He had no idea where her Evander Childs High School was, nor her Boston Post Road, nor her Mosholu Parkway, Van Cortlandt Park, Gun Hill Road, but these were mysterious places to which she belonged, and were strangely inextricable, too, in his wayward mind, from the crisp white uniforms worn by nurses, from the perfume-edged odor of sweat, or so he was compelled to believe, even from the smell of ice-cold furs and the oil-slicked glassy waters of the Narrows. He knew that something was happening, despite the banality of everything, perhaps because of the banality of everything, the musty smell of the garage, just opened after the winter, the dirty screens leaning against the sides of the house, awaiting springtime cleaning, the blowing phlox bordering the hedge. There she stood. He looked around for Perry, Perry Plymouth, where was he? and he was talking to the other girl, small and dark, with startlingly white, even teeth and a short haircut that held her face in an ebony frame. Later, that summer, his friend, Teddy, would fall in love with this dark girl, making his Italian family as unhappy as her Jewish family. “Such goeth the breaks, brother mine,” Teddy’s older brother, Joe, would say, but sadly. In any event, what was happening to him, now, could well be considered instrumental in understanding the romantic nature of bowling-alley light. Which, by curious but logical divagation, which there is no time to explain, led him to wonder, that summer, about the whereabouts of Perry.
Helen, her older sister, picked him up at the DeCamp bus stop in Caldwell that fall, in their father’s car, a powder-blue Buick. What in God’s name was he doing at the Caldwell bus stop? In the fall? Helen was engaged to a second-year medical student, Sam, whom she’d met at Jones Beach. Of him and her younger sister, Sam had said, that past August, “You sly dog.” Which reminds me that Marvin, her cousin, had said, “If she weren’t my cousin, oh yeah, oh Jesus.”
The subject of the foregoing is not at all clear, as will be obvious to the attentive reader. The subject, for all I know, may not even be in evidence.
Werner Heisenberg was not convinced by this proof, and thought it, as a matter of fact, “frivolous.” But then Heisenberg had no idea of what a bowling alley is, or, in this case, was. He is on record as saying, in reply to a question concerning bowling alleys, posed him by Lotte Knapke, “Of that which I cannot talk about, I have to keep my mouth quiet.” He of course meant “silent.”
It’s perfectly OK for New Yorkers to make fun of New Jersey and/or its residents, but it is not OK for others to do so. And I mean New Yorkers, not transplanted rubes like, say, E.B. White.
“What about a transplanted rube like Virgil Thomson?”
Fuck him, too, with his wand and his peanut-butter pie!
“I’m not quite …?”
Wand, wand, wand, for Christ sake! You never heard of a wand, and pie?
“You mean maybe a cane?”
Imbecile and slave
THE NIGHT BEFORE, HE HAD WALKED HER to her house down by the lake. Thick sweet darkness of the July night. He kissed her, leaning against the cool metal of her father’s powder-blue Buick. She said that she’d see him down at the lake the next day. I’ve seen you there, a lot, she said, last year.
And there she was the next day, lying on a blanket some twenty-five yards from the pavilion, with a girlfriend. She looked up at him and smiled. Do I know you? she said. He felt like a shambling moron in the face of that candid, girlish smile, and the girlfriend was giving him the once-over. Do you, like a, want a, like a want to have Coke? he said. She laughed and got up on her knees and patted the blanket with a hand so golden that her fingernails glowed as pearls. Here, she said. Sit here. He looked at her cool lips and felt them again in the moonless night.
The jukebox in the pavilion was playing a cheap song that would become ludicrously and unimpeachably beautiful in years to come, and the girlfriend left. Lie down, she said. I had a bad feeling that you weren’t going to say hello. What? What? Wasn’t it obvious from his stricken and stupid face that his very self had become her imbecile and slave? He saw that her eyes were hazel.
For heaven’s sake, it’s too soon to know. But it’s magic, tenderly. So said Claude Thornhill, Fran Warren, Dinah Washington, Doris Day, Sarah Vaughan.
She wore a white, one-piece strapless bathing suit.
Complexity of the simplest things, e.g., young men and women, or this young man and this young woman.
It doesn’t matter what lake in New Jersey this was. They were all alike. It doesn’t matter what the girl’s name was. They were all lovely.
Hopatcong, Ellen, Budd, Natalie, Hiawatha, Carole.
“I’ll close my eyes and she’ll just disappear, I know it, I know it,” the idiot says. To himself, at least.
In Caldwell
ALTHOUGH INFORMATION, SPARSE AND unsatisfactory as it is, has been grudgingly offered by crack journalists as to the mundane origins of a mundane summer romance that began in, of all places, a mundane bowling alley, the activities of Perry have been all but ignored, not only on that particular night (of the bowling alley), but throughout the entirety of the subsequent summer.
Questions were asked, possible witnesses canvassed, and so on. No one seems to remember Perry’s activities.
Perry was seen, as we know, in conversation with the small, dark girl, and we have been told, perhaps irrelevantly, that “later that summer, his [not Perry’s] friend, Teddy, would fall in love with [her].” Did Perry also fall in love with her? Did he tell her of his notions concerning the romantic light of bowling alleys? What actually happened to Perry that summer? For that matter, what happened to him that night? All the information so far granted or gathered has been filtered through a prose utterly, even slavishly subservient to the sensibilities of an embarrassingly lovestruck young man, dazed by a girl, by her smile and her perfume, and by the concomitant and irregularly recurring image of a faceless female body in what he imagines to be a crisp white uniform. Can such a prose be trusted? Was Perry angry that the small, dark girl found, if that’s the word, Teddy? And if there was such anger, did Teddy ever learn of it? Did Perry despise himself for his amorous vacillation, procrastination, shyness?
Somebody supposedly remarked to Hal, who would be killed the following summer in an automobile crash near the Delaware Water Gap, that Perry had been in Caldwell on, it was clear, the same fall afternoon that the young man, stupid with love, was picked up at the bus stop in that little town by the girl’s older sister, Helen. The small, dark-haired girl was also at the lake on that crisp, chilly weekend, but she was with two Upsala freshmen, Bob and Noah, complacent and insufferable identical twins destined for contented, more or less, lives, defined by endodontics, corporate law, and marital infidelities. She and Teddy had broken up; the young man, “our hero,” if you please, would soon break up with the girl of the bowling alley and beach and smooth tan.
But what on earth had Perry been doing in Caldwell?
He wished, for a long time afterward, that he could meet Perry again, bump into him somewhere, and explain. Explain? Explain what?
He went back to the lake years later, but he might as well have gone to Akron or Sunnyvale or Killeen. He stood outside a Radio Shack that had been the Blue Front. He stood there for an hour, smoking. Was he waiting for Perry? Maybe. Or Teddy? Or the magical girl in the white bathing suit? The bowling alley had also been torn down, and on its site was a buffet restaurant, Jack’s Pantry. Just as well.
This area of New Jersey was served by two bus lines, the DeCamp Bus Lines and the gray-and-white municipal buses of the Public Service.
It is always safe to poke fun at dentists, as the motion-picture business, in all its creative brilliance, well knows.
“Obviously, the author ‘well knows’ it, too.”
Perhaps Helen picked him up in a Chrysler station wagon: they still had wooden sides in 1948. Perhaps he made love to Helen in the back of the station wagon. Or maybe she drove them to a … maison de rendezvous.
“A maison de rendezvous? In Essex County, New Jersey?”
The begi
nner, bowling, looks somewhat endearing, but when shooting pool, he appears to be bumblingly incompetent, lost and abandoned and foolish. This proves that pool is a real game.
It is always safe to poke fun at bowling, as any fifth-rate stand-up comic knows. And when bowling won’t get a laugh, there’s always the toilet, humping, waitresses, and stupid girlfriends.
“It can be, kind folk, a veritable laff riot.”
If you have ever sojourned in Fort Hood, Texas, the chances are good that you whiled away many an evening in the town of Killeen.
“Your notions, Perry, concerning the romantic light of bowling alleys?”
“R equals two pi squared times em bee to the fourth power over lambda to the third power, lady.”
Costume parties
THE TAPIOCA WAS, LET’S ASSUME, WILDLY sweet in his dream, and the girl was smiling a lasciviously pure smile, although her face was not quite clear. She was wearing a crisp white uniform. The touch of her hand, the firmness and warmth of her thigh against his, the weight of her body on the bed, her quick and expert hand. She held a starched napkin for him to come into. She didn’t come back the next day nor the next and then his father came and took him out of the hospital, both eyes still bandaged.
They got into his father’s Cadillac, around them an early fall clarity of sound, and a sharpness to the light wind in the trees on quiet Parkside Avenue.
In the woman’s apartment, Connie, his father called her, he guided him to a chair at the kitchen table. Connie’s voice was something like the voice of the girl in the hospital. She gave him a 7 Up and he held the cold bottle, listening to sounds of lovemaking behind a closed door, whispers and small sighs, for maybe a half-hour, but then his father said, in a very harsh voice, that he wanted the goddamned furs back, did she think that he meant for her to keep them, just a dime-a-dozen skirt like she was?
They walked down the stairs, his father holding his arm and steering him carefully. They could both hear her crying behind the apartment door, but said nothing. The furs were soft and cool against his hand. There’s no need for your mother to know we stopped off, his father said, it’s just business. The kid got confused, but she’s a smart girl, went to Manhattan Marymount to be a dietician. She’s got a crackerjack of a sister.
He thought to ask his father if she worked, maybe, part-time at the hospital, but knew that it was stupid and that she didn’t. The girl at the hospital was sweet and understood how much he wanted her to touch him. Connie was a tramp. His father dialed the radio to some dance music. The furs smelled like fresh air and perfume, they smelled like women. So you want to swing by Nathan’s for a coupla hot dogs, eagle-eye? his father said, and squeezed his thigh.
Stories of promiscuity on the part of nurses and nurses’ aides in hospitals and clinics are, of course, legion, and some are absolutely true.
“How many?”
About 2.76333%.
Then the woman in the white silk pants suit at the bar says to him, “This is really too good to be true! Aren’t you the guy who had that wonderfully surprising and gratifying sexual experience in Caledonia Hospital in Brooklyn back in 1945? Well, I’m not that girl, but on the other hand, look at me!” [So it wasn’t Brooklyn Eye and Ear.]
Q. What is more boring than a costume party? And yet, here they are, “getting ready,” as the phrase has it, to go to one. He is a Filthy Capitalist, oh Jesus Christ spare us, with top hat, cigar, and bulky canvas bag adorned with a dollar sign; and his wife is a Bossy Nurse, help!, with huge horn-rimmed glasses, thick-soled shoes, and clipboard. When they get back home, he follows her into the bedroom, then holds her in his arms as tremblingly and self-revealingly as Melville’s Pierre first held Isabel. He lifts her white nylon skirt with sober passion, and she pushes her belly against him. “Oh, sweetheart, oh, sweetheart,” she says. She is terribly excited, as is he, and yet he says, looking directly into her dark eyes, “Don’t throw bouquets at me.”
This is sometimes known as putting the kibosh on things. It is followed by his wife’s:
“God! Let me get out of this damned uniform! How do those nurses wear these tacky things?”
All over for the nonce.
Stories of costume parties at which people actually do become other people are few and far between, but mostly true.
A. English Department meetings at any American university or college.
To get this young wife “out of [her] damned uniform” is not at all the same thing as having her undress.
Tu-whit, tu-whoo, jug-jug, and ding-a-ding.
The libertine’s hell
SHORTS AND DRESSES. AND SKIRTS AND blouses.
And shirts and slips and half-slips and camisoles.
And brassieres and panties and corsets and girdles and teddies.
And garter belts, sheer stockings, high heels.
Suits, evening gowns, slacks, jeans. Christ knows what else, or what they’re called. Dozens, scores, hundreds, thousands of each article of clothing, lacy and silky and soft and smooth and shining, mountains of the stuff, miles of it. Hats.
But not a single woman to be discovered in any one of these things, not one, anywhere. This, says Father Graham to himself, is the libertine’s hell, or should be, at least it’s mine. His eyes are looking at something that is not in the rectory, his eyes are glassy, yet frightened. The liquefaction of her clothes, he says, and moans. Help me, God, help me.
“O how that glittering taketh me!” O! O! O!
This “Father Graham,” surely the figment, the crude figment of a particularly diseased imagination, does not in any way represent the loving, serene, chaste, and paternal shepherd whom millions of the faithful have honored and will continue to honor as the true bulwark of Holy Mother Church: Joseph Cardinal Cullinane.
“O my God! I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because I have offended Thee, my God, Who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”
It is, perhaps, just as well that Father Graham has sublimated his tormenting desires into simple fetishes, since the parish is filled with women in their actual flesh.
Their flesh, he whispers, in the dark. Their sinful flesh!
Beauty Parade
AT FIFTEEN, DURING THE CRUSHINGLY slow months of the numbingly lonely vacations that his family spends at the lake, he discovers, one day, over at the Lang house, dozens of copies of Beauty Parade, dating back five years or so, leafs through the pages of big luscious women, all rich curves and swelling flesh pushing out of the tight, astonishingly abbreviated costumes that have not, surely, words adequate to describe them. And amid the sliding and mildewed piles of newspapers, magazines, junk statuary, empty whiskey bottles, fishing lures and spoons and hooks, sinkers and floats, and cartons, half-cartons, and opened packs of Lord Salisbury cigarettes, he learns to lust and to smoke.
Orville and Jackie Lang, old bachelor brothers, who allow anyone the run of their house and the raw, half-finished workshop behind it when they’re away at work, have unwittingly introduced this boy to the twin, darkly scintillant vices of self-abuse and smoking, two wondrous hells which he luxuriously inhabits. Orville owns a flat-bottomed rowboat, painted a bright, harsh, somehow sinful green, which is moored under the rusting footbridge at the end of the road leading to a small island, the keys to its padlock, along with its oars, just behind the door to the workshop. Each afternoon, all that thickly hot summer, our youthful lecher masturbates himself into nirvana at picture after picture of these utterly generous and unashamed, sensual women, who smile directly at him from out of their welter of lace and satin and elastic, of nylon and patent leather, then he smokes a Lord Salisbury, takes two more, and prepares to spend the balance of the afternoon rowing down the little river to the lake, where he drifts in its center, smoking his stolen cigarettes and listening to the voices and la
ughter of the young people, whom he does not know and whom he desperately envies, slide out to him in faint timbre from the far-off beach.
In three years’ time, he will fall in love with one of the girls who sat, that very summer, on that beach with her sister and mother, a girl whom he will meet through, somehow, a casual friend, Perry? He and this girl will often cross the footbridge to the deserted and overgrown island where, their young flesh sweating, they will drive each other mad in the dark. He will not comment to her on the rowboat, nor, of course, on the delirium of his lost afternoons, when, kneeling amid the hardly credible mountains of junk and trash at the Langs’, he showed his complaisant harem what he was made of! And in three years’ time, he will know the words for each item of underwear worn by those women, women who patiently wait for his unlikely return. The girl that he will adore will not, of course, wear the wondrously tawdry garments of his courtesans. Such is life.
And, in three years’ time, he will occasionally sit, in early twilight, with Orville, and accept a Lord Salisbury, even though he smokes Philip Morris. Jackie will emerge from the disaster of a house in a vast reek of Aqua Velva to climb into his black Chrysler convertible and start up the hill for a night of drinking and dancing with yet another graying widow who can, as Jackie always says, “ball that goddamned jack.” But he will be uncomfortable with Orville, and, soon, will stop passing the occasional hour or so with him altogether.
Little Casino Page 3
