Why did she tell so much to Porcépic? She was afraid, she said, that it wouldn’t last; that Mélanie might leave her. Glittering world of the stage, fame, foul-mind’s darling of a male audience: the woe of many a lover. Porcépic gave her what comfort he could. He was under no delusions about love as anything but transitory, he left all such dreaming to his compatriot Satin, who was an idiot anyway. Sad-eyed, he commiserated with her: what else should he’ve done? Pass moral judgment? Love is love. It shows up in strange displacements. This poor woman was racked by it. Stencil however only shrugged. Let her be a lesbian, let her turn to a fetish, let her die: she was a beast of venery and he had no tears for her.
The night of the performance arrived. What happened then was available to Stencil in police records, and still told, perhaps, by old people around the Butte. Even as the pit orchestra tuned up there was loud argument in the audience. Somehow the performance had taken on a political cast. Orientalism—at this period showing up all over Paris in fashions, music, theater—had been connected along with Russia to an international movement seeking to overthrow Western civilization. Only six years before a newspaper had been able to sponsor an auto-race from Peking to Paris, and enlist the willing assistance of all the countries between. The political situation these days was somewhat darker. Hence, the turmoil which erupted that night in the Théâtre Vincent Castor.
Before the first act was barely under way, there came catcalls and uncouth gestures from the anti-Porcépic faction. Friends, already calling themselves Porcépiquistes, sought to suppress them. Also present in the audience was a third force who merely wanted quiet enough to enjoy the performance and naturally enough tried to silence, prevent or mediate all disputes. A three-way wrangle developed. By intermission it had degenerated into near-chaos.
Itague and Satin screamed at each other in the wings, neither able to hear the other for the noise out in the audience. Porcépic sat by himself in a corner, drinking coffee, expressionless. A young ballerina, returning from the dressing room, stopped to talk.
“Can you hear the music?” Not too well, she admitted. “Dommage. How does La Jarretière feel?” Mélanie knew the dance by heart, she had perfect rhythm, she inspired the whole troupe. The dancer was ecstatic in her praise: another Isadora Duncan! Porcépic shrugged, made a moue. “If I ever have money again,” more to himself than to her, “I’ll hire an orchestra and dance company for my own amusement and have them perform L’Enlèvement. Only to see what the work is like. Perhaps I will catcall too.” They laughed sadly with one another, and the girl passed on.
The second act was even noisier. Only toward the end were the attentions of the few serious onlookers taken entirely by La Jarretière. As the orchestra, sweating and nervous, moved baton-driven into the last portion, “Sacrifice of the Virgin,” a powerful, slowbuilding seven-minute crescendo which seemed at its end to’ve explored the furthest possible reaches of dissonance, tonal color and (as Le Figaro’s critic put it next morning) “orchestral barbarity,” light seemed all at once to be reborn behind Mélanie’s rainy eyes and she became again the Norman dervish Porcépic remembered. He moved closer to the stage, watching her with a kind of love. An apocryphal story relates that he vowed at that moment never to touch drugs again, never to attend another Black Mass.
Two of the male dancers, whom Itague had never left off calling Mongolized fairies, produced a long pole, pointed wickedly at one end. The music, near triple-forte, could be heard now above the roaring of the audience. Gendarmes had moved in at the rear entrances, and were trying ineffectually to restore order. Satin, next to Porcépic, one hand on the composer’s shoulder, leaned forward, shaking. It was a tricky bit of choreography, Satin’s own. He’d got the idea from reading an account of an Indian massacre in America. While two of the other Mongolians held her, struggling and head shaven, Su Feng was impaled at the crotch on the point of the pole and slowly raised by the entire male part of the company, while the females lamented below. Suddenly one of the automaton handmaidens seemed to run amok, tossing itself about the stage. Satin moaned, gritted his teeth. “Damn the German,” he said, “it will distract.” The conception depended on Su Feng continuing her dance while impaled, all movement restricted to one point in space, an elevated point, a focus, a climax.
The pole was now erect, the music four bars from the end. A terrible hush fell over the audience, gendarmes and combatants all turned as if magnetized to watch the stage. La Jarretière’s movements became more spastic, agonized: the expression on the normally dead face was one which would disturb for years the dreams of those in the front rows. Porcépic’s music was now almost deafening: all tonal location had been lost, notes screamed out simultaneous and random like fragments of a bomb: winds, strings, brass and percussion were indistinguishable as blood ran down the pole, the impaled girl went limp, the last chord blasted out, filled the theater, echoed, hung, subsided. Someone cut all the stage lights, someone else ran to close the curtain.
It never opened. Mélanie was supposed to have worn a protective metal device, a species of chastity belt, into which the point of the pole fit. She had left it off. A physician in the audience had been summoned at once by Itague as soon as he saw the blood. Shirt torn, one eye blackened, the doctor knelt over the girl and pronounced her dead.
Of the woman, her lover, nothing further was seen. Some versions tell of her gone hysterical backstage, having to be detached forcibly from Mélanie’s corpse; of her screaming vendetta at Satin and Itague for plotting to kill the girl. The coroner’s verdict, charitably, was death by accident. Perhaps Mélanie, exhausted by love, excited as at any premiere, had forgotten. Adorned with so many combs, bracelets, sequins, she might have become confused in this fetish-world and neglected to add to herself the one inanimate object that would have saved her. Itague thought it was suicide, Satin refused to talk about it, Porcépic suspended judgment. But they lived with it for many years.
Rumor had it that a week or so later the lady V. ran off with one Sgherraccio, a mad Irredentist. At least they both disappeared from Paris at the same time; from Paris and as far as anyone on the Butte could say, from the face of the earth.
chapter fifteen
Sahha
V
I
Sunday morning around nine the Rollicking Boys arrived at Rachel’s after their night of burglary and lounging in the park. Neither had slept. On the wall was a sign:
I am heading for the Whitney. Kisch mein tokus, Profane.
“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” said Stencil.
“Ho, hum,” said Profane, preparing to sack out on the floor. In came Paola with a babushka over her head and a brown paper bag which clinked in her arms.
“Eigenvalue got robbed last night,” she said. “It made the front page of the Times.” They all attacked the brown bag at once, coming up with the Times in sections and four quarts of beer.
“How about that,” Profane said, scrutinizing the front page. “Police are expecting to make an arrest any time now. Daring early morning burglary.”
“Paola,” said Stencil, behind him. Profane flinched. Paola, holding the church key, turned to gaze past Profane’s left ear at what glittered in Stencil’s hand. She kept quiet, eyes motionless.
“Three are in it. Now.”
At last she looked back at Profane: “You’re coming to Malta, Ben?”
“No,” but weak.
“Why?” he said. “Malta never showed me anything. Anywhere you care to go in the Med there is a Strait Street, a Gut.”
“Benny, if the cops—”
“Who are the cops to me? Stencil’s got the teeth.” He was terrified. It had only now occurred to him that he’d broken the law.
“Stencil, buddy, what do you say to one of us going back there with a toothache and figuring out a way . . .” He tapered off. Stencil kept quiet.
�
��Was all that rigmarole with the rope just a way to get me to come along? What’s so special about me?”
Nobody said anything. Paola looked about ready to burst from her tracks, bawling and looking to be held by Profane.
All of a sudden there was noise in the hallway. Somebody began banging on the door. “Police,” a voice said.
Stencil, januning the teeth into one pocket, dashed away for the fire escape. “Now, what the hell,” Profane said. By the time Paola did open up Stencil was long gone. The same Ten Eyck who had broken up the orgy at Mafia’s stood there with one arm slung under a sodden Roony Winsome.
“Is this here Rachel Owlglass at home,” he said. Explained he’d found Roony drunk on the stoop of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, fly open, face awry, scaring little kids and offending the solid citizens. “Here was all he wanted to come,” Ten Eyck almost pleaded, “he wouldn’t go home. They released him from Bellevue last night.”
“Rachel will be back soon,” said Paola gravely. “We’ll take him till then.”
“I got his feet,” Profane said. They hauled Roony into Rachel’s room and dumped him on the bed.
“Thank you, officer.” Cool as any old-movie’s international jewel thief, Profane wished he had a mustache.
Ten Eyck left, deadpan.
“Benito, things are falling apart. The sooner I get home—”
“Good luck.”
“Why won’t you come?”
“We’re not in love.”
“No.”
“No debts outstanding, either way, not even an old romance to flare up again.”
Shook her head: real tears now.
“Why then.”
“Because we left Teflon’s place in Norfolk.”
“No, no.”
“Poor Ben.” They all called him poor. But to save his feelings never explained, let it stand as an endearment.
“You are only eighteen,” he said, “and have this crush on me. You will see by the time you get to be my age—” She interrupted him by rushing at him as you would rush at a tackling dummy, surrounding him, beginning to soak the suede jacket with all those overdue tears. He thumped her back, bewildered.
So it was of course then that Rachel walked in. Being a girl who recovered fast, first thing she said was:
“Oho. So this is what happens behind my back. While I was at church, praying for you, Profane. And the children.”
He had the common sense to go along with her. “Believe me, it was all perfectly innocent.” Rachel shrugged, meaning the two-line act was over, she’d had a few seconds to think. “You didn’t go to St. Patrick’s, did you? You should of.” Waggling a thumb at what was now snoring in the next room: “Dig.”
And we know who it was Rachel spent the rest of the day with, and the night. Holding his head, tucking him in, touching the beard-stubble and dirt on his face; watching him sleep and the frown lines there relax slowly.
After a while Profane went, off to the Spoon. Once there he announced to the Crew that he was going to Malta. Of course they held a going-away party. Profane ended up with two adoring camp followers working him over, eyes shining with a kind of love. You got the idea they were like prisoners in stir, vicariously happy to see any of their number reach the outside again.
Profane saw no street ahead but the Gut; thought that it would have to go some to be worse than East Main.
There was also the sea’s highway. But that was a different kind entirely.
II
Stencil, Profane and Pig Bodine made a flying visit to Washington, D.C., one weekend: the world-adventurer to expedite their coming passage, the schlemihl to spend a last liberty; Pig to help him. They chose for pied-à-terre a flophouse in Chinatown and Stencil nipped over to the State Department to see what he could see.
“I don’t believe any of it,” said Pig. “Stencil is a fake.”
“Stand by,” was all Profane said.
“I suppose we ought to go out and get drunk,” Pig said. So they did. Either Profane was growing old and losing his capacity, or it was the worst drunk he had ever thrown. There were blank spaces, which are always, of course, frightening. As near as Profane could remember afterward they had headed first for the National Gallery, Pig having decided they ought to have company. Sure enough, in front of Dalí’s Last Supper they found two government girls.
“I’m Flip,” said the blonde, “and this is Flop.”
Pig groaned, momentarily nostalgic for Hanky and Panky. “Fine,” he said. “That is Benny and I am—hyeugh, hyeugh—Pig.”
“Obviously,” said Flop. But the girl/boy ratio in Washington has been estimated as high as eight to one. She grabbed Pig’s arm, looking around the room as if those other spectral sisters were lurking somewhere among the statuary.
Their place was near P Street, and they had amassed every Pat Boone record in existence. Before Pig had even set down the large paper bag containing the fruits of their afternoon’s sortie among the booze outlets of the nation’s capital—legal and otherwise—25 watts of that worthy, singing “Be Bop A Lula,” burst on them unaware.
After this overture, the weekend proceeded in flashes: Pig going to sleep halfway up the Washington Monument and falling half a flight into a considerate troop of Boy Scouts; the four of them in Flip’s Mercury, riding round and round Dupont Circle at three in the morning and being joined eventually by six Negroes in an Oldsmobile who wanted to race; the two cars then proceeding to an apartment on New York Avenue occupied only by one inanimate audio system, fifty jazz enthusiasts and God knows how many bottles of circulating and communal wine; being awakened, wrapped with Flip in a Hudson Bay blanket on the steps of a Masonic Temple somewhere in Northwest Washington, by an insurance executive named Iago Saperstein, who wanted them to come to another party.
“Where is Pig,” Profane wondered.
“He stole my Mercury and he and Flop are on the way to Miami,” said Flip.
“Oh.”
“To get married.”
“It’s a hobby of mine,” continued Iago Saperstein, “to find young people like this, who would be interesting to bring along to a party.”
“Benny is a schlemihl,” said Flip.
“Schlemihls are very interesting,” said Iago.
The party was out near the Maryland line; in attendance Profane found an escapee from Devil’s Island, who was en route to Vassar under the alias of Maynard Basilisk to teach beekeeping; an inventor celebrating his seventy-second rejection by the U.S. Patent Office, this time on a coin-operated whorehouse for bus and railway stations which he was explaining with blueprints and gestures to a small group of Tyrosemiophiles (collectors of labels on French cheese boxes) kidnaped by Iago from their annual convention; a gentle lady plant pathologist, originally from the Isle of Man, who had the distinction of being the only Manx monoglot in the world and consequently spoke to no one; an unemployed musicologist named Petard who had dedicated his life to finding the lost Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, first brought to his attention by one Squasimodeo, formerly a civil servant under Mussolini and now lying drunk under the piano, who had heard not only of its theft from a monastery by certain Fascist music-lovers but also about twenty bars from the slow movement, which Petard would from time to time wander round the party blowing on a plastic kazoo; and other “interesting” people. Profane, who only wanted to sleep, talked to none of them. He woke up in Iago’s bathtub around dawn to the gigglings of a blonde clad only in an enlisted man’s white hat, who was pouring bourbon on Profane out of a gallon coffee pot. Profane was about to open his mouth and try to put it in the way of the descending stream when who should come in but Pig Bodine.
“Give me back my white hat,” said Pig.
“I thought you were in Florida,” said Profane.
“Ha, ha,” said the blonde, “you will have to
catch me.” And away they went, satyr and nymph.
The next Profane knew they were all back in Flip and Flop’s apartment, his head in Flip’s lap and Pat Boone on the turntable. “You have the same initials,” Flop cooed from across the room. “Pat Boone, Pig Bodine.” Profane arose, stumbled to the kitchen and vomited in the sink.
“Out,” screamed Flip.
“Indeed,” said Profane. At the bottom of the stairs were two bicycles, which the girls rode to work to save bus fare. Profane grabbed one and carried it down the stoop to the street. A mess—fly unzipped, crew cut matted down both sides of his head, beard let go for two days, holed skivvy shirt pushed by his beer belly through a few open buttons on his shirt—he pedaled away wobbly for the flop-house.
V. Page 47
