The dance ended spectacularly in one final discordant wail. Valeska and Moloch sat down to drink and stare intoxicatingly at each other. Suddenly the lights were dimmed and a stocky mulatto in full-length saffron tights appeared.
“She has the refined grandeur of a murderess,” cried Valeska, quoting for Moloch’s approval the words of an immortal Frenchman. Her eyes were flashing, her entire body alive with the vigor of an unrestrained imagination. They sat back and watched this “murderess” with the brass bellows as she paused for a space at each tiny table to do her stunt, and then pass on.
“Mah daddy rocks me with one steady roll;
Dere ain't no slippin’ when he once takes hol’…”
With repetition of this verse at each glutted table she threw in a few suggestive movements and held out her hand like an organ grinder. Valeska extracted a greenback from her purse in readiness for her coming. A dazzling spotlight accompanied the movements of the saffron tights as the “murderess” passed from table to table, repeating the performance, shoving greenbacks down her flaccid bosom. Meanwhile the epileptics on the dais kept pouring forth an explosive mixture of trip-hammer rhythms that affected the very chemistry of the blood. With nervous, angular pulsations they shook out a gorgeous fretwork of counterpoint, like vague theorems of watered silk. Glittering clusters of lapidary chords, following upon one another like the incessant beat of a tom-tom, disclosed gusts of wind and fading sounds, fluffy clouds of silk with flowers, skeletons in decollete, athletic robust limbs swelling with sap and blood. There was a fury in their eyes, at the climax, like dark hot coals, and in their cavernous flapping mouths the thick blood beat.
The mulatto’s performance ended on a split in a parrot-blue spotlight.
“You should have brought me here before,” murmured Valeska, breathing heavily. A riot of sensations deluged her in quick succession. The cheap gin permeated her guts. She was like a house afire.
Her eyes roamed over the boisterous groups. They brimmed with unfeigned admiration.
“They’re real, aren’t they?” she said excitedly.
“Real?” echoed Moloch. “I’ll say so! No neuroses, no inhibitions, eh?” It seemed to him that he had darned few himself.
Valeska had expected a different response. “Do you find them attractive, that’s what I mean,” she asked. “Could you make love to them—to one like that over there?” She pointed to a tawny female with straight black hair and aquiline features who reclined in the arms of a ferocious-looking buck.
“He seems to find her attractive.”
Apparently Moloch was unwilling to commit himself. Valeska had broached an idea that was not at all new to him. There were Negresses he had glimpsed on the street, not necessarily pale ones, either, who proved more enticing—some of them, at least—than any white woman he could think of. He had even followed them on occasion, wondering if he could screw up sufficient courage to engage them in conversation.
He realized that Valeska’s enthusiasm was not a mere expression of idle rapture. She was fully aware of the dark blood in her veins. At times she became morbid about it and shrunk out of sight like a leper, or she would ask him at the most unexpected moments (when they were riding in a bus, or dancing in a public place) if he wasn’t just a little bit ashamed of her.
This unwonted ardor of hers, this curious medley of exultation, of savage pride and ostentatious affection, made him slightly uncomfortable. He looked her straight in the eyes as she went on to accuse him of discarding his habitual frankness. Her eyes were smoldering; they leaped ahead of her words, inflaming his senses, making him sick with desire.
What was she going to do—start a scene? Was it the cheap booze talking, or had she dragged him here purposely to reveal her inmost self? She was pretty well oiled. He hoped she wouldn’t go blotto … not in this Eldorado of lust.
Another entertainer had taken the floor. “Get the words of this, Valeska.” As he spoke he detected the big buck with the woman Valeska had pointed out ogling the latter wickedly. He nodded toward the amorous couple and whispered: “You have an admirer over there.”
Meanwhile the performer was crooning:
“Ah wouldn’t be where Ah am,
Feelin’ lak Ah am,
Doin’ what Ah am,
Ef you hadn’t gone away.…”
When the entertainer had concluded Moloch nodded toward the big buck again and said: “Let’s call him over, what do you say?”
“Splendid!” she answered. “And you take his woman, eh?”
The music opened with a crash of carbolic tartness. He reeled among the swirling figures in a shaft of cobalt blue. In the middle of the floor stood a big Ethiopian with a red sweater. He acted as master of ceremonies. His nostrils, the color of roast veal, were distended and quivering. His ears had the puffy quality of a frankfurter skin. He glowered ferociously at the reeking bodies, taut and tingling, which brushed by him in all directions.
Moloch kept his eyes riveted on Valeska. Now and then he stole a timid glance at the dusky creature whose body was fastened to his with the impersonality of a brassiere clinging to the redoubtable bosom of a courtesan. Two splotches of rouge overlaid the deep cinammon of her cheeks. As she moved, with tigerish grace and vigor, the clanking of her crude adornments accompanied the violence of her gestures.
“Are you nervous, honey?” she inquired. At the same time she increased the convulsive movements of her loins.
Moloch forgot about Valeska entirely. He had a dry, indescribable sensation in his palate; his temples throbbed madly. He clasped his hands about her back and strove to imitate the careless freedom of his more primitive associates. “Your hands are hot, honey,” she murmured, resting her cheek softly against his. This simple gesture so completely unnerved him that he lost the power of locomotion. He stood still and crushed her to him, his lips fastened to her odorous throat. There was nothing repulsive about it. The fragrance of her body exhilarated him. The warm blood tingled in his veins and gave him the illusive strength of a stallion.
“You’ve got to keep moving, honey,” came the voice of the creature panting in his arms. Out of the corner of her eye she surveyed the bouncer in the red sweater.
They moved in closer to the voodoo workers on the platform. A brass whine, like a little child’s fear, yammered MOM-MER … MOM-MER! The brazen impudence of the cornet smote his ears and sent a chill down his spine. From the trombone came exasperating mocking glissades which made him tighten his steely grip on the fluttering form that shivered in his arms. She looked up at him and sang with burning lips:
“Not on the first night, baby,
An’ mebbe not a-tall!”
Whirling in and out among the reeking, glistening figures, flecked with quixotic shadows, he pushed her before him savagely. The maddening, hurried flurries of the strings swept them away into a limbo of insensate lust. From time to time, in breathless interludes, the musicians leaned forward over the edge of the platform, the full moon of their faces wrinkled and creased by huge steeplechase grins; brusque jets of creosote spilled over the heads of the revolving figures.
“Well, how was it?” asked Valeska, trembling and breathless, as he rejoined her at the table.
“Like nothing that ever was before.” He wiped the beads of perspiration from his forehead.
“Want to try it again?”
“Hell, no!” he stammered. “I’d go hermantile.” He suggested leaving.
Nevertheless they stayed. They stayed until the last horn brayed its last. When the lights went out it was on a scene of utter pandemonium.
“I wonder what the hour is,” he remarked, as he led Valeska to the cloakroom. It had just occurred to him that his wife had a serious engagement with the doctor in the next few hours. Perhaps she’d expect him to go along with her.
Valeska was singing to herself, staggering all over the place, oblivious of everything but her own pleasurable sensations. He grasped her arm, not too gently, and looked at her wristwatch.
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Just then the performer with the full-length saffron tights came along. She was full of gin and song. She began to hum:
“Ah looked at the clock and the clock struck six;
Ah said, Now daddy, do you know any more tricks?”
He listened indulgently, flung a wrap over Valeska’s shoulders, and started to carry her up the stairs. Valeska clung to him as if he were a fireman rescuing her from the burning flames. “Love me, Dion, love me,” she murmured, kissing him with an ardor that he found impossible to match. A few grinning bucks passed them on the stairs, offering silent congratulations, happy because they were happy.
A string of cabs were lined up at the curb. It was an everyday dawn in Harlem: drab, dingy, streaked with tenement cornices. A bevy of sawdust dolls, some white, some brown, some black as the royal prostitute of the Apocalypse, bounced out upon the chalky streets of Bedlam. They teetered at the gutter, stacked like a deck of cards waiting for a new deal. Thought Moloch: “Me for the laminated queen of diamonds gleaming like a bunch of carbuncles under the blue arc light … or that tall venereal flower in the buttonhole of the ace of spades whose mug is so wonderfully damasked with eruptions!”
As they flung a last glance out of the cab window out came the Great-I-Am, with his starch-front hierarchy, marching splayfooted down the Avenue. Mr. Mumbo-Jumbo (in full-dress suit and celluloid collar) walking home to the “Paludal Ooze Blues.” Under his right arm he carried a black funerary case containing a breath from the plagues of Egypt.
13
And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters; with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness.
The Café Royal on Second Avenue is an insignificant paste jewel in the lap of a great whore. Men and women congregate there like bluebottles. If it were a Gentile establishment the waiters would not be so proud of their soiled aprons; they would retire once in a while to shave and bathe. But if the congregation were less like the progeny of the maggot, and the waiters more immaculate, it would not be the Cafe Royal. That is why the great literati of America inhale the aroma of the place with deep drafts, and bury their seed in its rich manure.
Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg said: “It is altogether fitting and proper that we, the living, should do this. …” Without caring a hang what Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, Prigozi and Moloch were met by appointment in this sawdust rendezvous just below the beltline. They were well plastered when they met. Which, too, was altogether fitting and proper. For they had come to dedicate a portion of their grief to the memory of the dead.
Prigozi was sepulchral. His eyes were two tapers burning in a crypt. He spoke in a broken voice that issued from the bowels of the earth. When he laughed (which he did occasionally, to relieve the gloom in which he was smothered) the reverberations sounded like the punctuated squeals of a sow getting her throat slit.
“You’re going mad,” said Moloch.
Prigozi grinned sheepishly from behind his Mazda sockets.
“Listen, Sid, you’ve got to brace up. Do you hear me, you’ve got to brace up!”
A wan smile illumined the cadaverish expression. The man looked as if he wanted to puke up but couldn’t. His brain was working like a dynamo. No matter how much he drank it kept on whirring smoothly, piling up ideas, ideas that would haunt him tomorrow and the next day, and the day after.
At four o’clock that afternoon his wife had died of childbirth. For hours he had stood outside the operating room, absorbing the punishment the doctors were meting out to her. The incessant piercing screams had conveyed better than words that a murder was going on inside.
Behind the massive doors he knew there were cool, muscular men in long white robes mutilating her body. He knew they were working silently, swiftly, with glittering instruments that were swallowed up by her shuddering white body.
A tall young man with spectacles was bending over the inert form of Sarah Prigozi, his blood-soaked fists moving with furious diligence to extricate the twisted mass of flesh imprisoned in the narrow pelvic cradle. The prostrate figure offered no resistance. The screams had given way to a drawn-out moan that rose and fell with insane monotony.
Presently the moaning ceased. It was the end, Prigozi told himself.
It was. The battle was over. The shapeless, battered pulp of flesh fell out. Quietly the nurses gathered up the instruments. They were bathed in a vivid red glow.
Prigozi left the bodies of his loved ones in the hospital to be washed, packed with excelsior, and laid out for a long sleep.
Leaving the hospital he remarked to himself with a strange calm that but a few hours ago he had brought a healthy, budding, live form to them which they had exchanged for two dead ones: a big one, and a little one. The little one didn’t even resemble a corpse…. That, he told himself, was what the practice of obstetrics amounted to!
“I never broke down,” he explained to Moloch, “until I got home and saw the empty flat. Then I cracked. Jesus, I went wild! I wanted to go back and murder the doctors. But all I did was to run out into the street and bellow my lungs out.
He looked around him helplessly with the eyes of a man who can see nothing but the four walls of his cell, and is victimized by the thought that in six hours and twenty-five minutes he will be strapped to a chair and given a dose of embalming fluid.
Moloch started to pour another drink, changed his mind, and placed his hand affectionately on the other’s sleeve.
Prigozi burst out: “Come on, act natural! You can’t do anything. Let’s stay here and talk. Call some of these Jew bastards over, if you like, and pull their beards.” He banged his fists mechanically against the tabletop; his voice grew shrill and then hoarse.
“We’ve got to do something, that’s all there is to it!” He kept banging away with his fists. The knuckles were red and bruised.
His violence attracted the attention of an elderly gentleman with a goatee seated at a distant table. The gentleman left the group he was with and walked over.
He gave Prigozi a scrutinizing look. “My God! What’s happened to you?” he exclaimed.
“Meet Dr. Elfenbein,” said Prigozi in a lifeless tone of voice.
Moloch rose to his feet and glared at the intruder. “You’d better run along … leave us!” he cried.
“He’s all right,” said Prigozi. “He’s a friend of mine. He’s no doctor—he’s a dentist.”
He uttered the words without raising his eyes. He sat humped up, like a sack of potatoes, still banging away with his fists.
Dr. Elfenbein gave the two of them a hasty glance and made a move to retreat. A group of vaudeville artists at the adjoining table were taking it all in. The performance was as good as a rehearsal to them.
Prigozi now rose to his feet unsteadily. He put his arms about Dr. Elfenbein’s shoulders and pushed him gently into a seat.
“Everything’s fine, and we want you to stay and enjoy the funeral party,” he croaked.
“The funeral party?” Dr. Elfenbein tried to get up.
“Sit down!” Moloch shouted. “He says he wants you to stay.”
“Tell him about the two stiffs, Dion. He’s never seen a stiff in his life.... Tell him about the instruments.”
“Sure! Sure!” said Moloch. “If that’ll make you feel any better, Sid.”
Dr. Elfenbein showed plainly his amazement and alarm. Moloch frowned severely. Once more the dentist fastened his eyes upon Prigozi. He looked into a pair of drowning eyes. Big flakes of dandruff rimmed the man’s coat collar. Some mud had caked in his hair.
Prigozi’s glassy eyes stared straight through Dr. Elfenbein, straight through the outer wall of the café. He saw a chiseled epitaph in letters of fire.
Moloch called the wai
ter and ordered a big spread. Dr. Elfenbein protested that he had no desire for food. Moloch insisted.
“This is Sid’s party and you’ve got to eat with us. After the funeral comes the eats.”
The funeral had not taken place yet, naturally, nevertheless the two of them persisted in referring to it as a thing of the past.
Dr. Elfenbein smiled apprehensively as Moloch buried Prigozi under an avalanche of vile raillery that had to do with Lutheran Cemetery.
“You see, doc,” said Moloch familiarly, realizing that Prigozi was as receptive as a stone monument, “my relatives always insisted on patronizing Lutheran Cemetery because … well, for one thing, it was a custom in the family, and then, too, it wasn’t so expensive. They served wonderful food and drink at the brewery nearby, I remember that distinctly.”