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

by De Vries, Peter

  “You don’t think it’s too strong?”

  “Nah! For Pete’s sake, if a student can’t stand a little ribbing he just hasn’t any sense of humor, and shouldn’t be writing.”

  “You understand it’s parody.”

  “Of course I do. And a darn nifty one. Let me read some more. Have you got some more?”

  Nevertheless, Tattersall doctored the comment before returning the paper, in a manner calculated to soften it. He worked on it long and painstakingly, this time using preliminary drafts in order to get it as right as he could. In its original form it ended, “de deliberate confusion of reality wit illusion in de guy’s mind is most adroitly done.” He changed the period after “done” to a comma, and added, for there was room, “and presents a most effective use of the surrealist technique applied to fiction. You could be one of those successfully effecting a transfer of the Absurd from the theater to the novel.” And he changed the B− to a B +.

  He stood at his desk when he had handed it back to Mayo, after class, watching her walk out of the room and through the doorway into the corridor. She was halfway to the building exit when he saw her stop to read it. She stood a moment with her head down, doing so. Then she suddenly stiffened, squared her shoulders and marched rapidly away.

  “Maaw!” he bleated with a stricken sheep, throwing his head back. “Maaw!”

  Whenever he saw her in the next few days, he searched her face eagerly for some ameliorating sign, but it betrayed nothing. In averting her gaze to avoid his, as she seemed to, she appeared to be giving him a grade even farther below passing than he had feared—than a cold stare would have done. He got a few of those from the other students, but also a lot of good-natured laughs of appreciation from the less thin-skinned. But they didn’t essentially matter. And it came to Tattersall that, quite apart from the emotional turmoil he was going through, Mayo was one of those people, periodically encountered in the course of a lifetime, whose approval we must absolutely have. It had been her habit to stop occasionally at his desk after a classroom session, to chat of this or that or to air a point. Now she no longer did. “Maaw!” he silently bleated to himself every time she walked by and on out.

  At last he could stand it no longer. He ran to overtake her in the hall.

  “What did you think of my little effort, Mayo? I mean did you think it, you know, came off?”

  “I know you don’t think much of my work, Mr. Tattersall,” she answered, lowering her eyes to the books cradled in her arm and not slowing her pace.

  “That’s not true,” he said, pattering along at her side. “We all tend to exaggerate things. To fail to take them in the spirit in which they were meant. And just because this was done as a bit of burlesque … My wife …”

  Groaning savior, not that again.

  “Is she still away?”

  “Oh, my God, no! She’s back. Her mother hasn’t been at all well. And now she, poor thing, has to go visit her mother, because, believe it or not, Mrs. Tattersall’s grandmother is still alive at ninety—a victim of geriatrics!” he cried out in helpless indignation as he watched her stride down the stairs to the exit. It was only a moment that he thus struck a tableau of all dumb despair, all immedicable human pain and outrage, before again taking off after her. “What didn’t you like in particular about my little pastiche? My poor little taradiddle? Some of the other students were most—”

  She stopped, and they stood together in an impeding eddy of hurrying students as Mayo softly chided, “You must have realized how harsh it was by the fact that you changed it. The afterthought you put in was written with another pen, because the ink is different. So is the line that goes up and down in the plus sign. It was a B minus first.”

  “I see we’ve got to talk this thing out. Can you have lunch?”

  “I’ve had lunch. After all, it’s half past two. You must have eaten yourself.”

  He stood watching her pass through the revolving door and vanish down the walk. He was not sure what to think, or even what he was thinking. Perhaps he should say what he was feeling, since it was physical sensations, rather than thoughts, of which he was being dealt this numbing and contradictory jumble. Mingled with them was a suddenly unbearable curiosity about Mayo’s emotions—at the moment, of course, the critical factor. Had she a right to this extreme reaction, or was it the result of the same subjectivity that had all along been making him exaggerate his own plight? How did matters stand as of the moment? How bad was this, really? He reached wildly for his thermometer, but it was in the pocket of another coat.

  Four

  And so I thought it would be nice if we could all have dinner and get to know one another a little better,” Tattersall told the Wurlitzers.

  He was revising his tactics. He had decided to pull back from the second front, represented by Mayo Stiles, and shift his forces for a concentrated effort again on the first. This involved starting from scratch, of course; indeed it entailed a fresh hazard to the image he was trying to clear. Since it had been he who had taken the initiative, calling the Wurlitzers twice more to enlist their interest in such a foursome as had now materialized, the absurdity of its doing so in their uptown apartment was not lost on Tattersall. He was even momentarily the ass again, but only momentarily. Counterbalancing impressions were being swiftly mobilized to reverse the effect. Pre-dinner cocktail in hand, an arm hooked negligently around the back of his chair, he was doing his sociable best to make the Wurlitzers feel at home with him in this, to him, somewhat glacial duplex. It had been “done,” as poor Lucy had predictably put it, by a disciple of Mies van der Rohe. “And that crowd think less is more, as you know,” Wurlitzer said. Yes, Tattersall knew, and also that the aphorism originated with Browning, and not with the crop of architects who had merely appropriated it for a rallying cry. It killed him not to be able to correct his host, but he could not have done so without incurring a graver charge than that of ignorance.

  So principally, now, he was getting on with the business of making Lucy see after all and in spite of everything what she had passed up for some rather wide neckties and some rather wet cigars. But in courting Lucy all over again, he had also to sell himself to Wurlitzer. The twain were one flesh, and would discuss him in their bedroom after he was gone. He told Wurlitzer how much he had enjoyed his speech, particularly the sections lamenting the passing of the old front porch. He, too, had noticed the disappearance of that institution with all its implicit values from the American scene. He was getting quite a front porch himself, Wurlitzer.

  “These kids today,” Tattersall said, to assure his forty-year-old host that he considered him a contemporary though he was almost as much older than Tattersall as Tattersall was than the students toward whom he so graciously viewed them as sharing an age disadvantage. “They do mean all their protests, they mean them a hundred percent. They’re a lot more anti-bourgeoisie than we were. But all the same, it’ll be interesting to watch,” he added with an engaging laugh as he adjusted his hammerlock on the Scandinavian chair upon which he had been deposited, “when they get their fill of alienation and cut for the establishment bread.”

  “You make yourself out quite a fuddy-duddy, Hank,” Wurlitzer said, returning his laugh. His ruddy face beamed up clear along his scalp, which showed through his dwindling yellow hair. Always chunky, judging from college photographs on the piano showing him bursting his blazers even then, the decades of which Tattersall had so amiably knocked off one were expanding him swiftly, though a faithful regimen of workouts at a mid-town athletic club kept the fat to muscle as far as possible. Tattersall had heard that he liked to play Santa Claus at office Christmas parties. He was said to enter wearing a St. Nicholas costume and shouldering a sack, from which he drew the bonus checks for the year and flung them to the employees in turn as he called out their names. This struck Tattersall as having a faintly sinister, even sadistic, tinge. He was sorry he had thought of it since it cast a damp on his determination that they make an evening of it with th
e girls and hit it off as one Joe to another.

  “Well, I hope I’m not a fuddy-duddy, but I don’t regard myself as any stormy petrel either,” he said.

  “Of which the academic world has its share, evidently, Hank.”

  “What do you mean, Harry?”

  “Have you noticed how at odds your scholastic community is with our foreign policy, just for one thing? Obviously the health of a democracy depends on dissent, but they’re way out of line with public opinion this time, me buckaroo. I mean conspicuously more than in recent memory. Now I think in recent times, say two generations, you’ve had a public opinion that’s fairly liberal. Academic thinking is now to the left even of that. Therefore it stands to reason that it’s radical.”

  “Then I must be radical too, because I’m opposed to our foreign policy.”

  “Oh, let’s don’t get into politics so early,” Lucy prettily wailed, with a glance in Sherry’s direction.

  It was then that Lucy’s habit of frowning when she laughed came back to him with a jerk. In a recent dream he had cast her as a Circuit Court judge rapping for order with a croquet mallet, wearing that expression as she entangled herself in juridical robes. Many women knit their brows when they laugh, but they are women above a certain income and social level. A peasant housewife could not be imagined with such an idiosyncrasy. This voyeurism was presently transferred to his wife. Sherry’s oblivion to any menace lurking in the turn the conversation had taken recalled again the question at what point innocence ceased to be commendable, or indiscriminate deference to one’s husband. Her thinking the sun rose and set on him, when he had his own number, gave him a fresh twinge of vexation. As for Wurlitzer, his talk continued such a predictable rehash of what “the business community” thought, as against the “intellectual community,” that by the time they were through dinner and into their brandies all Tattersall could think of was how he’d like to work for this clod, just long enough to show him what “impractical” intellectuals could do in a jungle to whose rigors they were thought unequal. It was in this spirit that he tossed off his idea for the commercial.

  They had just caught a television show handled by the Wurlitzer and Wise agency, of which the advertisements featured a chorus of singing and dancing soup cans famous for scurrying into line just in time to spell out the name of the product. Wurlitzer had shut the set off with some murmured notation about planned improvements. Tattersall was lolling back in his chair with his legs crossed. All the good food and wine, served by an immaculate maid, gave him a pleasantly blurred sense of having wandered into some kind of power structure whose criteria it might be amusing to pit himself. Borrowing a mannerism from a sybaritic acquaintance given to gesturing with his feet, he twitched a toe in the direction of the Magnavox and said, “I’ve had a notion for a series of commercials for that thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “That one. The television medium.”

  “We’re always looking for new ideas, Hank.”

  They were all ears, and also all eyes as he swirled the brandy in his snifter and took a sip before beginning.

  “Are you tired of detergents that never get your wash really white? Light up a Salem.”

  They were if anything even more attentive. He had them in his grip, there was no doubt about that. They waited for him to go on. Lucy, leaning forward on a white leather hassock, or pouf, with her elbows on her knees and the fingernails of one hand along her teeth, was typical of their breathless regard.

  “Are you sick of the performance of your present car? Does it burn so much oil you’re beginning to think the damn thing is part Diesel? Is there so much sludge in your crankcase you can hear the bearings groan inside it? Pour yourself a drink of Cutty Sark, the man’s Scotch. Or have a Pepsi. Or a stick of Juicy Fruit, or a glass of Manishewitz wine,” he continued sharply, like a teacher to a classroom full of dolts. “Whatever the sponsor would be. The whole thing is a non sequitar, you see,” he continued, as though threatening to explain even what that meant if they did not shape up.

  You could have heard a pin drop. He slid up in his chair and took another drink of the brandy. The fingers of his free hand had crept to his inside breast pocket, where they felt along the tops of the pen and pencil to the sickroom thermometer clipped there.

  “The two things have no connection, don’t you see. The whole thing has no bearing on the product what … so … ever. It cuts through the humbug about solutions by honestly admitting that there are none, in the end, and in that respect I suppose you could call it Existentialist, or the commercial of the Absurd. The plug, at last, has come of age.”

  Wurlitzer did not seem to be looking Tattersall in the eye. Rather he was directing his gaze at his head, where dwelt such thoughts. In other words, none other than the teeming and fecund old coco. Our greatest natural resource. Tattersall resumed running it up the flagpole, trusting they would not make it necessary for him to point out that his influences were Beckett and Ionesco. His arms and legs twitched and flew in all directions.

  “You would show the woman with the husband’s work pants and their irremediable stubborn stains, or the oven no scouring powder gets lamb-fat spatter out of. Or the man with the mountain of bills no loan company has managed to get him out from under in conveniently arranged installments, or the flashlight with inferior batteries that he’s sick of, and then wham”—he smacked his palms together, shooting one hand two or three lengths ahead of the other—“you hit them with the unexpected switch. There is nothing to be done about these things in any final sense. They are simply the cares that infest the day. They are part of the human condition. So have a smoke, or a snort, or a Peter Paul Mounds, goddam it!”

  “I understand,” Wurlitzer said, sympathetically. He was not unimpressed at all. His face expressed that gravity professionals experience when confronted with an original concept calling for an abrupt readjustment of their entire mode of thinking. “It’s fabulous. Of course it requires a sophisticated sponsor. I mean somebody who can take something heretical and run with it. And has humor. That’s a lot of specifications. Sponsors who meet them are few and far between. For every Avis and Benson and Hedges there’s a thousand of the other kind. Because this goes a step beyond just kidding the product. It kids everything, even the medium. Even the art form itself. It’s not just avant-garde. It’s positively …”

  “Nihilistic?” Tattersall said, sensing Wurlitzer to be groping for a word.

  “Yes. It’s nihilistic. It’s Existentialist, if you will. How the hell did you ever think of that, Hank?”

  Tattersall shrugged and murmured something modest. He knew that Lucy was watching him with some version or degree of the awe prolonged in Wurlitzer’s regard. Sherry smiled with her perpetual pleased deference. She would be wearing the same expression if he had laid an egg.

  “Do you toss off ideas like this all the time?” Wurlitzer asked. “If so I can see a great future for you in the advertising game, God forbid.” He now did laugh, and, throwing Lucy a glance, jerked his head at Tattersall. “Put him in with crazy Gascoyne. What a fabulous team they’d make. He’s our far-outer,” he explained to Tattersall, who nodded. “He believes in an irrational universe too, which expands and contracts at intervals of, if I’m not mistaken, eighty-two billion years. How much do you want for this brainstorm?”

  “You’re welcome to it,” Tattersall said, flinging a hand carelessly into the air.

  “Well, any time you get tired of teaching.”

  The evening was like a tonic that exhilarated his teaching. He positively shimmered in class. He lectured brilliantly, especially to the advanced group. He devoted several sessions to humor, which many of them seemed to be writing, however black. He discoursed on the Aristotelian view of laughter as being provoked in man by something that falls just short of that which would have excited pain, and emphasized the perilous line at which the law of diminishing returns sets in and amusement is reversed—or rather goes on to its reverse.

&
nbsp; “And so we see that comedy deals with that portion of our suffering that is exempt from tragedy,” he concluded. “For with what does humor deal save with that which isn’t funny. Or at least isn’t funny at the time: broken bones, broken machinery, bad food, hangovers. Husbands. Wives. Brats. There is no comic mileage in good health, an excellent dinner, harmonious unions and well-behaved children.”

  Their pencils flew. Not a word was to be missed. Except in the case of Mayo. She either sucked her pencil or used it in a curious flamboyant manner about which his suspicions were confirmed when he could manage to sidle around for a closer look at her notebook. She was doodling.

  “For one cheek of this old world is always in shadow whilst the other twinkles in full sunlight,” he continued undaunted, passing her desk as though he had seen nothing. “We no less than the stars in their courses swing in our eternal orbit of contradictions: love and hate, hot and cold, birth and death, yes and no. This principle of contrariety is built into the very bricks of the universe. It whizzes in the merry molecules, it boils in the unthinkable vats of galactic space. Peer into the microscope and you will find it. Gaze out through the telescope and it is there. If you take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth, lo, it is there. You eat it and you drink it, you sneeze it and you sweat it. Socrates rightly said that the talent for tragedy was the same as the talent for comedy. Tragedy and comedy have a common root, whose name at last I think I know. Desperation. A man with his secretary in trouble is funny, if he shoots her it is tragic, but he is scarcely less desperate in the one case than the other. Mirth and grief have a common manifestation, the convulsion, and of course they share your tear ducts, like good neighbors sharing a well. This is the army of unalterable law, standing, rank on rank, behind us no less than behind Prince Lucifer himself in starlight. The whole cosmos is a contradiction balanced as delicately as a stick on a clown’s nose. The thing anything is most closely wedded to is its opposite. The relativity scientists of the day tell us that the quality that most nearly resembles Everything is—Nothing. That is why this life is always half promise and half threat. It is like Walter Cronkite giving us fair notice that he will be back with more news in a moment …”