The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “Oh, nuts! I know what’s happening. This book and all that’s at stake in it is now the main thing—not our love affair. It’s your male type all over.”

  I broke in two a cookie that accompanied the ice cream, and poked a piece of it into my mouth.

  “You might say you’re egging them on just to show Knopf up. It’s as bad as that. You’ve really forgotten me—or it’s taken second place. Knopf is now your number one target. You’ll prove he’s wrong and your damn book is right if it kills you. There was nothing in any of the papers this afternoon and that’s got you sorer. Now you’re fighting mad.”

  I drew a careful breath to avoid inhaling any of the cookie I had suspended chewing, and turned and shook my head like a man who has only himself to consult with.

  “It’s true,” she said, lowering her voice but speaking with increasing fire. “Oh, Jesus, you intellectuals,” she said, clenching a fist and rolling the expletive toward the ceiling. “It’s the story of my life.”

  “Perhaps you have a thesis of your own to prove?” I answered quietly.

  “You’re damned right I have,” she said across the table, in a compressed whisper that made her words reach me like a kind of lethal gas. “All this maturity stuff is fine, but there are two kinds, mental and emotional, and you rarely get the two in one guy. In fact the more you get of the one the less you get of the other. Maybe nature just hasn’t got enough to go around, specialization, the one at the expense of the other, et cetera. Anyhow, so we get the adult books and the adult paintings and the adult movies all turned out by spoiled children. ‘Look, Ma, I wrote an adult book.’ ‘Hey, kids, look at the adult drama I wrote.’ Oh, brother, can I pick ’em!” she went on through clenched teeth, her two bunched fists in the air before her as though she were leading the rooting section in a much-needed cheer. “The first one paints unicorns with adult flies on them. The second’s occupation is eating strawberries with ‘Harold in Italy’ going, while secreting three sentences a day on a biography of Berlioz. Then another long-hair who’s bald-headed on top of it, and then came Analysis with his trench coat, and then, oh, what’s the use. And now the prize of the lot—he wants to put his neck in a noose to spite Knopf.”

  “How about Todarescu?” I said, swallowing the last of the cookie.

  “You with your Baudelaires, all of you, and your infinite weariness, and your cultural patterns and your Voltaires and your Rimbauds and recurring symbols in Faulkner and now it’s Dylan Thomas. Oh you intellectuals,” she cried again, “smoking your literary cornsilk behind the barn of—of—I don’t know what,” she said, letting the metaphor collapse. “Todarescu? He’s got something lined up for the summer, a directing job in Florida, working tents and one-night stands and so on with a variety show. They’re trying to get New Faces material, but anyhow it’ll be a variety bill. Sort of a revue. He can get me lined up for a part in it.”

  “So it’s Todarescu who picks up the marbles. Is that it?”

  “This will be strictly professional.”

  “Mm, plim-plam-plom,” I laughed, imitating Todarescu. “That’s rich. You and him in Florida on a strictly plam-plom-plim. In tents. Oh, plim-plom.”

  Molly closed her bag and collected her gloves.

  “I don’t want to get into a fight about this, Andy. The theater’s in my blood, and it’s none too early to think about the summer road. You don’t seem to want to part friends, so maybe I’ll just leave you here—rise quietly and go. No, Andy. No fuss, no tears, no regrets. You’re really very sweet, but I just can’t take any more. It’s best this way. Good-by and good luck.”

  “Wait.” I stayed her at the table, standing. “Would it make any difference if we left Avalon and made a fresh start somewhere else? Because I have an offer from a church in Bridgeport. They’ll give me five thousand a year, the house, of course, free light and heat, and a scooter … Well, think it over. Don’t give me your answer now.”

  One of the troubles with middle ear business is that the nausea accompanying it is sometimes, after a while at least, indistinguishable from hunger pangs. The only way to find out which it is is to eat something, and then it’s too late. After walking around alone a bit, I made for a place that was a combination bar and grill, a mile or so from where Molly and I had so sketchily dined. I walked at the edge of the sidewalk, finally, with one foot in the gutter and the other on the curb, like a cripple with one leg longer than the other. How much more evidence was needed that elements in question were driving me out of my mind? I hobbled along experimentally for a block or two in this fashion, thinking about the scene with Molly and what things were coming to. Todarescu had a way of scratching his head gingerly so as not to disturb the part in his hair. Had she noticed that? This Bridgeport parish, would they have a theatrical director there? No, I would be expected to handle the dramatics myself, but they would consist in little more than sewing members of the congregation up in sheets and shoving them out onstage to yell, “Barabbas! Barabbas! Release unto us Barabbas!”

  The bar and grill was on the other side of the street and I crossed over. There were four or five tables, two of them occupied. I went to the counter. It was littered with crumbs of food. A waitress with a cloth came over and flicked them onto the stools. I brushed one clean and sat down. The waitress, a plump, pleasant-looking girl in a starched green uniform, drew me a glass of water. “What’ll you have?” she asked, and left.

  I caught a glance at myself in a mirror behind the coffee urn and dishes. Just over a stack of reflected plates, I saw my face. My upper lip was drawn taut, exposing my teeth, and one nostril was curled in a snarl. My God, what were they doing to me! How much proof was needed? I turned away, but presently looked again for further signs. My ears twitched perceptibly and the snarl became audible, as I hunched safeguardingly over my water. What could more clearly indicate that they were unseating my reason?

  I thought a moment, chin in hand and ticking my fingers along my brow, as though I might as well tap that as the counter—might as well drum that. The waitress returned with pad and pencil poised.

  “Give me a piece of apple pie with cheese, and a glass of beer,” I said.

  “Beer with pie?” she said.

  “No, with the cheese,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  She shrugged and made a record of my wishes, then hove off to fulfill them. She drew a wedge of pie from a glass case and flipped it onto the kitchen wicket for the cheese; then she went into the annex where the bar was, and I heard her say, “… he must be …”

  And well she might. The more so, had she access to the inner man behind the one she saw, by whom she had, did she but know it, already been plucked and eaten. For here the pressures to which Mackerel was being so cruelly subjected were keenest, here was still the sorest crucible in which he was being tried. The stretch of continence to this length had grossly lowered his threshold, so that a not terribly attractive girl at a nearby table interfered with his enjoyment of what turned out to be a surprisingly good piece of restaurant pastry.

  She was about twenty-five, and naked except for a green skirt and sweater, heavy brown tweed coat, shoes, stockings, and so forth, a scarf knotted at her throat and a brown beret. I regarded her breasts with melancholy, then my eyes began their ordained journey downward. A chink between the knees offered a gleam of white skin. “The secret where the stocking ends.” Spender? Her companion, an older woman in a sweat shirt, was completely lackluster I noted with gratitude.

  I returned to the other to ferret out a few flaws. She had a soft, pulpy pink mouth, which was parted in a rather moronic smile. She was saying to her friend, “Then he says to me, ‘Get out. I never want to see you again.’ I says, ‘Don’t be so possessive, telling me to get out, we’re through. Who are you trying to get possessive with? It’s your main trouble. You can’t tell me what to do.’ We had some more words, then he repeats, ‘Get out. I never want to lay eyes on you again.’ I says, ‘Listen, who do you think you’re taking for g
ranted …?’”

  I gave a stir of delight. In thirty seconds the girl had drained herself of every charm. I could sit here and without ordeal contemplate the moist mouth, that heartbreaking prow, those hemispheres which, when she rose to walk would—Listen to her talk.

  “So he says, ‘We’re through. You go your way and I’ll go mine.’ Just like that, imagine, out of a clear sky. He’ll make the decisions. I says, ‘Listen, buddy boy, I’ll come and go as I please. You don’t own me. I’m the master of my fate, you included …’”

  I laughed to myself. I was off the hook. For this relief much thanks. I needed it. Because I didn’t know how much longer I could go on like this. The obstacles in my way were unfair. I was human and I was normal. I must have a woman. A woman who would envelop my existence and befriend my spirit and leave her musk in my bed. The secret where the stocking ends. The flower where the fancy tends. The delta where the river wends. The garden where the hunger ends. Their thighs were like loaves of warm bread, their smell like that of warm bread …

  My daydreams (which now went deep into the middle of the night) were no longer the cool, meandering reveries of contentment but the visual ravings of thirst. They ran to erotic etudes and chimerical methods of pairing based on hearsay and the most extreme data, sequences in which at last I saw myself locked in complex and carnivorous postures with women I had never seen before. I was in the country of those dark specialists in rumination who had left their phosphorescent print on a corner of nineteenth-century French literature; beyond it lay those visions, penultimate to madness itself, that turned the brains of the saints into nests of maggots. The fruit of chastity: the Temptations of Saint Anthony.

  As I paid and rose to leave, I was put into a fresh lather, alas, by a black-haired belted figure leaving the restaurant ahead of me. She was a mare of a girl, her loins like a swaying bell. This was serious. I knew that I must evict this creature from my mind if I was to have a wink of sleep. As she left, she called a good-by to the waitress that showed an intelligent casual poise. Blazing with anger, I hurried to overtake her in the street, banking on some apparent plethora of chin to get me off the hook. Half a block down, as I was trying to scurry abreast of her to get a look, I bumped into another pedestrian. It was a woman carrying several bundles, which I knocked from her arms. I paused to help her retrieve them, and as I thrust them apologetically back into her hands I recognized Mrs. Sponsible. She gave a gasp of surprise, and I hurried on, excusing myself.

  When I reached the corner of the street the girl was just boarding a bus. I stood there as the door closed behind her and it rumbled away through the Saturday night traffic. When I turned around, it was to see Mrs. Sponsible standing up the street where I had left her, watching me. Seeing me glance back, she turned and hurried off.

  I went into a bar and had two whiskeys. Shouldering myself in beside a stocky red-faced man in a leather jacket, I said in a low voice: “Say, Mac, what do you do for gash in this town?”

  He lowered a stein of beer to the bar and shrugged. “Ask any cabbie. You new here?”

  “More or less.”

  “Well, there’s lots of places around here, though I personally wouldn’t know any addresses. But any cabbie can tell you.”

  I gulped down my drink and hurried into the street, breathing heavily. Were they satisfied with what they were driving me to now? Was this the way I would end? Denial by no means always resulted in the sublimation credited to it then, did it? Often it worked the reverse. I thought of those animals that attack people and kick out the sides of their stalls until gelded. As I walked along, I encountered a pet peeve that drew from me more than its normal fire.

  A street-corner evangelist was swinging a Bible and shouting, “Jesus is the powerhouse! Are you plugged in? Jesus is the transformer! Are you wired up? Jesus is the cable carrying that current from God Almighty! Is your trolley on? Oh, is your trolley on?”

  My teeth grated, and my fists worked in my pockets. It was not merely the humiliation of this imbecile’s being technically a colleague. It wasn’t just the vulgarity of the scene, though that was of a shattering kind. It was the spectacle of a faith and a form in which I had some belief being debauched into a yapping ritual for boosting paltry souls into heaven. These men were worse than infidels, for at least many infidels were Christians.

  The speaker must have detected the animation in my face, alone in the small group of sullen listeners who surrounded him, and mistaken it for approval. He therefore turned on the box on which he was standing and said to me:

  “Brother, have you found Christ?”

  “Is he lost again?” I said.

  “Oh, brother, don’t mock,” he said, his face falling, but only for a moment, as he rallied to the attack. “Won’t you take him tonight?”

  “No, I will not,” I said.

  “Oh, brother, why not? Give me one good reason. Come on, I’m waiting. So is he.” He pointed upward.

  “Don’t you see what nonsense all this is?” I hit out aggressively. “Don’t you realize that the Gospels don’t harmonize? That you can’t use the Bible literally, that this railroad to heaven you think you’re running makes a farce of a noble ethic?”

  “Don’t harmonize? Don’t harmonize! Oh, brother,” he said, slapping his brow with a gesture that converted the word from a vocative to an expletive. “He says the Gospels don’t harmonize.”

  “They don’t. Even Martin Luther admitted that, and suggested we get on with it, on to more important matters. When I say I won’t take him I mean I won’t on your terms. Where did Cain get his wife? Did you ever stop to think of that, if the Bible is literally true?”

  There was no telling how the tide of battle might have gone between us, because I found myself involved with a new adversary. A drunk, or semi-drunk, from the other edge of the circle made his way around to me. He had been listening as phlegmatically as the rest to the evangelist, but took the opportunity to pick a fight with the heckler.

  “Lis’n, bud,” he said, swaying slightly, “do you know who you’re talking to? Servant Lord.”

  “I’m not talking to you in any case,” I said. “And now if you’ll please clear out of the way.”

  “And if I don’t, then what? I suppose you’ll knock me?”

  “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

  The drunk swung at me, missed and fell. That enraged him, and he got to his feet and came at me like a butting goat. I caught my heel against the curb, and down we both went in a heap. Before I knew what else was happening, I felt myself being collared and hauled to my feet by a burly cop.

  “Now, what’s this all about?” he demanded, holding the drunk and myself face to face.

  A woman offered an analysis.

  “Well, he’s drunk and he was heckling the preacher, and he—”

  There were too many he’s. The cop couldn’t tell smiter from smitten or drunk from sober. Off we were packed to the station in a cruising squad car, which he summoned from a call box and which appeared in an instant. The officers over to whom we were delivered told us that they were under orders to clamp down on the spreading rowdyism in that part of Chickenfoot. There had been complaints, from civic groups, from the pulpit, from parent organizations, and the command was to run ’em in. Thus the original cop had much preferred chalking up an arrest to settling the disturbance on the scene. The drunk and I were charged with disorderly conduct and put in separate cells.

  That done, however, the sergeant at the night desk relented. He had done his duty. He let me telephone home around one o’clock. I got Hester out of bed and she got Turnbull, and between the two of them they managed to bail me out in time to preach the next morning.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “WUXTRY! WUXTRY PEEBAHS!” Knopf was shouting on a midtown Manhattan street corner. “Read all about it! Offbeat minister nabbed in slaying. Pleads innocence but protests social guilt. Action corroborates prisoner’s theory. Read all about it! Get your late editions here!”
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br />   I was stretched out fully clothed on my bed, at fifteen minutes till church. I hadn’t gotten home till nearly four, but not having slept, I was up and ready in time for divine worship. With a quarter-hour to spare, I lay down to compose my thoughts.

  I lay very straight. Presently I reached into my pocket for the two pennies and laid them on my eyes. I folded my hands on my breast. What a shame, cut down in his prime. So much yet to give, but done in by bungling hands, that flame snuffed with the candle not yet half consumed. What they did not understand was that he had no quarrel with the myth per se but only with its inevitable misuse by brutish men. They never understood his ministry, the meaning of his life: that he had come to call, not sinners, but the righteous to repentance. Too late now. Those lips were cold, the proud spirit flown. Now his house shall be removed from him, and his bishopric shall another take.

  There was a soft tread in the hall and a rap on the door and Hester said, “Andrew?”

  “I’m dead.”

  “I know. You’ll be able to rest after the service. I’ll see that nobody disturbs you. I’m going along now and don’t you be too long. It’s only ten minutes.”

  I slipped my fingers under my shirt and massaged my heart back into vitality. I pocketed the pennies, and as I put my legs over the side of the bed a sob caught in my throat, torn free by the spectacle of heroism in our time. Seeming to be digging vainly in my clothes for a handkerchief, I reached to a nearby writing desk and dried my tears with a blotter.

  So here was roughly how things stood with Mackerel in the public eye, I reviewed to myself as I walked over to the church building:

  He was an alcoholic, a lecher and a Red. His drinking was in the main solitary and had therefore not come to light before, but it was now a known and openly discussed fact. He sought his women in the disreputable quarters of Chickenfoot, where, in addition to chasing anything in skirts, he also undoubtedly frequented vice and gambling dens. He was a brawler. While indulging these graphic and assorted passions along those and God knew what other fronts, he had been going steady with a nice girl. The nice girl had found him out just in time and broken off what some said was an engagement, hardly surprising under the circumstances. She was reportedly hysterical and being packed off out of the country, under a doctor’s care.