William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice

by Styron, William

  “It was not exactly a tip for my services, yet it was a tip, too. I’ll swear, I never saw anybody give something with less feeling, less charm. It was neither a gift nor a gratuity, and maybe if it had been either I wouldn’t have taken it. I don’t know what it was, but whatever it was—or maybe it was just his manner, holding it out there and that terribly well-meant and sincere yet lofty and slightly tired ‘Oh take it along,’ and Rosemarie had slunk in, in a pair of those toreador pants, so I felt that here was the lady of the manor watching the baron himself as he dealt with one of the serfs —whatever it was, it was bad. It was bad and I knew it, I knew it right down to the bottom of my guts, but I couldn’t resist that sauce. So I took it and I mumbled my humble thanks, and then I got out of there, flaming like an oven. If I had offered to pay for it, why even that might have taken a little of the curse off it. But I didn’t offer to pay for it—not because I didn’t have any money anyway, but because decency had left me, and good sense, and pride. I just took it, that’s all.

  “Then again I heard his voice, calling down at me, just before I got down to the courtyard. ‘say, Cass,’ he hollered, ‘you wouldn’t like to make the PX run with me next time, would you? Maybe pick up a few things for Poppy in the grocery line. Something for the kids?’ And I just hollered back: ’sure, Mason, sure. That’d be just swell. Sure, I’d love to.’ Which was not a lie, but only the wretched truth… .

  “Funny thing,” he said after a long pause, “that last awful day —the day I met you on the road for the first time, remember?—that day I’d just finished what he always called a PX run. I lost count of the times I went over to Naples with him; it became a habit, like booze or dope, then at last I was tied to him, bound to him for reasons of pure survival, and not just my own, either, but of all those around me that I in turn had committed myself to save.

  “Mason,” he said slowly. “Uncle Sugar. I got so that with Mason I was as helpless as Romulus, sucking on the fat tit of a wolf. But this day here, this day he gave me that bottle, I had no idea how far in I would get with Mason, how deep and involved. Any more than I had the notion that in another way I’d rouse myself—God knows how I did it—and grasp a truth about the shabby and contorted life I’d been leading and make at least a stab at salvaging something out of the wreckage… .

  “I just took that bottle, that’s all.” Then, “Mason” he said after a long moment of silence. “I guess I’ve died a thousand deaths since I killed him. But never as long as I live will I forget standing down there in the courtyard, with that bottle like a big warm cow turd in my hand, and him hanging over the balustrade, so lean and so American, with the hungry look of a man who knew he could own you, if you’d only let him.”

  9

  “Art is dead,” Mason was saying. “This is not a creative age. If you look at it that way—and really, Cass, I’m not trying to pull your leg about this—if you look at it that way, you won’t have any worries at all. As capable as you are—and I mean that—do you think the world has any use for your stuff, even if it were not representational, as it is? Put the whole thing out of your mind. A kind of Alexandrian, patristic criticism will fill the vacuum, and after that—nothing. The Muse is on her last legs—look around you, can’t you tell?—she is tottering toward the grave and by the year 2000 she’ll be as dead as the ostracoderm.” Above the slipstream noise of wind sliding past the Cadillac, Mason sneezed; removing handkerchief from gabardine slacks, he wiped his nose. “What’s that?” Cass heard himself say gummily, his tongue (though it was not yet noon) already bethickened. “What’s an oshtracoderm?” In the V of his crotch he nursed a pint bottle, gripped tightly in both hands against the car’s pneumatic rise and sway, and he hoisted it to his lips and drank. Gurgle and glug, a sweet taste, burning. “A fishlike animal,” Mason said. “It vanished in the late Devonian. Just a fossil now. I mean really, Cassius,” he went on persistently, “that being the case, how can you take all this so seriously?” He saw Mason’s foot go up against the brake pedal, felt momentum urge his own spine forward as the car paused: a red and white stop sign, the sea blue, glittering beyond, gay with boats. Atrani—slimy fish nets, bedecked with seaweed, drying in the sun. “Now which way do I go, on this new route of yours?” “Take a left.” The words thought, spoken simultaneously, and uttered upon the fag-end of a half-hour-long program of hiccups which now, after much breath-holding, much squinting, more concentration, mercifully ceased: That’s what you get for drinking without any breakfast, enough to make Leopold give up the ghost. “Take a left, Mason. What’s patristic?” There was no reply to this; the voice continued, lilting, high-pitched, avid, tireless: “So look at it in this light. Hypothesis: art is dead. Corollary: after art’s death, talent must be put to expedient purposes. Final deduction: you yourself, Cass Kinsolving, have done nothing wrong. I desired the expediency of your talent—namely, a certain picture, commissioned in the way pictures have been for centuries. You needing goods I had to offer (Cellini and Clement the Seventh, all right, I’ll agree, the parallel’s absurd like you say, but there’s a similarity in outline), you needing goods painted me a certain picture. I in turn made the appropriate recompense. So it isn’t art. Who cares? The deal is done. Could anything be simpler than that?”

  Blinding blue with July’s clear weather, the sky arched above the topless car; cool sea-wind fanned Cass’ face. The Cadillac clock, aslant on the glittering panel, registered eleven on the nose. In his mind, a dilatory quality seemed to inform all of Mason’s words: they made their imprint on his brain seconds after they were uttered, like an echo. On the pebbled beach below, brownlegged children played; past the beach there were white-hulled boats; past these, flashing sea birds; past all, a blazing eternity of blue: slowly, replacing the bottle in the cradle between his legs, Cass brought his eyes back to the clock, then the road ahead, hearing the echo—Could anything be simpler than that? “I still—” Cass said. Just that for an instant: “I still—” Even he himself could not hear those muttered words. He cleared his throat. “ I still want that picture back, Mason,” he said. The hiccups commenced again, pain lurched in his guts: Bleeding Christ, stoppit! “Still,” he repeated. “I still—huke!—still want that picture back, understand? I reckon I’m ashamed of it, that’s all.” Mason was silent, though was that the engine making that chiding clucking sound, or something that Mason was doing with his tongue? Like a dog who averts his eyes from his master’s face, Cass could not, this moment, bear to look at him; he gazed at the sea again and though he tried to repress it the painting rose up in his mind, horribly superimposed against the seascape’s blue: a nude and lovely young girl with parted mouth and the fairest of hair, supine, eyelids closed tight in passion’s grip, the gold and rose-petal flesh of her thighs entwined round the naked waist of a boy, somewhat Grecian of cast, black-haired, nostrils aflare, who made his sturdy entrance into her at the very vortex of the painting, assisted by a young, fair, yet most urgently contorted hand. Pure realism, it had been done in encaustic (with waxes Mason had bought for him in Naples); though sickeningly plastered during the three sessions it had taken him to complete the job, he had used no model save his imagination, and Mason had pronounced it a work of genius. The contrast! The light flesh and the dark! The perineal area—ah, said Mason, he had never seen a perineum so “moistly stimulated,” and as for the lovely youth—why, each delicate bluish vein seemed to throb with a gathering, pitiless increment of desire. (And that hand, that girl’s sweet young hand: it was absolutely frantic.) And for all this: seventy thousand lire—just enough to pay back rent—three bottles of French brandy, three vials containing ten cc. each of streptomycin sulfate (Squibb), and, now, the burden of an all but unbearable shame. “No really, Mason,” he heard himself mutter, “I want that painting back. I’ll pay you for it, see?” But Mason, unhearing—unlistening?—had switched on the radio. E adesso le sorelle Andrews nella canzone ‘Dawn fanzmi in.’ … Christ! He flinched, grabbing the bottle as Mason swerved past a don
key cart loaded with bags of meal, gained the straightaway, gunned forward, leaving behind meal-motes floating in air, a stooped old man with skin like wrinkled mahogany, eyes rolling in blank belated terror. Give me land lotsa land under starry skies… . The bleeding Andrew sisters, a Red Cross canteen in Wellington, New Zealand, ten thousand years ago, and that song, a girl… . Gorblimey, Yank, you do cut a fawncy caper… . But the memory faded as Mason said now: “Really, why do you want it back so bad, dollbaby? If you’d just give me one honestly logical reason I’d—” But it was his turn to remain silent, thinking: Because of the bleeding abyss. Because I feel how close I am now. Because even in futility’s supremest futility I cannot let my last and only creation be a perineum, a moist membrane and a bunch of pulsing veins, in short, a screw. … He held his breath, the hiccups stopped. I got to watch out, he thought.

  Smooth and serpentine, the road wound far above the sea. The sun blazed down. On the heights above them wild roses bloomed, and water from springs poured forth out of the cliffsides, purling and splashing in whispery gush over the noise of the motor, the whistling wind. Far off, smoky Salerno sprawled against the shore, baking. He took another glug from the bottle, thinking the thought he had thought for many days: What I should do is really rob the son of a bitch. Let me be by my-saelf where the West commences! le sorelle sang, in wild throbbing treble. A power wire sagged above the road, cutting through the sisters with a blast of static. A seaside vacation village, smelling of caramel.

  “Where is this new road of yours?” Mason said, as the car eased to a halt. Hard by the seashore, where spangled umbrellas flowered on the rocky beach, there was a stone fountain, trickling rusty water. From this piazza, somnolent and sticky with morning, three asphalt roads branched off into the steep hills. “What’d you say, Mason? Wish I had a paper cup. ’Bout half of this here whiskey’s slopping down my neck." “What I said was—” He sensed the sharpness in Mason’s voice, was aware that Mason had turned to stare at him, leaning slightly forward, his left arm curled around the steering wheel. “What I said, Buster Brown, if you care to listen,” he said heavily, sarcastically, “is where is this new route to Naples you were telling me about. This short route, which presumably—if it’s shorter—we should have been using for the last dozen trips. If you can just remove that bottle from your lips long enough—” Two priests, one fat, the other rail-skinny, bounced past them on a sputtering Vespa, slanted black and billowing around the fountain, were gone. Neither Cass nor Mason spoke. For a moment motionless, they sweltered in the car, amid the smell of leather. Barely hearing Mason, Cass turned his eyes toward the sea; above Salerno, aloft, unbelievably high in space, there seemed to hover a mist, a churning rack of cloud, terrible and only faintly discerned, as of the smoke from remote cities sacked and aflame: he gave a stir, touched on the shoulder by an unseen, unknowable hand. He closed his eyes in sudden inward fright, trembling again on the marge of hallucination. Jesus Christ, not again today, not today when I got these things—Mason’s voice broke in: “Well, Buster Brown, do you navigate or do I?” Opening his eyes, Cass spoke. The mist, the stratospheric rack had vanished. “Ah, see that sign; says Gragnano? Take that one, Mason, dead ahead.” The car eased forward with an oily meshing of gears, barely perceptible; the sea slid out of sight behind them as they began the northward climb. On the outskirts of the village the road followed a stream bed where, shaded from morning heat by towering bay trees and willows, women with hiked-up skirts and brown bare legs scrubbed away at clothes. And now the way ascended, smoothly, through vineyards and lemon groves. Screaming, red-necked and with panicky flapping wings, a starved rooster rose up in front of them, escaping death by a feather. “So put it out of your mind, Cassius,” Mason said tersely. “The picture’s bought and paid for.”

  Gentili ascoltatori! the radio blared. Canzoni e melodie, un po’ di allegria di Lawrence Welkf Murder! Mason’s hand went out, fiddled with the dial, the voice complaining now about Italy, the dearth of jazz, the lack of this, of that—what? A short stretch through a tunnel in the rock, black as midnight, filled with the sound of rushing torrents, obliterated the voice. In an explosion of light they emerged from the cavern, Mason’s voice flat, insistent, haranguing: “—but you may not think so, Cassius old boy. I don’t mind missing a little chow once in a while—a can of beans here, a loaf of bread there, et cetera—you’re going to get that from servants anywhere. I think you’d agree, however, that there’s a slight difference between a little totin’ from the kitchen and lifting jewelry right out from under your nose. Those earrings were one of Rosemarie’s heirlooms. I’ve done my damndest, I tell you. I’ve eliminated Giorgio; I’ve eliminated those two wenches in the kitchen. Then who else is left? Much as I hate it, all the evidence points to—” Wrenching pain gripped Cass’ heart. The name Francesca on Mason’s lips, as always, spoken in that flat fatuous northeastern cum Hollywood voice larded over with some acquired lounge-lizard accent, faintly British, faintly phony—the name was like filth on his lips. Say one thing against her, do one thing out of line, friend, and I’ll pop you in the bleeding mouth. But Mason: close to the line as he often came, he had not stepped over it, yet; there was a wariness here, a caution, one area of Cass’ existence that Mason had hesitated—or feared—to violate, possibly dating from that day weeks and weeks before when Mason, in the very act of appropriating Francesca for a servant—after all, he could pay; Cass couldn’t—had said something crass and lewd, making plain in his broad wisecracking way not only his desires but his designs, and then had turned around blanched, wide-eyed, even apprehensive at the sound of Cass’ sober words, just those: Say one thing against her, do one thing out of line, friend, and I’ll pop you in the bleeding mouth. It had been a tense moment, but he had failed to drive the wedge in tight. For if there had been a single point during the past two months when Cass might have gained the advantage, at least come up to Mason’s eyelevel, made this plain: There is some shit I will not eat—that surely was the time. But instead the hard moment had become soft, blurred, blunted: Mason had said something querulous, vacantly apologetic—Arright, Cass, sorry, don’t be a hardnose about it, sorry—and he himself—in deathly outrageous panic lest his harsh words cause Mr. Big to withdraw the bambini’s fresh milk, plus Life Savers, bubble gum, frankfurters, bacon, liverwurst, booze (not the least)—had been soft, conciliatory, deplorable. What I mean, Mason, is don’t get any ideas, that’s all She’s just a kid, can’t you tell? And now Mason went on warily, cautiously: “She’s good around the place, works her little tail off. I remember when she was working for you and Poppy, how you told me what a terrific worker she was. And she is. That’s what’s so rough about it. I know how hard up she is. You’ve told me all about her trouble. My great heart bleeds, Cass. But I can’t think that it’s anyone but her. The evidence is in. The place, the time. Am I supposed to stand around and let her steal everything in the joint?”

  Drowsily, he heard himself say: “You’re barking up the wrong tree, Mason. Get you another goat, hear?” “What?” Mason said. “Goat,” he repeated. “I said get yourself another goat. You’re barking up the wrong tree.” Mason was silent. They were climbing now, steeply, along the rim of a gorge, a savage place where only scrub oak grew upon granite outcroppings strewn with gigantic boulders. But as they climbed, the air grew cooler, touched with a high mountain scent of laurel, fern, evergreen. Down through a space between the buttresses of the ridge they were ascending, the sea flashed by like blue enamel in bright sunlight, lakelike, a thousand feet below. Then the rocks and scrub oak returned—dusty abandoned country, conjuring hints of wolves, banditry, bleached and scattered bones. “This looks like the San Bernardino mountains,” said Mason. “Where’s that?” Cass said. “Out on the coast,” Mason replied, “sixty, seventy miles east of L.A. Parts of them wild as hell. Up around Lake Arrowhead, you know?” He fell silent for a moment. Then, “Well, all I can say, Cass,” he went on, “is that there’s going to come a reckoning with Francesca,
wrong tree or not. I can take anything but sneak thievery. It’s the worst sort of thing, this sneaky Italian malady of theirs. I’d almost prefer the out-and-out gangsterism they brought to the U.S.A. Violence. You can deal with violence. Anything but this mean, behind-the-back petty larceny. As for Francesca, I know you have all sorts of sympathetic insights about her that I don’t"—for a moment, again, the voice was touched with sarcasm, then became solemn as before—"but she didn’t work very long for you. I don’t believe you ever saw the sly little bandicoot in action. I could pay for a trip back to New York just on the sugar she’s stolen.” He felt Mason’s eyes turn toward him. “Look, dear dollbaby, don’t take my word for it. Ask Rosemarie. You just don’t know—” The voice became a nag, a slurred complaint, a monotone barely distinct from the sizzling and strumming of tires upon the macadam, the obbligato of fruity saxophones, muffled, halfdrowned in a steady nickering of static. “You just don’t know, you see, how—” A sound, half-giggle, half-moan, rose up softly in Cass’ throat. You just don’t know. I just don’t know what? he thought. Old buddy, I know more than you’ll ever find out. For if Francesca had finally been reckless enough this day to steal something of value—and he had no doubt that she had fleeced Mason (or Rosemarie) of earrings—what Mason still did not know was this: that for the rest—the sugar, the butter, the flour, the cans of soup which several times with a desolate whine Mason announced had disappeared from the pantry shelf—Cass had engineered their removal, encouraged Francesca in her depredation with all the smooth calculated craft of a Fagin, tipped her off as to Mason’s comings and goings, schooled her as to the amount of goods she might safely get away with, and in the end performed the feat, through Francesca, of depleting Mason’s supplies almost every evening in respectable proportion as he helped him augment them —through these insane, ceaseless trips with Mason to the commissary—almost every morning. He had cut a large hole into Mason’s cornucopia.