“A woman wants to feel like a woman,” breathing hard, “is all. She wants to be taken, penetrated, ravished. But more than that she wants to enclose the man.”
With spiderwebs woven of yo-yo string: a net or trap. Profane could think of nothing but Rachel.
“Nothing heroic about a schlemihl,” Profane told her. What was a hero? Randolph Scott, who could handle a six-gun, horse’s reins, lariat. Master of the inanimate. But a schlemihl, that was hardly a man: somebody who lies back and takes it from objects, like any passive woman.
“Why,” he wondered, “does something like sex have to be so confused. Mafia, why do you have to have names for it.” Here he was arguing again. Like with Fina in the bathtub.
“What are you,” she snarled, “a latent homosexual? You afraid of women?”
“No, I’m not queer.” How could you say: sometimes women remind me of inanimate objects. Young Rachel, even: half an MG.
Charisma came in, two beady eyes peering through burn-holes in the blanket. He spotted Mafia, moved toward her. The green wool mound began to sing:
It is something less than heaven
To be quoted Thesis 1.7
Every time I make an advance;
If the world is all that the case is
That’s a pretty discouraging basis
On which to pursue
Any sort of romance.
I’ve got a proposition for you;
Logical, positive and brief.
And at least it could serve as a kind of comic relief:
[Refrain]
Let P equal me,
With my heart in command;
Let Q equal you
With Tractatus in hand;
And R could stand for a lifetime of love,
Filled with music to fondle and purr to.
We’ll define love as anything lovely you’d care to infer to.
On the right, put that bright,
Hypothetical case;
On the left, our uncleft,
Parenthetical chase.
And that horseshoe there in the middle
Could be lucky; we’ve nothing to lose,
If in these parentheses
We just mind our little P’s
And Q’s.
If P [Mafia sang in reply] thinks of me
As a girl hard to make,
Then Q wishes you
Would go jump in the lake.
For R is a meaningless concept,
Having nothing to do with pleasure:
I prefer the hard and tangible things I can measure.
Man, you chase in the face
Of impossible odds;
I’m a lass in the class
Of unbossable broads.
If you’ll promise no more sticky phrases,
Half a mo while I kick off my shoes.
There are birds, there are bees,
And to hell with all your P’s
And Q’s.
By the time Profane finished his beer, the blanket covered them both.
Twenty days before the Dog Star moved into conjunction with the sun, the dog days began. The world started to run more and more afoul of the inanimate. Fifteen were killed in a train wreck near Oaxaca, Mexico, on 1 July. The next day fifteen people died when an apartment house collapsed in Madrid. 4 July a bus fell into a river near Karachi and thirty-one passengers drowned. Thirty-nine more were drowned two days later in a tropical storm in the central Philippines. 9 July the Aegean Islands were hit by an earthquake and tidal waves, which killed forty-three. 14 July a MATS plane crashed after takeoff from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, killing forty-five. An earthquake at Anjar, India, 21 July, killed 117. From 22 to 24 July floods rampaged in central and southern Iran, killing three hundred. 28 July a bus ran off a ferryboat at Kuopio, Finland, and fifteen were killed. Four petroleum tanks blew up near Dumas, Texas, 29 July, killing nineteen. 1 August, seventeen died in a train wreck near Rio de Janeiro. Fifteen more died the 4th and 5th, in floods in southwest Pennsylvania. 2161 people died the same week in a typhoon which hit Chekiang, Honan and Hopeh Provinces. 7 August six dynamite trucks blew up in Cali, Colombia, killing about 1100. The same day there was a train wreck at Prerov, Czechoslovakia, killing nine. The next day 262 miners, trapped by fire, died in a coal mine under Marcinelle, in Belgium. Ice avalanches on Mont Blanc swept fifteen mountain climbers into the kingdom of death in the week 12 to 18 August. The same week a gas explosion in Monticello, Utah, killed fifteen and a typhoon through Japan and Okinawa killed thirty. Twenty-nine more coal miners died of gas poisoning in a mine in Upper Silesia on 27 August. Also on the 27th a Navy bomber crashed among houses in Sanford, Florida, and killed four. Next day a gas explosion in Montreal killed seven and flash floods in Turkey killed 138.
These were the mass deaths. There were also the attendant maimed, malfunctioning, homeless, lorn. It happens every month in a succession of encounters between groups of living and a congruent world which simply doesn’t care. Look in any yearly Almanac, under “Disasters”—which is where the figures above come from. The business is transacted month after month after month.
IV
McClintic Sphere had been reading fakebooks all afternoon. “If you ever want to get depressed,” he told Ruby, “read through a fakebook. I don’t mean the music, I mean the words.”
The girl didn’t answer. She’d been nervous the past couple of weeks. “What is wrong, baby,” he’d say; but she’d shrug it off. One night she told him it was her father who was bugging her. She missed him. Maybe he was sick.
“You been seeing him? A little girl should do that. You don’t know how lucky you are to have your father.”
“He lives in another city,” and she wouldn’t say any more.
Tonight he said, “Look, you need the fare? You go see him. That’s what you ought to do.”
“McClintic,” she said, “what business does a whore have going anywhere? A whore isn’t human.”
“You are. You are with me, Ruby. You know it; we aren’t playing any games here,” patting the bed.
“Whore lives in one place and stays there. Like some little virgin girl in a fairy tale. She doesn’t do any traveling, unless she works the streets.”
“You haven’t been thinking about that.”
“Maybe.” She wouldn’t look at him.
“Matilda likes you. You crazy?”
“What else is there? Either the street or all cooped up. If I do go see him I won’t come back.”
“Where does he live. South Africa?”
“Maybe.”
“Oh Christ.”
Now, McClintic Sphere told himself, nobody goes and falls in love with a prostitute. Not unless he’s fourteen or so and she’s the first piece of tail he’s ever had. But this Ruby, whatever she might be in bed, was a good friend outside it too. He worried about her. It was (for a change) that good kind of worry; not, say, like Roony Winsome’s, which seemed to put the man worse every time McClintic saw him.
It had been going on now for at least a couple of weeks. McClintic, who’d never gone along all the way with the “cool” outlook that developed in the postwar years, didn’t mind as much as some other musicians might have when Roony got juiced and started talking about his personal problems. A few times Rachel had been along with him, and McClintic knew Rachel was straight, and there wasn’t any jazzing going on there, so Roony must have genuinely had problems with this Mafia woman.
It was moving into deep summer time in Nueva York, the worst time of the year. Time for rumbles in the park and a lot of kids getting killed; time for tempers to get frayed, marriages to break up, all homicidal and chaotic impulses, frozen inside for the winter, to thaw now and come to the surface, and glitter out the por
es of your face. McClintic was heading up for Lenox, Mass., for that jazz festival. He knew he couldn’t stand it here. But what about Roony? What he was getting at home (most likely) was edging him toward something. McClintic noticed that last night, between sets at the V-Note. He’d seen the look before: a bass player he’d known in Fort Worth who never changed expression, who was always telling you “I have this problem with narcotics,” who’d flipped one night and they took him away to the hospital at Lexington or someplace. McClintic would never know. But Roony had the same look: too cool. Too unemotional when he said “I have a problem with my woman.” What was there inside for deep summer in Nueva York to melt? What would happen when it did?
This word flip was weird. Every recording date of McClintic’s he’d got into the habit of talking electricity with the audio men and technicians in the studio. McClintic once couldn’t have cared less about electricity, but now it seemed if that was helping him reach a bigger audience, some digging, some who would never dig, but all paying and those royalties keeping the Triumph in gas and McClintic in J. Press suits, then McClintic ought to be grateful to electricity, ought maybe to learn a little more about it. So he’d picked up some here and there, and one day last summer he got around to talking stochastic music and digital computers with one technician. Out of the conversation had come “Set/Reset,” which was getting to be a signature for the group. He had found out from this sound man about a two-triode circuit called a flip-flop, which when it was turned on could be one of two ways, depending on which tube was conducting and which was cut off: set or reset, flip or flop.
“And that,” the man said, “can be yes or no, or one or zero. And that is what you might call one of the basic units, or specialized ‘cells’ in a big ‘electronic brain.’ ”
“Crazy,” said McClintic, having lost him back there someplace. But one thing that did occur to him was if a computer’s brain could go flip and flop, why so could a musician’s. As long as you were flop, everything was cool. But where did the trigger-pulse come from to make you flip?
McClintic, no lyricist, had made up nonsense words to go along with “Set/Reset.” He sang them to himself sometimes on the stand, while the natural horn was soloing:
Gwine cross de Jordan
Ecclesiastically:
Flop, flip, once I was hip,
Flip, flop, now you’re on top,
Set-REset, why are we BEset
With crazy and cool in the same molecule . . .
“What are you thinking about,” said the girl Ruby.
“Flipping,” said McClintic.
“You’ll never flip.”
“Not me,” McClintic said, “whole lot of people.”
After a while he said, not really to her, “Ruby, what happened after the war? That war, the world flipped. But come ’45, and they flopped. Here in Harlem they flopped. Everything got cool—no love, no hate, no worries, no excitement. Every once in a while, though, somebody flips back. Back to where he can love . . .”
“Maybe that’s it,” the girl said, after a while. “Maybe you have to be crazy to love somebody.”
“But you take a whole bunch of people flip at the same time and you’ve got a war. Now war is not loving, is it?”
“Flip, flop,” she said, “get the mop.”
“You’re just like a little kid.”
“McClintic,” she said. “I am. I worry about you. I worry about my father. Maybe he’s flipped.”
“Why don’t you go see him.” The same argument again. Tonight they were in for a long spell of arguing.
“You are beautiful,” Schoenmaker was saying.
“Shale, am I.”
“Perhaps not as you are. But as I see you.”
She sat up. “It can’t keep going the way it’s been.”
“Come back.”
“No, Shale, my nerves can’t take this—”
“Come back.”
“It’s getting so I can’t look at Rachel, or Slab—”
“Come back.” At last she lay again beside him. “Pelvic bones,” he said, touching there, “should protrude more. That would be very sexy. I could do that for you.”
“Please.”
“Esther, I want to give. I want to do things for you. If I can bring out the beautiful girl inside you, the idea of Esther, as I have done already with your face . . .”
She became aware of a clock ticking on the table next to them. She lay stiff, ready to run to the street, naked if need be.
“Come,” he said, “half an hour in the next room. So simple I can do it alone. Nothing but a local anesthetic.”
She began to cry.
“What would it be next?” she said a few moments later. “Larger breasts, you’d want. Then my ears might be a shade too big for you: Shale, why can’t it be just me?”
He rolled over, exasperated. “How do you tell a woman,” he asked the floor. “What is loving if not—”
“You don’t love me.” She was up, struggling clumsy into a brassiere. “You’ve never said it and if you did you wouldn’t mean it.”
“You’ll be back,” he said, still watching the floor.
“I won’t,” through the light wool of her sweater. But of course she would be.
After she left, there was only the ticking of the clock, until Schoenmaker yawned, sudden and explosive; rolled over to confront the ceiling and begin swearing at it softly.
While at Anthroresearch Profane listened with half an ear to the coffee percolating; and carried on another imaginary conversation with SHROUD. By now that had become a tradition.
Remember, Profane, how it is on Route 14, south, outside Elmira, New York? You walk on an overpass and look west and see the sun setting on a junkpile. Acres of old cars, piled up ten high in rusting tiers. A graveyard for cars. If I could die, that’s what my graveyard would look like.
“I wish you would. Look at you, masquerading like a human being. You ought to be junked. Not burned or cremated.”
Of course. Like a human being. Now remember, right after the war, the Nuremberg war trials? Remember the photographs of Auschwitz? Thousands of Jewish corpses, stacked up like those poor car-bodies. Schlemihl: It’s already started.
“Hitler did that. He was crazy.”
Hitler, Eichmann, Mengele. Fifteen years ago. Has it occurred to you there may be no more standards for crazy or sane, now that it’s started?
“What, for Christ sake?”
While Slab lounged meticulous about his canvas, Cheese Danish No. 41, making quick little stabs with a fine old kolinsky brush at the surface of the painting. Two brown slugs—snails without shells—lay crosswise and copulating on a polygonal slab of marble, a translucent white bubble rising between them. No impasto here: “long” paint, everything put there more than real could ever be. Weird illumination, shadows all wrong, surfaces of marble, slugs and a half-eaten cheese Danish in the upper right textured painstakingly fine. So that their slimy trails, converging straight and inevitable from bottom and side to the X of their union, did shine like moonlight.
And Charisma, Fu and Pig Bodine came rollicking out of a grocery store up on the West Side, yelling football signals and tossing a poor-looking eggplant about under the lights of Broadway.
And Rachel and Roony sat on a bench in Sheridan Square, talking about Mafia and Paola. It was one in the morning, a wind had risen and something curious too had happened; as if everyone in the city, simultaneously, had become sick of news of any kind; for thousands of newspaper pages blew through the small park on the way crosstown, blundered like pale bats against the trees, tangled themselves around the feet of Roony and Rachel, and of a bum sleeping across the way. Millions of unread and useless words had come to a kind of life in Sheridan Square; while the two on the bench wove cross-talk of their own, oblivious, among th
em.
And Stencil sat dour and undrunk, in the Rusty Spoon, while Slab’s friend, another Catatonic Expressionist, harangued him with the Great Betrayal, told of the Dance of Death. While around them something of the sort was in fact going on: for here was the Whole Sick Crew, was it not, linked maybe by a spectral chain and rollicking along over some moor or other. Stencil thought of Mondaugen’s story, the Crew at Foppl’s, saw here the same leprous pointillism of orris root, weak jaws and bloodshot eyes, tongues and backs of teeth stained purple by this morning’s homemade wine, lipstick which it seemed could be peeled off intact, tossed to the earth to join a trail of similar jetsam—the disembodied smiles or pouts which might serve, perhaps, as spoor for next generation’s Crew . . . God.
“Wha,” said the Catatonic Expressionist.
“Melancholy,” said Stencil.
And Mafia Winsome, mateless, stood undressed before the mirror, contemplating herself and little else. And the cat yowled in the courtyard.
And who knew where Paola was?
In the past few days Esther had become more and more impossible for Schoenmaker to get along with. He began to think about breaking it off again, only this time permanently.
“It isn’t me you love,” she kept saying. “You want to change me into something I’m not.”
In return he could only argue a kind of Platonism at her. Did she want him so shallow he should only love her body? It was her soul he loved. What was the matter with her, didn’t every girl want a man to love the soul, the true them? Sure, they did. Well, what is the soul. It is the idea of the body, the abstraction behind the reality: what Esther really was, shown to the senses with certain imperfections there in the bone and tissue. Schoenmaker could bring out the true, perfect Esther which dwelled inside the imperfect one. Her soul would be there on the outside, radiant, unutterably beautiful.
“Who are you,” she yelled back, “to say what my soul looks like. You know what you’re in love with? Yourself. Your own skill in plastic surgery, is what.”
V. Page 33
