“You not only need the money for Avery’s eye doctor,” said J sternly, “you need some respectable clothing to wear to work. That’s called overhead.”
“Oh, I borrowed a dress,” said Amy. “It’ll do.”
“It will not,” said J. “You don’t know anything about offices. This isn’t going to be the same as baby-sitting.”
Amy had done a lot of baby-sitting, which seemed to include often some actual domestic service. This was how she supported the two of them, hand to mouth, going to some woman’s house only when funds were low, never having any trouble finding a house to go to or some woman delighted to find a young and intelligent female willing to do her this service.
“It sure isn’t,” drawled Amy. “Baby-sitting is anyhow human, and your soul’s your own.”
J was scribbling a check for two hundred and fifty dollars. Now he looked up at the walls. “Is Avery getting anywhere near being able to sell some of his … uh … work?”
“Oh, Pops,” said Amy, “don’t talk about it.” She gave him a half smile.
“I don’t get these pictures, Amy,” J blurted. “I never have.” He threw the check on the floor between them and slurped from his glass.
“I know, Pops,” she said indulgently. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand.” She picked up the check. “Humph,” she said.
“How do you know I couldn’t understand? If you’d take the trouble to clue me?” J growled.
“Because you don’t even ask the right questions,” she said promptly. “You don’t ponder the creativity or the concepts or the self-expression. You want to know will they sell? But you see, Avery’s business isn’t a buying and selling kind of thing.”
“Well, I do my best,” said J. “Humph! Avery paints all these pictures. But he isn’t interested in selling them. I’m not going too far, am I, if I suppose he has to eat like everybody else? You’re not farmers. Food has to be purchased. So who is going to pay for it? You are, eh? For how long? That’s all I asked, and I don’t see anything wrong about the question.” J was vehement and felt huffy.
“Oh, someday,” she said, “maybe he’ll sell. Maybe after we’re dead and gone. Who knows? But that’s not …” Amy stopped herself and drank deeply. “We’ll go ahead and do things our way, you know,” she said. “One thing might make you feel better. We’re serious, Pops. He’s hitting for big insights, big stuff. Avery works very hard. Harder, I imagine, than anybody you ever saw in your whole life.” She stared at him over the glass.
“I doubt,” J chided, “that you can imagine what I may have seen in my whole life.”
“Oh, well,” she said, flushing, “I mean roughly speaking. Come on, Pops. Bottoms up! There’s more on the vine.”
J felt angry and frustrated. He let her pour again. The wine was sweet. It’s effect seemed odd at this hour of the day. “Well,” he said at last, wishing the three pillows had a back so that he could sag, “I guess I’ve been given pause. I’m not getting any younger, as the saying goes. Self-expression, you said? That’s the on-ly way to live, eh? Of course, I’ve always thought I was more or less expressing myself. But maybe there’s something in it that I’ve missed.”
“There may be,” she said very carefully.
“What bothers me, though,” said J chummily, “say I do express myself. To whom do I do that?”
Amy closed her eyes.
“All right, let me try to clear that up.” J was feeling giddy. “Say I see the light and walk out on my nine to five bit.”
Amy’s eyes flew open and stared boldly.
“Now then, I’m figuring to express myself,” J went on, “but who is going to pay attention?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t!” said J with genuine astonishment. “That’s funny. You mean art has no value, at all, except to the artist? Then why is Avery any more important than anybody else? Than you, for instance?”
Amy said nothing; her mouth twitched. J thought that if he himself wasn’t quite sure whether he was musing aloud or attacking, how could she tell?
“Seems to me, in that case,” he rambled on, “I may as well take up building sand castles. Let the tide come in and wipe them out. No matter. I should have expressed myself.”
“So you would,” she said abruptly. “What do you want art to do, Pops? Make money?” She sat on folded legs confronting him.
“Listen,” said J, his heart leaping, “I’m not asking art to do anything in particular. There it is, eh?” He was getting a little bit drunk. After all, breakfast had been very light, anticipating the doctor’s tests, and a long time ago besides.
“You know what you like, I suppose,” Amy said in warm tones, spiced with only a delicate contempt.
“Sure I do,” said J, confronting her. “I couldn’t tell you what a painting is, but I can tell you what it does if I like it. It speaks to me. To me, understand? Not to the artist. What do I care for him? Why should I go to the trouble of warping my imagination around to try to feel what he feels? The question is, what do I feel? Of course, maybe that’s the wrong question.” J forgot there was no back to his throne and had to catch himself from going over backward.
“You’re not looking for the right things in these paintings,” Amy said patiently.
“There’s no such thing as creativity,” said J, surprising himself very much.
“How’s Mother?” said Amy sweetly.
“Now, now, wait a minute,” said J, shaking his finger at her. “Laws in the universe, don’t you think? Say the artist doesn’t know what they are until he finds them? Like what’s the use of going to the moon?” J had begun to mumble; he braced up. “So what’s creative? You take invention. Hah, that’s only discovery, too. Don’t you suppose there was penicillin in the days of Moses? How’s about another little drink?”
Amy poured somewhat grimly.
“I might be serious about my problem,” J announced with an antic look. “How am I going to express myself? You can’t do it in business. Everybody knows that. Well, I can’t paint,” J continued with a wave of his hand. “Can’t sculp, either. The art of the dawnce has passed me by. Music? Well, since I can’t even carry a tune … What shall I do then? Be an actor?”
Amy kept her eyes cast down, not to show pity.
“Write? Hah, anybody can write!”
“No,” said Amy, “that’s not true.”
“Why not? I can put words down on paper. I know a whole lot of words. It doesn’t matter, you tell me, whether they mean anything to anybody else. Okay, then, so be it.” J reeled where he sat, feeling rather clever.
“It’s preferable to have something to say,” said Amy tightly.
“Why?” pressed J. “I don’t follow. Avery doesn’t have to say anything. To anybody else, that is.”
“Oh, Pops, you’re just being ornery. Of course there’s communication in art.”
“But only with some small esoteric body of connoisseurs?” said J, being as ornery as he could think how to be. “What is it they connoise, to coin a verb? Say I became an artist. Who’s going to say that I ‘unique’ am saying nothing? How would they know, except by whether or not I spoke to them?” He didn’t know what he was babbling about. His heart seemed to have a pain in it.
“Now you,” he went on, helplessly carried away, “aren’t going to live the way I’ve lived. You’ve rebelled against that. So, maybe you are right, and I ought to shuck off my stupid values. And you ought to approve of it if I do.” He felt like Pan. His hooves twitched. No, wait, maybe he meant Silenus. J forgot. He’d never been able to sort out those old Greek characters. There had been too many of those old gods and most of them bums, in J’s opinion. Unreasonable. Troublemakers.
“Pops, I’m sorry,” Amy was saying. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I know how you’ve slaved and sacrificed to do things for us. I’d never say I don’t appreciate …”
“Aren’t you ever going to have any babies?” J said softly.
She was severel
y startled. Even in the gloom he could tell by her face. “All right,” she wailed, “I can’t talk to you at all.” Her head bent over, knobs rose and dotted the black jersey along her spine.
But J thought to himself sadly, No, I’m afraid we talked this time. But he retreated. “Well,” he said aloud, “I didn’t come down here to make you cry.” He began to scramble to his feet by a process of first resting on all fours, and from this position he said, “It’s too late. I fold like a chair.”
Amy looked and began to laugh. She rocked where she sat, in a fit of giggles.
J managed to get to his feet; he brushed a hand through his hair, which seemed to have become rumpled and was tending to stand on end. Perhaps it had twisted into horns above his temples. What a clown he was! He gazed down at her through a mist, knowing there was pain the other side of the cloud. “I’ll scoot now,” he said and then woodenly, “Sorry to have missed Avery.”
“I’m sorry he missed you,” Amy whooped. “It would have done him good to see how f-funny …”
This was cruel. J recognized that she needed to be cruel because of pain. But he couldn’t figure how he could unsay what he had said.
“Good luck,” he muttered and staggered toward the door. Amy was up, springing to open it for him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, rather desperately.
“No, no,” J said. “No, no. Listen, I understand this much. You sacrifice …”
“No, I don’t!” she shouted angrily. “No, I don’t.”
“I see that, too,” said J heavily, “because neither did I. All right, Amy.”
There was a woman in the hall. She was in the act of opening the door to the other apartment across the way. “Oh, hi,” she said.
“Hi, Lily. Good-bye, Pops. Good luck,” Amy spoke lightly and shut her door fast.
J staggered and grabbed for the wall. It eluded him. His back fell against it, and his feet began to slide. He realized that he must be a ludicrous sight, middle-aged fellow in a business suit, drunk in the morning, and about to fall down.
The woman said, “Whoopsie,” and her strong hand came under his armpit.
“I have looked upon the grape.…” he babbled.
“Listen, you don’t wanna try and drive right now, mister. How’s about me fixing you a cuppa black coffee?”
“Be very kind,” said J, who was ready to bawl.
The other side of the door Amy Alice Little Gardner pressed her forehead on the wood and one hand to her mouth. She was sorry she had laughed; she couldn’t afford to cry. She loved her father; she wished he hadn’t come. All J’s bumbling talk had been touching. But she didn’t want … couldn’t afford to be touched. Amy had problems enough.
In a while, however, a certain silence in the building seeped through to her. She skipped into the bedroom, looked out the window, down at her father’s car, silently still there at the curb. Amy wiped her face on the first thing that came to hand, a pair of Avery’s socks. She braced on her fine lean legs and felt her insides turning over.
Well, if that was what was the matter with old Pops, if that was his commonplace middle-aged-male-in-a-panic problem, he might at least have had better taste than to buy himself what he needed right across the hall. Trust Lily Eden, though, to glom onto a customer! That old creep! Amy’s young skin crawled. Well, if that was what he was going to do to express himself.… “This is really terribly amusing,” said Amy to herself.
But it was Amy’s quality to know when she was lying.
CHAPTER 14
Tuesday Afternoon
J was weeping as he had not wept since he was six years old. This place where he was had furniture. He sat in a kitchen chair; his head lay on the kitchen table. The chair was hard. The tabletop was formica, and from time to time he rolled his head to press his throbbing temples to the cold of it.
Oh, what a great soft sinking down was this into the luxury of defeat! “Enough. Enough,” he wept, allowing himself to lose the long and futile battle. “No more. I can’t do it anymore,” he sobbed, “and why should I?” Oh, the struggle of the years, the disciplines, the hazards and the hesitations, the punctuating joys. Yet nobody—nobody—knew, or bothered to inquire, what J had thought he’d been doing all that time. He, who had sold his soul for a chair to sit in—clod and slave.
“The middle way,” he wept. “You bet! Supposed to be so great, so right, so wise. The Greeks said so, and everybody knows the Greeks knew everything. Yah, the ancient Greeks should be around to see what you get out of the middle way these days.
“You aren’t exciting. You’re not even interesting! Hah, you fall on the big fat hump of the probability curve where, as an individual, you count the least of all. Because your name is legion. Your real name never gets in the paper. Oh, no! But just the same, old Legion J Middle, he gets all the blame.
“Every damn thing that’s wrong with the world today is your fault, fella. Haven’t you heard? Certainly. Poverty, misery, corruption, crime, mental illness, certainly, certainly. All would be roses if it weren’t for the cheating way you’ve gone ahead and gone to the office and taken your wage and paid your bills. Cold heart!
“Why, if you’d had any compassion, you’d have gone forth to bind up the wounds of the leper with your bare, ignorant hands. You can’t have compassion, sitting in a chair, paying for the doctor. If you wanted reform, you’d go into the street, fight and push and shove and holler and go to jail. That’s where you should have gone. You’d just as soon show goodwill to man? Yah, you should have gone to Africa. You can’t do it in the office. Go anywhere but to your office from nine to five.
“All right. Okay. I give up. I never had a clue. I got no big insights. Oh, you can have big insights in a slum or out in the woods or else in Sweden. But you can’t have big insights in Burbank, California. You’re too comfortable! What do you know of blood and pain? It doesn’t count if your mother died in agony. The bed was clean. It wasn’t society’s fault. So why should you feel anything?
“You’re just a comfort-loving slave, remember. No heart, no soul. You think you appreciated the ten toes of your normal healthy baby? Or the dew in the morning on some tame rose in your ordinary backyard? Well, you just don’t know who you are, that’s all. The trouble with you, you’re not wild. You’re civilized! And you’ve had it, old boy. That’s where you made your big mistake.”
The wine sickness, however, was subsiding. J had begun to listen to himself. He sounded like a very unhappy child. He began to know that the woman was there, sitting across the table, pouring more coffee from time to time, in silence—not touching him or even murmuring. J thought, in sudden peace, what a nice woman she must be. He was very grateful to her. He was grateful for this place. He was grateful for the coffee and for her silence and for this wonderful escape from everyone who knew him and everywhere that he was known.
But how come he was bawling his head off, complaining like a baby, at noon of a Tuesday, before a stranger in a strange place? This was at least middling wild!
He lifted his head, but he couldn’t see very well through his swollen eyes. He asked about the bathroom, and she said, “Sure thing.”
The bathroom was just like Amy’s. J went in, shut the door, used the john, flushed it, took the corner of a more or less clean towel, soaked it, and mopped his face. The face in the mirror suddenly gave him a wink and a grin of pure mischief. J and the face seemed to have a secret between them. Hey, all that sobbing and heaving and flood of hot tears, that whole fit had been … well … (okay, we know this, don’t we?) pretty damn phony. “You old bastard,” he said to the face, without sound.
He dried his fleshly face. The one in the mirror looked awful. But J felt absolutely wonderful. The word “catharsis” did not come into his mind. (J was pretty much off the Greeks at the moment.)
He came out into the strange woman’s living room, feeling serene. There wasn’t enough shame in him for forming an apology. But he could see her now; he smiled at her.
She was medium tall, somewhat flabby, not young. Her hair was dyed bright yellow. The skin of her face sagged under the makeup. Her eyes were hooded. Their color was black. “Two pitch balls stuck in her face.…” Where had J heard that? His father?
But before he could identify or complete the phrase or, with another part of his mind, form a phrase to say, the woman spoke up in a business-like way. “So, okay? You ready?”
J’s brain got no message at all from this.
Then Lily Eden decided to find out, in the swiftest, most direct, and practical way possible, the answer to her question. At the touch of her hand J jumped like a scalded cat.
The present truth burst upon him, where he was, with whom, and what was expected of him now. He thought he was going into a fit! An enormous whoop of laughter started in his very gut and ripped up through his body. J M. Little, the clown of the world! The clown of the universe!
He gulped and choked and struggled to beat down the laughter. It wasn’t very nice of him; she might misunderstand. He wasn’t laughing at her. She’d been very nice to him; J still thought so. (Yah, whether she knew it or not, whoever she was.) He finally was able to speak. “Excuse me … uh …” he almost strangled. “What’s the—uh—usual fee?”
She said in tones of brass, her black eyes like hard dried raisins in the dough of her flesh, “Fifty dollars.”
It was too much. J knew that. He might be a clown—but he wasn’t that gullible. He got out his wallet. There were two twenties and a single in it. He took out one twenty, glanced at his watch, and said, “Afraid I’m running a little late.” His voice kept high and tight against the threat of laughter. “Here’s for the coffee and the company. No offense?”
Lily took the money and showed him her upper gums. “Okay,” she drawled. “Better luck next time.”
Maybe she had a heart of gold. Probably it was neither gold nor dross. What the devil is dross? J dared not make another sound; he still felt hysterical. He was afraid he’d begin to laugh (or cry) to the point where he would double up and fall down, after all.
He made it to the hall. There was Amy’s door. He shunned it. He went as fast as he could down the dusty old stairs. When he came out to the sidewalk, he became aware that the wine and the strong coffee had not quite finished their war below. He was in no fit condition for the freeways. Better (in middle-aged prudence?) walk off some of these mixed feelings. So he turned to the right, toward the shimmer of sand at the end of the block, and began to take strides.
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