Bill and Mary Gass gave their annual New Year’s Eve party. Steve, who’d expressed such astonishment weeks before when I’d shown up at his house in my tux, was in a tuxedo of his own. We were the life of the party. Or our clothes, our clothes were.
Jarvis Thurston was telling about the time he’d had to rent a tuxedo.
It was his senior year at Weber State College. He’d put the yearbook together, was the fellow in charge of all the nature passages, all that stuff on the seasons—autumn with its smell of falling leaves, spring with the buds and the sap, Jack Frost nipping at your nose. . . . He was valedictorian that year, too, and had, as part of the honor, as part of his duties, been chosen to escort the school’s beauty queen to the big graduation dance, not just to squire her but to signal that the dance could begin by promenading with her down this long flanking lane of the Court of Love and Beauty—past the deans and professors, the alums and parents and invited guests, past the fraternity boys and sorority girls and all the graduating seniors for whom he and Miss Weber State College were surrogates—and inviting her to dance the first dance with him in full view of a considerable part of the population of the state of Utah.
Now, he wasn’t too sanguine about a lot of this. A few things bothered him. For one thing, he’d always been a little nervous around beautiful women. For another, he was alarmed by all that ceremony. “You’d have thought it was a West Point marriage,” he said. “Crossed swords, that sort of thing. We had rehearsals for the marching part, for the bowing and scraping, but I wasn’t much comforted. Because the other thing was, I didn’t know how to dance.”
But he was the valedictorian. The fuss and the ceremony, the pomp and the circumstance, came with the territory.
Anyway, he got fitted for his tuxedo, the first one he’d ever worn, he said. He didn’t know how to do a bow tie, he said. He said he didn’t understand the accessories.
He was a nervous wreck, but everyone kept reassuring him he’d do fine, and he picked up his tuxedo the day of the dance and got suited up in plenty of time just to make sure, and all his friends in the boarding house were very supportive. They tied his tie for him and fixed his studs in place and did his handkerchief and fitted it into his breast pocket and told him how swell he looked in a dinner jacket. One of them even remembered about the corsage and rushed off at the last minute to get one for the beauty queen before the shop closed.
They kept up this cheerful pepper talk and reminded him that most of the things folks worry about, the awful things they think are going to happen to them, the faux pas and slip-ups, really never do.
They were very kind, he said. If it hadn’t been for them he didn’t think he could even have thought of going through with it. They not only stood by him, he said; they stood with him. Because he wasn’t going to take a chance on wrinkling anything important by sitting down. “It was a lesson, I tell you.” Jarvis told us, “in how nice people are.”
An hour before the dance he called the beauty queen up and told her he had to cancel.
“That was the word I used, ‘cancel.’ I told her, you know, that it had nothing to do with her, that I’d voted for her myself. It was the dancing, I said. That just wasn’t me. It was the dancing; I couldn’t dance. I was from Utah. I grew up on ranches. If it’d been anything else, if I could do it on horseback, I told her, I could handle it.”
That was better than forty years ago and he hasn’t worn a tuxedo from that day to this. He says, “I’ve had my chances, of course, but I figure I disgraced the uniform and lost the right.”
And maybe that’s the meaning of the tuxedo, too. Not just to hide, not just to play the gigs of class or money, or watch the ladies or practice the trends but, from time to time, to show the flag—of the civil, of the civilized, bound in the secular, civic glad rags and wraps of honor.
THREE MEETINGS
I met him, of all places, in western Kentucky in the, of all seasons, summer of, of all times, 1941. I was curator of a highway zoo and snake show gasoline-station complex on U.S. Bypass 97 eleven miles west of Humphries. I don’t flatter myself that Vladi stopped because of the wonders collected there. There was a gas war and Dmitri had to use the Men’s. (Nor am I showing off when I use the pet name. A gracious and democratic man, Vladi instructed me to call him thus not five minutes after we had met.)
You know how it is with these highway zoos. The specimens are scrawny and seem somehow sideshow, freakish reductions, bestial lemons teetering on the brink of some evolutionary misstep. Well there’s good reason, but it isn’t what you think. You mustn’t be too hasty to blame the curator. Nobby understood this. (Never a formal man, he instructed me to call him thus not ten minutes after we had met.) He knew the debilitating effect of the tourists on the fauna. It is the stare they bring, a glazed gaze between boredom and boldness on them like pollen, like the greasy dust of the last state line, like fruitflies and parasites on the oranges and plants between Arizona and California. What can you do? You can’t have them wash their faces first. It’s a ruinous hypnotism, this wear and tear of the eyes. With their fixed look they can intimidate even the healthiest animal and over the course of a season actually impoverish it. (I’ve seen the rich oriental rug of a snake’s second skin turn to a moldy scab under this gaze.)
I accompanied Boko through the menagerie—not one to stand on ceremonies, he ordered me call him after this fashion not seventeen minutes after we met—and watched as he grew sad contemplating my failing beasts. Every so often he would shake his head and punctuate his unhappiness with lush Cyrillic tch tchs that would have been beautiful had I not guessed at the torment behind them. When we had toured all the corrals and pens he looked significantly toward a woman tourist with New Hampshire plates who was depressing my porcupine.
“There’s your trouble,” he said.
“I know, but what can I do? It can’t be helped.”
“Have them wash their faces first,” he said gently.
“That’s brilliant. It just might work, Boko.”
“More rasp on the k sound. It takes a strong h.”
Struck by the incisiveness of his recommendation, I serendipitously offered to show him my butterfly cases. (I did not know who he was at this time, but there is something in a curator’s temperament or even in a caretaker’s or guard’s that makes him always keep something special in reserve that the public never sees. This is universally true. Remember it the next time you visit the top of the Empire State Building or go out to see the Statue of Liberty. We don’t necessarily do it for the tip, mind.) It was a standard collection made somewhat exceptional by the inclusion of two rare specimens—the Bangelor Butterfly and the highly prized Lightly Salted Butterfly.
I could see that Bozo was very excited. “Where did you come upon this?” he asked animatedly and pointed with a shaking finger to the Lightly Salted Butterfly. “I have searched in Pakistan and sought in Tartary. I’ve been up the slopes of Muz Tagh Ata and down Soputan’s cone. I have stood beneath Kile’s waterfall and along the shores of Van. I must know. Where?”
“In the meadow.”
He revealed who he was and gave me his card and said that if there was ever anything he could ever do for me I should look him up.
And that was the first meeting.
I saw him a second time in Venezuela after the war. We had met in Cair at a boatel, or marina, where we had both gone independently to be outfitted for an expedition up the Orinoco in search of the most fabulous and legendary creature in the entire species—the Great Bull Butterfly. (The highway zoo had failed due to the construction of a new interstate and a settlement of the gas war. With the acceleration of construction on the Federal Highway System many small curators were out of a job in those days. There is no more room for the little man, it seems. Many former highway zookeepers—those who have not been absorbed by larger institutions—have been driven by their love of display and the diminished outlet for their talents to exhibitionism and been arrested.) We decided to join forces.
It was Uncle Volodya who suggested it. (Never an uncompassionate man, he had seen that the rasping kh sound was giving me the sore throat and permitted me to call him thus.) By now I knew his reputation and his great work in lepidopterology and would have been too shy to put forth the idea myself. I was sitting in the boatel sipping an Orinoco-Cola and reading.
“What are you reading?” Uncle asked. I hadn’t noticed him but recognized him at once. I didn’t know if he would remember me, however, and so did not presume to remind him of our first meeting.
“Oh,” I said, “it’s a birthday card. Today is my birthday. Have you ever noticed how a birthday card always arrives on your birthday? Never a day early, never a day late? My people are in far-off Kentucky, yet the card was in this morning’s mail.” It was the longest speech I had yet made to him. He was clearly moved, and I have reason to believe that it was on the strength of this insight that he asked me to accompany him on the Great Bull Butterfly hunt.
We set out next morning and for the next five weeks assiduously traveled downstream, searching along the banks by day and camping by night. We encountered many strange and rare larval and pupal forms, together with some lovely eggal forms I had never before seen, but nothing approaching the mature imago we sought. Perhaps the natives were mistaken in their descriptions, I thought, never daring to voice my suspicions aloud, of course. Or perhaps, I thought racistically, they lied. Maybe the Great Bull Butterfly was a Wild Goose Chase. As I say, I never said this, but one night I was sitting glumly in front of the campfire. He noticed that I was not playing my saxophone.
“You’re not playing tonight, Shmoolka. Why?”
“It’s the reeds, Uncle,” I lied. “I’ve worn out the last reed.”
“That’s not it. What? Tell.”
“Well, if you must know, I think the expedition will fail. I think it’s a cruel hoax.”
“A hoax, Shmoolko?”
“We’ve been searching five weeks, and if you can’t find a diurnal creature in broad daylight in five weeks—”
“Diurnal be damned,” he shouted suddenly, falling unconsciously into his fabled alliteration. “You’ve given me an idea. What if—what if the Great Bull Butterfly is nocturnal? If he were, then of course we wouldn’t have found him. Shmuel, I think that’s the solution, I think that’s it.” Before I could even reply, he was on his feet and off into the jungle. He darted heedlessly across the path of a black cat and gave it bad luck. I followed breathlessly. We found it that night.
But, alas, we had been gone longer than we had expected. The bearers had run off. We were low on supplies. The trip back to Cair was upstream against a heavy current made more dangerous by the torrential rains. We had no more food. We had eaten my last saxophone reed the day before. I don’t think we could have lasted another twenty-four hours, but we were found at the eleventh hour by natives—Uncle puts it at the eleventh hour; I don’t think it could have been past ten-thirty—who fed us and promised to conduct us back to Cair the next morning. They knew a shortcut.
“Why are you so hung up on butterflies, Nuncle?” I asked at campfire that night after marshmallows.
“Shmuel, that’s because they’re a metaphor is why.”
“A meadow flower?”
“A metaphormorphosis.”
“I met a fire more for us? A meaty forest?”
“Call me Steve.”
“But why butterflies, Steve?”
“Lepidopterology—don’t you hear that word leper in there? They’re the outcasts, you know. They’re the exiles. Like me. Anyway, it wasn’t always butterflies; for a time it used to be squirrels and dogs. Then for a while it was pinto ponies. But I’ve been east and I’ve been west, and I think butterflies is best.”
“Could you speak about them?”
In the glow of the fire his face seemed serene and very sad.
“Like ur-airplanes they are,” he spoke suddenly. “Lopsided glider things riding turbulence like snowflakes. Heroic, heraldic. Bug pennants, bucking, choppy flags of the forest.”
“That’s beautiful,” I told him.
“Also, if you keep one in your pocket it’s good luck.”
“Call me Ishmuel.”
And that was the second meeting.
SOME OVERRATED MASTERPIECES
There’s nothing so convincing as an opinion, and an odd thing about words is the cockeyed weight they’re permitted to bear, so that if I say something as flagrantly meaningless or flat-out arbitrary as, oh, he’s the sort of person who parts his hair, I’ve not only suggested something negative about hair-parting but have made, too, an aspersion on character. He’ll think twice before he parts it next time, I bet. And this goes double for written words. “He uses after-shave,” I charge, “and his last three cars have been hardtops.” “His wife,” I continue mercilessly, “dresses the twins alike and pushes them about the streets in a perambulator like one of those wide-load house trailers!”
This isn’t just a haughty aesthetic of the superciliary, it’s the astonishing Law of the Unframed Indictment and is the critical equivalent of holding political prisoners without bringing charges. We condemn a thing simply by mentioning it.
Turner, I claim, evenly, uninflectedly as I can, paints elements, water and air in ratios seldom seen in life and got up in murk and slate fug like a foul mood. What’s the difference, then, between a Turner and ordinary mall art? Why, merely the weather, only the sobriety of his colors, as if genius were a question of the intervention of light, like sun block, say. This time, though, by having introduced a reason, however spurious, I seem to have taken higher ground. But in questions of taste there is no higher ground. In matters of art and cuisine, reasons are created equal. It’s a perfect democracy of reasons and, hey, I know what I like, isn’t only a perfectly respectable argument but an absolutely unanswerable one. There is nothing so convincing as an opinion.
Am I Philistine? What, with my up-front heart? Philistine? Me? With my sleeves and my hankies and all the other emotional ready-to-wear in the wardrobe of my attentive sentiments? The sucker I am for almost any statuary in the open air, in landscape, or any of the kempt green gardens of the world? This pushover, never mind the music or even only the tune it’s playing, for the simple human harmonics of any orchestra at work, any orchestra, any symphony or pit band, any string quartet, jazz band, pick-up bluegrass rhythm jammers, or even just any saw- or jug- or steel drum-and-washboard skiffle group! The cooperation, I mean, the parade-ground synchronicity, whatever the factor is that makes for the precision of the Rockettes, for example, or the spontaneous applause every time the shuttle goes up—all that concentrate timing, all that good will and get ready, get set, go of the honed and attuned? What, this soff-souled, nolo-contendere, hearts-and-minds pussycat? Anybody’s fascist, this nose-led company man, as willing—willing? anxious—to be stirred as sugar in tea, this, what I’m saying, lawn-chair enthusiast for all the brass, fife, and oom-pah-pah of high summer’s slam-bang reviewing-stand occasions and gazebo patrioticals.
But lesser art forms are all collective, I think. Which pretty much—because I know what I don’t like, too—puts opera’s hyperbolic charms and vocal circus in its place. Because art ought to be as one-on-one as intimacy, something if not actually shades-drawn and pulled-curtain to it, then at least discreet, and the last thing—saving architecture perhaps, which, like that gazebo from which those marches occur, is public, communal as wafering—art ought to be is stirring. And if Van Gogh’s painted room in Arles can command my tears, all I can tell you is that those must be a different sort of tears, vintage tears, could be, unlike my public performances in the sculpture garden as ripple from champagne. Speaking of which, incidentally, with its taste like a mixture of dishwater and sugar substitute, while not one of the overrated masterpieces I mean to consider here, may not be a bad instance. It comes down to us through the bubbles’ reputation. Though of course that’s how everything comes down to us, history working its gravitational will through word of
mouth.
Trust me. What I’m talking about has nothing to do with what’s in and what’s out, what’s up and what’s down—prepositional aesthetics. There ain’t any old Roman pleasure to it, the thumbs-up, thumbs-down joys. I don’t lord it over, I don’t set myself up. I already said, I know what I like. It’s strictly personal. Because, for me, there has to be something personal or I won’t play. And there is. Not envy, I hope not envy, or not envy exactly, and not sour grapes, exactly not sour grapes, with which I’ve no patience. Sour grapes are pathetic. Just something inimical in me to the overrated, the next guy’s hype, a kind of rage like an allergy. It’s a myth you don’t feel your blood pressure. I feel my blood pressure. And, for me, the test of time is simply an adjustment of the systolics and diastolics, a small subsidence of the personal. John Gardner’s dead, and how long can I reasonably hold a grudge against The Bonfire of the Vanities?
So this shall chiefly take place within the precincts of the safely historical, where bygones are bygones and even subjectivity has cooled to a temperature that can’t be felt.
Pieces of Soap Page 36
