I remember you still, his mind told her in the silence. I can never forget.
It was all memory. Remembering events in limbo. Yesterday was a mixture of little things. No continuity. A smile here. A whispered tragedy there. All memories that formed the backdrop for the present play. Nothing that seemed momentous at the time.
It was only later that he looked back on piled up events and wondered how he could have possibly passed through such moments without knowing them for what they were.
Sally.
4
Mostly he said it because he was drunk and had never been drunk.
“Self concern is a spawning bitch that whelps all manner of disfigurements. From its narrow, obscene womb call all the multiple inversions a man may destroy himself with, Selah.”
He said it to Lynn Mace. It was April, night.
“It depends,” Lynn said, “On which self of your many selves you’re concerned with.”
“I’m concerned with shit,” Erick said.
“Good deal McNeill,” Lynn said without emphasis.
“Get me another drink,” Erick said.
Lynn got up and went over to the counter. They were in the fraternity playroom, what was called the Rathskellar, what amended became the Rat Cellar. They were in one of the booths, those dimly lit booths that held some sort of intangible capacity to loosen a person’s tongue. Was it the intimacy of it? Or the liquor one did away with while one sat in the booth. Confessionals with beer. That’s what Leo called them. But that was more than a year away.
Erick looked hazily around the room. It was filled with french-cuffed frat boys and their falsied dates. It was Lynn’s fraternity. Erick lived in a room, alone. Lynn had invited him over that Saturday night to look the place over while they talked over plans for the show. Lynn said that Erick might have a few drinks. He said that Erick should contemplate membership. Erick wasn’t contemplating very hard.
“What in the hell?” he inquired as Lynn set down the drinks and slid in across from him, “made you join this junior Bedlam?”
Lynn smiled.
“When I came to college,” he said, “It seemed like a good idea. Now I’m used to it. I’m adjusted.”
* * * *
Lynn had come to the University from New York a year before Erick. With aspiration, dogged effort and a brain, he had piled up a straight A average his first two semesters. He joined the school scholarship society and was the very model of a superior student.
Then he began to believe it was getting him nowhere.
Grades didn’t make all the difference, he discovered. This plus recognition of the string which all the threads of his life had been twisting themselves into caused him to slacken his storming of the academic walls.
He became active in campus affairs, was in touch with various business people who had long offered him jobs upon his graduation. He was a casual intellectual now yet with both feet firmly planted in the practical world. That he still pulled down frequent A’s at least proved that his brain really had something.
Erick first met him while Lynn was editing the campus short story magazine. They printed one of Erick’s stories and Lynn was so impressed with it that he got in touch with Erick and they had been friends ever since.
“I am mildly blotto,” Erick said, “I have never been blotto in my life to any degree. My dear mama would shriek out in horror if she could see her little boy mildly blotto. I shrudder—shudder—to think of what added wrinkles I would bestow on that precious brow. I have despised liquor in my day. It struck my dear dead daddy a fell blow. And here I am, nonetheless, mildly blotto. Selah.”
Lynn took a sip from his glass and pulled out a package of cigarettes from his side coat pocket. He flicked a finger against the bottom and one cigarette popped up. He inserted it in between his thin lips and offered the pack to Erick.
“You know I don’t smoke,” Erick said, “Nor care for ladies that do.”
Lynn shook his head. Then he struck the match and held the flame against the end of the cigarette. Smoke veiled his eyes.
“We start rehearsal in a week,” Erick asked.
“Look for a dance director,” Lynn said.
Then he raised his glass a trifle.
“To your first glandular debauch, baby,” he said.
Erick looked at him. “Yes, ma,” he said. Then they drank and putting down his glass, Erick rested his chin on one bunched fist and looked around the room.
“See the people,” he said, “See the funny people. What are they dreaming of?”
“Nothing,” Lynn said, “They have no capacity for dreams.”
“One would think it,” Erick said, “To see them wander aimlessly, idly pressing groins together in the dance and giggling and chatting of baseball scores and thinly-veiled libido. What does it mean?”
“Nothing,” Lynn said, “Absolutely nothing.”
Erick turned to him, ran his eyes over Lynn’s thin, ascetic face, peered into his shifting grey-blue eyes, that moved like living things behind his rimless glasses.
“You are consistent,” Erick said, “If not prolix.”
He turned his gaze then and did his own tour of eye duty around the smoky, noisy room, over the paneled booths crowded with college youth, over the columned floor where danced as many couples as could possibly crowd there and still leave room for the glowering juke box.
“I think it is prolix, “Lynn said, “Nothing is the most complicated value there is. It entails everything canceling itself out. The good balanced by the bad, the intelligent by the doltish. All leaving a vacuum, a dead space of total, lethargic immobility.”
He blew out a cloud of nicotined smoke and adjusted the bridge of his glasses.
“Look at them,” he said, “Unreasoning animals. Ambulating evidence for the mechanical theory of life. Pitiful little summations of inner and outer influence, thoroughly incapable of dealing with themselves, much less others.”
He looked a moment more. “Advocates of the inordinate fuck,” he said slowly and coldly.
Erick chuckled without noise.
“Lynn,” he said, “You would have given Jesus a hard time.”
Lynn smiled at him and Erick pretended not to see what he saw.
“Still have those dreams about shooting men?” Lynn asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“Do you?”
Erick shrugged. “Sometimes,” he said, then yawned artificially. “Think they mean something?” he asked.
Lynn smiled.
“Emphallically,” he said.
“She had fluff in her belly button,” Erick said ignoring.
“Thumb me another,” Lynn said, looking at Erick carefully.
Erick said, after a moment’s thought.
“She was a man.”
* * * *
She was with Felix Karis, one of the bulkiest quarterbacks in the annals of midwestern college lore. They had been there all evening. Lynn had even pointed out Felix as a prime example of the Neanderthal extant.
Erick hadn’t noticed her.
Now, about eleven or so, Felix was pussy footing it around the floor, two drinks mangled in his great paws, his big, trusting eyes searching for a place to park.
She was following him.
Fate. Erick later guessed that was what he’d have had to call it. The fact that Felix lived on the same floor of the fraternity that Lynn did. And that, as a result, they had a nodding acquaintance. Which Lynn made every effort to suppress.
There was Felix standing by the booth.
“Hiya Mace,” he said, smiling broadly.
Take your fat face away from here, Erick mind requested on the spot.
He and Lynn looked up mutually to examine the rills and ridges of Felix’s broad Polish face.
It wasn’t that Felix was ugly, they later decided. It was just that his features were too rough hewn. As though they had been axed out. There was too much of him from the bushy top of his coarse black hair down to the two ch
ins and including the vase handle ears. It was the sort of a face, Erick thought, that looked as if it had been blasted out of a cliff.
“Hello,” Lynn said with a tone that added, to Erick—Kindly thaw and resolve into a dew, if you please.
“Say, uh, look Mace,” said Felix, fumbling the conversational ball, “Could we, maybe, my date and me, that is, I mean, maybe share your booth? There’s not any place to sit.”
Lynn’s pained scrutiny moved for a moment to the girl, then back to Felix. Erick paid no more attention, occupying himself by jiggling the ice cubes in his drink.
“Well, I …” Lynn started, unnaturally lost for words. Erick turned his head then and looked the girl in the face.
She looked back and seemed to smile although her lips didn’t move. First link. He didn’t sense it exactly.
But something made him extend his hand in the best hotel manager fashion.
“Sit down!” he said with ersatz gusto, “Pray!”
Then he glanced over at Lynn with a smile, getting amusement at the expected ice forming in Lynn’s eyes. For a brief moment he felt like some teasing date who had successfully irritated Lynn. Then the feeling drifted off into the cloudy wake in which all his thoughts mingled.
Felix and the girl hesitated, imagining that either Lynn or Erick would move to the other side of the booth and give them one half of it. But they didn’t move. So Felix put down the drinks and gestured to her to sit next to Lynn. Erick felt Felix’s bunching shoulders as he slid in beside him.
Elation seemed to mist over him. The dizziness, the room spinning with colored lights, the vibrating dull glow of the drunken fancy. Touch of the fantastic, came the thought.
“Now,” he said, “Isn’t this comfy, dears? Where were we? Oh, yes.”
He turned blandly to Felix who was sipping his drink.
“I was telling you what an intellectual citizenry we would have if people only had the right books in the bathroom.”
“What?” Felix said, his giant forehead sliding down over his skull.
“And the kiddies,” Erick said, “How are they? Bless me, it seems like eons since I bounced little Muggins on my wooden leg!” and in his mind he heard Felix saying—What’s he been drinking?
Felix looked at Lynn, Lynn who had forgiven Erick, Lynn who was erecting a tributary smile at one end of his sensual and snobbish mouth.
“What’s he been drinking?” Felix asked.
Lynn shrugged his shoulders, his eyebrows, as though he had just noticed Erick sitting there.
Felix let it go. He turned to his date.
And Erick looked at her.
Her face was non-committing. There was no way to tell what emotion was bordering on it. Later, Erick grew to appreciate how rare such a look was on her face. It only happened, he discovered, when she was more or less mystified.
“Mace,” Felix said, “I’d like you to meet Sally Birch.”
Lynn turned his head and smiled politely. “Pleasure,” he said. No, it isn’t, Erick’s mind observed.
“Hello,” she said, smiling now. A smile that made Erick feel something, he didn’t know what. It was the sweetest smile he’d ever seen.
“That’s not your first name, is it?” she asked Lynn.
“Lynn,” he said.
“Hello, Lynn.”
Lynn turned back front. His eyes met Erick’s. He pointed a well-manicured finger at Erick.
“This, I am called upon to indicate, is Erick Linstrom.”
“Oh!” she said, “The one whose show is being produced?”
She sounded actually awed. It set Erick off balance. Upset, flattered into startlement, he could do nothing but set aside mental dazzling and smile at her.
And she smiled back. With such a lovely smile that it made his heartbeat catch. It absorbed him, her smile absorbed him.
“Hello Erick,” she said.
“Hello,” he said.
And the next moment found Felix getting socially acceptable revenge by reducing Erick’s right hand to a pulp. Erick decided he could have gotten the same effect by putting his hand in a vise and turning the handle slowly until the bones snapped.
* * * *
“Gee, I think that’s wonderful that they’re putting on a show you wrote all by yourself.”
He didn’t write the music. He almost told her then decided not to. He basked in her attention. It was a new sensation and he like it. He was the center and Felix didn’t like it but Erick did. He leaned back against the booth and studied her through half-closed eyes. She noticed it. But he had finished another drink and was just about past caring whether his surveillance was obvious or not.
“What’s it about?” she asked, radiant with interest.
He gave her a few hints as to the plot. Always looking at her, appraising.
She had a coarse loveliness. There was no delicate precision of line to her features. All was molded roughly and no more. It was as though some potter had fingered out a general symmetry and then gone on to other work before he could refine.
Once, when she got up and danced with some boy who had stopped at the booth to ask her, Erick noticed her figure.
It was fabulous.
The dress seemed to sheathe her more than anything else. She was soft, swelling curves from throat to ankles.
“What did you say you did?” he asked her?
“I teach dancing.”
“At the school?”
“That’s right.”
He looked at Lynn. “Our dance director?” he asked.
Lynn’s face didn’t change. But Erick saw warning in his eyes.
In order that Erick be pacified, however, Lynn turned to her. “Have you ever done any group work?” he asked politely.
“Oh yes,” she said, “I’m a co-director of the dance recital we give every spring. We’re having one next week, why don’t you come and see it, it’s free?”
Erick smiled at the way she spoke, in such headlong fashion, rushing from thought to thought without usual grammatical bridges or rests. As though she had so many things to say that she must blurt them out eagerly before she forgot them.
Lynn smiled thinly. “Perhaps.”
“I think she’d be a good dance director,” Erick said. He didn’t look at Lynn. He knew what Lynn’s expression would be.
“Would you be interested?” Lynn said, getting tighter and tighter. Then, as she almost bubbled over with—Yes!—in her face, he added a dampening, “In trying out?”
She kept smiling although she couldn’t hide the disappointment. And for a moment, Erick wanted to hit Lynn violently and hold her hand and say—There, there, the job is yours.
“I’d like to try out,” she said quietly.
Erick was conscious of Felix, restive at his side, being shoved aside in the conversation. He didn’t care. She was looking at him. And he wanted to kiss her. She looked superbly beautiful to him, there in the dim light with his eyes half-clouded by drinking.
“You’ll be fine,” he said sincerely, “Very fine.”
* * * *
Later. More drinks in him. A few in them. Lynn still dead sober, watching Erick like a detective searching for clues. Erick discoursing.
“What a horror story I could write,” he said, “about drab routine. Werewolves? Vampires? Monsters? Witches?” He raised a finger which weaved in front of his eyes. “Romance, ethereal delight, all of them. But, routine. Ah! It is the very word horror. Inescapable, harrowing and all-pervasive.”
He took a swallow from his drink, feeling dryness in his throat. The cold wetness washed the membranes in a moment and he did not relinquish the floor. Even though Felix tried to say something. He broke in.
“I feel the creeping dread of it,” he went on, melodrama bound, “Like a child’s fear of the darkness—unreasonable and irrational. But childish fears of the dark pass as do all transient fears. But this remains—a blood-flecked monster that eats you from the inside out!”
At that, he laughed out loud
. Laugh number 3-A, his mind said, laughter at one’s own extremes of expression without the negation of one’s basic argument.
Then he let it all go, let the floods of fancy wash over the walls of his brain. Conscious of Lynn watching carefully. Conscious of Felix being bored into rapid death. Conscious of her, rapt and wide-eyed.
“Never!” he said, “Never shall I slide down into the still green waters of common life, letting the stench of uselessness close over my poor head.”
Lynn’s lips twitched a little, uncontrolled. Erick didn’t know what Felix was doing. But Sally’s face he saw, wasn’t registering amusement.
She was taking it straight.
He caught her eyes and they were almost vibrant with sympathy for him. It was a jolt to his equilibrium to have his obvious extremes taken as gospel. He began to know her then. The limits of her humor. But more, the powerful kindness in her.
And something else he wasn’t conscious of, until later.
That Sally was seeing underneath and knowing that, basically, in spite of bald exaggeration, Erick was saying things that he believed in. For it was his common ailment to coat over with humor those things which he believed yet could not help suspecting.
“Finished?” Lynn asked.
“Finished?” he said with pseudo-shock ringing in his voice, “I have not yet begun to fight, is this Paul Jones whiskey?”
Lynn smiled. And Erick turned to Sally. He looked at her and something flickered between them. Something happened to her eyes. He could never have described it. But he felt it. She saw that for she turned her eyes down suddenly and he saw a soft flush move across her temples. He saw her throat move once.
“I think routine is necessary,” she said, after a moment with an indefinite glance at him. “We couldn’t get anything done without routine.”
“Right!” he said, congressionally, “However, ninety percent of the populace makes of routine, not a slave, but a God. True, if we mold it and place it where we will then it is a benefaction, a mechanical aid to accomplishment. But! …”
“Sally, we …” Felix started.
“But! When it becomes our master, then are we truly lost,” Erick said, feeling a sudden tightening, realizing that he was drunk and out of order, even if it was only with Felix Karis. But he went on stubbornly even though he began to feel ill.
Hunger and Thirst Page 32
