by Purdy, James
She had known Joel when, as a very young man, he had been part of a well-known Negro ballet group, and the husband of the woman who headed it. A Ph.D. and a beauty,this woman had danced out in methodical savagery her contempt for the white race, until she herself had become a woman of wealth and social prestige. Joel had broken with the great choreographer during her rise to eminence, and had got himself a good job in the Government. Rather light-skinned in strong light, he somehow looked beautifully dark and interestingly menacing in subdued illumination. A mole near his satin mouth increased his appeal which, after his divorce from the choreographer, he felt too unusual ever for another marriage.
Harold Winternitz, who deplored racial fraternizing unless on a strictly professional or cultural basis, often taunted Carrie during their short-lived marriage by saying he was surprised so “emancipated” a woman had never crossed the color line in bed. Stuck as she was in a Caucasian vacuum, he sneered, perhaps much of her misery had been owing to her monotonous racial diet.
If Winternitz had been a witness to her present meeting with Joel, he would have seen it was more than race which brought her this evening to full realization of her caller’s startlingly exotic but obviously available charms.
When she finally showed Joel the large double-room that was for rent, she was already aware that Bernie’s voice, which had been echoing every day from every room in the house, would now be as inaudible as one of her busted phonograph discs. She did not know how Joel felt, but his very coming and his persistent smile, the padded way he followed her up the stairs to view the room, made her assume that he felt enough. She was not wrong. Before he had made final arrangements about the rent, they were automatically in closest embrace, as if a kiss were the conventional requisite for finalizing an agreement, like strong liquor drunk by businessmen over a deal. Kissing her with warmth and generous wet lip and tongue, he had allowed his hands to rest first on her breasts, then on her buttocks, and the two clasped each other like stars before a cameraman who had shot this scene innumerable times before.
“Have supper with me later tonight?” she managed to ask, once disengaged. As he began his descent of the impressive staircase, the keys to his room in his hand, he nodded to her question without turning around or speaking.
After Joel had left, she could only sit down again in the wicker rocker, and practice calm. Had one of the Illinois tornadoes blown away the whole house, leaving her and the rocker intact, she could not have sat there more oblivious to outside happenings. She knew this was a principal, albeit spectacularly unforeseen, event of her life. All other attachments, loves, husbands, events in her life seemed faint and unreal. There had never been a Harold Winternitz, and there was certainly now no Bernie Gladhart. She cried a little as she saw Bernie disappearing. He had needed her, and probably still did, but it was a hurricane after all that sometimes made you wake up. She knew now he could never be a writer. Those querulous phone calls told her, for on a telephone one finally hears the real voice isolated from the flesh that contains it. What she heard coming to her from Brooklyn was only a mewling infant, missing its milk. It had been for her a kind of drug to believe the impossible, to believe in Bernie, but suddenly her belief was dead.
Carrie knew of course what was coming this evening, and she prepared to make herself ready. She rested, she drank bowl after bowl of nourishing clam soup, and every so often just a nip of brandy. She telephoned a fashionable Hungarian restaurant which, on being pressed, would send out a complete dinner for two.
There would be no more empty hours in the wedding-bower, she told herself, aloud. After all, she had tried the impossible with Bernie, and she was glad her punishment was over. Waiting for evening, dressed only in her foundation, but with her wired bra lifted to dizzy heights, she snuggled under a coverlet covered with lily-pads for design.
In bed with Joel late that night, Carrie scarcely was aware of the telephone’s ringing, as freeing herself briefly from her lover’s smoky arms, she achieved consciousness long enough to say a few words into the mouthpiece. She could hardly remember what she said, for her body satisfaction, akin to a coma, owing to Joel’s expert lovemaking, prevented her from either recognizing what Bernie said in his puzzled voice, or saying anything much to him in reply.
In her special physical state, and her longing to be back in Joel’s arms, she had let the phone fall to the floor, remaining connected with Brooklyn and permitting Bernie to enter the wedding-bower, and by the miracle of electronics hear everything as clearly as if he were listening at the door.
AT FIRST IT was difficult for Bernie even to take it in, let alone believe his own ears. He felt like a man who had tuned in the radio to hear the announcement of his own death. Yet he was unable to leave off listening, and the earpiece seemed to have become attached to his face.
Carrie’s bed was always immediately adjacent to the phone, and her words to Joel Ullay came clear and merciless, leaving nothing in doubt. Bernie heard all, listening for what seemed hours at Carrie’s expense both financially (collect call) and spiritually (her soul laid bare). He heard, that is, not merely their lovemaking which in its eclipse of his own left him feeling annihilated, but toward dawn Carrie, speaking in quiet sober tones, declared that Joel was to succeed to all bower rights from now on. This was followed by her analysis of Bernie’s own spectacular failure as man and provider, then in turn by a vigorous new set of coitus, with cries of animal pleasure and yelps from an unidentified throat, at which Bernie himself seemed to lose consciousness, being awakened again by renewed cries and moans emanating from Chicago.
The last thing Bernie heard before he hung up once and for all was Carrie’s telling Joel that not only was Bernie pedestrian in bed, but he would never, even by wildest chance, finish the story of Cabot Wright.
Bernie planned immediately to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, but a headache of such exquisite pain and tender pulsation started that he could not even walk out of the Manor. He finally got to his bed, fell on it without taking off his clothes, and for the next few days did not know whether he was waking or sleeping. Early one morning when he came to, there was a woman sitting beside him. It was Mrs. Bickle, who had awakened him by the cool pressure of her hand on his temple.
5
ZOE SIGNS WITH PRINCETON
Mrs. Bickle had arrived in New York during the big drought, the revival of the wig and white-leadlip makeup, fellatio as the favorite subject in best-selling fiction, the campaign by the Commissioner of Markets to put palm-readers, fortune-tellers, and purveyors of the occult out of business, and world sugar irregular.
Dropping in unannounced from the Gramercy Park apartment that Keith had obtained for her, Mrs. Bickle had no idea she would find Bernie Gladhart as sick as he was or living in such squalor. She called a doctor, a young Sephardic Jew, who prescribed sedatives and told her the sick man was undergoing a minor emotional crisis. He cautioned her to sit at his bedside until he rallied.
Obeying, Mrs. Bickle listened to Bernie; incoherent mumblings through the night, their chief topics being incarceration and the noose. Early in the morning, he seemed to take a turn for the worse when he recognized her beside him. It required time and effort on her part, together with the doctor’s predilect remedy of cup after cup of warm water with lemon juice, to convince Bernie that they were not back in Chicago, and their New York career lay still ahead.
“When you’re stronger and I’ve had my beauty sleep, you can tell me what happened,” she assured him. “I suspect, however,” she added, “it’s the place as much as anything,” and she surveyed the filth and the mouldering walls and ceiling.
“The place, hell! Carrie’s gone and married a nigger,” Bernie exploded.
A few days later when he was well enough to be sitting in a chair, dressed in a monk’s cloth bathrobe, he explained it all to Mrs. Bickle.
“I suppose it’s my fault, too,” she said, “since I’m supposed to have sent you to Brooklyn in the first place.”
“You don’t seem too surprised at my news either, come to think of it,” Bernie studied her face.
“How did you find out he was colored?” Mrs. Bickle asked in reply. She did seem unsurprised. “I mean,” she said, “after all you were only on the telephone.”
“Oh,” he sneered. “Well, that’s easy. She shouted his name.” He laughed three times. “When she was in culmination, she called out, ‘Joel!Joel Ullay!’ and I remembered that was the name of the dinge dancer she knew.”
“I’m already in on the whole thing, Bernie. I may as well tell you.”
“You mean you heard it on the phone too?” he was nearly credulous.
“Curt phoned me about it,” she said. “News travels fast in that neighborhood.”
“Well, then you can tell me,” he snorted and leaned back in his chair. “Go ahead.” He lit a cheroot, and began examining the ends of his fingers.
“I’m sorry, Bernie, about it.”
“Skip the shit and let me have the facts,” he told her.
“Somebody talks like he was going to live after all,” Zoe couldn’t refrain from a sigh of relief.
“Go ahead and tell me, Zoe, and then I can decide by myself if I’m going to die or live.”
“Well, of course you’re right, Bernie. It is Joel Ullay. He’s moving in.”
“Moving? He was clear in the other night.”
Consuming his cheroot in enormous drags, he went on with: “Say, Zoe, did you ever hear of a guy that lost everything as quick as I did: my home, wife, job, my town. I ain’t got a thing left, if you think it over.”
She did seem to be thinking it over, and he turned away from her face with irritation and impatience.
“Go ahead and give it to me,” he told her.
“If you can wait a minute, I’ll give you Curt’s version of it,” she fumbled in her purse for a cigarette.
“Oh don’t give me nothing. I hate people who got versions from out of somewhere, and horse around with pauses and commas and expression on words, and that jazz. Give me the news.”
“All right, the gory facts then.” She stared at the long ash on his cheroot and lighted her own smoke.
“Seems Carrie and Joel had a mock wedding at her house,” she began.
“Well,” he was impatient again at her pauses.
“They claimed they didn’t want to go to the trouble and expense of a divorce this time, and in any case Joel’s present girl friend would not cooperate at any level, it seems, though later she may be agreeable to a settlement… Everybody who has ever half-known either Joel or Carrie was there. Mostly South Side folks, of course. And it was a costume affair.” Mrs. Bickle turned down the corners of her mouth to show what she thought of that. Bernie’s face was stony, but he managed to inquire:
“You don’t know who the bride came as, by chance?”
“Curt didn’t mention how any of them came,” Zoe replied. “But they were all pretty seedy costumes, and a good many only made a stab at dressing like anybody. There was a pillow fight early in the evening, and a good many of Carrie’s American antiques and objets d’art got busted, and Harold Winternitz’s Oriental carpet burned badly. The usual great jazz pianists, that U.S. Senator Carrie always keeps in tow, an old opera star or two, the university people, the young fry and children and finally the ceremony, with ring, ‘preacher,’wedding march, and the rest.After that it was just like it always is at your house on Saturday nights.” Zoe stopped. “Don’t look like that,” she couldn’t help saying to him.
“How?”
“All ashes and thorns,” she told him. “It had to end, Bernie,” she went on as consoler. “Be glad, really, that it ended here for you instead of there. It would have been terrible for you had it occurred while you were in Chicago, believe me. You really would have been hurt. It’s terrible here, too, I realize, but distance dissolves some of the nastiness, not the main part, granted, but some.”
“Jesus, you have philosophy,” Bernie said.
“Bernie,” Mrs.Bickle proposed, “supposing I invited you out to a nice big restaurant with carpets and chandeliers and tall drinks and food. Wouldn’t that make you feel more like living? I’ve got a message for you from Princeton Keith.”
“Don’t have the clothes or the appetite,” he replied.
“You will,” she said in a soft if sarcastic voice.
Looking at her studiously, Bernie brightened and went on: “Would you mind stepping over here and doing a little something for me in the line of a favor?”
She nodded.
“Bend down now,” he said when she had approached him, “bend down and cover my face with nice warm cool kisses. I know you won’t feel it when you give them to me, but fasten a few on just the same.”
“Well, poor little hard-up you,” Mrs. Bickle bent down and pecked him a couple of times. He took her hand in his.
“Did big old Keith tell you about him?” he moved his head in the direction of Cabot Wright’s room, below.
She thought a moment before she said, “Is it really him, then?”
“No question about that,” Bernie mumbled. “The rapist is down there all alright… Go take a peek, why don’t you. It’s in the clothes closet, and you just lift up the loose board on the floor.”
“I take your word for it.”
“If I get to feeling better, I’ve got to show him to you,” Bernie spoke now almost too low to be heard. “You know you look good here, Zoe,” he still held her hand. “You look almost gorgeous.” He kissed her fingers.
“You are homesick as well as light-headed,” she sighed, but she bent down again to kiss him, and he held his mouth to hers.
Freeing herself, she heard him comment: “Just to think when I accomplished my mission at last and found my rapist, the lady who thought it up in the first place had just given the whole thing up for love.”
“Life is full of incidents,” she spoke as he pulled her down to him again.
“Don’t do this because you think you have to or because we’re both away from home,” she cautioned him. “And for God’s sake no little games of spite on poor old Carrie, please.”
“You look good to me. I told you that,” and he put his mouth to hers again.
After a night in Bernie’s arms, Mrs. Bickle found that if she had not yielded to him as ardently as Carrie always testified she did, she had warmed him up from total despair, and on returning to her Gramercy Park apartment, taking off her high heels as she sat with a drink on her divan, she realized that she had replaced Carrie more completely than Joel Ullay had Bernie. She would probably never be Bernie’s lover in any full sense of the term, though nobody can be sure what is coming so far as love is concerned. In any event she had better take over Bernie’s book about Cabot Wright, or Princeton Keith would make her life a hell.
ON HER FIRST day in New York, Keith and Zoe had met for their talk at a fashionable hotel, in a huge court of potted palms, in an alcove protected by an awning, exclusively reserved for the publisher by the management at certain hours each day of the week. (A gentleman from a rival publishing house had once inadvertently approached Keith’s reserved space a bit ahead of the editor; Keith had commanded him to be off; when the other refused, they had come to blows; worsted, the interloper had left with a bruised cheek and eye, cursing his assailant roundly.)
Studying Keith closely now, Mrs. Bickle discovered he was happy over two things, one that Bernie had a book about the rapist and the actual rapist in tow, and two that Zoe was here, on the spot.
“It’s a little bit too wonderful for me to believe,” he told her. “And I need a book like this, believe you me, Zoe, dear. My publisher, Al Guggelhaupt, needs it too, God knows. We’ve got to find something good. We’re dying from best-sellers. All money and no bite.”
Mrs. Bickle looked away.
“And to think,” Princeton went on to exaggerate a bit, “that it would be an old girlhood sweetheart who would bring this all about!”
Zoe Bickle smiled, and e
ven flushed faintly, trying to remember what Princeton had been like as a boy in the small Illinois town where they had grown up. He could have been nobody’s sweetheart, she was sure.
Her uneasiness about Princeton was not prompted by his inadequate memory of their childhood, but by the offer she knew he was about to make, which he had already referred to as something concrete and substantial.
When he realized what was wrong—her obvious distrust of him—for he was nothing if not sharp, he began to work on her, hard.
“There you’ve been for years,” she heard his voice as she sipped the incredibly frondescent mint julep he had insisted on selecting as her drink, “hiding your light under a bushel, nursemaid to a ne’er-do-well hypochondriac writer, a wet nurse, if the truth were told, when you could be one of the best editors in publishing. But now I’ve got you here, I’m not going to let you go. You know I have this offer to make to you, or you wouldn’t be sitting before me. We’ll forget the other little job you came here to do. A ghost can do that… Let me put it this way, Zoe dear, you can send Curt money, enough to let him study Hebrew the rest of his life, if you’ll see the light of reason here in New York.”
Without waiting for Mrs. Bickle to say no, he named the sum of money he would give her.
As it was an incredible amount of money, she expressed her surprise by total lack of expression. Princeton repeated his offer.
She could only sit there, perhaps stunned, but looking bored and dull.
“I’m offering Gladhart half as much,” he was clearly puzzled by her poker face.
“Just enough to put him on easy street,” she quipped, to his relief.
As he rattled on with his plans, he was careful to watch the look of temptation come and go on her face. She had been not only poor a long time, he knew, she had not been praised or complimented by anybody for even longer. He was positive Curt never paid her the slightest flattery. As a matter of fact Curt seldom kissed her, and sexual matters, Keith decided, must be nearly forgotten between man and wife back there. But in New York, he saw, Mrs. Bickle was blooming, and looked ten years younger than her age; she looked certainly fine in the court of palms, and her good appearance would help him when it came to promote their idea, possibly even more than Bernie’s having the perfect book, and the actual rapist under surveillance. It was all too goddam wonderful.
