. Mad applause, loud and raucous. People applauding themselves. Who can tell, Erick thought, maybe some of them were there when the first session began those one hundred and twenty years ago.
The man talked incessantly it seemed. Erick kept glancing over at Lynn and saw him sitting there as if anesthetized. A bored Marie kept trying to read a magazine she had with her but with notable lack of success since it was practically dark in the auditorium.
“We must support the Institute,” said the man.
Erick looked up and hoped it would not cave in on the spot. The man said they should go to all the functions of the institute and the museum and the concert series and the operas and so on. Then, after talking twenty minutes he said he wasn’t going to make a speech. He left after everyone had applauded various people in the institute and various customs of the institute and just plain the institute. Erick kept applauding vigorously, once crying “Hurrah!” in a fit of vicious levity. The old school teachers, suspecting cynicism, looked back at him from beneath irate eyebrows.
The applause rang on. Erick could just picture all the old men and women there. He could see each one of them sitting there, glorying in each moment, wishing to make each passing second of such import that even on their death beds it would be memorable and make the passing easier.
I’m young, he thought and will not understand. But life to the aged is a fast one, a cruelly rapid one. It flies past. The days are moments, the months are winks of the eye. It gains velocity the older you get until it goes so fast by your eyes that you cannot even see it clearly and it makes you want to cry aloud. And so they struggle hard to make each moment count for the most.
And this affair was glorious business for the old people. They were all together and they were going to see a show and they had a whole glorious season of shows and lectures and concerts and marionette shows and operas before them. Ahead were bounties, palmy days for the decrepit. A boon to the palsied.
So they applauded. They felt good. They felt as if every moment should be heralded, feted and given the honor so due it. To them, each moment was a precious jewel and it was held tightly and no
t let go of without a sigh and a backward look that brought tears to the rheumy eye. And if those moments could be made auspicious by singling them out, by applauding them away, by shouting their departure as a crowd shouts departing passengers away on an ocean vessel—then all to the good. Farewell, sweet moments! Never can you come again but I have treated you kindly. Treat me equally so in our next meeting when I am only a shade.
So they applauded. They felt good. And Erick tried to shut his eyes and sleep.
The man left the stage. Except for slight mumbles and chattering, silence fell down like a tent.
“Now do we see the pitcha Lynn?” Erick asked, “Now, haah, Lynn?”
“Shut up or I’ll buy you a season ticket to this place,” Lynn threatened.
“No, not that!” Erick begged.
The old ladies grew more irate. The rest of the audience talked elatedly.
The curtain went up. Erick murmured, “Uh-oh.”
It was a ballroom scene. There were pillars of canvas that trembled as if the ague were upon them. There were doors of canvas painted brown on the backdrop. There was, for reality, a great lumpy grand piano standing boldly and forcefully on the stage.
“Is that the movie projector Lynn?” Erick asked.
Lynn looked discomposed. “I thought this was a picture, Lynnie.” Marie said. Lynn looked disgusted. “So did I,” he said.
“Next week is the picture,” said Erick, “This weeks is the Mill’s Brothers.”
Four men filed out on stage, five. The four were middle-age young, held in by trusses. The fifth was old. They strode in manly strides. Over the wings and into the stage. They walked with a good walk, with a true walk. They had tuxedoes on. They smiled. They were a quartet. What else? Erick thought.
The fifth man was desiccated. He was an old grey potato in a black tuxedo. He had no hair. He plopped on the piano seat and struck at the keys savagely as though they were pit vipers all in a line. He bounced his fingers on the whiteness and the blackness. They keys screamed. There was noise. It was music. The men sang.
They sang old songs and new songs. Cowboy songs and songs from the South. The second baritone introduced the rest of them. This is Gene Cole from Alabama. Applause, sighs, laughter, muffled sobs as though Gene Cole from Alabama was the greatest thing since the crucifixion. This is John Foster from Kentucky …
They were a decent quartet. They sang in tune. But it seemed funny to Erick. It had an air about it. Old people and the old opera house. And a quartet singing humorous songs in four part harmony and an old raggedy man stabbing at a keyboard.
“This is glorious, haah Lynn?” Erick asked.
Lynn put his hands over his face and moaned softly. Erick laughed. The three of them laughed at Lynn. Leo held onto Erick’s arm and looked at him with a look of affectionate hunger.
The quartet finished. They strode off stage. They strode on again. Lynn sank down in his seat. The quartet sang an encore. Moonlight on the Campus. A sad memory song. It made the old people melancholy and they smiled tender smiles to themselves. When I was young—the words hovered in hundreds of brains, Erick thought. When I was a boy. When I was a girl. You don’t appreciate. If I only had the things that. Why if someone offered me a. You young folks have no idea what.
Yup.
Down went the red curtain. People chatted. Good, wasn’t it.
He looked at Leo. “Glorious?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” she said.
“Is there a picture, Lynnie?” Marie asked.
“I’ve lost contact with reality,” Lynn said, “You’ll forgive me. I thought I was coming to see a film partially made by a young lady I knew at college. Instead I have been subjected to a hideous round of shocking sights and sounds. I apologize to you all. Shall we depart?”
“Maybe is next, Lynn,” Erick said, “Maybe is the pitcha now.”
The curtain went up. A white sheet hung down.
“Thank God,” said Lynn.
The lights went down and a stocky, bustling woman came out. That would be Adelaide, Erick thought.
“Good evening fellow travelers,” she said, simpering.
* * * *
The film was asinine to Erick.
Adelaide Cross kept rattling off platitudes about the lovely Mexican woman who never wore mascara while behind her on the screen would be pictures of writhing, pop-eyed fish gasping for life in a fisherman’s net. She spoke about beautiful capework and the camera reported the dragging of a dead bull from the arena.
A lot of the film was about bullfighting.
First the film showed Mexico in recent times. The horses padded around the body thickly. You see how they are protected from the bull’s horns, Adelaide Cross told blithely.
Then the film showed pictures taken in Spain in the 1920s with the horses getting gored and lying in heaps with their blue guts hanging out and throbbing on the hot bloody sands.
“So you see,” Adelaide Cross said, “Things are much better.”
“Oh, what excellent capework,” she said, “How indomitable the man is.”
In went the razor point banderillas into the muscle of the bull’s neck. A banderillero misses. “He’ll get the boos,” said Adelaide Cross. “Then, like a flash, the sword is plunged into the heart of the bull,” she said, “It drops dead instantly.” As though in indication that instantaneous death was not death at all.
It wasn’t a travelogue at all, Erick thought.
It was a satire on travelogues. Sunsets every few moments of film bringing inevitable applause. Idiotic women giggling as they picked flowers. Rooftop shots of the various cities. And Adelaide Cross giving full measure of clichés in her faltering prose.
“The women never have to wear mascara,” she said.
* * * *
“Good God,” Lynn said despairingly, “My poor friend Virginia Green teamed up with that female cretin.”
They were in a small Village restaurant, stone walled, travel posters slapped on the walls. The white-covered tables glowed in the candle light and shadows flickered on the walls. A recorder played Shostakovich’s Fifth.
“It sure was interesting,” Erick said, mockingly earnest.
“I think that woman is the most ignorant female I have ever come across,” Lynn said.
“Can I have a little more wine,” Marie asked, as if reminding Lynn that she possessed that title. Lynn poured her some from the bottle. Erick looked at Leo and offered her wine. She still had some.
He looked at her carefully.
Her eyes sparkled in the candlelight. The jacket of her grey plaid suit was open and her firm breasts showed through the sheer white silk of her blouse. She held her wine glass in both hands. She smiled at him.
He turned away.
“How’d you like that stuff about bullfighting,” he asked.
Lynn wrinkled his nose. “Sickening,” he said.
Erick mimicked Adelaide Cross. “The bull drops dead instantly.” They all grinned.
“As if that condones it,” Erick said, “If that isn’t a grisly sport, I don’t know what is. To kill for sport.”
“One of glorious man’s most monstrous moments.” Lynn said.
“It is,” Erick said and noticed how Leo looked at him intently as he spoke. “Man at his lowest ebb,” he said. He shook his head. “It isn’t death itself that’s unnatural. When it’s done for food, for self-protection, then it’s natural. It’s part of evolution, each seeking to survive. It isn’t cruel or uncruel, it isn’t good or bad. It simply is.”
Lynn nodded. “That’s right.”
“Killing for sport though,” Erick said, “To destroy a life, any life, just for the killing itself. Just to amuse a bunch of jerks on a hot Sunday afternoon, to give them entertainment. That’s brutal.”
Leo took a deep breath and, for a moment, her eyes were Sally’s eyes on him and he saw Sally across from in the little cellar place they used to attend at college. He swallowed, returning forcibly to intellect, its detachmen
t and its relative security.
“Well, at least it’s honest hypocrisy,” he said, “They’re killing outright, they don’t try to hide it. For brutality it’s the most honest kind. Not like our prize fighting.”
He drank and felt the clutching heat of the wine roll down his chest.
“In prize fighting,” he went on, “Death comes slow, treading on the footsteps of a ruptured vein, a severed ligament, a swollen lobe. That’s the prime stupidity, the most horrifying cruelty. The same crowds, the same betting, the same roar of the beast. Only the crowd is the beast now. And the thing that dies is the man. The making of dollars and the loss of vitality, the presenting as entertainment of the destruction of life.”
“Superb brainlessness,” Lynn agreed.
Erick noticed how Marie was staring at the table cloth. He wondered briefly if she was contemplating what he said or whether she was just wishing she were somewhere else, in someone’s bed.
“They don’t drag a boxer out by his heels,” he said, “The dead and bloody victim of sport. No, he walks out. Perhaps he smiles and raises his arms in a grimace of victory.”
His teeth clenched. Cynicism washed over him now, a vicious view of the world which was, now, as attainable to him as hunger or thirst.
“But he’s closer to death,” he said, “There are differences. His muscles are different. His brain is less efficient. His eyes see more poorly. And with every fight he dies a little more. More of his greatest gift is dissipated. He trods quickly and yet more quickly toward the grave. Soon, he dies too, a swollen dead victim of the endless pummeling. And even if he dies in bed, he’s died sooner because he gave himself up to the lights and the flailing of commercial demand. It’s insidious. At least the bulls haven’t the reasoning power to know what horrors they’re taking part in. They run and rage and try to kill and finally are killed themselves. They don’t know.
“But the fighter knows. He can detach himself and know that he’s being slaughtered piecemeal. But he can’t give up. Not easily. He’s in too deep. He needs money. There are contracts. And he can’t do anything else anyway. So he surrenders to the inevitable. And he makes money and he digs his grave with clotted blood vessels.”