Suddenly—so suddenly it scared him—there was light ahead, around a corner. Not the light of a rainy evening in the city, but paler, less certain. They rounded the corner. He noticed the flashlight bulb starting to flicker; lost the alligator momentarily. Then turned the corner and found a wide space like the nave of a church, an arched roof overhead, a phosphorescent light coming off walls whose exact arrangement was indistinct.
“Wha,” he said out loud. Backwash from the river? Sea water shines in the dark sometimes; in the wake of a ship you see the same uncomfortable radiance. But not here. The alligator had turned to face him. It was a clear, easy shot.
He waited. He was waiting for something to happen. Something otherworldly, of course. He was sentimental and superstitious. Surely the alligator would receive the gift of tongues, the body of Father Fairing be resurrected, the sexy V. tempt him away from murder. He felt about to levitate and at a loss to say where, really, he was. In a bonecellar, a sepulchre.
“Ah, schlemihl,” he whispered into the phosphorescence. Accident prone, schlimazzel. The gun would blow up in his hands. The alligator’s heart would tick on, his own would burst, mainspring and escapement rust in this shindeep sewage, in this unholy light.
“Can I let you just go?” Bung the foreman knew he was after a sure thing. It was down on the clipboard. And then he saw the alligator couldn’t go any further. Had settled down on its haunches to wait, knowing damn well it was going to be blasted.
In Independence Hall in Philly, when the floor was rebuilt, they left part of the original, a foot square, to show the tourists. “Maybe,” the guide would tell you, “Benjamin Franklin stood right there, or even George Washington.” Profane on an eighth-grade class trip had been suitably impressed. He got that feeling now. Here in this room an old man had killed and boiled a catechumen, had committed sodomy with a rat, had discussed a rodent nunhood with V., a future saint—depending which story you listened to.
“I’m sorry,” he told the alligator. He was always saying he was sorry. It was a schlemihl’s stock line. He raised the repeater to his shoulder, flicked off the safety. “Sorry,” he said again. Father Fairing talked to rats. Profane talked to alligators. He fired. The alligator jerked, did a backflip, thrashed briefly, was still. Blood began to seep out amoebalike to form shifting patterns with the weak glow of the water. Abruptly, the flashlight went out.
II
Gouverneur (“Roony”) Winsome sat on his grotesque espresso machine, smoking string and casting baleful looks at the girl in the next room. The apartment, perched high over Riverside Drive, ran to something like thirteen rooms, all decorated in Early Homosexual and arranged to present what the writers of the last century liked to call “vistas” when the connecting doors were open, as they were now.
Mafia his wife was in on the bed playing with Fang the cat. At the moment she was naked and dangling an inflatable brassiere before the frustrated claws of Fang who was Siamese, gray and neurotic. “Bouncy, bouncy,” she was saying. “Is the dweat big kitties angwy cause he tant play wif the bwa? EEEE, he so cute and ickle.”
Oh, man, thought Winsome, an intellectual. I had to pick an intellectual. They all revert.
The string was from Bloomingdale’s, fine quality: procured by Charisma several months before on one of his sporadic work binges; he’d been a shipping clerk that time. Winsome made a mental note to see the pusher from Lord and Taylor’s, a frail girl who hoped someday to sell pocketbooks in the accessories department. The stuff was highly valued by string smokers, on the same level as Chivas Regal Scotch or black Panamanian marijuana.
Roony was an executive for Outlandish Records (Volkswagens in Hi-Fi, The Leavenworth Glee Club Sings Old Favorites) and spent most of his time out prowling for new curiosities. He had once, for example, smuggled a tape recorder, disguised as a Kotex dispenser, into the ladies’ room at Penn Station; could be seen, microphone in hand, lurking in false beard and Levi’s in the Washington Square fountain, being thrown out of a whorehouse on 125th Street, sneaking along the bullpen at Yankee Stadium on opening day. Roony was everywhere and irrepressible. His closest scrape had come the morning two CIA agents, armed to the teeth, came storming into the office to destroy Winsome’s great and secret dream: the version to end all versions of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. What he planned to use for bells, brass band or orchestra God and Winsome only knew; these were of no concern to the CIA. It was the cannon shots they had come to find out about. It seemed Winsome had been putting out feelers among higher-echelon personnel in the Strategic Air Command.
“Why,” said the CIA man in the gray suit.
“Why not,” said Winsome.
“Why,” said the CIA man in the blue suit.
Winsome told them.
“My God,” they said, blanching in unison.
“It would have to be the one dropped on Moscow, naturally,” Roony said. “We want historical accuracy.”
The cat let loose a nerve-jangling scream. Charisma came crawling in from one of the adjoining rooms, covered by a great green Hudson’s Bay blanket. “Morning,” Charisma said, his voice muffled by the blanket.
“No,” said Winsome. “You guessed wrong again. It is midnight and Mafia my wife is playing with the cat. Go in and see. I’m thinking of selling tickets.”
“Where is Fu,” from under the blanket.
“Out rollicking,” said Winsome, “downtown.”
“Roon,” the girl squealed, “come in and look at him.” The cat was lying on its back with all four paws up in the air and a death grin on its face.
Winsome made no comment. The green mound in the middle of the room moved past the espresso machine; entered Mafia’s room. Going past the bed it stopped briefly, a hand reached out and patted Mafia on the thigh, then it moved on again in the direction of the bathroom.
The Eskimos, Winsome reflected, consider it good hostmanship to offer a guest your wife for the night, along with food and lodging. I wonder if old Charisma is getting any there off of Mafia.
“Mukluk,” he said aloud. He reckoned it was an Eskimo word. If it wasn’t, too bad: he didn’t know any others. Nobody heard him anyway.
The cat came flying through the air, into the espresso machine room. His wife was putting on a peignoir, kimono, housecoat, or negligee. He didn’t know the difference, though periodically Mafia tried to explain to him. All Winsome knew was it was something you had to take off her. “I am going to work for a while,” she said.
His wife was an authoress. Her novels—three to date—ran a thousand pages each and like sanitary napkins had gathered in an immense and faithful sisterhood of consumers. There’d even evolved somehow a kind of sodality or fan club that sat around, read from her books and discussed her Theory.
If the two of them ever did get around to making a final split, it would be that Theory there that would do it. Unfortunately Mafia believed in it as fervently as any of her followers. It wasn’t much of a Theory, more wishful thinking on Mafia’s part than anything else. There being but the single proposition: the world can only be rescued from certain decay through Heroic Love.
In practice Heroic Love meant screwing five or six times a night, every night, with a great many athletic, half-sadistic wrestling holds thrown in. The one time Winsome had blown up he’d yelled, “You are turning our marriage into a trampoline act,” which Mafia thought was a pretty good line. It appeared in her next novel, spoken by Schwartz, a weak, Jewish psychopath who was the major villain.
All her characters fell into this disturbingly predictable racial alignment. The sympathetic—those godlike, inexhaustible sex athletes she used for heroes and heroines (and heroin? he wondered) were all tall, strong, white though often robustly tanned (all over), Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and/or Scandinavian. Comic relief and villainy were invariably the lot of Negroes, Jews and South European immigrants. Winsome, being ori
ginally from North Carolina, resented her urban or Yankee way of hating Nigras. During their courtship he’d admired her vast repertoire of Negro jokes. Only after the marriage did he discover a truth horrible as the fact she wore falsies: she was in nearly total ignorance about the Southron feeling toward Negroes. She used “nigger” as a term of hatred, not apparently being capable herself of anything more demanding than sledgehammer emotions. Winsome was too upset to tell her it was not a matter of love, hate, like or not like so much as an inheritance you lived with. He’d let it slide, like everything else.
If she believed in Heroic Love, which is nothing really but a frequency, then obviously Winsome wasn’t on the man end of half of what she was looking for. In five years of marriage all he knew was that both of them were whole selves, hardly fusing at all, with no more emotional osmosis than leakage of seed through the solid membranes of contraceptive or diaphragm that were sure to be there protecting them.
Now Winsome had been brought up on the white Protestant sentiments of magazines like The Family Circle. One of the frequent laws he encountered there was the one about how children sanctify a marriage. Mafia at one time had been daft to have kids. There may have been some intention of mothering a string of super-children, founding a new race, who knew. Winsome had apparently met her specifications, both genetic and eugenic. Sly, however, she waited, and the whole contraceptive rigmarole was gone through in the first year of Heroic Love. Things meanwhile having started to fall apart, Mafia became, naturally, more and more uncertain of how good a choice Winsome had been after all. Why she’d hung on this long Winsome didn’t know. Literary reputation, maybe. Maybe she was holding off divorce till her public-relations sense told her go. He had a fair suspicion she’d describe him in court as near impotence as the limits of plausibility allowed. The Daily News and maybe even Confidential magazine would tell America he was a eunuch.
The only grounds for divorce in New York state is adultery. Roony, dreaming mildly of beating Mafia to the punch, had begun to look with more than routine interest at Paola Maijstral, Rachel’s roommate. Pretty and sensitive; and unhappy, he’d heard, with her husband Pappy Hod, BM3, USN, from whom she was separated. But did that mean she’d think any better of Winsome?
Charisma was in the shower, splashing around. Was he wearing the green blanket in there? Winsome had the impression he lived in it.
“Hey,” called Mafia from the writing desk. “How do you spell Prometheus, anybody.” Winsome was about to say it started off like prophylactic when the phone rang. Winsome hopped down off the espresso machine and padded over to it. Let her publishers think she was illiterate.
“Roony, have you seen my roommate. The young one.” He had not.
“Or Stencil.”
“Stencil has not been here all week,” Winsome said. “He is out tracking down leads, he says. All quite mysterious and Dashiell Hammett–like.”
Rachel sounded upset: her breathing, something. “Would they be together?” Winsome spread his hands and shrugged, keeping the phone tucked between neck and shoulder. “Because she didn’t come home last night.”
“No telling what Stencil is doing,” said Winsome, “but I will ask Charisma.”
Charisma was standing in the bathroom, wrapped in the blanket, observing his teeth in the mirror. “Eigenvalue, Eigenvalue,” he mumbled. “I could do a better root canal job. What is my buddy Winsome paying you for, anyway.”
“Where is Stencil,” said Winsome.
“He sent a note yesterday, by a vagrant in an old Army campaign hat, circa 1898. Something about he would be in the sewers, tracing down a lead, indefinitely.”
“Don’t slouch,” Winsome’s wife said as he chugged back to the phone emitting puffs of string smoke. “Stand up straight.”
“Ei-gen-value!” moaned Charisma. The bathroom had a delayed echo.
“The what,” Rachel said.
“None of us,” Winsome told her, “have ever inquired into his business. If he wants to grouse around the sewer system, why let him. I doubt Paola is with him.”
“Paola,” Rachel said, “is a very sick girl.” She hung up, angry but not at Winsome, and turned to see Esther sneaky-Peteing out the door wearing Rachel’s white leather raincoat.
“You could have asked me,” Rachel said. The girl was always swiping things and then getting all kittenish when she was caught.
“Where are you going at this hour,” Rachel wanted to know.
“Oh, out.” Vaguely. If she had any guts, Rachel thought, she would say: who the hell are you, I have to account to you for where I go? And Rachel would answer: I am who you owe a thousand-odd bucks to, is who. And Esther would get all hysterical and say: If that’s the way it is, I’m leaving, I will go into prostitution or something and send you your money in the mail. And Rachel would watch her stomp out and then just as she was at the door, deliver the exit line: You’ll go broke, you’ll have to pay them. Go and be damned. The door would slam, high heels clatter away down the hall, a hiss-thump of elevator doors and hoorah: no more Esther. And next day she would read in the paper where Esther Harvitz, twenty-two, honors graduate of CCNY, had taken a Brody off some bridge, overpass or high building. And Rachel would be so shocked she wouldn’t even be able to cry.
“Was that me?” out loud. Esther had left. “So,” she continued in a Viennese dialect, “this is what we call repressed hostility. You secretly want to kill your roommate. Or something.”
Somebody was banging on the door. She opened it to Fu and a Neanderthal wearing the uniform of a third-class boatswain’s mate in the U.S. Navy.
“This is Pig Bodine,” said Fu.
“Isn’t it a small world,” said Pig Bodine. “I’m looking for Pappy Hod’s woman.”
“So am I,” said Rachel. “And what are you, playing Cupid for Pappy? Paola doesn’t want to see him again.”
Pig tossed his white hat at the desk lamp, scoring a ringer. “Beer in the icebox?” said Fu, all smiles. Rachel was used to being barged in on at all hours by members of the Crew and their random acquaintances. “MYSAH,” she said, which is Crew talk for Make Yourself At Home.
“Pappy is over in the Med,” said Pig, lying on the couch. He was short enough so that his feet didn’t hang over the edge. He let one thick furry arm fall to the floor with a dull thump, which Rachel suspected would have been more like a splat if there hadn’t been a rug there. “We are on the same ship.”
“How come then you aren’t over in the Med, wherever that is,” said Rachel. She knew he meant Mediterranean but felt hostile.
“I am AWOL,” said Pig. He closed his eyes. Fu came back with beer. “Oh boy, oh boy, yeah,” said Pig. “I smell Ballantine.”
“Pig has this remarkably acute nose,” Fu said, putting an opened quart of Ballantine into Pig’s fist, which looked like a badger with pituitary trouble. “I have never known him to guess wrong.”
“How did you two get together,” Rachel asked, seating herself on the floor. Pig, eyes still closed, was slobbering beer. It ran out of the corners of his mouth, formed brief pools in the bushy caverns of his ears and soaked on into the sofa.
“If you had been down the Spoon at all you would know,” Fu said. He referred to the Rusty Spoon, a bar on the western fringes of Greenwich Village where, legend has it, a noted and colorful poet of the ’20s drank himself to death. Ever since then it has had kind of a rep among groups like the Whole Sick Crew. “Pig has made a big hit there.”
“I’ll bet Pig is the darling of the Rusty Spoon,” said Rachel, acid, “considering that sense of smell he has, and how he can tell what brand of beer it is, and all.”
Pig removed the bottle from his mouth, where it had been somehow, miraculously, balanced. “Glug,” he said. “Ahh.”
Rachel smiled. “Perhaps your friend would like to hear some music,” she said. She reached over and
turned on the FM, full volume. She screwed the dial over to a hillbilly station. On came a heartbroken violin, guitar, banjo and vocalist:
Last night I went and raced with the Highway Patrol
But that Pontiac done had more guts than mine.
And so I wrapped my tail around a telephone pole
And now my baby she just sits a cryin’.
I’m up in heaven, darlin’, now don’t you cry;
Ain’t no reason why you should be blue.
Just go on out and race a cop in Daddy’s old Ford
And you can join me up in heaven, too.
Pig’s right foot had begun to wobble, roughly in time with the music. Soon his stomach, where the beer bottle was now balanced, started to move up and down to the same rhythm. Fu watched Rachel, puzzled.
“There’s nothing I love,” said Pig and paused. Rachel did not doubt this. “Than good shitkicking music.”
“Oh,” she shouted, not wanting to get on the subject but too nosy, she was aware, to leave it: “I suppose you and Pappy Hod used to go out on liberty and have all sorts of fun kicking shit.”
V. Page 14
