Very Old Bones

by William Kennedy

  “Your Brenda,” said Giselle. “Your behavior is ridiculous, Orson. It’s the way you were back in Germany. You seem to like living in the sewer.”

  “Orson the underground man.”

  “What’ll you have, Orse old buddy?” the bartender asked. He was tall and muscular, with a space where his left canine tooth used to be, a casualty of a bar fight. But you should see the other guy’s dental spaces.

  “Port wine, Eddie,” I said. “The best you have. Two.”

  “Port wine. Don’t get too many calls for that.”

  “It’s a romantic drink, Eddie. My wife and I are celebrating our reunion. I brought her in to meet Brenda.”

  “Yeah? Now that’s a switch, bringin’ the wife in here. You don’t see much of that either.”

  “Wives have a right to know their husbands’ friends,” Giselle said.

  “Not a whole lot of husbands buy that idea,” Eddie said.

  “It’s trust, Eddie,” I said. “There has to be more trust in this world. Shake hands with Giselle.”

  “A pleasure,” Eddie said, taking Giselle’s hand.

  “When is Brenda on?” I asked.

  “She’s next.”

  “We are in luck,” Giselle said.

  “Eddie, would you ask her to come out and say hello before her act?”

  “Right away, old buddy.”

  “Eddie is certainly a friendly bartender for a place like this,” Giselle said.

  “You should avoid categorical thinking, Giselle. There are no places like this.”

  “They’re all over Europe.”

  “The Candy Box is different. Trust me.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “Because basically I’m a good person,” I said.

  “That’s another reason I married you, but I’ve decided that doesn’t mean I should trust you.”

  “In God we trust. All others should be bullwhipped.”

  I saw Brenda walking toward us from the back of the club, wrapped in a black dressing gown that covered less than half of her upper significance. On the stage Consuela was removing, as a final gesture, her minimal loin string, revealing a shaded blur that vanished in the all-but-black light that went with that ultimate moment.

  I stood to greet Brenda, her eyes heavily mascaraed, her red lipstick outlined in black, her shining black hair loose to her shoulders. I bussed her cheek, offered her my bar stool, then introduced her to Giselle as “my good friend Brenda, who has done everything a woman of her profession is ever asked to do by men.”

  “And what is your profession, Brenda?” Giselle asked.

  “She’s a dancer,” I said.

  “I didn’t ask you, I asked Brenda.”

  “Is this really your wife, Orson?”

  “She really is,” I said. “Isn’t she lovely?”

  “I’m a dancer,” Brenda said to Giselle. “What’s your profession, honey?”

  “Giselle is a photographer,” I said.

  “You take my picture,” Brenda said, “I’ll take yours,” and she parted the skirt of her gown and spread her legs.

  “Is that what you’d like me to photograph?” Giselle asked.

  “No,” said Brenda. “That’s my camera.”

  “She has a sense of humor, your Brenda,” Giselle said.

  “She’s had dinner with Juan Perón, she’s stripped for the Prince of Wales. Is there anything you haven’t experienced, Brenda?” I asked.

  “True love,” said Brenda. “Men only want my body.”

  “What a pity,” said Giselle.

  “It’s good for business, is how I look at it,” said Brenda. She stood up from the bar stool. “Business calls me.”

  “Happy business,” Giselle said as Brenda left us.

  “A lively mind, don’t you think?” I said.

  “I’d say her tits were her best feature,” Giselle said.

  On stage Brenda worked with a film of herself dancing, and a stage spotlight. The film and her live dance were the same but in the film she was seducing a shadowy male figure. As she removed a garment on stage the camera moved in for a close-up on the area about to be revealed, then cut away as the stage garment was tossed. The spotlight dimmed progressively as nudity impended, and then the camera focused in grainy close-up on the parts of Brenda that were illegal in the flesh.

  “Clever juxtaposition, isn’t it?” I said. “It was Brenda’s own idea.”

  “Two Brendas for the price of one,” Giselle said.

  I turned my back to Brenda’s performance and faced Giselle. “I have something I must tell you,” I said.

  “Don’t you want to see how Brenda comes out?”

  “I know how Brenda comes out. My editor didn’t buy my book, he rejected it. The money I spent belonged to your friendly editor from Life. I took two of his checkbooks and his identification to cash them. It’s really quite simple to assume a new identity.”

  Giselle stared and said nothing.

  “The care and feeding of love and beauty should be a primary concern of the human race, but if I can’t afford it at any given moment, it doesn’t follow I should abandon my concern. Making love to you this afternoon, I argued with myself about confessing the deed, but confession would have destroyed the aura of love that we’d created. I also tried to understand whether my fraudulence was enhancing or diminishing my excitement, and decided it wasn’t a factor, that I existed for you apart from my fraudulence. But I knew the confession would change your view of what was happening, and I didn’t want that. I wanted you to see what lies in store for you in America, the future of your ambition, which we both know is formidable. You will have a successful career, I’m certain of that. Given our marriage and our love, I suspect you’d be inclined to tuck me in your pocket and carry me along with you, or park me in an apartment on the Upper East Side while you circle the globe with your camera. But I would rather have no Giselle than half of Giselle. I could never survive the madness that would follow such a raveled connection.”

  I knew that as I talked Giselle’s vision was framed by the real and the filmic visions of Brenda’s performance, naked on screen, all but naked on stage. I turned to see Brenda remove her G-string and, unlike Consuela, stand before the club crowd without a garment, letting all eyes find what they sought while she danced another sixteen bars, and then, lights out, she was gone.

  “Brenda looks naked, doesn’t she?” I said. “More fraudulence: She never lets herself be naked. She’s wearing an all-but-invisible G-string she puts on with adhesive. It covers her opening, and has a bit of hair that matches her own. She provides the illusion of nudity while she retains the protective integrity of the larger G-string, and so the customers never see the complete Brenda. I find a fascination in this betrayal of the public trust, don’t you? Most of the time in this life when you see a naked pussy you assume it truly is a naked pussy. Since we all live in the great whorehouse, and since we all give a fuck whenever we can, no matter what the cost, the discovery that even the most openhanded lewdness is only another act of cynicism seems just right, admirable even. Dr. Tannen used to chide me for my quest for innocence, or at least that’s how he described it. He said my time underground, or in the sewer as you put it, was really a search for something that didn’t exist in the world, not now, not ever. How far back in darkness do you want to go to find that innocence? he asked. The womb? Amniotic innocence? Do you really think the womb was such an innocent place? Maybe you’d like to go back beyond the womb to the soul’s descent into the womb, or back even to the soul’s creation. Personally, he said, I don’t think you can get there from here.”

  Giselle put her hand on the right side of my head and held it. “Do you still get the headaches?” she asked.

  “Once in a while,” I said.

  “How often do you see the doctor?”

  “We’re quits. I can’t afford him. But I understand. He doesn’t run a free lunch counter.”

  “It was beautiful, what you did for
me,” Giselle said.

  “I’m glad you liked it,” I said. “I’ll pay your friend back when I get the advance on the Meriwether book.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take it out of my paycheck.”

  “You are a generous woman, Giselle.”

  “You’re a loving husband, Orson.”

  “Yes. That’s true. Isn’t it a pity.”

  Giselle dropped her hand from my head, took my hand in hers, and was smiling her smile of rue when the shooting began in the street. One shot broke the window in the club’s door, and Eddie the barman yelled, “Get down, folks, they’re shootin’ out there.”

  I could see someone huddled in the doorway until the lights went out, heard a pistol fired twice, three times, four, heard a volley of return shots, and then the doorway went silent. Eddie switched the lights back on and when he opened the door a man in a light-gray overcoat rolled down from the two steps where he’d been huddling. Two uniformed policemen with drawn pistols stood on the sidewalk observing the situation. Both holstered their pistols and one went elsewhere.

  “Who is he?” Eddie asked the policeman.

  “He just held up the joint next door.”

  An Interview with the Corpse on 52d Street

  by Orson Purcell

  The interview took place on the threshold of The Candy Box, a Manhattan nightclub on 52nd Street, a crosstown artery that is home to two dozen jazz bars and exotic dance clubs along its neon way. The corpse was male, reasonably well dressed, without a necktie, but wearing a shirt with starched collar, double-breasted dark gray suit, gray overcoat, and a gray fedora that had fallen off when the man was shot. Two policemen had come upon him almost as soon as he emerged, gun in hand, from an adjacent nightclub, where he had stolen an unspecified amount of money.

  The door of The Candy Box remained open throughout the interview at the suggestion of police, who were awaiting the homicide photographer. A woman customer in The Candy Box was actually the first to photograph the corpse, using a Leica thirty-five-millimeter and natural light. This dramatic photo received wide currency, appearing in Life magazine six days after the shooting.

  The corpse lay on its right side during the interview, bullet holes in its head, neck, chest, and other parts of the upper torso. The eyes were open, and the expression on the face (which was free of blood) was one of inquiry, as if the man had died asking a question. This was the first interview the owner of the corpse had ever given, either in life or in death.

  O: Is there any single reason why you are dead?

  C: The cops shot me eight times.

  O: Why did they do that?

  C: I shot at them.

  O: Isn’t that a crazy thing to do?

  C: You could say that.

  O: Do all hoodlums behave this way?

  C: Not everybody. It’s somethin’ you decide.

  O: Was your decision prompted by the fact that you’re suicidal?

  C: Hey whatayou sayin’? I was raised a Catholic.

  O: Then maybe you were just stupid.

  C: Nobody calls me stupid, buddy.

  O: This is speculative conversation. Crime is often an aggressive form of stupidity. Don’t be upset.

  C: You think stupid guys get away doin’ what I do? You think the boss’d trust me if I was stupid?

  O: Maybe you were doing it to escape.

  C: Now you’re talkin’.

  O: But you didn’t escape.

  C: I had a chance.

  O: You gambled with your life. You’re a gambler.

  C: I never win nothin’.

  O: Would you consider yourself an unlucky man?

  C: Yeah, could be. But, shit, luck ain’t everything. I know a lot of unlucky guys who got nothin’ but money.

  O: Perhaps it was madness.

  C: I’m as sane as you are, friend.

  O: That’s not saying a whole lot, but we won’t go into that here. Perhaps it runs in your family. If your entire family was mad then possibly you are as well.

  C: My old man wouldn’t let any nuts run around in the family.

  O: What about fear? People get their backs up when they’re afraid, when they think something might destroy them, or what is most valuable to them.

  C: Balls. I been in half a dozen shootouts. You want the rundown?

  O: No need. Consider that you may have been foolhardy. More brave than smart, in other words. Is that why you did it?

  C: We do what we do because we gotta do it. You don’t like that reason I’ll give you another one. We do it because it’s gotta be done.

  O: A compulsive, responsible hoodlum. That’s rare indeed. But shooting it out with the police all but presumes a belief in your own unkillability

  C: Oh yeah?

  O: One might describe it as hubris, which of course means challenging the gods to destroy you.

  C: You’re one of them smart bastards.

  O: If I may sum up, you enter into this sort of contretemps with total awareness, and you do it because you decide it’s the valorous thing to do, because it proves that at your center you are a courageous individual, because it is your obligation to a world you mistakenly believe you understand, and that, no matter what the odds against you or your ideas, you are the final arbiter of your own action. Captain of your soul, so to speak. Am I wrong?

  C: What the fuck are you talkin’ about?

  O: It remains to be seen. One final question. Do you think it’s possible that you’re not really dead, that you have a chance at resurrection, I mean coming back to life?

  C: Nah, I’m dead.

  O: Thank you, Mr. C.

  I decided that not only was I an eschatophiliac, but also an eschatophile. It seemed to be the healthiest of all possible conditions: In this most illuminating darkness of the city’s night I could distinguish the last weakened light of end times, could see, with my heightened vision, that in The Candy Box’s sign the ionized neon had grown sooty in its finality, a soiled and fading flickering of the city’s last artificial light. Above my head the sky had turned increasingly frigid and black in a sunless world, and I knew that death was on the prowl. Could judgment, heaven, or hell be far behind? Even scavengers cringe in light such as this, for it destroys even the appetite to survive. Only solitude, and the contemplation of the ease of existence in the face of futility, are viable now. Suicide is pointless, for the entertainment value of terminal events exceeds that of the vapid flight to oblivion.

  I now realized how much I loved to lose. Acquisition had invariably brought with it the anxiety of loss, and the settling in of that anxiety had always proved to be a prelude to harsh reality for me. This was how I had lived. I created the highs and lows of my life. I accumulated the Giselles and Les Montrachets of my days, and then I lost them. I would never again enumerate all that had been taken from me, and I blamed no one for this recurring phenomenon. I was beyond blame and had come to understand that this was the natural curve of life, especially for the Phelans. This knowledge elevated my spirit, for I knew I would live under no more delusions. I would be prepared for the worst that life could offer. Solitude, contemplation, and waiting for the finale: these were the meaningful pursuits. And also, oh yes, the elimination of the past. I would throw out all that I had written, all my letters (including those from Giselle; especially those from Giselle). I would throw out all books that did not enhance solitude. I would throw out memory. I would throw out the memory of Miss Nelson, in whose home I roomed when I first went to Albany to live. Demure, old, white-haired Miss Nelson, retired schoolteacher, had lost her connection to significance long ago. Where had it gone? There, under her canopy bed, I saw one day the bright light of yesterday’s loss shining on forty empty bourbon bottles. Goodbye, memory of Miss Nelson. I would also throw out the memories of Quinn. That would take time, there were so many. I would begin with the night at the Grand View Lake House when I was with Joanie Mac in the boat house, my hand down at Joanie’s place, when we saw Wanda, the new waitress, come back t
o the hotel’s servants’ quarters with Liver Mason, back from the movies in Saratoga. Let me kiss you, Liver said, and as he threw his arms around her, Wanda peck-pecked his liverly lips and pushed him away. Tomorrow again? pleaded Liver. Tomorrow maybe, said Wanda, and she ran up the stairs to bed. Getting some air, Quinn came out the back door of the hotel bar, whistling, searching in life for the elusive meaning of his solitude, and Wanda, after less than eight bars of the whistling, bounded down the stairs, took Quinn’s arm, and—just as if it were planned—they came into the boat house, his hand already up at Wanda’s, and he said later he never expected it to happen, didn’t know she was there, hadn’t been following her and Liver, was surprised out of his socks, was just out for a walk, and other genuinely true lies he told himself. Quinner the sinner. Quinner the winner. Goodbye, Quinner at the boat house. Goodbye, Quinner in Europe with Giselle. And I felt lightened already. It would be a pleasant thing to unmemorize my life. It would prove I was no longer afraid of time. I would sit in my window and watch the garbageman take away the evidence that Orson Purcell had ever existed.

  And so I moved on, ever deeper, into the lovely, lovely darkness, thrilled by it all as only a true eschatophile can be.

  In the early spring of 1953, and with blinding illumination on through the fall of 1954, Peter Phelan came to perceive this: that individuals, families, or societies that willfully suppress their history will face a season of reckoning, one certain to arrive obliquely, in a dark place, and at a hostile hour, with consequences for the innocent as well as for the conspirators. Peter saw this first in my collapse, and then in the rolling boil of divine vengeance visited upon his brothers and sisters in these years.

  In much the way that he had left Colonie Street in 1913 to escape what he saw as the shallow morality of his mother, only to discover that a tissue of other reasons had contributed to his move (and her behavior), so in November, 1954, did he return home to cope yet again with the Phelan family shallows, again pushed to doing so by ancillary reasons: the death and departure of so many friends from his changing Greenwich Village neighborhood and his near isolation as a result of this, his diminishing bank account, deficient income, and the appealing prospect of free rent in Albany, his growing problem with arthritic hips, which prevented him from standing at his easel and had sat him prematurely in the novice invalid’s chair, his unflagging love for his brothers and sisters, and, not least, his distance from me, about whom he had begun to fret in unreasonably paternal ways.