“You’ve been chaperoning too many frat parties,” Glennis said.
“I’m tired of being an outsider. I want to be hip, reet, beat, a winner, a loser (I don’t want to win first prize at the dog show!), I want to happily barf again.”
“Poor Pete.”
“ ‘Barf!’ sez Andy. No, I’m getting my decades mixed.”
“That’s getting easier and easier,” Joe said.
“You mean it’s easier to want to,” Glennis said, and went on without stopping, “Joey cut his hand today and had to have stitches.…” Glennis spoke without taking a breath, urgently, as if she were afraid she might be interrupted. Pete’s expression was shrewd and, if possible, compassionate. He listened carefully. Glennis’ voice, her whole body signaled danger to Joe. He moved closer to her, hoping that she would take it as a slight, a very slight, warning. Yet even as he warned her he had an astounding little twinge of jealousy: someone should hear his pressures for once, face for once all his disorganized complaints.
“Did you ever think how we’ve always unjoined?” Pete said. “You remember in school, Joe, ‘The Unsociety for the Repeal of All Stupid Laws’? We decided not to join it, as I remember. We unjoined ourselves right out of the outsiders. Way out, man. Out.”
“You’ve got your mother,” Glennis said, bitter about the interruption. Joe leaned against her slightly.
“Kick me under the table,” Glennis said, and began to cry.
“Listen, Glennie,” Pete said. “Get the picture, see? Soft, imperial music. Old mansion. Library. Handsome son back from academic wars. Listless, impeccable ennui. Beneath, real despair. Suicidal. Enter tall, silver-and-lace, handsome, wise, saintly lady. Mother. Rings for tea things on the pull thing, gracefully seats herself on delicate Sheraton chair. Stately, compassionate. Speaks softly, ‘What is the matter, Peter?’ “
Glennis cried, “Oh, I’m sorry, Pete! It’s just that I’m so damn sorry for myself. I hate it, but I can’t stop.” She got up quickly and took the beer out into the kitchen, then brought back three bottles, this time with glasses, on a tray.
They were sitting in the living room. “The hope room” Glennis called it, after the do-it-yourself houses which consisted only of a basement roofed over, the builders unable, year after year, to finance the upper floors: “hope houses.” Their hope room contained one Eames couch, two Paul Mc-Cobb benches and a Swedish chair. They sat and listened to a record, “The Weavers at Carnegie Hall,” as they drank the rest of the beer. It was one of Glennis’ favorite records. “It makes me so sad,” she said. “I wish I never had to grow up.” She put her head on Joe’s lap. “You remember on the Mauritania, Joe? All those guitars and all that real beery beardless love for humanity? I wish we weren’t such snobs.”
“I’d rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn,” Pete said.
“And love up the abstractions,” Joe said. He remembered one time he had gone, half as a joke, to a Communist Party discussion group, in college, and heard those voices that dripped with passion and certitude: Peace, peace, humanity, together. It had disgusted him, almost made him sick, and at the same time nostalgic, yearnful.
“Joe,” Glennis said, bending her head back until he could look right down her nostrils, right down into her flat little nose. With a feeling of weakness he knew came from love, he realized that he had looked into those flat little holes before.
“Joe? Did you ever get with anything, really? I mean like.…” She began to sing, in her cracky little voice, always too high because she never could find the note in the right octave,
“Tsena tsena, rum te um turn turn turn. Or, E Franco se va paseo! Didn’t you ever let stuff like that melt you?”
“Just you singing stuff like that,” he said.
“I melt when I look at the two of you,” Pete said, and jumped up, truly embarrassed. His owl’s eyes blinked three times and he said, “Come on, Joseph. Let’s get some more beer.”
“It’s too late. The stores are all closed,” Glennis said. “It’s after twelve.”
“No, no,” Pete said. “Just across no man’s land lies—for a price, though—what your friends the Weavers might call the Lemonade Springs. Only in this case it’s a Coke machine, with beer in it. Come on, Joe. Don’t be so hard on old Smegma Beta.”
“Go on, Joe,” Glennis said.
“We can go,” Pete said, “under a flag of truce.”
Just then Joe, Jr. began to cry, low and hopelessly. He sounded to Joe like an old woman, a tired and ancient woman, and the dry, long sound made him turn toward the stairs, bitter and hopeless himself that a child should sound as though he had suffered the last possible bereavement of a whole lifetime. Glennis caught his arm, her fingers hard, and turned him back. She looked up into his face and said, “This is for me, Joe. Now you go. I want you to.”
Now he was confused: he had never seen Glennis try to direct him before, and her serious face now hid some plan he could not fathom, some idea or judgment upon his emotions he could not follow at all. Joe, Jr. still made his long moans. He let her shove him out into the night.
He and Pete stood next to a cement block barbecue made by a former tenant of the house. It looked like a miniature garage. Across the hedge and the weedy yard, few lights shone in the Beta house.
“I guess Glennis had too much to take, Pete,” he said. “I guess she’s been nervous lately or something. Don’t mind it, will you?”
“There’s something you ought to know, Old Sport. Small thing, really. I’m in love with your wife. Beastly of me, what?”
“Pete, I think it’s damn nice of you.”
“What a lousy thing to say!” Pete really seemed to mean it—that it was a lousy thing to say. He grabbed Joe’s arm—precisely where Glennis had—and turned him around. “Listen, Joe. I mean it. Only like this. You’re the only people like me I know. I mean, I can’t hardly get you no more.” He lifted a beer bottle with his toe and kicked it back over the hedge. “Listen, Joe. This may sound awfully pompous or something, but I think I know why an old man doesn’t mind dying. My grandfather, after he had a stroke that half paralysed him, said something that struck me. My sister-in-law was a nurse—before they had kids—and whenever he saw her he’d ask about the hospital, and then he’d say, ‘Many people dying down there lately?’ You know—he had to be a member of the club. One of the boys. Anyway, last Monday in my freshman sections I put on the board four names: Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz. In one section two students guessed they were concentration camps or something like that. In the other, nobody knew. Nobody. I was trying to tell them the meaning of the word ‘connotation.’ And one kid has a Mercedes-Benz 190-SL, so he put a little swastika on the door. Connotation.”
Joe picked up a beer bottle and tossed it over the hedge into the fraternity backyard. When it landed it hit another bottle.
“I’ve never been inside that house,” he said.
“The fascination of the abomination,” Pete said.
As they walked through the bottles, some of them round and rolly under their feet, past the derelict car toward the dark walls of the Beta house, Joe felt uneasy, as if the votaries of this house might spot him at once for his alienness. Not for his disapproval of them so much as something they had made him feel in college even though he had been approached by them and had decided not to join any fraternity—so much as a feeling that maybe he didn’t, couldn’t belong, even if he wanted to, because of some quirk or awkwardness in him, some deficiency of social grace. He had to remind himself that he had never been blackballed.
Pete opened the back door, and at the same time they were surrounded by the smell of old tennis shoes one of them did appear, a cold questioning look on his young face—a boy in chinos and T-shirt. Then he recognized Pete, and the transformation of his face, from such truly cold speculation to pleasantness and warmth, was astounding.
“Mr. Simpson!” he said, and led them in, up some narrow stairs to the front hall and a huge, shabby living ro
om where the sound of blues, lazy and sad and precise, filled the smoky air. Joe had been trying not to step on all the little oblong brown spots that covered the hardwood floor, and now he looked at them more carefully and saw that they were all little cigarette burns.
In one corner of the room several boys, all dressed in chinos and T-shirts, lolled in big chairs or leaned upon an upright piano. As their guide led them nearer, Joe saw the boy who played. Though obviously as young as the others—in his early twenties—he was dark, with a mature, rather Italianate handsomeness: he looked a great deal like the actor Rossano Brazzi. And he had gray hair. He seemed, as he played and hummed, to be in an exaggeratedly euphoric state, as if he had been taking dope. The others were not so lost, so dreamy. It seemed to Joe that they tried to be, and kept an eye, each one of them, on the boy with the gray hair, willing themselves into, or nearly into, that sad and lazy mood.
For a moment they stood, Joe, Pete and the boy who had brought them in, feeling the dark beat of the music. One of the boys who leaned over the piano, his eyes for the moment shut, did a nearly unself-conscious little bump to the rhythm. The gray-haired boy played with his eyes half shut, and sang in a deep and breathy voice:
“Some say the heart is the source of love, man;
Pumps out love so sweet and so red.
Got no sweetheart to warm my bed.
Man? Now ain’t that terrible news?
All I got is balls and blues.”
And Joe found himself startled. Pete snapped his fingers noiselessly on the half-beat, and then their guide drew them aside and told them, as if it were his duty, his ceremonial duty at that mystery, that the boy at the piano had had a coronary at nineteen and another at the age of twenty-two. It was the mystery of the house: as he spoke, his conventionally handsome face went dark with gravity unfamiliar to a youth who possibly could not quite imagine his own death in another’s. His eyes, as he sought the unfamiliar tones, grew inward, turned up a little, and seemed to fade out for a moment each time he searched back for the words of tragedy; became somewhat reptilian, as if there moved upon them the glassy, protective shell of the eyes of a diving bird.
The large room was worn, faded and shoddy, the rugs were spotted with sticky islands, on the walls group-pictures of hundreds of old boys, never looked at, could hardly be seen through dusty glass. The chairs sagged and bulged, and the lamp at the piano had a broken shade.
“Some say the brain is the source of love, man.
If that is so I sure am most dead;
Got no big brain to turn my head.”
“He’s a great, sweet guy,” the boy said, his eyes gelid again for a moment.
“Man? Now ain’t that terrible news?
All I got is balls and blues.”
Then they all hummed, the group at the piano, and the humming was, at the same time, strangely collegiate and exuberant yet truly blue. Joe wondered, even as he found himself moved by their skill at harmony and rhythm, how much of a duty, possibly, they considered this midnight music to be. How much, he wondered, did they dutifully serenade their doomed brother? The humming boys were clustered together around the piano, close, touching each other as if, even in their own house, even in their own living room, they sought warmth, and in the precision of their music, order against a disorder that, from the looks of the room, they preferred.
The brothers sang together, and their jazz had become a kind of litany. For some reason Joe remembered when he was a boy being taken to see The Student Prince, and he felt again a strong nostalgia for a determinedly simple, gung-ho sort of life. If only, he thought, one could strip one’s mind of the consciousness of that life’s stupidities and cruelties and snobberies. Via Sigmund Romberg, the sentimentalities of the Prussians—without the Prussians’ wailing victims for chorus. Now jazz. Well (he shivered, and wished Pete would get to the beer business), this was what he had deliberately avoided ten years ago. He thought, too, that it was a cold disease to have to see, unavoidably, the reasons for what Pete called “unjoining.”
Just then the gray-haired boy, still playing, turned halfway around on the piano bench and looked straight into Joe’s eyes. The boy’s eyes, in contrast to his hair, were very young, and clear; bright blue, and though his smile was inward, and somehow sweet, Joe saw with shock that he, too, had not quite achieved the forgetful euphoria he needed. He, too, tried and tried.
“Man? Now ain’t that terrible news?
All I got is balls and blues.”
And yet there was in his face a hint of certitude: the boy felt that he would make it, with help, sooner or later. Suddenly Joe knew where he had seen that look before—on the face of a soldier, during the war, who had just said in a mild voice, “Screw you, Jack. I’ve got mine.”
The beat never faltered, and while Pete got their bills changed into quarters for the machine the beat went on; immaculate, subdued but constant, it seemed as though they meant to keep it up until morning. As he and Pete left by the back door he still heard it, receding, the beat only, as they crossed the littered back yard, and he seemed to feel it still when it could no longer be heard at all.
When they again sat down with their beer they found themselves sleepy and dopey. Pete said he knew all about the delicate progression necessary in beer drinking, and that they had somehow violated its ceremony. It was always easy, he said, to drink whiskey. With beer, however, art was needed, and to preserve and at the same time enhance the glow.… Here he had to stop for a jawbreaker of a yawn.
“I’m too sleepy for that foolishness,” he said. Then, looking at Joe, he added. “That’s true about the boy with the gray hair. He’s a bad risk. I heard the doctor say something about it. According to the pattern of the disease he’ll probably never see thirty. He’s got a sixty-five-year-old heart, the doc says.”
“Oh, the poor kid!” Glennis said in a rush, and Joe saw double highlights appear in her eyes. “Oh, God. I don’t know,” she said, and shook her head helplessly.
Joe walked Pete out to his car, and Pete said, “Joe, you’re still a great man. I have been sustained. And Glennis! How can you two be so sane?” He didn’t wait for an answer, and as he drove off Joe turned, feeling weak, and looked at the dark, unadorned back of the Beta house. He thought for a moment he could hear music; then, as the nature of the sound became clear he turned and ran, for it was the high, hysterical keening of one of his children. At first it had sounded like the highest note of a flute.
In the upstairs hall Glennis came rushing out of the bathroom and joined him, and together they entered the kids’ room, the high note, impossibly sustained, increasing like the whistle of a bomb. Joe turned on the overhead light, and there was Joe, Jr. on his knees in the middle of the room, bloody bandage in loops and coils around him, screaming and holding down his stitched hand by the wrist as if it were the head of a snake he desperately pinned to the floor. As Joe swooped down on the boy and got him in his arms (he seemed too light, too rigid), Glennis went to Gregg, whose eyes, shocked by the light, were as opaquely blue as the blanket he pressed in handfuls to his mouth.
Joe, Jr. cried on, not with such hysteria, but he wouldn’t let go of his own wrist. The cut palm was now deep red, and swollen, bruised black and blue by the needles. The stitches were like black wire through the tough flesh, and one dark bead of blood, round and viscid, held to the edge of the wound.
While Glennis called Dr. Falle, Joe held his son in his arms, trying not to squeeze him, knowing that such pain is not transferable at all, and even though he ripped open his own chest, threw out his heart and lungs and stuffed the tortured boy inside, still Joey would have his own pain.
“Now, now, Joey,” he crooned, “we’ll get that thing fixed up. Now, now, now, Joey.” And the boy did seem to take his word for it, and did seem comforted. When he was quiet Joe asked, with some pique, he knew, and even desperation, “But Joey, why did you tear off the bandage like that? Why didn’t you call us? Don’t you know that’s bad to take the bandage off?
”
“But I forgot, Daddy. It hurt so much, and I forgot what it was, and I had to see what it was!” The boy cried a little for shame, then got his voice again. “I didn’t know what it was, hurting me so, Daddy!” Then, in a tone of speculation and perhaps discovery, or the possibility of it, he asked, “Don’t you ever forget like that?“
The Orphan’s Wife
The car hummed contentedly, the sun was climbing in a dusky fresh day, and beside him a beautiful girl drowsed in the morning light, her fresh yellow hair as clean and somehow as unanimal as corn silk. On either side of the straight highway the corn, in thick yet graceful ranks, seemed to breathe heavy life into the air. It was Iowa in August, and the sense, the feel of growing was so thick he wondered how anything could matter anywhere but here. It was as though he had come, finally, to the center of life itself. Come as an alien, though.
Phyllis certainly hadn’t come as an alien. He had to glance down at her smooth long legs that were so clean and perfect they were hard to believe. Her strong hand lay open on the seat, and in its openness, its quietness, life moved without the jangling of nerves or the sweat of emotion. It seemed to him that the lovely hand lived with a natural economy and rightness, as did Phyllis. All she needed was food and water, and her skin glowed, her eyes stayed pure and blue, and her blood moved smoothly through her healthy flesh. He liked to drive with her drowsing beside him, with the clean smell of her in his nose.
Because, awake, Phyllis was constantly active. Always her mind grappled with something or other; there was always some paradox or some injustice toward which she directed herself. Idleness to her was not a sin, it was something which didn’t exist. She read, she listened, she went to things like lectures and plays and rallies, and she was the first girl he had ever known whose schedule hadn’t perceptibly changed under his influence.
She was, he couldn’t help thinking, not his type at all. His girls had always been in tune, somehow. Intellectual types, basically passive under the casual force of his desires, careful to get the joke, to have heard of everything, to act as comrade as well as lover. Those poor girls. Phyllis would despise their obeisance to his male ironies. If Phyllis didn’t really think something was funny, she didn’t laugh.
A High New House Page 13
