Herman Wouk - Don't Stop The Carnival

by Don't Stop The Carnival(Lit)

  The governor and his wife soon came strolling in. Paperman hurried to them, dragging along the Yonkers girl, and took a glass of punch with them. The governor agreeably toasted the success of the Gull Reef Club, and an end to water shortages. Most of the guests knew who the skinny grizzled Negro in the black suit was, but few had met him. Paperman began introducing the governor, a handshaking line formed, and Sanders responded with the affable grace of any politician. This novelty put the party into high gear. Stragglers came crowding in from the bar and the dining terrace to shake hands with the governor of Amerigo. He sealed his little triumph by asking the Yonkers girl to dance, and wobbling off in a stiff rickety meringue to loud applause. This put Mrs. Sanders into Paperman's arms. She danced clumsily, her eyes darting about in amused curiosity at the guests, the poster, and the tarpaulin. "This place has a real nutty charm, you know? I gave friend husband holy hell about your pregnant chambermaid," she said. "I mean I pointed out in other words that if the best hotel on the island gets closed down by an idiotic female bureaucrat who just feels like making trouble, that won't look too good either when Interior finds out. I guess maybe that penetrated."

  She saw the sailors, standing in a corner by themselves. She said it awakened her old USO hostess blood, and she went over and asked one of them, a tall, powerful Negro boy, to dance with her. He hung back, grinning in embarrassment, but his friends, thrilled by this gesture of the governor's lady, pushed him into her arms. Later Paperman saw Mrs. Sanders dancing one by one with the other sailors, to all appearances having a fine time. Sanders himself made a shadowy withdrawal. After a while he just wasn't there.

  Norman asked various lady guests to dance, and in time the one truly good-looking girl at the Reef, a tall skinny blonde, with slanting brown eyes ringed in black paint, was in his arms. She had been posing on the Club grounds and in scenic spots of the island in breath-stopping bikinis and sun clothes, for a bald gnome of a fashion photographer. The man was clearly indifferent to her, except as an object to put on film; he emerged from under the black drape of his camera to push her naked limbs here and there like a dummy's, while men gathered to gape and envy. This girl at work, striking her angular poses, was as solemn as though she were doing algebra. Norman had noticed her, of course, but in his driven state he had never even bothered to find out her name. He now learned that it was Delphine. She had drunk a lot of punch, and she treated Norman with instant marked warmth. She knew of his friendship with Dan Freed. Obviously she thought him a man of glamour, and Norman perceived almost at once that something was doing here. In the Broadway argot of the moment, Delphine was a "swinging chick"; that is, an unfettered sort, reasonably available for fornication.

  This discovery delighted him less than it might have some years earlier. Nowadays he found swinging chicks a bit oppressive. There was little excitement in conquering an easy girl; at his age it was a stale small chore. With the onset of middle-aged health problems, moreover, the question as to who his dirty or diseased predecessors might have been loomed large. Most of all-though this was not the point he dwelled on-Norman no longer had quite the energy to service a swinging chick.

  The effect Delphine had on him was to make him think of Iris. Why wasn't she at the party? Norman thought he would just go and have a look in the Pink Cottage. He turned Delphine over to a hot-handed bachelor with a peeling red nose, who had been following her around the dance floor like a bloodhound. He borrowed Church's raincoat, swallowed another glass of punch, and ran out into the heavy rain.

  The Pink Cottage was dark. As Paperman came to the door he heard growling and snarling; and the hurled thuds of the dog's body against the door indicated that he was unchained. It was a stout door, but Paperman reversed his steps and was leaving hastily when Iris's sleepy voice called, "Anybody out there:1 -Meadows, for Christ's sake, shut your big face. -Who's there? -See stupid, it's nobody. You were dreaming. Shut up! I'm trying to sleep."

  Paperman shouted, "Iris, it's me, it's Norman."

  "Norm? Are you out of your mind, wandering around in this Weather?"

  "I want you to come to the party. I miss you."

  "You sound drunk. Go away, will you? I look unspeakable."

  "Have you got on your bat ears?"

  He heard her laugh. "Just about. Wait a second, Norman. I can't go yelling through a door in a storm."

  Paperman huddled under the streaming overhang, listening to the rich pleasing gurgle of water down the spouts. The entrance light snapped on and the door opened a crack.

  "Still here? Come in for just a second and be cured of me for good. Shock treatment."

  She wore her green silk robe, her hair was close-tied in a net, her face was pink and oily, and her eyes seemed smaller and less brilliant without cosmetics, but she looked desirable enough, Norman thought. Only one red-shaded floor lamp was lit. Meadows crouched in the cone of light, ears cocked, tongue flickering over his nose, curses rumbling in his throat.

  "My God," she said. "You're half-drowned."

  Norman dashed the rain from his face. "Listen, come on to the party."

  Iris yawned. "Are you crazy? It would take me two hours of hard labor to make myself fit to be seen. And for what?"

  "Don't be difficult. Put on lipstick and some powder and a dress. We're having fun up there."

  She shook her head, yawning and yawning. "I just took two sleeping pills. You trot yourself back up there and dance some more with Reena Sanders." She grinned at him and wagged a finger in front of her nose. "Spies. I've got spies. Surprised you, didn't I? Heh heh."

  "Were you having dinner on the terrace? I didn't see you."

  "Oh, no, you were too busy convulsing His Excellency and the first lady. Cute, isn't she?" Iris yawned again. "I'm about to pile up on this floor in a heap of old bones. Anything I can do for you first? Wanna drink?"

  Norman buttoned up the raincoat. "Well, if you're full of happy pills, it's no use arguing. I'm off to the Thousand Steps."

  "You're off where?" Iris's heavy dimming eyes opened wide and glistened at him.

  He told her about Miss Buckley and Esm‚. She shook her head groggily. "You're cuckoo, I swear. How much champagne have you had? Don't you dare go sloshing around on those steps tonight, do you hear! Don't you dare! Go back up to the hotel and get stoned- It'll do you good."

  "Iris, if Immigration doesn't renew those bonds-"

  She shook a fist at him. "You're not going up to the Thousand Steps, Norman Paperberg! I mean Paperman. Jesus, what a name. Listen, Arnaranthe does sewing for me. We talk. We're real old pals. I'll track down your Esm‚ myself, first thing in the morning. Leave it to me." Her voice was becoming thick and trailing off. She put her arms around his neck. "Promise? No Thousand Steps?"

  He embraced her soft body in the smooth silk robe. Iris was no photographer's object like Delphine; she had the blurred used figure of thirty-nine; but she was an attractive woman, not a swinging chick. She yielded against him, inert, sagging, heavy. "Don't you go raping me now, you unprincipled cad," she murmured. "I'm dead to the world. It'll be-it'll be-necrophilia."

  The cover was off the divan, the pillow was crumpled, and the thin blanket was thrown back. He had to lead her only a few steps. The crouched dog did not interfere, but the bright brown eyes never left him. She let Norman take off the robe, moving her arms with drowsy limpness, like Hazel in her baby years. Iris's gauzy, peach-colored short nightgown made him regret her remark about necrophilia. It had put him on his honor. He tucked her into bed, turned out the light, and when she reached a hand toward him with a meaningless mutter, he leaned over and kissed her once. Then he went out into the whipping rain.

  3

  The party was in a jolly roar. A surpassingly noisy business was going on at the far end of the lobby. Two sailors held a long stick parallel to the ground, and a line of guests, sailors, and Kinjans were dancing under it face upward, or trying to. This "limbo" had been in progress for some time, for the stick was low, and most of the white peo
ple who attempted to wriggle under, with knees bent and spines arched back-Ward, were sprawling one by one on their backsides, each time raising fresh bawls of mirth. The Kinjans were undulating beneath the pole without trouble, and two of the sailors also edged under, less fluidly than the natives but with practiced speed. The star of the antic, however, was certainly Delphine. Her dress, a tight beige linen sheath, allowed little room for the necessary knee work. The swinging chick solved this difficulty, when her turn came, by sliding her skirt up on her hips; and as she went inching under the stick, head and body thrown back, legs bent double at the knee and spread apart, she displayed to one and all her naked thighs clear up to their natural junction, imperfectly veiled by a wisp of pink nylon. She passed the barrier to a cheer, and shook down her skirt, only to raise it again in a minute or so to repeat the performance under the lowered stick. The sailors and guests, of course, were goggling and applauding, the women hardly less than the men. But the Kinjans glanced uneasily at each other, and mostly averted, their eyes from Delphine's free show.

  It was a new sensation for Norman Paperman to be ashamed of the white race. Whatever one might say of the Kinjans-and he had already endured much from their taciturn primitiveness and odd ways-their modesty was austere. The one Negro girl left in the limbo line, a Reef waitress, was thrusting her full orange cotton skirt far down between her thighs as she took her turn; moreover, as Delphine made another pass, Norman saw this girl wrinkle her nose, whisper something to a Negro boy, who was the best dancer of the lot, and walk off with him.

  Norman went to the punch bowl and drank three glasses, one after the other. All at once, returning from Iris's cottage to the rollicking party, he had been hit hard by loneliness, by homesickness, by certainty that his ownership of this grotesque hotel in the Caribbean, where a crowd of strangers were jigging, writhing, haw-hawing, and guzzling to crude music, was an insanity. Norman Paperman had in his time taken part in many a steamy brawl, and had seen much lewder displays than Delphine's. Unmistakably, he knew now that that part of his life was over. He was as disgusted by the chick, almost, as if he were his own synagogue-going father; and this knowledge threw a chill of evening on his once jocund Broadway spirit.

  But the champagne worked. His mood hovered in blue gloom for a few minutes, while he looked at the cavorting, sweaty dancers and thought of the vanity of all things, the frailness and brevity of human existence, and such liverish profundities. Then, slowly but definitely, the world-or at least the lobby of the Gull Reef Club-began to assume a brighter hue. Paperman drank some more, and-why, there was the good old world again, looking quite all right. In fact, this was a hell of a party, and Paperman regretted that the limbo was finished, and that Delphine was now doing only a mild twist with the red-nosed bachelor, to a most inexpert whumping of the steel drums. He was restored to a normal, even hearty, interest in a display of her underwear, but alas, the moment was gone. He gulped another glass for good measure, and asked one of his waitresses to dance.

  His memories of what happened after that were unclear. He did a lot of dancing, and drank a lot of champagne, and said a great many enormously funny things, because everybody he talked to kept laughing and laughing, and he was continuously laughing too. This was the first time since his purchase of the Club, he realized, that he was having any fun at all. The party was a marvelous idea, he decided, and he'd have a champagne party in the lobby once a week, water shortage or no. He danced with Reena Sanders, and while he couldn't remember anything he said, the governor's exotic lady laughed so hard she could scarcely keep time to the music. At one point, he was dancing the meringue with Hassim, in the center of a ring of clapping and cheering merrymakers, and the effete Turk in his orange slacks, far from being offensive, struck him as a killingly amusing parody of a fat lady. There was even another limbo after a while, and he got into line and fell flat on his back the first time he tried to go under the pole, which caused a new climax of hilarity. Delphine generously showed her underpants time and again, with the roguish zest of a little girl playing Doctor, and some of the less appetizing women guests were emboldened to imitate her; and so all was laughter, champagne, jokes, shouting, and voyeur delights, when the tarpaulin tore loose.

  It was a total surprise. One moment there was the limbo, and a gay joking crowd; the next moment a writhing brown wall sailed across the lobby, battering down in its path musicians, steel drums, guests, chairs, and both punch tables in a bedlam of shrieks, clatters, yells, and the crashings of overthrown glass. The huge canvas fetched up against the opposite wall and collapsed, still flapping and tumbling about, and the wind and warm rain of a tropical thunderstorm came boiling into the lobby, through the hole that had once been a wall, and through the chaos and ruin of the old dining room. All of Akers' building materials -the windows, the door frames, the plywood panels, the washstands, the crates of tiles, the Venetian blinds-lay in toppled, tangled, sodden heaps. Some crates had burst open. There appeared to be forty toilet seats scattered about, and a thousand brass doorknobs, and crisscrossing in all directions were unrolled fluttering yards and yards of streaked soggy red-and-silver wallpaper. The wind, coming in gusts of perhaps thirty miles an hour, clattered the aluminum blinds, careened the ply. wood panels, and pelted the victims of the tarpaulin in the lobby-who were picking themselves up and dazedly staring around-with flying rain, green leaves, paper scraps, and wet excelsior.

  The destruction and the mess went almost unnoticed at first, because the tarpaulin, piled up against the far wall and trailing halfway across the lobby, was continuing to writhe in a peculiar way not ascribable to the wind. There were several lumps working under it, and the lumps were making muffled, discontented sounds.

  Church, the sailors, and Paperman went to the rescue, and after much hauling and heaving of the incredibly heavy, soaking brown canvas, they liberated three guests, including the red-nosed bachelor and the Yonkers schoolteacher, who was laughing and crying at once. Then the tarpaulin began to work again and out crawled a very small sailor in filthy wet whites. On his hands and knees, peering around with a glassy smile, he said in a young Southern voice, "Jesus, Ah never did see such a wing-ding. Is the bar still open?"

  This brought a shout of laughter from most of the guests. They had drunk enough to regard mishaps and destruction as funny. Norman, who had been laughing almost without cease since the tarpaulin's brief mad flight, was inspired to yell, "You bet it's open! Everybody into the bar! All drinks on the house, from now till dawn!"

  With a cheer and a rush, the entire party went funnelling into the bar, musicians, guests, waitresses, sailors; Mrs. Sanders too, arm-in-arm with Paperman and Hassim, the three of them bawling in raucous song,

  "Carnival is very sweet Please Don't stop de carnival-"

  Church tactfully closed the doors on the lobby and the old dining room: on the crumpled tarpaulin, the overturned furniture, the broken glass glinting from every tile of the wet slippery floor, the piled-up tangled wreckage of unused building materials; on the wind, still coming in gusts to knock and slide things around; and on his red-lettered sign -Champagne Si, Agua No-swimming in mid-lobby in a puddle of blown-in rain.

  "Carnival is very sweet Please Don't stop de carnival," sang Paperman, and the Turkish homosexual, and the black governor's lady, as the door closed on them.

  It rained all night, and the water level in the cistern kept rising. Norman was not thinking about such matters. Mine host was having a good time at last.

  4

  He did not in the least recall going to bed, but obviously he had, since he woke up in bed; in his own bed, on the second floor, under the slanting ceiling of hyperthyroid roses. He woke with what presented itself at once as the worst headache of his life, a headache like a big object with many razor-sharp edges inside his skull; with a filthy taste in his mouth; with a terrible quick pounding of his heart; with a scary numbness running all down his left arm to cold trembling fingers; and with a general sinking sense of ill-being, compared
to which death seemed no great threat. He had a champagne hangover. He knew, he had known for thirty years, that this was the worst of all hangovers; what on earth had possessed him to drink all that mediocre champagne doctored and made deadlier with grenadine and sugar? The very memory of that taste drove a wave of nausea through him.