Class Warfare

by D. M. Fraser

  “Well, I’m not going with you,” Isobel said presently, lighting up what appeared to be a joint but was actually a noxious herbal compound guaranteed (falsely) to ease nicotine withdrawal. Her right hand strayed toward the whisky sours, and prudently withdrew; her mouth contracted. In recent weeks she had been seeking professional help, and finding it. “I said I’m not, not, going with you. To this Lonesome Town, or wherever. I’m a real person in my own right, and I have a mind of my own, too. Lonesome Town just isn’t my thing, if you grasp my meaning.” Jamie grasped her meaning, held it tightly. “I didn’t expect you to come with me,” he told her. “Did you ever hear me invite you?”

  “Did you ever hear me accept?” Isobel said.

  The telephone rang once, diabolically. “Yes?” Jamie enquired of it. “Yes? YES?” Somewhere down the line a thin, infantile voice giggled. Somewhere else—in the next apartment—the young marrieds who lived there achieved simultaneous orgasm, to a fanfare of bedsprings. Jamie lit a Running Dog cigarette imported from the People’s Republic of China; the smoke was redolent of honest toil, upward striving. “This has been going on too long,” he advised the telephone. “Perhaps it was interesting in its way, at the beginning, at least an amusing diversion for us both, an unforeseen metaphysical link to the Great World, in a manner of speaking. There was a certain novelty in that. But there is no novelty left in it now, and I’m getting impatient. I want information, content, and it is not coming through. Wherever the Great World may be, I think it is not at the other end of this wire. That’s all. Goodbye.” The connection at once went dead. Isobel clapped listlessly. “When are you planning to leave?” she asked. It was, for her, an entirely rhetorical question.

  Soon. It was summer, after all, a season of little urgency. Cocaine sparkled on the table; a minor Third World demagogue beamed benignly from the wall. Jamie poured himself a whisky sour, downed it, poured another, looked at it critically, licked his moustache. This has been going on too long. Ah, it had to be laughable, this reckoning. He had been warned, often enough, that it would someday come upon him, just like this, and he’d only said, Sure, let it come, I can handle it. He’d supposed himself prepared for it, armed against it, indifferent, but here suddenly was the thing itself happening, defying all preparation. It was awful. He looked at Isobel Monadnock, marvellously arrayed on a chaise longue, and thought: I can’t stand it anymore. He thought: This life must be some kind of advertisement for something, but I’ve forgotten the name of the product, the reason for buying it. “It’s basically a matter of estrangement,” he said, recollecting a seminar he’d attended at college: Applied Social Psychology in Contemporary Industrial Relations. He’d always liked that word, “estrangement,” appreciated the sound, the resonances of it; he’d only been waiting for an opportunity to use it. “Estrangement derangement,” Isobel said. Her eyes drifted to the cocaine, and away again. “The general well-being,” she continued, “is definitely at an all-time low ebb.” Jamie waggled his head.

  He was making an effort to think about his vacation, to deal concretely with the worldly logistics of going to Lonesome Town: what to pack (and what to pack it in), what to wear, where to stay, whether to make a reservation. What’s there to do, he wondered, to pass the time in such a place? Is there live entertainment? Will there be shortages of beer, staple commodities, energy? Will there be a crisis? What will I find to take snapshots of, to preserve my memories forever? Many people harbour these thoughts, at the onset of their holidays. “That place is nothing but a cheapo tourist trap,” Isobel muttered, watching him. “A lot of garbanzo rigged up to gull the proles. You ought to know better.” It had been an excessively hot day, and two people had dropped dead in the department store where, occasionally, she worked. It had happened in her department. One respiratory ailment, one cardiac arrest. The inhalator attendants had seemed to blame Isobel personally. The floor manager, whose name was Adrian Agostini, had fed her librium and lemon tea in his office; she’d noticed, reviving, that he had deplorable taste in shirts. “In the kingdom of perfect love,” she explained, “everything is always in good taste.” She fanned herself irritably with a back issue of Strength and Health. “In the kingdom of perfect love, there are no unseemly incidents.”

  Soon, soon. He’d take with him the minimum of everything, all dispensable, disposable things. He’d risk finding a hotel, a room, after he arrived. Let the timid make plans. Let the anally fixated organize their lives. He, Jamie McIvor, would play it by ear. The tenor sang:

  With hapless fancies am I bur-urdened

  derry-derry-nonny-ho.

  When shall mine errant heart be par-ardoned?

  When free at last where shall it go?

  “Fuck off,” Jamie said to the stereo. There would be time enough for sad songs when he reached Lonesome Town; what he needed now was uplift, inspiration. He rolled up a dollar bill, inserted it experimentally in his nose, drew in air. At such moments he was always nervous; he had few vices, and he was inept at all of them. “Is that really how you do it?” Isobel asked, eyeing the glittering mound of expensive powder. “What happens if you sneeze?” You don’t sneeze. But the power of mental suggestion is formidable: a word, ill-timed, can trigger an earthquake. Don’t sneeze. Jamie felt it coming and managed, for an instant, to aim a look of cosmic malevolence in Isobel’s direction. Then he sneezed. As the pale dust settled, ruinously, on the carpet, it occurred to him that his vacation was swiftly becoming overdue. He decided to leave the next day. “Lonesome Town,” he said, “here I come.”

  II. Ordinary Living

  Subsequently, for reasons he confided to no one, Jamie found excuses for postponing his departure. “It’s all right,” he said vaguely, when Isobel nagged him. “It’s nothing to worry about.” Something seemed to be deteriorating; he was losing weight again; he was thinking, obscurely, of getting a job. “Procrastination,” Isobel said one day, “is the thief of you-know-what.” Jamie said nothing; he was reading a long, serious novel about the medical profession. Dr Mallory was about to lose a patient. Things were tense in the operating room. “Normally,” Isobel said, “I admire resolution in a man. Spunk. Many women are attracted to spunk, and repelled by the lack of it. Do you follow me?” An odour of curried shrimp wafted through the apartment. The patient expired, tersely, in a paragraph. “Life,” Jamie said, “frequently begins at birth and continues, more or less consecutively, until death. One doesn’t have to be a philosopher, or a poet, to see the ramifications of that,” He sighed, for the sadness of it all. Dr Mallory was delivering a stirring peroration on the brevity of our mortal span, how like a penny match our little flame is soon snuffed out. Isobel put an album of cowboy songs on the stereo. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think you’re a lost battle.” In the kitchen, Scarface mewed.

  A lost battle. Well, that was possible—but what had he been fighting? What prize, what kingdom, had he unaccountably failed to claim? As he busied himself with these reflections, Isobel busied herself with ordinary living, buying fake emeralds at a garage sale, trying out elaborate recipes, reading her horoscope and finding it unsatisfactory. “Someone close to you will suffer fits of indecision,” the horoscope said. Another day it said, “Accept loss forever.” One night, when Jamie was deep in thought, she went to bed with Adrian Agostini; he turned out to be a leather freak with strong S & M predilections. Occasionally, she went to the zoo to commiserate with the Lesser Panda, condemned by an accident of zoological history to be always the lesser. “You and me, buddy,” she told the Lesser Panda, “we’re in the same boat. The same cage, I mean.” It was scant consolation, for either of them. Looking for clean underwear, on a morning of heat-haze and exhaust fumes, Jamie found a raunchy letter from Agostini to Isobel; he had it photocopied, and sent the copy to the department store. That was the end of that. “We’re just going through a rough time,” he explained at parties. “Everyone knows how it is.”

  Everyone knew how it was. The newspapers were full of madness, signs of decay
, outbreaks of disintegration, incursions of reality. Jamie had his hair cut, inexpertly, by a high school sweetheart who wanted to learn a trade. He acquired a quantity of hashish, smoked most of it in a single night, and stayed in bed for three days thereafter, mumbling a recitative that included references to trace elements, lunar modules, Paul Tillich, the national priorities, the crisis of confidence, Luigi Pirandello, urban sprawl, animal husbandry, the sinking of the Lusitania, the sinking of his hopes. Isobel brought him Scotch broth, refused him cigarettes. “You were probably right,” she wrote to her mother. “Jamie is an unstable personality. He can’t seem to adjust to things.” Her mother immediately came to town and took Isobel off to an ornate, vulgar hotel, where they wept for a week.

  Jamie bought a ticket to Lonesome Town, and carried it around with him, in his wallet, as a kind of talisman. He felt, at odd moments, random stabs of disquiet, a sense of purpose somehow dislocated, misplaced, dusted over with unfinished business. There were things to do, things to arrange for, things to put in order, before he went down to Lonesome Town. There were friends to get drunk with (just one more time), relatives to write to (just one more letter), deals and suchlike to consummate, goodbyes to say. All this required concentration; it demanded a measure of organization that Jamie, heat-doped, wasn’t sure he could summon up. People began to suspect, and to whisper among themselves, that his talk of going to Lonesome Town had been a bluff from the beginning: a ploy of some kind, a pretext. To what end? From what motive? Who could say?

  On the peak of a heat wave, in mid-afternoon, he followed Isobel to the zoo. The Lesser Panda watched them without visible interest. “I know how you feel,” Jamie said to both of them. “I wish there were something I could do about it. Something you could do. What can I tell you? One cage is very much like another, sometimes, and love can’t spring the lock. At some point the heart must break. At some point it will break, with an audible snap, not unlike the twanging of elastic. It often happens at night, late, in public places; on certain streets, if you happen by at the right time, you can hear the racket of breaking hearts. The pieces lie there on the ground, on the sidewalk, still strangely vital, reflecting stars, streetlamps, moonlight. Isobel, there never was a language capable of saying it, what has to be said. These tears will, in the normal course of things, dry. Winter comes soon enough. And I have no choice, now, but to go down to Lonesome Town.”

  “What are you talking about?” Isobel said. “Why are you harassing me? Why don’t you take a bath once in a while? When are you going to grow up and settle down?”

  The summer rumbled on, the weather worsened and improved irregularly, the government fell and was propped up again, Isobel bought an aquarium and filled it with guppies, several of the guppies quickly died, and Jamie had not, yet, gone down to Lonesome Town. “Later,” was all he’d say. “Eventually.” He was writing a diatribe, for a little-known journal of political thought, on the application of Marxist-Leninist dialectics to the interpretation of dreams; it helped pass the time. “I have to finish my work,” he explained to anyone who asked. “I want to wrap things up properly, before I go.” His friends looked skeptical.

  He didn’t care. The world was asserting its old attachments, flexing its chains, tightening, day by day, its network of connections. He couldn’t gainsay its authority. Summer light was witchcraft, a seduction he hadn’t the will to refuse. Voices addressed him, preached to him, quibbled and questioned; he heard them, perversely, as music. When he thought of Lonesome Town, as he frequently did, the thought lay limp and gelatinous, a foreign body, in his mind. “I swear to God,” Isobel said one day, “there must be something wrong with you.” There was, but he couldn’t positively identify it; it was always turning into something else. “The revolutionary process,” he wrote in his diatribe, “is a matter of continual adaptation to new circumstances, and thus a continual revision of the circumstances themselves by the activity of adapting to them.” Isobel, reading over his shoulder, felt a surge of annoyance: once again he was trying to excuse himself. Jamie went on writing, undisturbed: “It can be said, then, that the Uncertainty Principle applies to the behaviour of the proletariat as it does to that of particles … ” Isobel went back to her needlepoint. “I get the distinct and unpleasant impression,” she said, “that things are over between us.”

  Nonetheless, scraps of resolution floated, like waste paper, in the air, gathered themselves together and stuck—gradually—to Jamie. He began to plan, to pack, to settle what had to be settled, to dispose of encumbrances. He finished the diatribe with an eloquent call to arms against the incursion of counterrevolutionary dreaming; he sent it off to an editor who, a few weeks later, would gently reject it as “extremist”; he said all but the most difficult of the necessary goodbyes. No one entirely believed in his resolve, but it didn’t matter: he had his ticket, his baggage, his wits about him. “So,” Isobel said, and stopped. Any number of words, phrases, occurred to her, and none of them seemed adequate. “The least you can do,” she said at last, “is take me out to dinner before you go.” Jamie smiled, for the first time in weeks. “That would appear to be in order,” he said. Ordinary living had its attractions, its unlooked-for splendours, after all. Isobel had her species of loveliness, after all. He would think more stringently, later, of the wires, the ropes of need and remembered pleasure, that bound him to this world; right now, he was content simply to admire them. “I’ll get my hair tinted for the occasion,” Isobel said. “And I’ll even take a bath,” Jamie answered her.

  In the dead of summer, they made their preparations.

  III. The Kingdom of Perfect Love

  It came about, then, that on the eve of his leaving for Lonesome Town Jamie and Isobel went out to dinner at an expensive, melancholy restaurant. “We can’t afford it,” Isobel said; she was wearing the fake emeralds again, and her hair was newly reddish. Jamie was achingly clean. “I know,” he said. “It isn’t important.” He had been saying that, or versions of it, a lot. There were reasons. Of these the most interesting, to him, was that he was about to go down to Lonesome Town; there could be no postponing it, now. It was a journey not to be undertaken casually. Through that summer of manifold imperfections, through the past few hours in particular, he had given his departure careful consideration. He had studied the appropriate texts, had sought out advice, had accepted (not uncritically) the advice proffered. Some of it would be useful, some not. He stroked Isobel’s arm. “I’m just feeling the years, if you know what I mean,” he said apologetically. Isobel laughed, showing remarkable teeth.

  In the restaurant, the lights were amber and blue; they flickered irregularly, as though meaning something. The tablecloth was snowy white, except where Jamie had ashed on it. A handsome fiddler in ethnic garb played Serbian folk dirges. A handsome woman in a dirndl sang: “Oh, I am so unhappy, my heart is rent in twain, soon it will fly away. The fallow fields will weep, O my people.” Isobel shivered. “It’s the air-conditioning,” she explained, whispering. “You should have worn a sweater,” Jamie said. Isobel’s eyes opened marginally. “Here?” They both noticed, independently, that their table was not the most desirable in the house.

  Waiting to be served, Jamie counted his money, trying to appear unconcerned. What he was really doing, he reminded himself, was looking for that amusing newspaper clipping he’d been saving, in his wallet, for just this occasion. “You’ll love it,” he remembered to say aloud, as he searched, filling time. He must have lost the damn thing somewhere, or thrown it out. There was nearly enough money. “I’m not especially hungry, come to think of it,” he complained. “Whenever I think about food, I lose my appetite.” The waiter smelled remotely of musk oil, and his uniform could have dressed a palace guard in the Principality of Hopelessness. “And what will be your pleasure?” he said nastily. “Shipshape yachts and buggery,” answered Jamie. “A good screw and an early death.” Isobel blushed.

  They ate buffalo steaks and asparagus drenched in something yellow and obscure
ly cheesy, and they drank a quantity of politically reprehensible wine. After the third glass, Jamie developed a problem with his knife and fork; there was a small, jarring clatter, and an audible turning of heads in the vicinity. “Oh Jesus,” Isobel said. In a moment, the Dirndl Woman began to sing:

  How shall I rise

  above

  the mournful cries

  of love?

  How can I re-

  alize

  it’s not just me

  who cries?

  The iced raspberries arrived then, and lay uneaten, small, round and pristine red, in their silver bowl. The Dirndl Woman went into a back room for her fix. “I guess we should probably talk,” Jamie said. “It seems to be the thing to do, over dessert.”

  “Talk,” Isobel said. (You could be waiting for a bus, at your accustomed transfer point, and someone could pull a knife on you, as swiftly.) “There’s no end to the talk, like the first movement of a Vivaldi concerto, like the eleven o’clock news, if you want to get prosaic about it. I suppose you do. I don’t, this time around. In the kingdom of perfect love, there’s no prose; they speak in strophes, alexandrines, measured, quietly lyrical, full of understated resonance. I miss that with you. Yesterday, in mid-afternoon, I had a dream in which you were crushed under the wheels of a locomotive. You resembled red cabbage in a vulgar salad. Nobody even tried to save you, glue you together, cover you. The police asked questions I couldn’t answer. Outside, an eyelid’s flicker away, there was a racket of gunfire; I thought it was a truck backfiring. These things occur. Still, when they do, they bother me—my palms sweat and I see little sparklers in the foreground of everything. In the kingdom of perfect love, I’d take the sparklers for granted: they’d be torches (as in the old legends) held aloft, peripherally, by Nubian sentries.”