“Good evening, Mr. Lyndon.”
“Good evening, Reverend, how you, Mrs. Lakeland?”
“Oh, we re fine, just fine. Would you be good enough to remove this basket of”
By this time the cotton-topped black would be on the porch and their voices would drop to those inaudible whispers which they exchanged between themselves while looking out from their chairs at the approach of dark.
Sitting on our porch adjoining theirs one evening, I inquired of Mother,
“What are they like, Mother?”
“They’re eccentric.”
My grandmother laughed, softly and mockingly.
“So’s your son, that doesn’t answer his question.
“Please, let’s drop the subject.”
“When’ve you ever done anything else with a subject?” her mother muttered in a rebellious tone.
“Son, help your grandmother inside and make her some cocoa.”
“I don’t need help inside or cocoa made for me. Listen, son. You know what an insult is and that’s what they have received, they’ve received an intolerable insult from the Bishop of the Diocese and from the town of Thelma. Why else do you think they sit out there except in defiance of people passing by who delivered this intolerable insult to them and think they can rectify it with the baskets left at their door after they’ve gone inside, and him rejecting morphine for his wife’s pain, intolerable as the insult from the church and town of Thelma?”
“Mother,” said Mother, rising abruptly from her wicker rocker and jerking the screen door open.
My grandmother let her stand there while she studied the night sky for a minute or two, then rose indifferently to enter the house.
“Intolerable insult it was and you may not explain what it was concerning the Lakelands but he will discover the meaning concerning himself and I hope he responds to it as quietly and fiercely as they do.”
She entered the house then, grandly, an old tigress.
My interest in the Reverend and Mrs. Lakeland was now aroused to a point that demanded more complete information and I soon hit upon a likely source of it in the person of a dyed redhead named Pinkie Sales, a lady whose hair had been flaming in her youth and which remained flaming at sixty by benefit of bottled products from the drugstore.
She moved briskly about the block at practically the same blue hour of dusk every evening, talking to her chained companion, a poodle red-eyed as a drunk. Somehow the two of them had the theatrical effect of a parade with a band although the band was Pinkie’s high-pitched whisper and an occasional little recalcitrant yap from the poodle.
“Will you come along now, quit sniffing and pissing, you’re not going to promenade the streets all night.”
So I thought to myself, if she’ll talk to that drunk-eyed poodle she will talk to me, so I fell in step with her one evening and after polite “Good evenings,” I said to her, “I wonder if you can tell me about the ex-Reverend that lives next door to us, Miss Pinkie.”
“Oh, sonny, I don’t think I should discuss it, it’s too awful and you’re too young.”
“I just want to know if they received an intolerable insult from the Bishop and Thelma and what kind of insult it was.”
“All right, dear, help me get Belle to the drugstore and promise not to repeat a thing I say about the Reverend Lakeland and I’ll tell what I know. They had a daughter, you know, that used to scream out the window and one time the Bishop was having dinner with them and the daughter appeared at the table, fetching a chair to the table directly across from him.”
“Oh. Did she scream?”
“No, but she threw the chicken in his face.”
“Just that?”
“Lord, sonny, that was sufficient on top of the Reverend Lakeland’s heretical opinions of the Bible. He insisted that the Old Testament was a lot of fairy tales that contained too many characters engaged in incestuous relations, the congregation wasn’t at all pleased by it and the Bishop wasn’t either and the chicken was so tough he had trouble with it. Then the daughter screamed at him and threw a drumstick into his face which was dripping with gravy. Lah, lah, lah, said the Lakelands, trying to swab the gravy off him. But it did no good at all. ‘Put your daughter away and recant these heresies from the pulpit next Sunday or you will be removed without pension and God help your souls, good evening.’ And the Bishop stalked out and that next Sunday the Reverend Mr. Lakeland made two sermons, one about the flight of his daughter to places unknown and the second about his confirmed opinion that the Old Testament was the most unbelievable document ever put in print. Well, that did it. Out without pension, and I hear without a trace of their wildcat daughter. How people go out in this world, well, here’s the drugstore, good evening.”
She tugged at Belle, who yapped, and went clicking on her spike heels to the cosmetics counter and said loudly to the clerk, “Henna, please, and Shalimar perfume, will you shut up, Belle?”
A few days before I left Thelma, Alabama, Mrs. Lakeland at last succumbed to her illness, and that night their house went up in flames, cremating them both: a pair of old human boards, dove-jointed, on which perched love and madness as two inseparable specters. The hoses of the fire department were mostly turned on our house to protect it from the contagion of flame and heresies, and the scandal of the fugitive daughter. The fugitive impulse ran very strong in the sons and daughters of Thelma, just as strongly as the hanging-on impulse ran in the slowed-down blood of their fathers and mothers.
So many good evenings in Thelma.
And here the cat-pack kisses and the Bon soir, Désespoir, in so many hearts at this hour, oh, but on we go with it to the end of our Blue Jays, except for those having the valor of the Reverend Mr. Lakeland the night that he was alone and driven to arson and the final heresy of self-destruction.
(Their bodies were committed to unhallowed ground.)
And I think it is time now for me to write “quoth the raven” or to slip through the corner crevice of the plywood enclosure to see how the long night continues.
What I actually did was to go into the bathroom to look at my face in the small, square mirror attached with adhesive tape to the wall above the washbasin, a thing that I do at times when I have a feeling of being unreal: not to assure myself that, unlike a vampire, I am reflected by glass: and while I was in there trying to face myself as a visible and believable creature, I heard footsteps on the staircase from West Eleventh. Naturally I assumed that it was Charlie returning. My heart did things in my chest like a waking bird. I leaned very close to the bit of mirror to see if my face could be suitably prepared to face my wayward lover, but what I saw was a face that suggested that of a character in a silent film revival, frothing and spitting with rage, a close-up that belonged over a caption such as: “How dare you face me again?” I stood there counting to ten and attempting to erase these facial contortions and replace them with a look of haughty indifference, if such a look exists in the range of expressions, when the person who had trudged stumblingly up the staircase spoke out in a voice that was husky with drink and much lower pitched than Charlie’s could ever be. The voice was familiar to me, not from long acquaintance but from very recent encounter: still I couldn’t place it.
“So you’re a writer, too,” was what the voice said.
Then I knew who it was and I came out of the bathroom and there, indeed, was the freakish old playwright attempting a comeback at the Truck and Warehouse Theater by the Bowery. He was seated on the bed leafing through the last of my Blue Jays. He must have known that I was observing this outrageous invasion of my—about writing, can you say privacy? No, but still, to root through a writer’s work without invitation is the height of insolence. He laid the Blue Jay aside, still not looking up at me, and squinted his good eye at an Oriental cardboard and at a large rejection envelope. He looked sad but unembarrassed. I cleared my throat. I shifted my weight from one foot to another. He continued squinting and reading.
At last I broke the silence
with something verbal.
“Is it your custom to go through the unpublished writings of strangers without permission? And is it your custom to invade their bedrooms at any hour of night simply because”
“Because of what?” he asked in that voice which was nearly as ravaged as his vision.
“Because they don’t have a door locked against intruders?”
“Proprieties are properties I’ve forgotten through”
“Through what?”
“Through desperation, which is a product of time you haven’t had time to explore.”
“How would you know I haven’t?”
“I don’t see well. Anyway, to have mentioned desperation would have been a tasteless appeal for sympathy which—I was about to say I don’t want, and that would be shit, too.”
“Well, you’ve said it, by intention or not. You know, under some conditions I might feel sympathy for you but they’re not conditions that prevail on me now. You look to me like an old con man, playing words instead of the pigeon drop or poker with a stacked deck.”
“That’s very odd what you said, the pigeon drop. You know, a couple of years ago I was sailing for Europe because at the time I thought a transatlantic plane flight would give me another coronary, and the day before sailing I’d had a furious confrontation with my publishers’ secretary over the phone. I’d learned they were planning to bring out several volumes of my plays under the title The Collected Works of. So I called them up and got this secretary and I told her that I would not accept that title, Collected Works, since I was not yet certain my work was finished and I said to her, ‘Tell them that I suggest this alternate title, The Pigeon Drop,’ and I told her what it was, that it was a con game which is played on a senile mark with savings in the bank. Won’t bore you with the details, perhaps you know them. But at dinner the first night out I received a ship-to-shore call from one of the publishers and he assured me that they didn’t regard my work as a con game and that if I objected to The Collected Works, how about using The Theater of instead.”
He fell silent then.
“Is that all?”
“Well, I believe in peaceful concessions, so I settled for The Theater of, although it struck me as pretentious and”
“You believe in unfinished sentences, too.”
“You don’t sound like you want me to go on.”
“No, I got the point. Would you mind moving over on the bed.”
He moved over slightly.
“A little more than that slightly.”
“Do you think I’ve come here with seduction in mind?”
“In a world of infinite jeopardy, why take chances you can avoid?”
“Can you?”
He had now moved to the other end of the bed so I sat down.
“Get your smart ass off my pillow, please.”
He put the pillow behind him and leaned back.
“I went back to my hotel but I couldn’t go in alone. I’ve tried to return alone to a lot of hotels at night lately and it’s more and more dreadful. I’ve taken to asking bellhops and elevator boys when they get off duty, and if it’s before daybreak I beg them to come to my room and I wait up till I’m sure they’re not going to show before I try to sleep. Oh. Something funny. A few nights ago one of them did show before daybreak, enticed by the promise of a large compensation for his service which is only to hold me till the Nembutal works, just to hold me, I swear. Oh, preferably unclothed but not necessarily so. Well, this one did show. I was in one of my two Sulka robes and asked him to put on the other but he declined, just sat in a straight-back chair by the bed and said, ‘Drop it, the Nembie, I ain’t got all day.’ So I dropped it and washed it down with a glass of wine and all at once as my sight blurred with sedation I saw him as the film actor Dalessandro. I gasped and said to him, ‘Hold me, hold me.’ I had my arms extended. And what he did was to take hold of one of my hands in a gingerly fashion as if he suspected I had some awful contagion communicable by touch. Isn’t that funny?”
“No, I don’t find it any more amusing than did the bellhop or”
“Elevator boy,” he prompted. “But, you see, that same evening when he’d let me off at the tenth floor, he had the impertinence to say to me, ‘Watch your step, Miss.’”
“You should be flattered that he didn’t say ‘Madam.’”
“You’re being a little bitchy, but I don’t mind. I believe it’s indigenous to this part of the city.”
“It’s what you get for slumming.”
“Baby, I’m not slumming even on Boogie Street in Singapore where cockroaches fly in your face after midnight but they’ve got the most beautiful transvestites in the world, more feminine than women, I swear it’s true.”
“I didn’t question the fact but I wish you’d stop messing around with my manuscripts like I’d submitted them to you.”
“Sorry. I’m not quite conscious. Are you at all interested in foreign travel?”
“You asked me that before. The answer was negative and it’s still the same, maybe more so.”
“It wouldn’t involve more than occupying an adjoining room, answering phones and helping me with carry-on plane luggage. Oh, and sitting with me at lunch and dinner. You see, I can stand sleeping alone but not eating and drinking alone.”
“I should think by your age you’d have learned that you have to stand a lot of things you can’t stand.”
“Yes, including myself. I remember once the host on a TV talk show said to me, ‘Do you like yourself?’ to which I responded with a blank look and a silence and then he said, ‘Do you adore yourself?’ and I said, finally, ‘Well, I am stuck with myself and have to put up with it as best I can.’ So you don’t like foreign travel?”
I could see that he was no longer listening even to himself.
When he wasn’t talking he was almost, I mean he would have been almost, a bearable presence. But how long does a creature like this stop talking while still partially living? I realized he was right when he had called me bitchy, partially right as he was now partially conscious. After all, his effrontery was enormous. But on the other hand perhaps his loneliness corresponded to it in size. I was now able to observe him more objectively. I saw that he was about my height and, Christ, yes, the Cyclops eye was about the same color as my eyes were and I had always regarded them as my best facial feature, a sort of light lettuce green. In his case, however, there was chronic inflammation and the lightness might be symptomatic of a cataract developing on the good eye, too. And the mouth hung open slightly in an unpleasant way. The nose was regular but the nostrils slightly distended and veined. He had unbuttoned but not removed the fur coat. Probably once he’d had a neat build but that was once, not now, he was now a pretty good model for a painter with a hang-up on spheres. And how could I be sure, intentions false or true, that under the influence of two bottles of wine and perhaps a barbiturate he mightn’t come through that door to the adjoining room, unclothed or in a Sulka robe, and cry out, “Hold me, hold me!” Did I like foreign travel that much? Was I that much of a hustler, which I had never been in my life? No, I remarked emphatically, and I must have said it out loud since his eye focused on me again and he blinked it so that a streak of liquid rolled down the cheek on that side.
“No what?”
“I don’t like foreign travel.”
“Oh, but you might acquire a taste for it, especially by first class, jumbo jet, there’s really a lot to be said for coming out of the clouds over Hong Kong at night, all of that gorgeously tacky neon in ideograms you can’t read, so you can imagine they’re advertisements of the sensual allurements and satisfactions of the whole Orient, if you have yellow fever and a taste for buttocks that are smooth as breasts, and there are still several old hotels in the traditional style that haven’t gone to seed such as the Royal Hawaiian, very high ceilings and revolving fans, and the Hotel Mena in Cairo is in sight of the pyramids, a very short ride by camel, and in Bangkok you can occupy the suite that was occupie
d by Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward or you can move to the modern high-rise annex that’s air-conditioned, sometimes comfort has to take precedence over esthetics in the Far East. Tokyo’s out for me because of the air pollution but I had an unforgettable cab ride with a Japanese youth like a pale yellow rose after I’d collapsed at his feet somewhere along the Ginza, all the way to Yokohama, I recovered halfway there and to distract myself from the warning of mortality on the Ginza, I’d placed a hand on his thigh and he had actually moved it like a chess piece to his crotch and put his hand on mine. . . .”
“Well, somebody was overplaying his hand.”
“Somebody always does that. I don’t know if it’s the human comedy or tragedy, but sometimes there’s a bit of humanity in it. Do you like foreign travel, I mean could you bear it with me?”
“Maybe five years from now if we’re alive.”
(I nearly added, “and you’re immobilized and finally speechless.”)
I was rather shocked by the cruelty of my attitude toward this derelict who had stumbled into my life some hours before, shouting—what was it he’d shouted as he crashed out of the Truck and Warehouse lobby? Something about it being too dreadful to believe? He wasn’t speaking to me then and so it wasn’t a pitch for sympathy at that point. What troubled me was my lack of sympathy now that I’d come to know him. To lack sympathy for the unknown, reported on a newscast as having been burned alive in a nursing home fire, well, that’s inaccurate, you feel sympathy, you may even feel a vicarious horror, but the next minute you’re laughing at a close-up of Nixon and Brezhnev at a banquet in a fifteenth-century palace in the Kremlin, but this icy revulsion I felt for the man who only had the enticements of luxurious foreign travel to offer me in exchange for his intrusion on what was an existence almost as derelict as his own, a difference only in years, wasn’t it an ominous sign in someone who wanted to write? Couldn’t it mean that I was already too old for my chosen vocation? Jet-aged by Charlie’s defection? Or could the revulsion be for—