I'm Dying Laughing

by Christina Stead

  ‘Oh, I hate to go to that sadist and you’re a sadist to send me. I see a regular gleam of pleasure every time I enter his office. He knows I’m a milksop when it comes to teeth. I’m going to find a tender-hearted dentist who has a nervous breakdown every summer from seeing his patients suffer. Last time I told him, “Ben, I know you’re a sadist. Don’t save on drugs with me; I’ll pay you extra. Why should I suffer? If I were a pretty girl you wouldn’t make me suffer. If you hurt me, I’m going to squeal, the first prick and you’ll get a thin and pathetic squeal, and if you really hurt, I’ll roar. It may please you but it’ll drive away your clients.” It’s so funny, but there are no masochists among dental patients. He promised he’d never hurt me again. I said, “No, and you’re not going to hurt my children either.” Now he’s probably going to give me a damn good jab. I can see his milk-fed, white jowls faintly smiling. He’ll keep me waiting while he strokes his hair back and smiles at himself in the surgery.’

  Stephen was lounging in his chair with a self-satisfied pretty languor. Full of coaxing petulance and gentle graces, he lounged about the house for a while and then went off to the dentist’s. He said, ‘Ring me up in about three-quarters of an hour. Find out how I am. If he fills me full of dope, perhaps I’ll want you to drive me back.’

  Off he went, strolling down the path along the street, in the sunshine, with a small snap-brimmed hat, the picture of the elegant young college man, a very youthful forty. Emily, running upstairs to look at the bedroom, watched him from the small-paned window through the curtain frills. She saw his curly blond head, shining like a dog’s coat, gliding along the fence in the side-street. When he turned the corner she went and telephoned Uncle Maurice. After waiting, she got him.

  ‘Oh, Maurice, I want to thank you for coming yesterday and the wonderful time we all had, oh, how lovely. You were lovely, Maurice darling! Oh, how happy you made me with your trust. Listen, darling, will you try to come up for the next weekend? You know the political crisis I told you about? You know nothing about that, but I’m going to need a friend. We’re not having a big party; this is select, practically only you, darling, and Anna of course, and the Oateses, they know Europe. It will be the last time we cook outside, this year and maybe forever. We bought citronella and will spray the whole place with DDT in the morning and midday and it is definitely not one of these big routs we seem to have been perpetually getting up this year, with all kinds of people undesirable to each other and sometimes even to us.’

  But she telephoned Dr Coriolis and spoke to him in almost the same words. The doctor murmured, ‘Oh, next weekend? But you know I must go to Pittsburgh to meet an ancient colleague from Frankfurt, and his lady too. I must tell you that I very fond of his lady once, but of course nothing happened because he was behind her and now it has all passed away. But I have a certain natural wish to see how she looks now. I am sure she looks much older! That will be disappointing to me. Women disappoint when they get older. Except you, Emily. You are such a bewildering, fascinating woman and then—an American and forever young. And then you have such strength, so much of the frontier still in you.’

  Emily said, ‘Say, Doc, things that might have been said otherwise.’

  ‘Please?’ said the doctor.

  ‘Skip it! Well, too bad. Are you sure you couldn’t go to Pittsburgh on Monday? You could fly, couldn’t you? Listen, Alfred, this former Frankfurter and his lovely pain-in-the-neck—‘

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Listen, Doc, I don’t like ’em, see? I don’t like this Frankfurt and his wandering cutie, for she must be if she was flirting with you. Give me their address and I’ll send them a box of exploding soap powder. Why can’t you go Monday?’

  The doctor laughed, ‘You are so original, it really is the frontier; Oklahoma Purchase, no Louisiana Purchase, and Oakley Annie. I have been reading about it, you see.’

  ‘Listen, Doc, don’t read so much. We’ll have the party inside if you like.’

  ‘I should like this better. They are many mosquitoes now. Ha-ha.’

  ‘OK. It’s a deal. Inside; and listen, we’ll just sit around and talk to each other, no walking round the corn-rows. Oh, joy, joy, I’ll make it a real event, only for ourselves. I’m not even inviting your colleague, as you call him. I am sensitive, Doc, about my parties, since you frankly told me I was greedy for self-expression and that it could degenerate, and that company was bad for me and produced a pathological excitement in me. But still—people do have parties, it’s quite an American weakness, it isn’t really pathological.’

  The doctor still demurred. She exclaimed, ‘Oh, please, please, please Alfred! Don’t spoil it for me. I work so hard and if you’re not here, there’ll be no joy for me. That’s a truth I only found out yesterday.’

  She laughed hysterically, ‘Imagine me, I’ve always had hundreds of friends and belonged to things and worked for things and if you’re not there, the whole world is black and I’m cynical—the day’s so bleak—oh, Doc, Doc, what have I come to?’

  She was between laughing and crying.

  He said reluctantly, ‘Well, but I have a guest. I was just trying to make up my mind to put off my Pittsburgh trip. Could I bring my guest?’

  ‘Oh, Doc, oh, how delightful! Will I write an invitation for your guest?’

  ‘No, this is kind. I’ll send you a telegram if I can’t come.’

  ‘Oh, yes, but do come. Oh we both hope so, Doc, so loudly and passionately and truly. Oh, I’ll compose the most urgent, endearing, insistent invitation for your guest so that you both can come.’

  ‘Perhaps I must go to Pittsburgh.’

  ‘Oh, Doc, oh dear, oh dear! Oh well—frustration again! Very well. Well, don’t forget to telephone me. Doc, you must come. I’ll send you a telegram every day till then.’

  He laughed, then, ‘Don’t do that. I’ll come all right. I’ll persuade my guest.’

  She said laughing, ‘Oh, Doc, darling, how grateful, passionately grateful I am. I have something to live for. Salud, Salud! Goodbye, my darling.’

  She turned away from the telephone crossly, ‘These Europeans all play hard to get. You have to lick their boots before they’ll stir. I can’t bear him and I beg and pray him to come. Oh, well—Maurice will see I have a beau.’

  The rest of the week she was feverishly gay. Stephen said, biting his lip but hiding his smile, ‘What is it now? Are you going to get married? Leave me and get married?’

  Later he said, ‘It’s this damn footling idiot, this magic refugee, isn’t it? What has he got that I haven’t got? Anna’s money? Just like me. He’s apparently trying to get Anna to put up money for some laboratory or some such thing. I don’t mean he’s a gigolo.’

  ‘Stephen, I don’t give a damn for him.’

  ‘What can he offer you?’

  Emily looked at him in contemptuous astonishment. ‘Offer me? That’s a real American question; or maybe that’s how men see it. You don’t suppose he offered me anything?’

  ‘No?’

  Emily stood looking at him, torn between anger and amusement.

  Stephen said, ‘Well, I don’t offer you much; why shouldn’t you look for a man who’d do more for you? There’s nothing strange in that. Only I don’t think Coriolis will. If there was a better man about, I’d understand it only too well. There are—only Coriolis isn’t one of them.’

  Emily said, ‘What am I? To be bought with offers? Well, that’s silly, I guess. Still, I’d like you both to go somewhere and out-offer each other; it’s a man’s idea of love. Go on, go and out-barter each other and I’ll get two other guys. Men are supposed to be the passionate sex. I’d like the idea of you two shut in a little room outbidding each other. Tell me, if the other man did outbid you, would you yield gracefully?’

  Stephen said nothing.

  ‘Oh, pfooey,’ said Emily.

  ‘Well, is Coriolis coming to the party?’

  She bragged, ‘Yes, I telegraphed him and telephoned him every day and I
left a note at his house when I was in. The bastard wasn’t in although we had an appointment. Maybe he’d gone to Pittsburgh to see this jane of his. The maid seemed mum. I wonder if she is one of his seducees.’

  ‘You haven’t much confidence in him.’

  ‘Golly, you don’t think I’m serious.’

  ‘I don’t know; and I don’t think you know.’

  ‘If I were serious I’d pick on Uncle Maurice, not this flirtatious trimmer.’

  He looked at her in surmise. She said saucily, ‘Uncle Maurice could be a great help perhaps.’

  But they changed the nature of the party before it came about. Fourteen members of the branch were invited and Emily, wanting their favour, had made a great effort for the cocktail party and subsequent supper. It was Olivia’s birthday: they were nearly all parents: they must be touched by the child and the loving efforts of Stephen and herself. There she was, as she really was, a family woman. The children were drilled for their parts; and Christy had invited his closest friends. The house was in beautiful order, with not only Paolo and Maria-Gloria, but a butler for the occasion. The house, always fresh and beautiful, was at its best, the windows shining, the flowers arranged by Stephen and Olivia, a striking modern picture. The members of the branch were of all sorts. There were impudent people, devoted followers with no minds of their own, a noisy but ever loyal Connecticut editor, who was rude to all intellectuals and particularly rude to communist intellectuals, because he was one himself; and people from New York, Emily’s own editor, a man in tweeds with a pipe, a large British type, Holcombe Oldtown, with a big nose, a mole and swollen lips, a young medico from Bellevue Hospital, the district organizer, a man suspected by everyone of being the police spy in the branch, a self-described ‘real worker’, who had been expelled from a labour union, the garage owner, the Negro gardener lately joined, some factory workers from newly established light industries, a woman house-cleaner. Some, including the garage owner and the gardener, were shy. There were more than thirty guests half-drunk and shouting when Dr Coriolis arrived. It was about five-thirty.

  ‘Oh, at last,’ cried Emily, who had been on the alert.

  Coriolis was unlike himself, fresh, slightly excited, bashful. He pulled from behind him a fleshy young woman with fair hair to her shoulders, a long, peachy, oval face, large blue eyes, a round chin; a very sensual girl. She wore a silk dress, a three-quarter coat in blue, and in her hair a wreath of small blue velvet and ribbon flowers.

  Dr Coriolis said breathlessly, ‘This is my friend, Dr Camilla Bruce. Camilla did not want to come but I told her, at my friend Emily’s place she would get the most wonderful things to eat. There is no place in New York, I told her, where you can get for no matter what money the delicious food my friend Emily always has.’

  Emily said drily, ‘You’re welcome’ and left the maid to take their coats. Drily she said, ‘Come and get your drinks. You’ve a lot to catch up.’

  She became adult suddenly. A good-natured, ironic smile played in and out. She brought them the drinks, sent them the canapés, sent Stephen to them. When she came round with Lennie to give them a second drink, she served the doctor and, seeing the girl in the middle of the floor with a good many people around her, she said to her, ‘You must meet people!’ She turned, ‘Ruth Oates, this is—what did you say your friend’s name is, Alfred?’ He frowned and told her. ‘Ruth this is Dr Camel; Mrs Thornton, this is Dr Camel; Alec Brown, Dr Roberts, Holcombe Oldtown, you must meet Miss Camel, she’s a doctor of some sort—’

  Alfred’s young friend shook hands with everyone, correcting her name, emptied her second drink and herself went to get a third.

  Dr Coriolis was angry. He kept away from Emily and her guests, talked most of the afternoon to Dr Bruce, and some of the women. Emily was on her high horse, sparkling, dimpling, and embracing her more intimate friends, jolly with the children. She swept by Dr Bruce without seeing her. Stephen was very happy: he smiled like a bridegroom. Every time Emily saw this, she bit her lip. Presently she went upstairs (when Stephen had gone into the garden with Axel Oates) and came down in a much changed mood, challenging, laughing, imperious. She neglected Dr Coriolis and his guest, grew into one of her wildest moods and began to circulate furiously among the branch members, exhorting them, saying the strangest things about the Party, the central committee, characterizing them as men who lived off rich women, all cripples, or with heart disease, saying she had last seen the chief crossing University Place, peagreen, a new-drowned man, spineless with fear, supported on each side by a gorilla, with the fear of the devil in him; and describing his family life; his wife, a foreigner who declaimed socialism while terrorizing and tyrannizing over the servants; one of the servants, a faithful follower who had worshipped the leader for years, and worked free for them, now afraid to go even to the post office. She was not allowed to post a letter for fear she would ask for help, tell someone how she was tortured and sneered at. She was sneered at for her peasant ignorance, her worship of the leader. And the new leader? An immense ball of dough, with an unknown past. And the sacred and famous Albert Coster, one of the Inner Heaven of Sick Men who had not shaken hands with a worker for fifteen years, and their newly furnished office in brocade, plush and thick carpets; their parties, the sacred seventy who were invited to everything; all the scandal and gossip about the Party brass for ten years, during the time she and Stephen had been in the seventy, as well as things found in the mud stirred up by the Browder crash, divisions, quarrels, private matters. Then on to the policy of the Soviet Union.

  Almost everyone was drunk and the usual brutal personal attacks, parlour analyses were going on, along with all brands of economic and political discussion.

  It was quite impossible for a foreigner like Dr Coriolis to tell friend from foe, the loyal from the renegade. He gave it up and took Dr Bruce into the garden, showing her the place as if he were the proprietor. In fact, he believed himself passionately loved by Emily. He knew she had bought the house and kept it running and thought he could be master of it and her if he liked. He hinted this to Dr Bruce.

  Meanwhile, there was scandal at the cocktail party. The words, ‘wreckers, saboteurs, Trotskyists, bastards, petty bourgeois poseurs, rich crackpots’, had already been shouted at Emily and Stephen by certain partisans led by the suspect district organizer; and this man, suspected of being a spy, coming into the middle of the floor, with a drink in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth and facing Emily, who was drunk and calling to Stephen, spoke as follows, ‘I’ve something to say to you, Howard.’

  ‘Uh-huh, all right, I want to hear it,’ said Stephen, who, on account of his ulcers, could not drink and was sober and sour.

  This man they called Bake. ‘We know all about you,’ said Bake, smiling broadly.

  ‘Everyone knows all about us,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Yes, I bet they do, you lousy traitor.’

  ‘Do you call this a discussion? Do you want to discuss my ideas?’

  ‘Oh, well, no. I’ve read all of your stuff. I wasted three lousy hours on it and I think it’s terrible; you’re a splitter, a damn dissident and I know why.’

  ‘Why then?’ said Stephen coldly.

  ‘Come on, make good,’ said Emily.

  Bake laughed up and down the scale theatrically, ‘Oh, yes, you theorists! Don’t you know it isn’t theory and brain-beating, but action that counts?’

  Stephen said, ‘We can discuss this some other time. After dinner, if you want to stay with the rest of the branch. As well now as any time.’

  He looked round at the members of the branch, some their friends and some friendly acquaintances who had gathered about them, with anxious expressions.

  Bake roared with laughter. ‘Oh, no, we don’t. I read the paper all the time, the daily; it’s all you need to read. Why don’t you leftist theorists shut up for a while, come off your pinnacle of purity and do a little work for the movement, eh?’

  ‘Well—’ said Stephen

 
Emily said, ‘That’s colossal brass. Why don’t you? What do you do? Didn’t you get thrown out of two or three unions for the sad wreckage that occurred in your coincidental presence? Is that action?’

  Stephen hissed, ‘Shut up! Let him get it off his chest. It amuses him. Let’s see what’s in the bastard. Did you ever read my stuff in the Weekly?’

  Fright and doubt, anxiety and pleasure were now written on the faces around them. The guests had divided. Some had moved away, some outside, others gathered quietly and silently around the arena.

  Bake declared, ‘Yes, I know they’ve had their fingers crossed for you since 1945 if not earlier.’

  He began shouting with laughter, ‘But I didn’t waste much time on your stuff. I don’t go for the heavy stuff. I hope not. And I don’t stick my neck out. I should hope not. I don’t read, I don’t think. I work for the Party.’

  ‘What do you do?’ asked Emily.

  ‘I leave it to you theorists and fancy guys to stick your necks out and get it where the chicken gets it—me, I stay in the Party. Ha-ha. In the Party, not out. Ha-ha. In like me, not out like you. Ha-ha.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Emily.

  ‘Listen, we’ll have an impromptu discussion after,’ said one of the members.

  ‘Not with me, you don’t, no unofficial lobbying for me. Bonsoir! Goodbye,’ said this extraordinary character; and he took himself off, laughing wildly.

  ‘Drunk as a peacock,’ said Stephen, turning on his heel and looking at the others with a slight smile. ‘If any of you want to discuss this report now, let’s go into my study and go over any points you want to raise. I would welcome discussion or even a good beating. If you can show me I’m wrong, I’d like that too. It might get me out of a lot of trouble I’m not looking for,’ he ended with his usual self-confessing petulant grace.

  In confusion, some of the branch members went hesitatingly towards the double doors standing open; and others walked there resolutely. The district organizer followed them with a sarcastic expression. When they were all seated, Stephen, as if elected chairman, went behind his desk and sat there with a pencil in his hand. He said this was not a meeting but a group of friends, whose advice he was seeking. He asked any one of them to speak up. No voice was raised. Stephen asked them one by one, if they had read his report and what they thought of it, what suggestions? Then each one said either that he had not had time to read it, or was only a quarter through, or could not understand it, or was not theorist enough to judge, or could not make up his mind, or was shocked or puzzled, or would read it before the day set for the next meeting, or thought it better not to take a stand on so extraordinary a document, or thought such things dangerous and whatever the good intention, showed a desire to split and divide, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’; and the district organizer himself when all had spoken, said he had read it, and not only would he reserve his opinion and criticism for the proper time and place, but that he intended to do what he could beforehand to show the other members the tendency, that ‘of a confused, vicious, mistaken and dissident document’. At this most of the other members looked relieved, although the garage worker and the factory worker said each that he thought he had better read the document carefully to make up his own mind.