“Gay, carefree! Waltzing down the street with friends!”
“How many friends?”
“How should I remember? Friends!”
“How many, Harvard?”
“One.”
“Male or female?”
“Do you want another drink or what?”
“Aaah!” A horde of invisible hobgoblins began to beat on me. One pummeled my stomach, another kicked me a series of stern ones to the groin, and three or four took turns boxing me about the ears. The most awful of them, the Bruce Lee of the hobgoblin set, poked his fingers through my ribcage kung-fu style and ripped out my heart.
Harvey went to fix me another drink.
By the time Harvey returned I’d somehow driven the manky little gits away. My system was on standby, waiting for a deluge of alcohol. I sipped at my beverage (Harvey had thoughtfully made my favorite, a concoction we called “The Top Shelf in a Pail”) and once more attempted to make conversation. “In town,” I said, “they call this the old Quinton place.”
“That’s because”—Harv sang some thriller-type music, bum-ba-bum-ba—“it is. A man named Quinton used to live here.”
I thought of the naked monster in the night. “Harv …” I began.
The three girls came back, all wearing queer and disgusted faces. Sad Sara looked sadder still.
“Do you know what’s up there?” demanded Lee. “Up there on that path?”
“It’s gross,” said Sheila, as if she were giving us hints.
“A deer,” said Lee, “with its goddam throat ripped out!” Lee buckled her hands on her hips, making this clearly my fault.
“What would do something like that?” asked Sara.
“Dogs,” answered Harvey. “Probably just a couple of dogs. And I’ll tell you what else. After they killed that deer, those dogs trotted on home and hunkered down in the family room to play with the kiddies, and they have names like Fido and Rover and Prince.” Harvey puffed on the cigar. “That’s the way it is, baby.”
Lee sat down on Harvey’s lap. “What’s for sups?”
“Tonight,” said Harvey, “linguine à la Bensoni.”
I caught Sara looking at me. Sheila and Lee might have been living in expectation of a nuclear holocaust; Sara was clearly waiting for fallout.
After dinner, Harvey produced the dope. Harvey was always in possession of dope, although that night the holdings didn’t amount to all that much, three or four joints, a nugget of hash and a little white pill.
“What’s the pill?” the girls and I demanded in unison.
Harvey examined it, raising his granny glasses on to his forehead and squinting like a jeweler. “I think it’s acid,” he decided, bouncing it on an open palm as if he could learn something from its weight. “I think.”
I lost interest. I had a head full of naked monsters, giant fish and Elspeth screwing others with gleeful abandon. Sara, Sheila and Lee remained in the running. Sheila, whose curls had become an even bigger bubble, dropped out graciously. “Me, I think I’ll get tanked on booze tonight.”
“Good idea, good idea,” seconded Harvey.
Lee likewise declined, although not so graciously. “Acid sucks,” she said. “It’s as bad as Nathaniel fucking Hawthorne.”
That left Sara. Sara was the most sober of us, having spent the evening slowly sucking on a bottle of beer. Harvey handed her the pill. “Go ahead, take it,” he told her gently. “You’ll hardly notice it. Today’s stuff is nothing like it was in the old days.” Harvey turned nostalgic. “Hey, did I ever tell you girls that I was at Woodstock?”
“Where?” asked Sheila.
Sara popped the pill willingly.
It dawned on me that everyone was planning to spend the night. I did some arduous mental arithmetic, adding up the number of people present and dividing by the number of bedrooms available.
Harvey put a record on the turntable, some piece of new wave shit to show the girls that he was hip. Professor Benson began to bounce up and down, explaining that this was how one danced to such music. Sheila joined him, jumping with such vigor that her halter-top exploded away from her breasts. Sheila giggled and didn’t bother to reattach it. Lee found a book on the shelves, some novel translated from Swedish, written by a man whose name was surmounted by a row of double periods and full of slashes through the “o”s. The cover notes seemed to say that the author was so depressed that he committed suicide several months before the novel was even begun. Lee sat down in the easy chair and began to read. I located a bottle of booze and wandered outside.
Sad Sara followed me, carrying a lit joint. We walked down to the side of the pond and didn’t say a word.
When we went back to the house, Harvey and the two girls were no longer in the living room. I could detect a furious giggling coming from the second bedroom upstairs, and it was Harvey’s, his asinine laugh excited into tiny little yelps. I went over to the stack of records and located the one I’d played the night before. Only then did I read the title of the piece, out of the corner of my eye, so that I could name it for Sara in an offhand way. I set it on the turntable. Perhaps I’d done this to impress the girl with my alleged sensitivity, but as soon as the “Vocalise” filled the air my knees weakened and I had to sit down in the big chair. The composer, Rachmaninoff, seemed to have insight into my tiny life and problems, every note and chord corresponding to some ragged piece of my spirit’s tale. Here’s Elspeth in bed with someone else, sang the lovely melody, here’s a sky full of moon and stars, here’s the last pull from a bottle of whiskey, here’s sad Sara sitting down on your lap. I kissed Sara and rudely yanked off her top. Sara arched her back as she kissed, feeding her breasts toward me.
The chair we shared faced the picture window, and in the middle of the kiss (Sara’s tongue was like a friendly neighbor on moving day, popping in and saying, “Hi! How’re ya doin’? Need any help? My name’s Phil!”) I opened my eyes.
The monster was there.
Again the thing was dancing, huge and naked. When first seen the monster’s back was toward me, one hand reaching awkwardly toward the moon, and as he revolved I saw that the other hand was at his groin, two enormous fingers tugging at his penis, jerking off in the style of a seven-year-old. The monster’s dick was as tiny as it had been the night before, but it had achieved the horizontal. One of the monster’s crooked eyes was aimed at Sara and I, the other was closed in transports of rapture.
“Ouch,” mumbled Sara, without removing her mouth from mine, and I realized that I had been squeezing her breast overly hard.
“Let’s go,” I mumbled back, “upstairs.”
Sara was eager, and set off for the staircase, and thankfully she never saw the thing contained in the night.
Being Foolish
Boston, Massachusetts, 1848
Regarding the character of Hope, we know the following: that, with the exception of a few hours on an autumn’s day, he was never in his lifetime foolish.
Joseph Benton Hope, some months after his meeting with Theophilius Drinkwater, entered the kitchen of his residence (he and the Quinton twins lived in rooms above the Free Church proper) to find George drinking tea and eating bread and butter. George immediately looked sheepish, because it was late in the afternoon and Martha would disapprove, claiming that George was spoiling his appetite. The truth of the matter was, George Quinton had so healthy an appetite that nothing short of a complete turkey dinner could come close to ruining it. Still, George didn’t like to annoy his twin. He was relieved to see that his discoverer was Joseph Hope, although George still felt guilty in a vague but profound way.
“Bread and butter?” said Joseph. “Whatever would Martha think?”
“I’m sowwy,” mumbled George.
Oddly, Hope laughed, or at least the short birdlike noise that he produced sounded more like a laugh than it sounded like anything else.
“George,” said Joseph Hope, “I was …” Hope searched about for the right word. “I was teasing.”
>
“Oh!” George was puzzled. “Teasing me?”
“Yes. Go on, eat. I won’t breathe a word of it.”
George Quinton tore off a chunk of bread and buttered it lavishly. He put the whole thing in his mouth and began to chew.
“George,” said J. B. Hope, “I’ve been foolish.”
George began to make protestations, but his mouth was full of bread and butter. He swallowed desperately and said, “Neveh, Wevewend Hope! Not you.”
“Yes, I have.” Joseph pointed his bony backside to the fire inside the belly of the stove. “I meant to be.”
George must have looked very alarmed, because Hope produced the queer birdlike sound again. “I was with Polyphilia,” Joseph started to explain, but then something occurred to him. “Isn’t that a lovely name? Polyphilia,” he murmured softly.
“It’s vewy nice,” agreed George. “But …”
“We were out for a constitutional, over in the park. And all the leaves were on the ground, you see, and some children had gathered together an enormous pile right in the middle of the walkway. Might I have some bread and butter, please?”
George frantically began to prepare a piece. He was clumsy by nature, even more so because of his agitated state. George got more butter on his finger than on the bread. He handed it to Hope, who said, “Thank you, George.”
“Vewy welcome, Wevewend.”
Joseph Benton Hope looked surprised. “Is that how you call me? Wevewend—that is, Reverend?”
George nodded hesitantly, trying to think of options. “Your holiness” came to mind as a possibility.
“Call me Joseph,” said Hope. “Why, call me Joe!” he decided suddenly.
George didn’t think he was capable of calling Hope “Joe.”
“At any rate,” said Joe, “as I approached the leaves, I turned toward Polyphilia and said something. I disremember what. I always disremember what I’ve said to Polyphilia, although I seem to have perfect and total recollection of what she says to me.” Joseph took a moment to marvel at this truth.
“You tuhned to Miss Polly and said something,” George prompted him.
“Indeed. You see, I pretended to be oblivious to the existence of the pile of leaves. So when we walked into it, I made to be very startled. I shouted ‘Egad!’ and I fell into the leaves.” Once again Joseph produced the short birdlike noise. “Don’t you see, George? I was being foolish.”
George nodded, considering Hope’s story carefully. “I don’t know that it was foolish,” George said slowly. “It seems to me that you wuh making mewwy.”
“That’s it,” agreed Hope with enthusiasm. “I was making merry. Although one has to admit I was being foolish as well.” Hope sat down at the table with George. “I must say,” he confided quietly, “I enjoyed it. I’ve never been foolish before.”
“No! Not even as a boy, Joe?” George had used the familiar without thinking. He reared back, alarmed by the ease with which it had tumbled out of his mouth. Hope seemed to think nothing of it. Joseph sat across the table, shaking his head in a thoughtful manner. “Not even as a boy.”
George reached for more bread and butter. “I have been foolish many times,” said George Quinton. He licked a gob of butter off his hammerlike thumb. “Martha never has.”
“Martha? No. Heavens, no, I should think not!” Hope’s face was twisted oddly. George, staring into it, realized that Joseph was grinning.
Suddenly, George Quinton was filled with a vast sadness. For a moment he was not sure why, and then his thoughts caught up with his emotions. Joe was in love with Polyphilia Drinkwater, George understood with a quick pain. George understood further that the love was a tragic one, for various reasons. One reason was, Polyphilia was a trollop. Every month or so George Quinton would sneak out of the house and take his monstrous body over to The Sailor’s Wife, a groghouse down by the docks. George would drink ale and whiskey, buckets of it, but he wouldn’t get drunk. Drinking made most men dullheaded, but not George. Alcohol seemed to give his thoughts clarity and precision; often it seemed to give George insight and even scraps of knowledge he hadn’t had before.
George Quinton would actually converse at The Sailor’s Wife, talking with men about politics, religion, whatever subject wanted discussing, which more often than not was the subject of ‘Woman.’ George Quinton therefore knew that Polly Drinkwater had lain with many men. He’d learnt about it at The Sailor’s Wife, drinking and talking. George didn’t understand all of what the men said—a fellow once told him, for instance, that Polyphilia enjoyed it “in the back door,” which George found a baffling statement; another man said that Polly’s favorite food was “the living sausage, covered in cream.” When the men said things like this they winked and chortled hellishly. If half of them—even three-quarters—were lying about it, Polyphilia Drinkwater would still have had, at her eighteen years of age, scores of lovers.
Now, even if Polyphilia were pure and virginal (and, George reflected, it was very unchristian to think the worse of her for not being) Hope’s love would still be tragic because her father hated him. In all of Boston only one man seemed ignorant of Theophilius’s immense dislike for J. B. Hope, and that one man was Joe himself. The other thing that Joseph didn’t know was how vicious and underhanded Drinkwater could be and, sadly, how powerful.
The reason Hope was ignorant of all this is that on a superficial level nothing in his relationship with Drinkwater had changed. If anything, it had improved. Joseph still sent his small articles to be published in The Battle-Axe & Weapons of War and Theophilius still published them. In the past few months, Drinkwater had given Hope’s articles front-page prominence, often summarizing their contents in bold type at the head. J. B. HOPE SAYS THAT HE LIVES WITHOUT SIN or HOPE PROCLAIMS HIMSELF PERFECT. Joseph interpreted this as some indication of professional respect; even George could see that Theophilius only meant to get Hope into deeper trouble with the established church.
George realized that Joseph Hope, while sitting at the kitchen table eating bread, had been recollecting his boyhood. George felt a burning shame, because he had not been listening. He’d been thinking of these other things, and now knowledge that might have enriched and enlightened him was lost to George forever. Quinton shook his massive head and concentrated on listening.
“Apparently,” Hope was saying, buttering bread in a quick, efficient manner, dividing the pieces between George and himself, “I spoke not at all until I was three and a half years of age. And when finally I did speak, it was to quote Scripture. Do you know, George, I’d memorized the Bible, cover to cover, by the time I was nine? I was made quite an exhibition of. My father would have me at his side as he preached, and when he came to quoting, he’d tap me on the head, tell book, chapter and verse, and I would speak them. Go ahead, George.”
“Pahdon?”
“Try one. Book, chapter and verse.”
For a long while George could think of nothing, not even one of the books. Then he remembered—slowly the story came back, Jesus and his apostles —“St. Peter,” George said happily.
“The first or second Epistle?”
“Fust,” George decided arbitrarily. And then he selected some numbers. “Chaptuh thwee. Vuss fowah.”
“ ‘But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is, in the sight of God, of great price.’ ”
“Vewy well done, Joe.” George clapped his hands together enthusiastically, producing cannonworks in the small kitchen. “Vewy impwessive.”
“I suppose,” agreed Hope. “At any rate, it impressed at the revival meetings.”
George Quinton experienced another shock of understanding. He saw that Joseph Hope’s Christianity, a stately refined thing, was a direct attack against the brand of religion that was currently all the rage. George Quinton had gone to revival meetings, he knew what went on there. First of all there was singing, at the outset calm and harmonious, and then a demo
nic, black-clothed man would appear in front of the crowd. This man’s first word was always you and it was always shouted, and it was always accompanied by an accusatory, all-inclusive sweep of the forefinger. “You”—and then the voice would fall away to a mere whisper—“sorry, sinful people.” The man would next begin to catalog their sins, speaking as if it were common and public knowledge what they’d all been up to. “There is lust in your hearts, there is anger in your bones, there is pride in your haughty spirits!”
Everyone would nod, secretly hoping to sneak one by the nightclad preacher, though no one ever did. “Gluttony! Sloth! Lechery! Drunkenness!” The people would turn red, try to take their eyes away from the preacher. By this time the man’s voice had risen again, and the list of sins was accompanied by a fine mist of spit.
This wasn’t even the worst part. Once he’d gotten through all that, the preacher would tell them what they could expect in the Hereafter due to this astounding amount of wickedness. Eternal damnation, and the preacher seemed to have firsthand experience of Hell and could describe it very graphically. “Have you ever put your finger into candleflame? Well, recollect that pain—but do not confine it—oh, no!—do not confine it to a fingertip, because it will consume the whole of your body, from the hair on your head to the ends of your toes!! And it shall be the flame of a thousand thousand candles!! And it shall be everlasting.”
This was something George Quinton had never done, stuck his finger into candleflame, until he’d heard a preacher suggest the analogy. Then George had gone home and tried it. “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth!” Gnashing of teeth, upon first hearing, didn’t seem too bad to George, until he’d spent a few minutes gnashing his own late one night. The sensation made his skin crawl, made him feel as if serpents, snakes and eels shared his bed. He couldn’t sleep after that.
Once the people were all profoundly terrified, the preacher would announce the existence of “Good news and glad tidings!” If he’d done his job well he’d have to spend several minutes harping on the announcement before the people were inwardly settled enough to listen. The good news was, of course, that you could accept Jesus as your Savior, something all of them had been doing on a weekly basis for years. The preacher would read to them from the Bible, words repeated countless times. Then it was singing again, only this time the singing was frenzied, all hand-clapping and thigh-slapping, full of desperate jubilation. The people would sing until they were exhausted, and then they’d fall back into their seats to wonder how many days, hours or minutes it would be until they sinned again.
The Life of Hope Page 10
