Love Among the Cannibals

by Wright Morris

  I leaned out for a look at our car as we drove by. The radiator and the block to the engine were now gone. Anything else? The man working on it dozed in the front seat. Having worked all night, I suppose, he had earned his sleep. On his feet were the shoes I had tossed into the car, and on his back was my shirt.

  We had to make several stops. The documents could be purchased, for a consideration, but they had to be signed. An English clergyman, retired, with a panoramic view of Oxford in his study, conducted a civil suhvus admirable in its simplicity. Very brief. I’m a little vague on the details. When I have a guilty feeling my eyes avoid any sort of focus, like a shoplifter. A small dog chewed the laces of my shoes during the ceremony. I remember the bride’s puckered lips—I mean, I remember her kiss. At the front of this house, supplied with a camera I had no idea Mrs. Macgregor possessed, I took a snapshot of the bridal party. Testimony. I remember focusing on the serene face of the Greek. Too serene. One tap of the chisel and the marble smile would crack. Señor Carrillo, his hat off, peered sharply slantwise at Señor Macgregor, with the eyes of a man who is paid to keep what he knows to himself. Billie Harcum Macgregor, the ring on her finger, held the license clasped like a high-school diploma, her radiant smile beamed in the direction of Mac. He gazed directly at me. Not at the camera. It was one of those cameras you look down into; you focus what you see on a ground glass, so that I seemed to be—in Mac’s gaze—in two places at once. In the cool eye of the camera, and the one that he sought in the top of my head. The appeal men make to the assassin they had assumed to be their friend—an et tu, Brute appeal—was on Mac’s face. It gave me the creeps. I couldn’t take my eyes from what I saw on the glass.

  “Will you snap it?” said the Greek, and I snapped it. I have never seen the print. When I think of the wedding, it’s the ground-glass picture I see. What I saw there altered my feelings—the way an assassin’s might be altered—after he has pulled the trigger, and he sees what he has done. Had I got my man? No, he had escaped. The man I had shot was some sort of nameless stand-in for him. The man I wanted—Irwin K. Macgregor, first-class slob and second-class song writer— slipped out of focus when I pulled the trigger, when the shutter snapped. In his place, in his pitiful shoes, I had caught Adam Macgregor, most pitifully nude, with his ever-fair Eve green and swollen with the apple she had picked, but did not eat. Stand-ins, perhaps, but not people, figures in a frieze symbolizing the eternal bride, the eternal groom, and the eternal deception they played on one another—being true to one another in order to be false to everything else.

  “Uhl, honey—” Billie said, when I looked up, “Uhl, honey, yoh fohgot to wind the shuttuh!”

  Did I? I wound it again, said aloud, “Hold it,” and focused on them, the Greek serene, the clergyman smiling, Señor Carrillo leering like a bandit, and the happy bridal pair, petrified with affection, about to kiss.

  “There,” I said.

  “Is it all ovuh?” asked Billie.

  “All ovuh but the shouting,” I replied, and said, “Hooray!”

  “Hoo-ray,” Mac said.

  In keeping with the simple service, we had a simple lunch. Under the ceiling fans of an open-air drugstore we ate hamburgers, American style, while Señor Carrillo rounded up the makings of the bridal feast. We could have blown what little dough we had and gone to one of the clubs or big tourist restaurants, but one of the things we seemed to have lost was a taste for that sort of thing. It had been stripped off like the chrome on the car. A bride and groom call for something special, however, this bride and groom in particular, and I told Señor Carrillo to let himself go, not thinking he would. But he did. He came back with a freshly roasted suckling pig. This little fellow had green gumdrop eyes, a soiled ribbon around his neck, and an American flag hecho en Mexico where his tail should be. As we drove south along the bay, with our pig, I could see Dr. Leggett’s Sea Beast at anchor, the flag flying, the frogmen equipment scattered on the deck. Was he anchored out there waiting for the Greek to make up her mind? I could see a rope ladder, as if for her convenience, dangling at the side. I could also see, in the rearview mirror, the too-serene Greek at my side, the drilled iris of her eyes at a pinpoint in the shimmering light.

  That stretch of beach with its buzzards was habit-forming. We couldn’t keep away from it. We pitched our bridal camp back near the sea wall, and watched the fleet of touring fishermen come in. Big-fish hunters from small places, loaded up with creels, reels, gaffs, rods, and head nets, perched like targets in the cockpit turret seats at the rear. Sometimes a gray-haired matron, a visor shadow on her face, sat there winding up her line like a run in her stocking, her husband barking signals at her through a megaphone. On the deck would be the swordfish, waiting to be weighed in and photographed.

  We had begun with two buzzards, both of them a little shy, but having tasted our food and sized up our situation the word had gone around, and we now had a small flock. They were patient birds, and sat along the sea wall like sentries. Now and then Señor Carrillo, shouting Spanish oaths, would seize a piece of driftwood and run at them, but I preferred them on the wall at my back rather than circling over my head. They did too. When he came back and sat down they would return to the wall.

  About sundown we all went in for a dip and watched them gather, like crows on a highway, and pick over the bones and scraps we had left. At that hour the breeze died, and in the slanting light they cast shadows on the beach like monsters. A faint whiff of their odor, like decay, hung around our camp. A motor launch that might have been Dr. Leggett’s, with lights in the cabins, cruised out about dark, the motor coughing wetly like a man with a cold in his chest. We had planned to stay and build a driftwood fire, toast the marshmallows we had bought, and lie on the beach listening to the portable radio. But we didn’t. We gave them to Señor Carrillo, for his kids. We stayed until the tide began to roll in, then we started back.

  A lantern with a steady flame marked the spot where our car had dropped into the ditch. It was held by a woman while the two men with her went about their work. One had crawled into the ditch, where he worked beneath the motor, and the other had crawled into the opening at the top. Both greeted us when we passed:

  “Buenos noches!”

  “Buenos noches” I replied. “How goes the work?”

  “It goes well,” one replied.

  “But the night is dark,” replied the other.

  “But the night,” I replied, “is the best time to work.”

  They agreed. I wished them good night, and the woman, lifting the lantern, said, “Go with God.”

  The piano I had rented, and forgotten about, was there in the yard when we came up. Also Señor Eroza. He had not known in which apartment we had wanted it put. To put it in the wrong one, heavy as it was, might be worse than leaving it out in the yard. So they had left it. In the light from the sky we could see the yellow keys.

  Mac dropped the beach chairs like a man suddenly summoned, stepped up and sounded a chord. What chord? “What next?” naturally. After a week of inarticulate talk, he could verbalize. I had forgotten about a stool, but that chopping block of wood, pitted with feathers, raised him to where he could rock forward, lovingly, over the keys.

  I asked Señor Eroza if he would mind if Señor Macgregor, a song writer, got in a little practice before he went to bed. Señor Eroza did not mind. Quite the contrary. Did I not know the Yucatecans were born musical? He left us there and went to get his Yucatecan family out of bed. He returned with the lamp, which he set on the piano, the Eroza kids formed a circle in the yard, but Mrs. Irwin K. Macgregor, nee Harcum, not only knew “What Next?”—she had done it. Without waiting for her cue, she joined her man at the piano. She leaned on it. The light from the lamp glowed on her hair, her teeth were like pearls. There was no moon, that would come later, but we had the bay below us, ringed with lights, the sky like a shell above us, and the faint beat of the drums. Music is like the weather. It depends on how you feel. Seated at the piano Mac felt bett
er, his chick looked better, I was better, the Erozas were enchanted, and the Greek put her hand in my sandy hair. Mac found the keys that would work, most of them, and in her big, talky voice little Billie sang:

  “What next?

  The life of love I knew

  No longer loves

  The things I do.

  What next?”

  “Ahhhhhhhhhh—” exclaimed Señor Eroza, “she has lost him!”

  I knew that she had, but I said, “Not lost—just losing.”

  “Ahhhhhhhhh,” sighed Señor Eroza, and made a clucking in his throat.

  “Man,” said Mac, “get a load of this—” and he sounded a chord. A new one—almost new, that is—and he stretched it, gleaming, like taffy. “What next, man?” he said, and I guess we are a great team, since I knew. I had my cue, and I also had the scene laid out for me. The tropic night and the sea, the piano in the yard, the ring of white-eyed little savages, like cannibal-Knaben, and from the palm-strewn wings the pagan love song of us cannibals. “What next, man?” crooned Mac.

  Smiling at him, I said, “They eat each other.”

  “Man—you crazy?”

  “Take a tip, son—” I said, then I hopped up and sang:

  “Take a tip, mon vieux, from the lady spider,

  She has her lover deep inside her,

  When he asked her what next? Why she Dined on him most carnally.”

  “Carnally?” said Mac. “They won’t buy it.”

  “They will,” I put in, “once they try it.”

  I did a heel-and-toe number, á la Fred Astaire, then tipped my hat and cane in the Ted Lewis manner, sang:

  “A cannibelle’s affection is a dangerous thing.

  She prefers the knuckle to the wedding ring.

  The banquet of love

  Is the one she cooks

  Without the aid of how-to-do-it books.”

  “Man, I’ll buy it!” croaked Mac. “What next?”

  “What next?” I echoed, and wheeled to look at Mrs. Macgregor, the Million-Dollar Baby aus ole Memphis, and Mr. Macgregor, her piece of Christmas jewelry already turning green.

  “What next, man?” yelled Mac, the way a gobbler would turn, with his head on the block, and taunt his executioner. He knew, God knows. What he wanted me to do, while he still felt good, was chop it off.

  “That’s up to you—” I replied, “and your baby cannibelle.” Then I crossed the yard to where mine was sitting, took her hand and said, “Us cannibals are going for a dip,” and off we went.

  “Look, man!” Mac yelled, and came down on the keys with both his elbows. The ear-splitting racket made us run like kids from a haunted house. We skidded down the slope, and in the street below we just kept running, on down the grade to the highway, then along the ditch to where the woman raised the lantern to watch us pass. We stumbled across the empty lot to the sea wall, then over the wall to the beach, where we sprawled on the narrow strip of sand the tide had left for us. We lay there, winded and laughing, till the sea began to lick at our feet. Then we sat on the sea wall, our feet dangling, and watched a big two-masted schooner glide into the harbor like a phantom, her power cut off. We could see, against the sky, the lacy web of her rigging, and two spidery men out on her bowsprit.

  “What a dream of a boat,” I said, since she looked like a dream in the dusky harbor.

  “A dream?” she replied. “What dream?”

  “The dream of everyone on shore,” I replied. We watched her anchor. In the quiet we could hear the slide and rattle of the chain.

  “Am I a dreamer?” she said, in a way that made it clear she thought the idea pretty corny. She fancied herself a nondreamy realist.

  “You’re all dream,” I said. “There’s not even a line down your middle where you begin and the dream stops.

  You live your dream, which is to say you’re a realist. Living with you has made me something of a realist myself. An essentialist, that is. The little inessentials have been stripped off.”

  She didn’t reply to that, and I went on, “I didn’t know when I bolted with you that it was not to sleep with you in a warmer climate, but to love you in a language we could both understand. Earl Horter, the master of the cliché, did not say to you what he thought he was feeling, since he hardly knew, without the clichés, what it was he felt. If he talked about love in the language he knew, he cheated himself. He had to learn about loving and talking from scratch, and he saw that the first thing the lover destroyed was the mind in his body, since it had nothing to do with his body of clichés. The body was cannibal, the clichés were vegetable. Love among the vegetarians, that is, was verbal—it was made with participles, unmade with verbs, honored, cherished, and disobeyed with nouns. But love among the cannibals is flesh feeding on flesh. I’ve been living on your lips, the strings of your eyes, and you’ve been living on my heart, my lungs, and my liver. Essentials. The fatty inessentials cut away. If and when you get around to the hollow of my skull, I’ll serve it up. If anybody asks us if these bones live—” I put out my hand and gripped a near one—“we can say yes, thanks to the essentials, thanks to the essential business of love. Such is the love song, Greek, of Earl Horter to his cannibelle.”

  Was it my feelings that kept her silent—or her own? She had to be so careful, as she had said, to keep from hurting me. But I would have her answer later, in her own language, one that we had fashioned between us, and I would settle for it until something better came along.

  We sat there till the tide lapped on the wall and wet our feet. Out on the bay the dream boat dissolved into darkness, the mast lights blinked. Later, the moon arose, and on our way back we could see our car, with its nose in the ditch. The woman had gone. The men were still beneath, working on it. In the flickering lamplight I could see their sweaty faces, the whites of their eyes. A few more pieces, perhaps another night’s work, and the car would be stripped down to the same point we were. What point was that? The one we were at. My cannibelle took a grip on my hand, and I crooned:

  “You’ve stripped my chassis,

  You’ve drained my gas,

  You’ve brought me, baby,

  To a new impasse.

  A cannibelle’s love,

  Of which I sing,

  Is a one-time rather than

  A two-time thing.”

  Walking up the grade I thought I heard a piano tinkling. That was probably just my imagination, but when I awoke, several hours later, the moon had moved over to shine on the yard, and the moonlight glowed on the ivory piano keys. I would have sworn I saw them move, and heard the first bars of “What next?”

  V

  But it was not imaginary music that woke me up. It was real, real Cole Porter, lightly fingered in the Macgregor manner, blowing loud then soft as it came to me on the off-shore breeze. The tune? “Love for Sale.” Quite a little number for the morning after, but no connection. No intentional connection. It had merely crossed the groom’s loving mind that there might be something there that he could swipe. What made a song good was being able to recognize it, as Mac liked to say.

  It made me think of old times, old times in the army, when Mac would spin the seat of the piano stool, dust it with his knuckles, then sit down and improvise. I couldn’t see him, but I could almost hear him, when he worked out something good, pausing long enough to leer toward me and say:

  “You like that, eh?”

  Well, I did, I still did, and got myself out of bed to say so, but the Irwin K. Macgregor who now sat at the piano was not the same man. He had shaved. The sunburned flesh of his neck was badly cut up. Strips of the bride’s roll paper had been used to staunch his wounds. He had also put on his new Italian-style loafers, the imported pants of nubby raw silk, the shirt with full flowing sleeves, and on his head, level as a stopper, his green beret. To keep his new shirt collar clean a handkerchief had been tucked between the collar and his neck. He was a great one to sweat. Mrs. Macgregor had taken notice of it.

  She sat at his side, he
r knees drawn up so that the heels of her pumps were on the edge of the chair, wife and pupil, listening to the Maestro improvise. She wore one of her simple peasant-type gowns, a full skirt lapping over the sides of the chair, her arms bare to the vaccination scar she loved to pick. A simple silver ornament gathered her hair, and a simple silver log chain encircled her throat. She also listened. Listening is now done with the lips and the eyes.

  “Like that, eh?” said Mac. Not to Horter, of Macgregor & Horter, but to Mrs. Macgregor. She liked it so much that words failed her.

  “Da-da-dee-dee-dee-da-da,” she said.

  “Mornin’, Irwin,” I said, knowing how it killed him, but it didn’t disturb Mrs. Macgregor. She turned her big, soft eyes on me, and I saw very clearly that I needed her help. That I was about to get it, that is.

  “Uhl, honey—” she said, “yoh-all leavin’ us ah-lone was the sweetust thing yoh evuh did. We had the longest talk. Din’t we, Hon? An’ the moh we talked, moh we could see we both felt the same way. Now that we foun each other, all we wanna do is wuk. As mah honey-bun put it, what we all come down heah foh, was to wuk. So we both decided to tun a new leaf, which was jus what we did this mohnin’. Din’t we, Hon?”

  “We turnt sumpin’, all right,” Mac replied.

  “Missus Macgregor—” I began, and watched Mac’s head drop about an inch between his shoulders. He was squatted on the chopping block, head bowed, and I remembered that scene on the ground glass of the camera. I had shot him once. I didn’t have the heart to shoot him again.

  “One li’l thing we decided,” she went on, “is that the beach is no place to wuk. It saps a puson’s strength an I doan know what-all. We plan to wuk heah in the mohnin’ an’ maybe take a li’l dip in the aftahnoon.”

  “Why not a li’l air-cooled apahtmunt,” I said, “where you two can wuk fah into the night?”

  “Doan think we din’t discuss it, Uhl, honey, but we both feel the atmospheah out heah is so impotun. We both pahticulah feel you do so well in this heah atmospheah.”