The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels

by De Vries, Peter

  He still could not remember her married name. “Water-house, Weyerhauser, Winkleman,” he panted to himself as he galloped across the grass. He was now sure it began with a W. A Calendar of Events tacked to the bulletin board identified both the banquet and the speaker when the name Wurlitzer shot off the page at him. Harry T. Wurlitzer, of course, of the Wurlitzer and Wise advertising agency, was to speak on “Advertising—the Fifth Estate” at a dinner sponsored by the Department of Economics. Reservations were closed, but by pulling some wires Tattersall managed to scrounge up a pair of tickets, after hastily telephoning his wife to make sure she was agreeable to going. “You like to eat out,” he reminded her. Then he galloped homeward through the falling dusk.

  Sherry did everything he wanted. She left the cellar, where he had found her coping with a faulty washing machine, and flew effortlessly about the house checking on his clothes as well as her own. She had no problems and no complications. She was a miracle of amenability who gave Tattersall no cause for complaint, except for a sometimes irritating view that the sun rose and set on him. She was a bright finch of a woman without moods, or any lapses of animation save those ordained by fatigue or bad news, which would have been wearing were it not for a certain resilience that went with it, an instinctive recognition that other people’s tempos varied, that their natures periodically called for withdrawal or silence. His report that the speaker was married to an old flame into whom he had just run she took in stride, and made his curiosity her own, while sparing him hers.

  Their seats were naturally not very good. They were put at a corner table for ten, of which the other eight were a close-knit group unfamiliar to them and who, happily, paid them no mind. Their discourtesy soothed rather than riled Tattersall’s detestation of banquets. Lucy and Mayo, sitting together, were closer to the speakers’ dais, but by chance visible. Mellowed by a couple of cocktails and some dinner wine, Tattersall led his shimmering little wife over during coffee and presented her. He tried to give the term “classmate” a deliberately jocose connotation when introducing Lucy, by his laugh freely conveying implications of water picnics, of bottles of Chianti slowly consumed, of dormitories entered long after lights-out. “Why we’d …” Here Tattersall, who had drunk his share tonight, made a latticework of his fingers in a manner suggestive of boosting another through an open window in the small hours, glancing in spite of himself at Mayo as he did so. “Your dormitory’s been torn down, Lucy, but the river’s still there.”

  “And running downhill like all of us.”

  “Swell,” Sherry said, and exemplifying by her manner one of the adjectives which he forbade his students to use, “chipper,” towed him back to their table. Yes, she was chipper. He was married to a chipper woman, he observed as he tripped along in her wake. They resumed their seats in time to hear the president of the Economics Club rapping his water goblet with a spoon. The speeches were about to begin.

  Tattersall had correctly picked out Wurlitzer as the broad-shouldered man with the thinning blond hair seated on the toastmaster’s right. His pulse began suddenly to race when Wurlitzer rose to speak. Wurlitzer cleared his throat into his fist, and then grasped the lectern at diagonal corners in the manner of dynamic speakers everywhere. The thick-framed glasses he donned before beginning gave him a look of explosive efficacy even before he opened his mouth.

  “The proper study of mankind,” he began, “is still, as it always has been, man. Modern man has carried this injunction farther than all previous generations combined, but all the good it’s done him in the way of peace of mind. The discoveries of psychology, augmented by the illuminations of literature, have left us little to admire in ourselves,” he went on, as the fear gripped Tattersall that he was going to be good. “Self-scrutiny has certainly not conduced to complacency. It’s now reached a point where no self-respecting man has any use for himself.”

  Tattersall swallowed dryly as he tried to join in the general laughter, and he clapped with moist palms. Perhaps Wurlitzer had a writer. He seemed to be more glued to his manuscript than a man would have to be who had written it himself …

  “Why is all this? I think it’s because our self-concern has become too individual. Literature from Proust and Joyce on to nine out of ten current novels deals with the vertical exploration of interior man rather than his horizontal connection with others—the mankind Pope meant. Fiction is unilateral. Poetry, God knows, is unilateral. Even dancing, the first of the social rituals, is. Young people don’t even touch each other any more on the dance floor. They just bounce around in one another’s general vicinity. We hear a great deal today about the malaise of modern man …”

  Yes, Tattersall thought, and so let’s not hear any more about it tonight, shall we? Because I’ll tell you what the malaise of modern man is, Buster. The malaise of modern man is that he’s no goddam better than he ever was, while the slings and arrows haven’t let up none either. But go on. Give us the bit about not communicating. Get to that. It’s after ten.

  “Man has isolated himself because of the narcissistic turn his self-concern has taken. Advertising, I fear I must confess, is tarred with the same stick. Am I attractive, am I dainty, fresh all day, graying, carrying enough insurance, well enough groomed, or able to get into this or that club. Well, damn the clubs! What I want to know is, what’s happened to the front porch!”

  Swell. Great. Then this citizen was going to be all the ass he could have hoped, and in so doing restore to Tattersall some of his competitive dignity, so sorely damaged. On balance, he would come out looking better by comparison. Lucy mightn’t see it—why should she?—but Mayo would. This speech must certainly be bringing out the Gioconda smile.

  “The front porch is gone because we’ve all gone inside and shut the door, there to pursue the first person singular that has replaced the third person plural poets once meant by mankind.” The tie-in with advertising was so predictable that Tattersall wondered how he could possibly have failed to anticipate it. “We don’t really want anything to do with one another any more, and this precisely at a time when mass conformity is the bugbear. With the character in Edna Millay, we love humanity but we hate people.” Yes, he had a writer. He himself would not have known the source of the quotation, which was cropping up everywhere and without credit on the sweatshirts young people were slopping around in. “We don’t want anything to do with one another any more. Houses are no longer built with front porches. There’s the patio instead, in back, and screened from our neighbors the better to sip cocktails in solitude on it, or at best with a few chosen friends. The open, neighborly gemütlichkeit of yesteryear as typified by that institution known as the front porch is gone. The neighborhood is gone! …”

  Tattersall stole a glance at Mayo, who was known to slip into New York for weekends in the Village, and was rumored to smoke pot, sending back his own counterpart of the Gioconda smile: a deadpan telegraph to kinship no more in need of actual facial expression than of words. Overt amusement here was out: humor itself barred it. Taste did not smack its lips. It knew instinctively what was not fair game. Sensing all this, Tattersall leaned back to enjoy in a relaxed manner the half-hour of banality that lay ahead.

  The result was to overmellow him, and thus lay him open once more to disaster.

  The wish to square himself with Lucy had made him get over to the dinner, and it now motivated the close, even fulsome attention he paid her husband. He laughed at all his jokes, and in the serious portions hung on every word, sometimes going so far as to give curt nods of agreement, as if by way of silent “Bravos!”, always trusting that Lucy took note, though careful not to glance in her direction to see that she did, content that she could see him. Once in a while Wurlitzer gave cause for alarm, threatening again to be good, but the danger swiftly passed. This was a good bad speech, not a bad good one. “I think you found a better assortment of individuals on that front porch where nobody cared about status than you do now on that pernickety patio designed to make us see as litt
le as possible of the neighbors we do our damnedest to be as much as possible like!” There was another burst of applause here in which Tattersall gratefully joined. He continued to be big about it all by sitting spellbound through the peroration.

  “The kind of man who truly respects his neighbor will stand up to him when the occasion arises, and will let his neighbor see that he gives him the same right. We are now talking about pride, not vanity; character, not personality; individuality, not ego. And I say to you,” Wurlitzer went on, wagging a finger in the air, “that no man is worthy of the name, either personally or professionally, who has not at one time gambled everything, or will not when the need arises gamble everything—but everything—on what he knows to be right. Who has not the guts to go for broke on the win-or-lose, red-or-black spin of the wheel of fortune if that commitment is called for. Beware of safety, beware of security—and hang your ‘image.’”

  Just then there was a slight disturbance down the line of tables to Tattersall’s right—a clatter of dishes and a buzz of voices. He leaned forward, and craning his neck to look past the rows of intervening guests, sent a scowl in the direction of the offenders. “Shhh!” he even said. He then did glance over toward Lucy, but she had apparently not noticed either the commotion or the action taken on her husband’s behalf to quell it. Only Mayo did, and she lowered her eyes into her lap and smiled.

  Two

  Tattersall lost no time in trying to square himself with Mayo. He seized the first opportunity to rehabilitate his image in that quarter, now opened up against him like a second front. After all, he saw more of her than he did of Lucy.

  He caught sight of her running up the library steps the following Monday afternoon, her long legs flashing and her black hair bouncing on her shoulders, and decided to wait in the street for her to come out again. He was carrying a brown leather attaché case, filled, at the moment, with washing machine parts, and wearing a blue blazer with a white shirt open at the throat. An ascot had been removed and pocketed since leaving the house, in a moment of self-doubt. This was more Gioconda-phobia, which might be a name for the fear of being laughed at (or, what is worse, smiled at) especially by women. Even women fear the derision of their own sex more than that of men.

  No such vacillation, in any event, attended the contents of the attaché case. Tattersall made no bones about liking to tinker with his hands, of plain liking to do his own repairwork, whether of machinery or furniture. He had dismantled Sherry’s broken Kitchen King and was carting some of its smaller organs down to Mr. Tompkins’s sales agency, for scrutiny and possible replacement, doing so on foot since Sherry needed the car to take the wash to the coin laundry. He not only did not mind such errands. He enjoyed them. Like many husbands, Tattersall liked those aspects of domesticity that got him out of the house.

  The attaché case was heavy, and he set it down while he waited. He more or less hid behind a tree from which he could keep an eye on the library without being seen himself. He had decided to give it five minutes. If Mayo did not emerge by then it meant she had gone in to study, not merely to return or draw books. Five minutes did go by, but he gave it a few more. He was debating whether to light a cigarette when the door opened and she tripped down the stairs to the sidewalk. He snatched up the attaché case and ran across the street after her.

  “Well, good afternoon, Mayo,” he said, trying not to pant too heavily as he slowed to draw abreast of her, for she had settled down to a normal stride herself. “How did you like your uncle’s talk? I didn’t get a chance to see you afterward. I thought he did a bang-up job.”

  “It was all right as far as those things, you know, go,” she answered in her rapid, gliding whisper. “I just don’t know much about conformity.”

  Mayo’s speech was heavily studded with you-knows, a habit Tattersall found intensely irksome as a general rule. You-knowers, in fact, put him on edge. You waited for the next one, clocking them almost. Mayo you-knowed you to death. She even incorporated the expression into other expressions. “He’s a hail, you know, fellow well met,” she might have said of her uncle.

  “It’s what you expect at a dinner like that, I guess,” she whispered, hooking her leather bag over her shoulder. “I wouldn’t know. I never, you know, go to them.”

  Mayo had the tendency of many people, particularly young people of a certain stamp, of preening themselves on their ignorance of those areas of life familiarity with which would stigmatize them as commonplace. The realities of bourgeois existence fell especially in that category, gaps in their comprehension of which was deemed commendable, to be preserved if at all possible—almost a form of perception. She knew nothing about Big League baseball or Little League baseball, she knew nothing about the PTA, or about banquets at which establishment platitudes were rained on the unresisting.

  Then this was all he got for his pains. To be as much as told that he had rebuked a boor on behalf of balderdash of which she took an even dimmer view than he did. He longed to say it wasn’t a world he made either, to tell those watchfully innocent, gently ridiculing doe’s eyes, “Don’t give me that Mona Lisa gaze, my dear. I didn’t come out of the Dodge Rebellion owning two cars. This is a satchelful of built-in ob, you know, selescence that I’m at least waging a little war on by doing my own repair work, and not letting every contraption I buy give up the ghost when the manufacturer wants it to. Oh, no! What’s your generation doing?”

  The take-over generation spawned like smelts, they swarmed like bees. Why did they then not take over? Why had they not already done so? Were there still some few not quite of the voting age at which they could elect, as threatened, the representatives who would legalize not only pot but LSD itself? They would take that till they were forty, when they would be ready for Medicare and candidates for relief—guests from then on of the square society. Guiltily shoving the ascot farther down in his pocket, Tattersall changed the subject.

  “How did you like the music? The concert the other afternoon.”

  “All right of its kind. I just don’t think the quartet was very good. So the composer didn’t get a fair, you know, shake.”

  “There’s an even farther out concert this afternoon. The German composer Witkopf? He’s demonstrating some of his electronic music in the Student Center lounge. I’m on my way to it,” he fabricated. “Care to come along?”

  “Oh …” She frowned uncertainly at the Tower clock.

  “It starts at two, and it’s an easy place to sneak out of. I know, I’ve lectured there. We’ve just time to make it.”

  “We should certainly be out by half-past three,” Mayo whispered.

  Tattersall’s spirits rose as he struck out across the campus beside this enchanting creature, swinging the heavy briefcase as though there were nothing in it. He held a forefinger against the lid to secure it, since one of the catches was sprung and he was afraid the other might not hold the weight of all the hardware by itself. Here it was again, the eternal second chance, the opportunity to sparkle on a subject in which, music being a kind of hobby with him, he was passably versed, and as they hurried under falling leaves, yet through the warm November sunshine, he briefed his young charge on what they were about to hear.

  The innovation that awaited them in this instance was something known as “plaid music.” The coinage, Witkopf’s own, was intended to emphasize the separate but equal themes running at right angles to one another, or visualizable as such, like the patterns in a fabric. The result was best grasped by being imagined as music standing on end (like a plaid garment hung on a line), with a vertical theme, a melody in the sense of its being composed on notes going up and down the scale, interwoven with a sound principally harmonic, a single sustained noise varying in volume and depth but with little use for pitch, so that in its persistence it could be imagined as fixedly horizontal.

  “Or you can think of it as warp and woof,” Tattersall panted as they sprinted up the stairs to the lounge. “I don’t care. It’s more legitimate than might at firs
t appear. It’s basically quite rooted in tradition, when you think of arpeggios against held notes, say, which runs through the history of musical …”

  They slipped into the last two seats left, one of them available only after an elderly gentleman had removed his hat from it and set it on his lap. Tattersall sat with his thirty pounds of hardware on his. Repulski rose to introduce Witkopf, who in turn gave a short introductory talk about what he was driving at. The composition they were about to hear was a recording of a symphony of his made in Stuttgart the summer before. The comments being rather technical, Mayo drew a small notebook and pencil from her bag, and after a few moments of inconvenient scribbling on her knee, leaned toward Tattersall and whispered, “May I use your briefcase?”

  “What?” he said, looking away.

  “Your briefcase. To write on.”

  “There’s no paper in it,” he whispered back, pretending to misunderstand.

  “No, to write on. For a desk.” She wrote in the air to illustrate.

  Feeling for the third time in as many days that malevolent agencies were conspiring to keep the back of his neck roasted, Tattersall picked up the attaché case in both hands and transferred it from his knees to Mayo’s. Then he looked away again, trying to do so in a negligent manner, but he knew perfectly well she was turning to gape at him.

  “What in God’s name have you got in here?”

  “Another chapter of Oxenfelt’s novel.”

  An old lady in a black hat turned around to glare at them, the forerunner of many another scowl from various directions. These Tattersall welcomed, as they put a necessary end to Mayo’s interrogation. They all again concentrated their full attention on Witkopf.